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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the SINGLE cause of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

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

The world of physical form is a projection of the ego thought system. It is based on a belief in separation, which has produced 3D images of physical objects, all of which appear to be different and unique. And every form screams "we are not one" or "I am not the same."

Miracle mindedness, on the other hand, is an opposite state, in which there is no regard for differences, forms or appearances. All differences are completely ignored. All forms are recognized as a deception. All illusions are the same. All seeming levels and degrees and variations and intensities and difficulties and measures are completely irrelevant.

The world of bodies is the world of form. And form takes on many forms, being the forms of the same one error. The single belief in separation has produced a fragmented world, with an entire hierarchy of differences. Big and small and heavy and light and round and square and near and far and every other conceivable difference is represented here. But they are all forms of separation.

Separateness produces form, and form pictures the ways in which the separate parts are separate. One object sticks out more, another is smaller, another a different color. One has extra parts, which the others lack. One moves in a different way, while the others seem more or less alive. And this results in an entire world filled with contrast and conflict, competition and inequality. A world of a trillion truths.

"Illusions are always illusions of differences."

"Where do all these differences come from? Certainly they seem to be in the world outside."

"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."

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation."

"He has one answer to appearances regardless of their form, their size, their depth, or any attribute they seem to have"

"You HAVE no problems, though you THINK you have. And yet you COULD not think so, if you saw them vanish one by one, WITHOUT regard to size, complexity, or place and time, or ANY attribute which you perceive that makes each one seem different from the rest."

"the concept of size exists only in a plane that is itself unreal."

But miracle mindedness is not deceived by any of this. It is a state of mind of wholeness, not fragmentation. It completely ignores all forms of difference, all measures of value, all sense of degrees and proportions and ratios. It has absolutely no regard for the infinite ways in which separation shows up. It does not buy into the temptation to believe that one thing is NOT another thing, seeing ALL illusions as the same and equal.

To live in a world of form is to live as though surrounded by many different things. Countless objects, each with many parts and sub-parts. Even to the extent of all things being formed from tiny little microscopic parts. All of them different, all of them unique. No two objects are even alike.

And so you believe this is normal and natural. You think this is reality. You accept it as if the form of an object defines its meaning, its true inherent nature. As if apples are apples and oranges are oranges, and they have no thing in common. As if cars are not houses and dogs are not cats and Earth is not Mars and one body is not another body.

But moving toward miracle mindedness must entail the questioning of appearances. The questioning of ALL forms. Every disguise. Every temptation to believe that the form of an object is truth. To recognize that all objects are disguises. They are all projected images from an egoic belief in separation. Not one of them is anything else other than just another form of the same one error, the same one problem, the same one illusion.

This must entail moving away from a dependency on different forms. Believing that life is normal when you use a car key to open the car door, and a house key to open your home. Or that one food is different to another. Or that some kinds of weather are better. Or that some relationships are more special. Or that one piece of clothing is different to another and changes your whole appearance.

This whole "lifestyle" of living in a world of differences, has to go. We can't continue believing that there are in fact many things here. That is the deception. We can't keep believing that we're surrounded with an utter buffet of choices. As if there are even any different choices at all. As if things are really any different.

"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."

We have to stop being dependent on unique special forms, and particular options, and conditions and styles and themes and preferences. We have to let go all prejudices and all ways that we make some parts of the world special.

We should not believe that one form of sickness is different to another, just based on how it looks or its severity or its size or appearance or how it seemed to arrive. We should not be deceived that a dead body is more dead than a living one. Or that a small wound is more difficult to heal than a gaping hole. Or that there is any such thing as "orders of difficulty."

The illusion of separation has not only taken on many forms, it has resulted in a vast hierarchy. A tremendous amount of different values, different amounts, severities, intensities, difficulties, degrees of problem, sizes of activity, degree of value or credit, amount of importance, etc. We've built our whole lives on the basis of fictional differences, buying into illusion after illusion of how "this is not the same as that".

We have to put all of this aside and recognize that ALL FORMS ARE LIES. Every way that one form says "this is how I am not the same", is a lie. They are ALL doing this. Every object is doing this, claiming to be different somehow. And we buy into it. And now we believe in the differences, and set up a whole egoic thought structure of rules and laws and limits of freedom, about how one thing is more or less something than something else.

Miracle mindedness is the state you reach when all of this is undone. When you are not convinced by ANY forms. When you see clearly and recognize the truth that ALL forms are a temptation to believe something that isn't true. You are not deceived by size or weight or severity or strength or proportions or values or importance or colors or shapes or types or classifications. You just put them ALL into one category - they are all equally unreal, equally the same, ONE ILLUSION, ONE PROBLEM, ONE SOLUTION.

This is why in miracle mindedness there are NO ORDERS. There is no hierarchy, no levels, no separations, no divisions. There is no sense of one thing being different to another. No belief in the deception that a slightly broken body is different to a severely damaged one. Why raising the dead is really on different than curing a headache. Why converting water into wine is effortless. Why walking on water is no more special or different than walking on land.

Once all things are equalized, once all differences no longer deceive, once all problems are recognized as one problem, once all forms are seen to be untrue, and once you stop living in a world of many reactions and many relationships and many separate conditions, your mind becomes WHOLE. It becomes unified and singular and "one with itself." It is not divided or twisted or mis-shapen by differences of any kind.

"You are one within yourself, and One with Him. Yours is the unity of all creation. Your perfect unity makes change in you impossible."

Such a mind is miraculous because it utterly ignores differences. It can have power over them all because it is not deceived by them. It sees that to change one small illusion is in fact NOT different to changing a "big one".

That to raise the dead is NOT really a bigger feat than curing a headache. And it is precicely this equality and singularity which gives the mind its POWER. A power which is derived from being undivided and singular. You are a singular whole unified one being, presently confronted with a world of many differences and separations, learning to disregard all of these alien separations so that you can be restored to ONE SINGULAR STATE. One mind. One voice. One will. One power. One wholeness. One capability. And this capability has the power to move mountains, just as much as to reconfigure objects, or materialize different body images, or to do anything at all. Because a mind free from differences is a mind free from limits, and there is nothing your holiness cannot do.

The course is moving us away from fragmentation, towards INTEGRATION. Away from a split mind, towards WHOLENESS. Away from many, towards ONE. Away from separation, towards ATONEMENT. Away from hierarchies, towards UNIFORMITY. Away from exclusion, towards INCLUSION. And away from isolation, towards UNION. Away from rejection towards JOINING. Away from selfishness towards SHARING. Away from the eseparation, towards GOD.

"In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."

"When you maintain that there MUST be order of difficulty in miracles, all you mean is that there are some things you would WITHHOLD from truth."

"As long as you would have this be, so long will the ILLUSION of order of difficulty in miracles REMAIN with you. For YOU have established this order in REALITY"

"there is no order of difficulty in healing."

"Once the professional therapist has realized that minds are joined, he can also recognize that order of difficulty in healing is meaningless."

"To understand there is no order of difficulty in healing, he must also recognize the equality of himself and the patient."

"This is the message of the crucifixion; there is no order of difficulty in miracles."

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

"To the Holy Spirit THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES."

"Without a range, order of difficulty IS meaningless, and there must BE no range in what you offer to each other."

"There can be no order of difficulty in healing merely because all sickness is illusion. Is it harder to dispel the belief of the insane in a larger hallucination as opposed to a smaller one?"

"By DEMONSTRATING to yourselves that THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES, you will convince yourselves that in your NATURAL state there IS no difficulty, because it is a state of Grace."

"Healing and Atonement are not related; they are identical. There is no order of difficulty in miracles because there are no degrees of Atonement. It is the one complete concept possible in this world, because it is the source of a wholly unified perception."

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles, for they ARE all the same."

"WHOLLY natural perception would show you instantly that order of difficulty in miracles is quite impossible, for it involves a contradiction of what miracles MEAN."

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles because all of God's Sons are of equal value, and their equality is their Oneness."

"He need make no distinctions among the problems he perceives, for He to Whom he turns with all of them recognizes no order of difficulty in resolving them."

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

"You will recognize that you have learned there is no order of difficulty in miracles, when you have applied them to ALL situations. For there IS no situation to which miracles do not apply, and by applying them TO all situations, you will gain the REAL world."

"It is emphasized here that these differences have no effect at all on the miracle, which can heal any of them with equal ease. This is because of the miracle's inherent avoidance of within-error distinctions. Its SOLE concern is to distinguish between truth, on the one hand, and ALL kinds of error, on the other. This is why some miracles SEEM to be of greater magnitude than others. But remember the first point in this course, i.e., that there is no order of difficulty in miracles."

"The illusion of orders of difficulty is an obstacle the teacher of God must learn to pass by and leave behind."

"The world perceives orders of difficulty in EVERYTHING. This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable."

"As you survey your inner world, merely let whatever thoughts cross your mind come into your awareness, each to be considered for a moment and then replaced by the next. Try not to establish any thought of hierarchy among them. "

"The concept of ANY sort of need HIERARCHY arose because, having made this fundamental error, he had already fragmented himself into levels with DIFFERENT needs. As he integrates, HE becomes one, and his ONE need becomes one accordingly."

"What is seen as "reality" is simply what the mind prefers. Its hierarchy of values is projected outward, and it sends the body's eyes to find it. The body's eyes will never see except through differences. Yet it is not the messages they bring on which perception rests. Only the mind evaluates their messages, so only the mind is responsible for seeing."

"Again, there is no order, but a SEEMING hierarchy of values."

"It is impossible that one illusion be LESS amenable to truth than are the rest. But it IS possible that some are given greater VALUE, and less willingly OFFERED to truth for healing and for help. NO illusion has ANY truth in it. Yet it appears some are MORE true than others, although this clearly makes no sense at all. All that a hierarchy of illusions can show is PREFERENCE, NOT reality."

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate, and has a different set of thoughts which SETS HIM OFF from others. This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are MORE valuable, and THEREFORE true."

"It is not a thought which judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. It merely focuses on what it is, and knows that no illusion can be real."

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal."

"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs."

While the world and its hierarchy of illusions would tell you that some sicknesses are far more severe than others, ultimately there is no world and there is no difference between them.

When the world suggests for example that a stroke, brain damage, severe paralysis, is irreversible, serious, extremely bad, wrong, progressive, unhealable and proof of threat and danger, you are heavily deceived. But when reframed, it is literally nothing. A tiny little nothingness.

And if perchance a miracle were to occur where what is in fact tiny and nothing were to simply be changed into health and wholeness, this would not be surprising, given that it was nothing to begin with and hardly a serious challenge or obstacle.

It should become second nature, even habitual, to be able to heal the sick and raise the dead in the blink of an eye. These should not be even considered difficult or serious or big challenges, because all of those impressions of its difficulty are in fact illusions.

It is the ego world that testifies and claims and asserts that there is tremendous difficulty in raising the dead, or reversing brain damage, or undoing paralysis, or repairing organs, but this is because the world has defined all the terms for just how important and serious the body is. And it is all a lie.

What if the body is nothing. And what if sickness is so nothing that it does not exist. And what if what seems immense and insurmountable if taken to be real, is in fact minuscule and easy to change and brushed off like it were nothing at all? Such is the outlook of miracle mindedness.

"Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles."

We are simply too deceived by the world's lies and have fallen for its assertions of difficulty so many times, that we really think the hierarchy of illusions is true. That there are big scary impossible things in the world like cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, amputation, chronic illness, even death. And that all these things are so far toward the end of the extreme spectrum that they have no chance of being healed. This is part of the deception.

The world makes everything difficult, taxing, an effort, and a problem.

"The world was made that problems could not be solved."

"All its roads lead to death."

"It is the world you see that is impossible."

"When he is not in a state of grace he IS out of his natural environment, and does NOT function well. Everything he does becomes a strain, because he was not created for the environment which he has made. He therefore cannot adapt to it, nor can he adapt it to him. There is no point in trying."

But here's the thing. If the world truly is so filled with impossibility, if it testifies to the immense difficulty and hardness and irreversibility of its conditions, then it isn't actually far to go to realize that because it IS impossible, it is IMPOSSIBLE that it really exists. All you have to do is realize its impossibility is NOT REAL, and DOES NOT EXIST. Because impossibility IS impossible.

And so impossible sickness.... things too hard to heal.... things too big and intense and difficult to even change slightly.... these are all lies, told by a world of illusions, bought into by all magical medical institutions, and believed by the masses. If limbs were suddenly restored and bodies were raising from death left right and center and sickness were just vanishing before your eyes on a daily basis, you wouldn't give a shit what the world suggested can't be done.

All sickness is a lie. Every form of it, all of its properties, all of the medical stories about why it is so impossible to heal it, all of the physical laws, every appearance, it's all part of a huge f'ing deception. And you stop believing it the second you regard the entire world as unreal. It's a dream of death, not a reality of death. It's a dream of sickness, not real sickness. And Jesus says the illusions can EASILY be changed BECAUSE they are illusions.

Seen in their proper light, that which is an illusion, when not taken to be real, is recognized as EFFORTLESSLY modified by the mind's power. It is regarded as SO NOTHING that it has no power and no ability to resist the will of God. As an illusion, it can EASILY be altered.

"He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."

Believing you cannot work miracles is very heavily influenced by the belief in orders of difficulty. Buying into the hierarchy of illusions and taking individual separate forms to be different to others.

Believing that some things are harder or easier. Being deceived that you simply can't go up against "big real sicknesses" because of the tremendous weight and power and immensity of their established realities. But if they are not real, if they are nothing, if they have no value, and do not exist at all, then what obstacle can they possibly present, and how would such an obstacle be different to wafting a fart in the wind?

Miracles are effortless and easy and commonplace and automatic and natural, for one who recognizes there is no world, and for whom they are not deceived by any illusion of difficulty. The only reason you think you cannot do this is because you ARE deceived by illusions of difficulty, and thus you fear the power of sickness, and want to keep it. Sickness must be recognized as NOTHING in order to strip it of this power, so that you realize it presents NO obstacle and is EASILY dismissed.

"Miracles are natural and should be happening all the time."

"Every day should be devoted to miracles."

"There are no orders of difficulty among them. One is not harder than another."

"There is 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?"

Change the world? Well. As it turns out, its not possible to immediately materialize changes with the mind, unless of course you are more spiritually advanced. In this world, all things tend to be governed by the ego laws, and everything is difficult. To bring about any kind of alteration requires effort and a lot of time. A lot of work. You have to go through the proper channels and processes and plans and all the steps that it takes to go from idea to creation. It's a very long, laborious, slow process, no matter what you do.

Such a scenario is unnatural. It is our God-given ability to create life in an instant just by willing it. But in this world we've become severely limited, stripped of our powers seemingly and able only to affect change through physical brute force. Someone somewhere has to use the tools or move the objects. And then that leads to entire segments of activity like skills, the arts, craftsmanship, construction and assembly etc, all the efforts we make to "make stuff happen". To bring about a change. Long and slow and effortful and difficult and fraught with problems.

I thought it was maybe just me, some failure on my part or some inability to get things done. Or some procrastinating attitude. But really the difficulty and hurdles are built into spacetime. It's just the nature of the place. We literally made things difficult for ourselves and embedded orders of difficulty into just about everything. And now either you just do nothing and be a lazy bum or you are going to have to put in effort and struggle to make anything happen. And then this struggle is spiritualized and lauded as a valuable thing in its own right. And those who make bigger waves or create within the confines of the laws of spacetime become idol worshipped.

Change... on this level, is not an easy thing. And any amount of "getting stuff done" or trying to bring about a goal, takes a lot of constant efforting and striving and expenditure and loss and frustration. Those who become good at it can turn shit into money. Those who are bad at it end up with few abilities and a lot of limitations and poverty. And all of it is an attempt to "make something" out of the world and convert it into something else, some kind of magical transformation to some supposedly better more desirable form. Because otherwise it's a turd waiting to be polished.

So excuse me while I just take a lazy break from efforting and accomplishing, and just sit back and laugh at how broken the world has always been.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur. The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one. The miracle is the one thing you can do that TRANSCENDS order, being based, NOT on differences, but on equality. Miracles are NOT in competition, and the number that you can do is LIMITLESS. They can be simultaneous and legion. This is not difficult to understand, once you conceive of them as possible at all. "

There was a situation in which something went wrong, but there wasn't any evidence whatsoever that the person involved caused it to happen. It seemed like there was no way they could've caused it. I noticed that as a result, I did not and could not project guilt onto that person. If I could find no grounds for believing that they were guilty somehow, I couldn't turn them into a scapegoat. I did not get angry at them at all.

I found that interesting, because it's not just that we automatically scapegoat someone when we perceive that they are the cause of a problem, we also DON'T scapegoat them when the "proof of sin" is missing.

Our ego reactions to stuff and whether or not we USE it for projection of guilt, seems to depend very much on what we perceive as happening and the fact that we BELIEVE what we see.

If there is evidence, externally, in terms of form, or bodies, or objects, or anything tangible that we can put our finger on, the ego can and will jump in and USE it for projection. It's almost like a trigger. The presence of this "sinful thing" in the environment is picked up on by the senses and the ego and it automatically reacts to it with an attack. BUT, if the stimuli is not there, it DOESN'T tend to do this.

This reveals just how much we can be so totally dependent upon what we're perceiving as "existing" or "happening" in the world. How much we're allowing the world and its states to DICTATE whether or not we are AFFECTED. That we can only seem to HAVE certain reactions when the world PRODUCES certain scenarios. And when it doesn't we don't seem to have these reactions.

Isn't it weird then that we not only get triggered and pushed into ego reactions when the external world SAYS WE SHOULD, we also fail to have any reaction at all when the world SAYS WE SHOULDN'T.

Solely because I could find no evidence "in the world" as to a certain person being the cause of sin, and was DEPENDING ON the world and LISTENING TO IT, therefore, I could not seem to get myself to be angry at them. There was nothing to latch onto. There was nothing to use. This doesn't mean, however, that I don't have an ego, or that my ego wouldn't scapegoat at the next opportunity. It's just that we seem to WAIT FOR the world to fuck up before we have a reaction to it, instead of being proactive.

This reveals how much we're at the EFFECT of the world, allowing it to tell us WHEN we should be upset, and WHEN we should be happy. It presents lulls in the storm and breaks in the conflict, during which we seem to NOT have reactions. Why don't we have reactions all the time? Why don't we constantly launch into massive fear responses? Because the hierarchy of illusions tells us it's NOT A BAD SITUATION. Just as much as the same hierarchy then goes on to tell us that such-and-such a situation IS worth being upset about and is very serious.

If for example a situation arises where something in the world seems terrible wrong, I WILL much more likely have a reaction. It may even induce a panic. And this reaction will be in proportion to the sense of severity or seriousness or importance or value of the problem. Bigger problems elicit a LOT more fear. Smaller problems elicit a lot LESS. The seeming LACK of problems produces an illusion of peace, in which I seem to think everything is going well. Until the next calamity, which the world certainly has in store in endless supply.

How do we get off this rollercoaster ride of always having reactions to the ups and downs of the world? Why CAN'T I scapegoat when there is no reason to, just as much as when there's a juicy opportunity to pounce on? Why when someone has clearly done nothing at all is it so hard to project guilt? And why when they seem to have done something awful is it so easy? Why do we RELY ON the world to INFORM US of what is true?

Recently quite a "serious thing" happened and I had a strong visceral reaction. In fact I pretty much went into an anxiety attack. This came out of nowhere, but it was in relation to "how serious" I thought the situation was. I bought into the hierarchy of illusions and had the appropriate amount of drama about it. Right on cue, just as the world says I should, and entirely reflective of what I believed to be the importance of the situation. It seemed unavoidable. It seemed AUTOMATIC and mindless. And there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop it once I'd bought into it.

But somehow there has to be a way to live that isn't DRIVEN by the world and its images, BASED ON its illusions and its forms, its happenings and its dangers. It has to be possible somehow to NOT BUY INTO the heirarchy and to not USE the world as a FORM OF TRUSTED PROOF about anything. Just because the world or the ego or the body says "this is really serious you should be very concerned", we have to find a way to NOT be "appropriately concerned". To not GET our truth FROM the world.

How about laughing at it instead? How about laughing in the face of death, or laughing when someone is hurt, or laughing when people are crying their eyes out? Like... how can we disconnect from the automatic chain-reaction of "world says you should feel this now"? Or rather, that my belief about what it MEANS and my judgement of what it IS, BASED ON ITS FORM, dictates what I believe is true and the consequences that will come from it.

It's me who has apparently decided what everything means, including good stuff, and including bad stuff. And all of these meanings should apparently be WRONG, ie a mistake. Because if there is really NO order of difficulty in miracles and the hierarchy of illusions is actually FLAT AND EQUAL, then it should make NO difference whatsoever what happens, it should not have ANY effect to change who I am or what I experience. Unless I am TRUSTING MY SENSES and basing my TRUTH on the world's current STATE.

That's where the real challenge comes in. Because now we're talking about practically IGNORING how situations look, IGNORING appearances, IGNORING meanings that I make up, IGNORING what the world would say is a very good or bad situation, IGNORING the body, IGNORING sickness, IGNORING terrible difficult tragic threatening dangers, and somehow transcending them so that peace and happiness become a CONSTANT. And getting my truth from ANOTHER WORLD.

How to get off the rollercoaster of death, that's the big question. How to not be affected by the world. How to not USE OR ALLOW the world or any events or happenings to influence me in ANY WAY, and to operate solely in a proactively DELIBERATE manner. How to be free of suffering forever, and how to never forget to laugh at the illusion of hell ever again. Nor GIVE MY POWER AWAY TO IT or allow it to have the power to TELL ME what I should be feeling.

"The world perceives orders of difficulty in EVERYTHING. This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable. By DEMONSTRATING to yourselves that THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES, you will convince yourselves that in your NATURAL state there IS no difficulty, because it is a state of Grace."

"The illusion of orders of difficulty is an obstacle the teacher of God must learn to pass by and leave behind."

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate, and has a different set of thoughts which SETS HIM OFF from others. This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are MORE valuable, and THEREFORE true. And each establishes this FOR HIMSELF, and MAKES it true by his attack on what another values."

"All that a hierarchy of illusions can show is PREFERENCE, NOT reality."

You may not realize it but God has totally unlimited power. "With God all things are possible." This doesn't just mean "all ego things are possible" or "all worldly things are possible." It means literally, there is absolutely nothing you can conceive of that is impossible.

Having become accustomed to being limited by ego laws, we have a tough time with this. When for example there is a tsunami which floods an entire city, you might think, well, this is such a huge tragedy that we cannot possibly undo it.

Think again.

God can.

And so what this gives rise to is, realizing there is no order of difficulty in miracles BECAUSE God can do anything. And that means, in order to tap into that power that's in you, you're going to need to have ego-world-defying FAITH or TRUST in God's capabilities, even as they go way above and beyond what SEEMS to be possible.

So the world might be telling you, we can do nothing about this and cannot reverse it. Jesus says that these are mere appearances and that all appearances can be changed by miracles. That there needs to be not one part of the illusion that we consider capable of healing while another part is not. That even this huge seeming disaster can be completely corrected, because this TOO is possible.

Opening our minds up to these POSSIBILITIES, the freedom from all bondage and all ego laws and certainties and consequences, opens us up to having to put our FAITH in a source of power and freedom far beyond what the world suggests to us. This law-defying power is precisely what MIRACLES are for.

When someone dies and they're laying there, are we to think with the ego that "even this cannot be changed" or are we to think with God that "even this can be changed"?

To not believe the sense of limitation and difficulty and irreversibility of these `problems` IS the willingness to overlook their illusions and disregard them as having no order of difficulty at all. We need to learn that nothing is impossible with God, and to trust that, and to know this above all else, otherwise we simply will stay slave to the consequences of sin.

There is nothing God cannot do through you. There is nothing your holiness cannot do. And if that means raising the dead or completely reversing an entire tsunami, so be it. Moses parted an ocean. That's no small feat. If we simply "accept" worldly situations and bodily conditions and problems at face value as though written in stone and irreversible, we have NO FAITH at all.

Jesus is asking for us to develop not only some faith in God's capabilities, but TOTAL FAITH in Him. That means utterly world-defying, law-breaking, demonstrations that what seems IMPOSSIBLE is perfectly possible. Because to God, all things are possible. We are to put our trust in something that is UNLIMITED in its freedom, rather than putting our trust in the ego's sense of utter limitation and impossibility.

I’ve come to realize the Course refers to miracles on three distinct levels.

1. Everything in Heaven is miraculous. All expressions of love, in reality, are miraculous. The soul is miraculous. Creation is miraculous. Everything real has a miraculous nature. You are miraculous. You are a miracle. Miraculousness is permanent, natural, and the way God’s thought system always functions. Miracles give LIFE. At this level miracles defy every ego limitation and law. Life itself is a miracle.

2. After the separation, God blessed the Sonship with a miracle. The miracle was the answer to the separation, a healing thought, designed to fully heal the separation. This produced the Holy Spirit. References to "the miracle" are referring to the Holy Spirit. He is the "mechanism of miracles" because He is the way by which miracles (on level 3) are produced. This "one miracle" contains all individual (level 3) miracles. Accepting "the miracle" is accepting the atonement.

3. Within the realm of perception, there are many seemingly individual miracles. Course references to "miracles" in plural refer to this. E.g. "Miracles make minds one in God." "Miracles unite you with your brother" etc. These miracles are holographic, in that each of them contains wholeness and maximal love. They are all reflections of the one miracle, all support each other, are all equal, and all transcend orders of difficulty. These are the "miracles" that you perform IN the world as a miracle worker. These miracles can heal the sick, raise the dead, change perception, and repair the separations between brothers. As a subset, these may also include "shifts in perception" which are not "what a miracle is", but are one of their results. "A miracle is a correction introduced into wrong-minded thinking etc". Here the aim of miracles is to heal the separation between the sonship and induce revelation.

These are all tied together by statements such as "Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers." Similarly, miracles extend through Christ as their source, as in "miracles express from an inner awareness of Christ and the acceptance of His atonement."

Miracles do NOT originate at the ego level. They do not originate in your attempts to correct perception. YOU do not do them without God/Christ. Miracles require the absence of fear (ie maximal love), and express FROM a state of miracle mindedness, which is equivalent to true perception. Blocks to awareness must be removed, extensively, before FULL love is allowed to express with enough wholeness to perform a miracle. "The perceptual content of miracles is WHOLENESS." They require vertical perception which is a recognition of mind over matter cause-effect, in which the world is recognized as an EFFECT only, containing no causes, and transcends all ego laws and breaks every law of this world. Miracles are supernatural.

Miracles can correct perception. They can even correct the mind of your brother. However, "the world IS perception" and so additionally, miracles can correct the world. They have power over all forms. Earth is a world of tremendous limitation. Miracles demonstrate that this world is an illusion by changing its forms to show that they are not real. Mind is stronger than the body, and every miracle demonstrates this. Miracles can literally move mountains.

You as a miracle worker become MORE miraculous as you remove blocks to love. When you are done shifting perception, miracles do not come to a stop. Instead, you perform miracles ALL THE TIME. Miraculousness is your God-given NATURE. It is completely natural to your spirit, which is omnipresent and beyond ego laws. Your soul is permanently miraculous. To extend God’s love as LIFE is miraculous. Miracles are life-giving creative acts. They supply a lack. Death is lack of life, so miracles can raise the dead.

There is no sin and nothing impossible that miracles cannot reverse and undo. Believing otherwise is believing the hierarchy of illusions, which is a belief in orders of difficulty. Miracles are all the same. They ignore difficulty. "There is nothing your holiness cannot do." You cannot be loving without being miraculous. Atonement, which includes miracle working, is the natural profession of the Children of God.

Some people don't believe in miracles. Some don't think A Course in Miracles is about the kind of miracles Jesus was known for, and some are quite convinced they have nothing to do with healing the body or being able to cure all forms of suffering.

Mainly this is because of sin. "The world of bodies is the world of sin", which the body's eyes were made to believe is permanent reality, and this sin is a sense of "irreversibilitly". It's the apparent nature of this world that all roads lead to death, all things seem to degrade and get worse, there is entropy and it all seems to be built into the laws of physics, as if there is no escape.

The whole world in its conditions and maladies seems to attest that all these things cannot be undone, cannot be changed or healed or reversed. That sin is real and permanent and there is nothing you can do to stop it's march toward death. The seeming inevitability of death is founded as the logical outcome of the belief in sin, and all the universe seems to testify that sin is real and its effects are permanent.

But in the Course we are actually being taught to believe that this is completely untrue, that sin is NOT irreversible, and that in fact all the laws of this world can be completely broken by miracles. That things are POSSIBLE that this world would suggest simply cannot happen or is highly unlikely. That in fact, miracles are completely capable of reversing, undoing and healing every single thing you can find in this world that seems to be permanent or "too difficult" to heal.

For example, even the things that medical science has no ability to cure, such as deadly cancers, heart attacks, stroke and brain damage, alzheimers and parkinsons, paralysis, kidney failure, aging, death - all these really serious seeming problems that seem to just get worse. The world in its expression suggests this is simply all too difficult, all too permanent, you just have to live with it and die. That all these things lead eventually to total destruction and that this is "natural". Yet it could not be more unnatural or unalike the nature of the Kingdom. The course says:

"Thus does the miracle undo **all things** the world attests **can never BE undone**. And hopelessness and ****death MUST disappear*** before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt."

So what is this saying? It's literally saying that when you are operating from the laws of God, which are not of this world, there is nothing you cannot do, and as a miracle worker you should not believe in orders of difficulty. You should not "buy" the appearance of permanence in this world, or the suggestion of something being so far gone there is no hope of reversal. You should not have to tolerate or live with any kind of sickness or death, and there is literally no law of this universe that cannot be broken by miracles.

"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."

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world."

So on the one hand we have this world of death in which the entire system is set up to testify that sin is real and cannot be undone, glaring us in the face, with our own body sensing it and making it seem real and full of difficulty. And then on the other hand we have this light, this power, the Holy Spirit in our mind, which believes the TOTAL OPPOSITE, completely denies that anything of this world is permanent or real, CAN REVERSE AND UNDO anything the world says cannot be undone, and can even reverse death itself.

This is what miracles are about and this is what miracles are capable of. They are not just merely little changes in how you see things that influence how the world looks to you. They are a power, from an entirely different level of reality, a spark of life from God, which fall like drops of healing rain from heaven, which are capable of resurrecting that which seems to be death and reversing ALL the effects of sin. There is literally not even ONE single thing in all this universe which has a power STRONGER than OR equal to the Power of God, which demonstrates that ANYTHING can be changed, BECAUSE it is an illusory world.

So we're not just talking here about having a different view of this world. We're talking about adopting a TOTALLY OPPOSITE viewpoint, which completely disregards everything the world seems to suggest is true, real, permanent, or a given. And that includes the overthrowing and cancellation and reversal of death in all its forms. Every form of sickness, every "extremely serious disease", every damage, every effect of war, all conflict, all hurt, all seeming effects of sin and attack, even to overcome gravity and walk on water, not one thing is beyond being shown to be reversible, healable or changeable to a miracle.

"The happy dream about him takes the form of the appearance of his perfect health; his perfect freedom from all forms of lack; and safety from disaster of all kinds. The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form, because it can so easily be CHANGED. This demonstrates that it was never real, and could not stem from his reality. For that is changeless, and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

And it would indeed BE miraculous to witness such a thing, because it literally would break and defy all the laws of space and time. It would show you that what you thought could never be possible, is possible. What you thought could never be healed or undone CAN be. The bodily conditions that seemed so hopeless you had resigned yourself to accept inevitable death, is NOT the only way. And in fact it is ridiculous to think that death IS the only way.

And so now you will find that you are torn between what this world seems to demonstrate as "natural and likely", versus what the Word of God is expressing as a supernatural miraculous nature completely in defiance of every law of space time, which breaks every seeming limitation, and completely ignores any "claim" the world makes about what is impossible. "It is the world you see that is impossible". And possibility is of God. When you are under no laws BUT God's, you are NOT under the laws of the ego. And then anything is possible for you as a miracle worker.

So you'll find this tug of war going on between, do I believe what the world and body are suggesting can never be solved, do I believe these inescapable problems, do I buy into this hierarchy of difficulty, do I just accept that there is no hope for a cure, OR .... do I put my faith in this quirky book which is telling me that through the Power of Love, through miracle impulses, and through the Holy Spirit, even LITERAL mountains can be moved? That the dead can be raised, and every sign or symptom or effect of damage or attack in any form can be completely obliterated and disappeared? Who do you trust? The world the ego made, or the Power and Word of God?

This is why we have to hang onto the hope of healing, recovery, miracles and possibilities, which regardless of a lack of faith, remain always accessible. This is why we have to HAVE faith and trust and develop our relationship with the very power God gave TO enable such miraculous demonstrations. We're asked to really dig deep and go beyond the world's dirge of death and put our faith in possibilities not of this world. Potentials and capabilities that defy and go against everything even your own senses suggest can be possible.

If you are willing, and if you will receive healing, you too can perform the miracles that Jesus demonstrated are possible through the Power of God in this world. This is what A Course in Miracles is about. It's about learning to be a miracle worker, to never believe orders of difficulty, to overcome the laws of space time, and to become a master over this world.

"There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No-one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is ***you who have the power to dominate all things you see*** by merely recognizing what you are."

"My Self is ruler of the universe. It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

"Unless the healer heals HIMSELF, he does NOT believe that there is no order in miracles. "

"I raised the dead by KNOWING that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God Created. Why do you believe that it is harder for me to inspire the dis-spirited or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles: YOU do. I have called and you will answer. I KNOW that miracles are natural, because they are expressions of love. My calling you is as natural as your answer and as inevitable."

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

Physical sight is blinded by perception of form. It looks only at the forms of error. It regards form as all that exists. The physical sight is blindness, because it cannot see everywhere, and is easily obscured be meaningless objects.

Form doesn't mean anything. But mind then takes the form and decides that certain forms mean certain things. We make up meanings and project them onto the forms. Now there is a hierarchy of illusions, varying degrees of difficulty, and the form of life seems to mean something different to the form of death.

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

The form of death is not really death, and the form of life is not really life. We decided that death and decay "means" death and decay, and that living forms are "more alive". Who told you this? The myths of the world told you this. People made this up.

The form of death is not really death at all. It's just one configuration of materials. A kind of state. One possible way that form can appear. And when the same form appears more animated or fresh or vital, or capable of giving rise to more forms, then we say it means life. But these forms are neither alive or dead.

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

We give all forms all the meaning they have. We decide that a broken object means there's something wrong. We decide that a rotten corpse means something is beyond the hope of living. We look at the form of things and use the form to substitute for meaning, as if the form something takes MEANS something.

But all forms are illusions, and death is not death, and life is not life. They are all just equal images, appearances and illusions. All easily changed into other forms by the power of the mind.

"The miracle is means to demonstrate that ALL appearances can change BECAUSE they are appearances, and CANNOT have the changelessness reality entails. The miracle attests salvation FROM appearances by SHOWING they can change."

When no artificial meaning is given to the forms of the world, and the world's inherent meaninglessness is recognized, we end up with a level playing field. And now miracles can operate, disregarding any orders of difficulty or "reasons why" you can or cannot change one thing into another.

And now the seemingly dead bodies can be resurrected to "the living", to symbolize eternal life. And forms of sickness can be undone, to testify to innocence. And now water turns into wine and bread and fish multiply and who cares about the so-called law of gravity.

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

"What the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

A miracle, is not of this world, and is absolutely unlimited in what it can do, with no order of difficulty whatsoever.

MIRACLES VIOLATE every law of reality that this world thinks is true. Every law of space, and time. All the laws of physics, biology and chemistry. Every suggestion of what is and is not possible. All degrees of magnitude and difficulty and severity and importance and value and possibility. There is NOTHING that you cannot do, by BREAKING the laws of space and time and violating the laws of physics. THIS is what miracles are. Not little shifts in perception, changes in feelings, or adjustments to your belief system.<

Miracles, according to ACIM, include, literally moving mountains, walking on water, multiplying food, converting objects into other objects, levitation, bilocation and teleportation, calming storms, parting oceans, manifesting stuff out of nowhere, healing the sick, raising the dead, controlling time and space, communication that transcends distance, fixing broken objects instantly, dematerializing and materializing, telekinesis, and all manner of other things that some would consider IMPOSSIBLE in this world's reality. Because they BREAK THE LAWS of space and time. Shifting your perception does not break the laws of reality whatsoever.<

Those who believe and spread the lie that miracles are little shifts in perception, are WATERING DOWN A course in Miralces and have far too weak of a vision of what a miracle is and what it is capable of. This is in part due to the fear of the power of the mind. Jesus is clear that what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is in CLEAR VIOLATION of everything this world says is possible. EVERYTHING. And that means there is literally NOTHING that your holiness cannot do. Miracles ignore all the laws of this world.

They don't care about mass or size or weight or distance or time or hardness or materials or nuclear forces or anything else. They are the wielding of the POWER OF THE MIND to cause effects, above and beyond the limitations of the FAKE LAWS that run this world's simulation. And A Course in Miracles is designed to put you BACK in touch with the miracle minded state in which you are CAPABLE of doing all this and more. Jesus even says that your mind has the power to create worlds. You MADE this planet. do you think your mind is so minuscule and weak it cannot even move a single object directly? Jesus asks you to reinstate the power of the mind in the body.

This is a course in regaining ALL POWER and becoming DOMINANT over the world. "It is you who have the power to dominate everything you see merely by recognizing what you are." "Teachers of God will take over the world because of their strength". And it culminates in TOTAL POWER OVER DEATH and thus the entire dream of death. The surmounting of death, in the resurrection state, gives you power to DO ANYTHING. LITERALLY ANYTHING without limit. That is what miracles can offer. And miracles are everyone's right. That is FAR above and beyond the safe little fairytales about how a miracle is just you changing your mind a little bit. Miracles have the POWER OF GOD in them.

"If you can accept the ONE GENERALIZATION NOW, there will be no need to learn from many smaller lessons."

Effectively what the Holy Spirit is trying to teach you is ONE LESSON. This one lesson is to learn how to "teach only love", because you are only love. It's to have a single response of love in all situations, to use love's miraculous power to heal all sickness and to solve all problems. To recognize no orders of difficulty or hierarchies of illusion, to see all forms of suffering as the same effect having the same ONE cause. One problem with one solution to rule them all.

Over time, in the application of what may seem like more specific lessons, ultimately what you are LEARNING is really to simply be as God created you. To be loving. To be singular, or ONE. One in character and substance and nature and identity and attitude and response. One single way of always consistently being the same, in complete disregard for any illusions of forms or differences. Completely ignoring orders of magnitude or difficulty or importance or seriousness or size or duration or any other property.

As we gradually "polish" our minds from seeming to be fragmented, with different responses for different people, different relationships with different individuals, different reactions to different objects, different meanings for different things, we gradually GENERALIZE the learning and move into a much more ABSTRACT state of mind. A much more singular state of mind, whole and one and unified and undivided and free from conflicts. Being so one, this state of mind - miracle mindedness, houses the power of love and truth and sees all things from a single perspective.

This is the ONE LESSON which the Holy Spirit is teaching, behind all the lessons in the workbook, behind all the text material and all thoughts and life lessons/trials, behind all relationships and dramas, the simple movement away from complexity and multiplicities of action, towards simple unification, integration, wholeness and oneness. This lays the groundwork for one-mindedness, which is a state of complete abstract purity and wholeness, in which the entirety of everything acts as one with no conflict or difference or adjustment to conditions.

Unconditional love is completely ignorance of conditions. It ignores the form of problems, the shapes of bodies, the types of sickness, the reasons for their supposed causation, the worldly powers, the forces of nature, the laws of physics, the many rules and regulations. It doesn't even care to need to know how something came about, to analyze it or diagnose it or figure out the complicated pathways of cause and effect. It simply APPLIES ITSELF singularly by giving itself and sharing itself, to increase itself and to supply the lack - the lack of love, the lack of unification, or seeming unwholeness, which is the basis for all suffering.

Learn this ONE LESSON, and you are done with the curriculum forever. See past the illusion of separations, which gives rise to countless numbers of bits and pieces. Look to the one vision to show you the one true reality. And you will rise above the fragmented battlefield into the wholeness of light.

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF." "This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

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

"My one lesson, which I must teach as I learned, is that no perception which is out of accord with the judgment of the Holy Spirit CAN be justified." "That is why you must teach only ONE lesson. If you are to be conflict free yourselves, you must learn ONLY from the Holy Spirit, and teach ONLY by Him."

"We said before that the message of the Crucifixion was teach ONLY love, for that is what you ARE. This is the ONE lesson which is perfectly unified, because it is the only lesson which IS one. And only BY teaching it can YOU learn it."

"As the teacher of God advances in his training, he learns one lesson with increasing thoroughness. He does not make his own decisions; he asks his Teacher for His answer, and it is this he follows as his guide for action. This becomes easier and easier, as the teacher of God learns to give up his own judgment."

"But the Holy Spirit teaches one lesson and applies it to ALL individuals in ALL situations. Being conflict free, He maximizes ALL efforts and ALL results. By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that ALL POWER IS YOURS. Its application does not matter. It is ALWAYS maximal."

"Thus is YOUR healing everything the world requires, that it may be healed. It needs ONE lesson that has perfectly been learned."

"As you perceive more and more common elements in ALL situations, the transfer of your training, under the Holy Spirit's guidance increases and becomes generalized. Gradually, you learn to apply it to everyone and everything, for its applicability IS universal. When this has been accomplished, perception and knowledge have become so similar that they share the unification of the Laws of God. What is One cannot be perceived as separate, and the denial of the separation IS the reinstatement of knowledge."

"The purpose is to train the mind to generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is as applicable to one situation as it is to another."

"the impairment of the ability to generalize is a crucial learning failure" "Place cause and effect in their true sequence in one respect, and the learning will generalize and transform the world."

"The specificity of the ego's thinking, then, results in a spurious kind of generalization, which is really not abstract at all. It will respond in certain specific ways to all stimuli which it perceives as related. In contrast, the Soul reacts in the same way to everything it knows is true, and does not respond at all to anything else."

"Miracles demonstrate that learning has occurred under the right guidance, for learning is invisible, and what has been learned can be recognized ONLY by its RESULTS. Its GENERALIZATION is demonstrated as you use it in more and more situations. You will recognize that you have learned there is no order of difficulty in miracles, when you have applied them to ALL situations. For there IS no situation to which miracles do not apply, and by applying them TO all situations, you will gain the REAL world."

"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."

"Temptation has one lesson it would teach, in all its forms, wherever it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty, and bound by what it orders him to feel. It sets the limits on what he can do; its power is the only strength he has; his grasp cannot exceed its tiny reach. Would you BE this, if Christ appeared to you in all His glory, asking you but this, "Choose once again if you would take your place among the Saviors of the world, or would remain in hell, and hold your brothers there." For He HAS come, and He IS asking this."

Temptation is quite a big thing. The entire world was made as a temptation. There is an ACIM quote that says exactly that but I couldn't find it. What does it tempt you to do or believe? In and of itself it is nothing but it has the "potential", if you are not vigilant for reality, to seemingly coerce you into believing that something is true that is not. That something is real or happening that is not.

This was the purpose of the world you made. It was designed not only to shut God out but to also tempt you, taunt you, suggest to you, and to try to convince you, that some things are true and real which are not. In your "susceptibility" to temptation you fall for these illusions, these tricks, these deceptions, and believe in them. Only by not believing in them are you able to overlook the temptation and not be caught in it, which is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook temptation.

So often we are tempted to believe something based merely on its seeming presence in the world. Someone's body seems sick. Something bad seemed to happen. Something went wrong. Whatever it is, it's a temptation. You are being tempted by "the ego" to believe lies and illusions. Your body's sense are stimulated by these sources of temptation all the time. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile inputs, all designed to suggest to you "something is there", "something is real", "something is happening".

When you ARE being tempted and have fallen for it, and you are in this heavily tempted ego unconscious state where you are just on autopilot believing the world is real, there isn't a significant seeming contrast between what's happening and reality. But as you start to step back from illusions and question the world's bullshit, a growing contrast arises between what appears in front of your face, and what is true.

And then you'll start to feel challenged or caught between.... do I believe what my senses are telling me and buy into the disaster and believe the sickness and go along with the magic and fall for the fear-inducing hell, or do I circumvent all of that, disbelieve it, seek the Holy Spirit and try to find a way to forgive and undo and perform a miracle, which completely flies in the face of the entire planet, goes against the grain, seems totally contradictory and seems almost crazy to even contemplate? Do you put your trust in a truth which is unseen and a possibility that the entire world testifies is impossible? And this then is all to do with overcoming an order of difficulty in miracles.

You are tempted to believe that the world is filled with difficulty, of all different levels, and that it's even difficult to change or correct even a tiny thing, yet alone a big thing. This has to be disbelieved. Not fallen for. Cancelled. The whole world is a lie. How will you stand in the face of a lie and not believe it, when the whole world is screaming for you to believe it? To know better. To recognize the world is an illusion, unreal, untrue, false, completely bullshit. While you're in it. Immersed in the lying. Immersed in the stimulation and temptation.

"Teachers of God choose to look upon dreams a while..... they are not deceived by what they see."

Okay so, you hear people saying the Earth is flat - the "flat Earthers"... and obviously it's not. But... technically it is.You see, there is this thing called the "hierarchy of illusions". The hierarchy is an ILLUSION that there are differences. All differences are illusions.

So you've got things like different importance, different value, different size and weight, different difficulty, different materials, different appearances, different behaviors, different forms, all of that.

However, the world isn't real, and these differences aren't real.Imagine a canvas on which an artist is going to paint a picture. The canvas itself is just one thing, neutral, empty. There is nothing inherently pictured on it. This is the background of the illusory world.

The artist takes the paint and starts to paint pictures of humans. There's a large body over here, and a small one over there. There's one with two arms, and there's one with only one arm. There's one that's jumping in the air, and one that's laying seemingly dead on the ground.

But the truth always is, that these are all just images, made of the same paint. There is really no difference between the body jumping in the air and the one that appears dead. They're both equal in the sense that any of their difference are an illusion. There aren't really ANY bodies on the canvas, it's just images of bodies.

And so what the illusion of the picture of a world of bodies is, is really a picture of what those things might LOOK LIKE. A body which looks LIKE a dead body, a body which is similar to how a living body might look. And this makes the images on the canvas once removed from the actual thing, from "reality" or "real bodies". They are pictures OF bodies, not actual bodies.

The thing is, the physical world is usually considered to be real, where the "real bodies" are, but in fact the physical world is the realm of the what LOOKS LIKE a world. It's a picturing of a world, an image, like a photograph of some place that you visited. The photograph is not the place itself, just an idea of what it might be like there. That's what the world is. The world is the paint on the canvas, pretending to look like things. A picture OF some OTHER place that doesn't exist.

"The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. It cannot change what is its waking state. ***It cannot make a body***, nor abide within a body. What is alien to the mind does not exist because it has no source. For mind creates all things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful state. ***It cannot make the physical. What seems to die is but the sign of mind asleep.***"

ie The physical world is not REALLY a REAL physical world, it's a picture of one, an imagined idea of what a physical world might be like. It is like a dream about a far off land that you never really visited.

You have never actually REALLY seen a real body, you have only seem what bodies MIGHT look like if they existed. Because really the world is a dream of, an idea of, what it MIGHT be like IF you were able to separate from God. It remains true that you cannot separate from God because God is everywhere. Nor can you REALLY create bodies. So we've just pictured a world which looks LIKE some OTHER place that we've never been to, trying to form it in its likeness to represent it. To symbolize it. The world is a SYMBOL OF a world OUTSIDE of God, which does not exist.

Now, because the physical world of form is the layer of paint on the canvas, and let's say the canvas is what ACIM calls "the real world" which has no inherent forms or bodies or places or things, when you look at it and recognize it as "all made of the same stuff", or "its all just paint" or "its all an equal image", this FLATTENS the hierarchy of illusions. It's stops it appearing as though one thing is bigger or heavier or more important or different to another. Or that any of it is real.

This recognition that the world has NO hierarchy, and that it is all just one thing appearing to be many things, is what it's like to recognize that the picture is just the layer of paint, and it's all just paint. Which means that really a picture of a living body is just as much equal and just paint, as a picture of a dead body. Neither of them are truly different. They're both illusions.

The form of the living body may appear different to the dead one, but that is the illusion of it. "Nothing so blinding as perception of form." When you focus on the forms and their differences you're being deceived by the painted picture, and are failing to recognize it for the trick that it is. You're not realizing it's only a painting, and are mistaking it for BEING the thing it visualizes. You think the PICTURE OF a body really IS a body. That pictures of death really ARE death.

When you overlook ie forgive the ILLUSION of things being different, and you don't fall for there really being a live body or a dead body, and you see the paint instead of the picture, that is true perception. That is accurate perception. It isn't a perception that looks at paint on a canvas and believes there are real people living there with real bodies. It isn't the way the "brain" sees a photo of a body and believes it's looking at the actual person. It's a recognition that it's JUST a photograph, looking at the grain on the paper and the blots of ink.

This is a "flattening" of the hierarchy. A PICTURE of a dead body is now equal to a picture of a living one. A PICTURE of a body with disease is no different in truth than a picture of a body that seems healthy. Because really they are both just images on a blank canvas. And neither of them is more dead or alive, in truth.

"They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

There is no more MEANING in a dead body. There is no more "seriousness" in a dead body. There is no more "lack of life" in a dead body than in a supposedly "living" body. Which tells you also that the living bodies are NOT REALLY ALIVE either. The bodies aren't alive, and they aren't dead, they are just pictures of bodies. They are symbols, not ends in themselves. All made of the same illusory stuff.

"The body neither lives nor dies, for it cannot contain you who are life."

"There is no life outside of heaven."

"At best an illusion of life, at worst death."

"The body is not an end in itself."

So what that calls for, in order to see with forgiveness, is to recognize that there is no truth, life, will, mind, power, causality, strength, force, capability, or existence, to either the living bodies or the dead bodies. They are nothing but pictures. They don't have a "life" to be defended against death, and "death" cannot happen to them any more than life can. e.g.

"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays ***a picture*** of a DIFFERENT you. It is ***a picture of a body*** still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all."

The body is just a picture, in a painting in your mind, which has NO DEPTH. It is not really three dimensional. And its differences are ALL illusions of the way (form) that it's painted in. See the paint for what it is and you no longer see bodies there, or imagine that pictures of houses are real houses, or that pictures of cars are really cars, or that pictures of death are really death.

This ultimately flattens the hierarchy and means there IS NO DIFFERENCE between illusions. There is only one separation, one illusion, one picture, and it's all equally false. Even the suggestion that something would be more DIFFICULT to change than another thing, is part of the illusion of the hierarchy. It is not true. And this ultimately means that there really is no "orders of difficulty."

"The only effort you need make, to give this world (earth) away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make (heaven), is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

From the vantage point of recognizing it all as ONE THING, one dream, one illusion of a world, and ignoring its FORMS, overlooking its differences, and not being deceived or tempted to believe there really ARE any differences at all, there is no "orders" in the world. There are no divisions and levels and parts and pieces. It's all just one illusion, one separation idea. Which means live bodies and dead bodies are the same thing, pretending to be two different things. They are both the dream of death. An illusion.

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."So ultimately THE WORLD IS FLAT, because the hierarchy is flat. When you take away all the illusions of difference, which is false perception - not recognizing it's all just paint - all you end up with is a FLAT world. A world where there is ONE WAY of looking at everything, and it is recognized as ONE THING. And so there is no bigger or smaller or harder or easier.

From that perspective, which is the state of miracle mindedness and true perception, in which everything is given NO extra meaning other than the universal ONE meaning of love, and there is no falling for the deception that a sick body is "a really serious bad thing", and there is no difference in meaning given to "that body seems really healthy" versus "that body seems disease-ridden and ugly", you are now coming from ONE perspective. One vantage point. One loving outlook. One all-inclusive perspective. No longer tempted by form.

From that one perspective, with Vision, for you there is no longer a rough terrain, or a 3D world, or a world where some things are dealt with differently to others. There is one problem and one solution, not many. And there is no hierarchy of orders of difficulty. So now it is ONE ACT, to change the painting, to any given form. It is ONE ACT to perform a miracle which modifies a PICTURE of a dead body into a PICTURE of a living one. One act which can in turn convert a living body into a dead one, and back again. Because all bodies are fake.

To that mind, there is "no order of difficulty in miracles." "They are all the same". Each one is an expression of a spark of life which repaints the picture. A modification to the mind projecting so that the paint on the page changes to SYMBOLIZE something else. Because remember the paint is what something looks LIKE, not what something is. It is all symbolic and once removed. So the body now SYMBOLIZES eternal life, instead of symbolizing death.

It now becomes useful to heal the mind to heal the body, ie to convert the PICTURE of the body into a body free of pain and suffering and damage and death, because this picture in the dream world demonstrates and SYMBOLICALLY communicates an IMAGE of, a representation of, innocence and immortality and harmlessness and holiness. And this TEACHES those who look upon it that they must be innocent, because it does not play by the rules of the laws of a world of difficulty. It does not prove their sinfulness. And proof of sin is not there, breaking the laws of physics.

"Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt."

"The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live.""

"It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."

So you see, the world IS flat, because it is only an ILLUSION that it has any FORM at all. And all its differences are illusions. Bodies and planets and galaxies are not alive, or dead, or anything. They are once-removed PICTURES on a canvas, the underlying canvas of "the real world", and the pictures shift just like the shadows on the wall of the cave. And they are not reality. They are just imagined ideas of what it might be like to go be where God is not. it's not the same place as actually going there. And so the world is just a brochure for hell, not real hell itself.

There is no death, and dead bodies are no more dead than live ones. And live ones are no more alive than dead ones. And all levels of sickness are meaningless. And all degrees of suffering are a lie. And miracles express from a higher vantage point in which the Earth is flat and the hierarchy is flat and every artistic act of "healing bodies" is merely a way of reconfiguring the paint, so that it can symbolize eternal life and point in the direction of heaven rather than hell. As a physicalized symbol of forgiveness.

In this view the body is nothing but an IMAGE in the mind. It has no sickness or health. It cannot be well or dead or suffer at all. I this no will, it has no mind of its own, or instincts, or natural ways. It does not really obey ANY laws of the world, unless your mind believes in the hierarchy of illusions. When you lift away from this PICTURE of a body, the rules and laws and restraints that your mind GAVE to it, trying to make it something OTHER THAN just a neutral image in a dream, it no longer serves the laws of the world.

And now the body is not under the effect of the world. And it cannot become sick on its own, nor can it die against your will. It is now simply suspended in the mind as a figment of imagination, and mind has complete power and control over it, to override any external influences. It cannot age, it cannot get sick, it does not need the world to exist, it does not depend on anything, it just moves around like a puppet for the mind. An avatar in a dream. A figure pretending to be you. A symbol of your immortal self.

Of course, when you throw the painting in the trashcan there is no world, and "heaven is all that remains."

"The recognition of the part as whole, as of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you." "Each part you remember adds to YOUR wholeness, because each part IS whole."

This is a very key statement in ACIM. It is telling you that GOD THINKS ... in a holographic way. In that, each of his thoughts are of wholeness, and are whole. And therefore each PART of God's creation - his mind - his thought system - heaven - the sonship - your brothers - your creations - all of it is run per the holographic principle. The whole is in every part and every part is the whole. This is natural to God, and to you, in heaven. It is THE NATURE OF HEAVEN.

"For you cannot understand Wholeness unless YOU are whole, and no part of the Son can be excluded, if he would know the wholeness of his Father."

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect."

EVERY aspect of heaven's reality MUST abide by this law, because all of it IS the thought SYSTEM or "order of reality" of God's mind. And everything IN it is God's system of thought, which functions per his WAY OF THINKING. He thinks holographically because he can only think of "sharing wholeness". This is why there are many sons who are parts of God, forming a sonship, in which EACH son is ALL the sons, and every son is the one son. Because each part of the Sonship IS the whole Sonship.

"Never forget that the Sonship is your salvation, for the Sonship is your Soul."

"WE are the joint will of the Sonship, whose wholeness is for all."

"If you believe that all of the Souls that God created ARE His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul MUST be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness DOES transcend the sum of its parts." (this happens only in a holographic system)

"Love is a law without an opposite. Its wholeness is the power holding everything as one, the link between the Father and the Son which holds them both forever as the same."

A holographic system arises in God's mind simply because God is WHOLE, and CAN ONLY create that which is whole. So each of his creations MUST be whole. And to be truly whole, it has to be one with God, sharing EVERYTHING with him and with all creations. This is why all the children of God are WHOLE beings and SHARE everything with each other. Wholes within wholes, which are still one whole.

"God's wholeness IS the wholeness of his Son."

"the holy Son whom God created whole"

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul."

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds. Such is the truth."

"This places you both WITHIN the Kingdom and restores ITS wholeness in your minds."

"Sanity IS wholeness. And the sanity of your brothers IS yours."

"But the Resurrection IS the symbol of sharing, because the re-awakening of every Son of God is necessary to enable the Sonship to know its wholeness."

"God WOULD be mocked if ANY of his creations lacked holiness. The Creation IS whole. The mark of Wholeness is Holiness, not holes. THE SONSHIP HAS NO HOLES ANYWHERE."

If you can understand this and accept it, it will make your grasp of the course material a LOT easier. But notice that the quote in the image says that we have hurt our minds so much, that it does in fact make it DIFFICULT for us to understand what reality is like.

This why a lot of people do not recognize OR understand the holographic structure of heaven. It is completely alien to life in this world. But he's also saying that if you can understand that the whole is every part, ie God/wholeness IS each of his children, and each child of God IS all the Children of God, then it should be easier to understand.

"You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness DOES transcend the sum of its parts. However, it loses this special state as long as any of its parts are missing. This is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved UNTIL all of the individual parts of the Sonship have returned. Only then, in the true sense, can the meaning of wholeness be understood."

In a holographic system, wholeness does not mean "there is a count of one thing". Or one son. Or just God. It means, that everything is shared by all creative beings. Every soul in the sonship IS all other souls. The whole sonship is ONE, because it shares the same whole. And the whole it shares is God.

God is omnipresent. What this means is, the entirety of His being is fully present in every part of His being.

If you could conceive of God as taking up "space", then this means that in one particular location, the WHOLE entirety of God is fully present. And yet, simultaneously, in another location, the WHOLE entirety of God is present. This should give you a sense of how God is SHARING or is "stretched out" between these two locations, as though he completely DEFIES all sense of spatial limitations.

And when God is fully and completely present in one location, this does not detract from His presence in another location. He is able to be everywhere simultaneously and fully. This UTTERLY defies the entire ego's way of thinking and its world of separation, in which nothing can share with anything, an object cannot be in two places at once, and everything shows you a picture of there being some things in one place that are not in another.

For God to be able to be fully in multiple locations at once, defies absolutely all ego laws. God simply is UTTERLY UNLIMITED by any concept or law or structural or spatial construct. Jesus says that ALL of Him is in EVERY PART, fully and equally. And this is why every PART has been expressed as a SOUL, which is an entire WHOLE within itself because God expresses His wholeness in every part of Himself and creates WHOLE BEINGS.

The closest I can come to conceiving of God's nature is some kind of absolutely massive network of connections that share every part of Himself everywhere. Every part of God is EVERYWHERE. In God there IS no space or time. He is instantaneous omni-present and fully present in every speck of existence.

Similarly, God utterly transcends absolutely every limitation or difficulty or restriction or space-time concept that you can ever come up with. He quite literally, is INFINITE and UNLIMITED in every way. This is absolutely ego defying. Totally law-breaking and COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to this world.

This world was made as an attempt to shut out God by presenting a picture of what God is NOT LIKE, a world where nothing is shared, nothing is in multiple locations, there is no omnipresence, every location lacks something or has compromised with others, there is severe finite limitation placed on everything etc. This is totally unlike God.

In our development of trust, we ARE to learn to start TRUSTING and putting FAITH IN God's totally unlimited nature, in defiance of this world's totally LIMITING framework. We are to learn to OVERLOOK the limitations of matter and form, to NOT BELIEVE the sight of form, because "nothing is so blinding as sight of form". Form literally was made by the ego to create an artificial, unnatural "nature" that operates and looks NOTHING like God's nature. We have to learn to NOT BELIEVE IT, look past it, and recognize the sheer POSSIBILITY AND FREEDOM present in God.

This freedom breaks absolutely every law of this universe, because this entire universe is in OPPOSITION to God's nature. And so God's nature completely DEFIES every conceivable limitation. That means we have to learn, literally, to put our FAITH and trust in a God who can DO ANYTHING, a God who IGNORES orders of difficulty, a God who is completely FREE of all limitations and problems, and a God for whom NOTHING is impossible.

That means shifting our allegiance away from the ego, not just in our mind and perception but also in terms of what we think we are "stuck with" or what is "assumed" or "cannot be changed" or " is a given" in this world, including the so-called inevitability and irreversability of death, which is nothing more than one more ego statement that "This has the power to prevent God's will, and kill His Son, and He can do nothing about it." That is the ego's motto, and we've fallen for it.

Now it is time for a new thought system. A new way of looking at the world, and a new POWER to place our trust in. This is the foundation of all MIRACLE WORKING, which IS SUPERNATURAL, which defies and breaks all ego laws and proves that NOTHING CAN RESIST GOD'S POWER, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, and therefore show that this world is EASILY changed because it is merely an illusion.

If we are to be miracle workers, we can't be sitting on a fence looking happily upon a dying world. Our task is to demonstrate that to God anything is possible, and therefore that is NOTHING that cannot be healed or reversed, and even death - the consequences of sin, all torment and sickness and disaster and world-wide or even universe-wide problems CAN be reversed. "There is NOTHING my holiness cannot do", not even the most radically extraordinary things you could ever imagine being possible.

The limitations of this world are a total lie. We are to demonstrate this fact by performing miracles which place total faith in GOD'S COMPLETELY UNLIMITED NATURE. If we trust that HE CAN DO ANYTHING, then we too can do anything in cooperation with His Will.

AND WHY THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES...

In this world, forms of objects and bodies and planets are all made to establish how one thing is DIFFERENT to another.

So when we look at the spectrum of types of sickness for example, we have DIFFERENCES in appearances. A headache, a cold, some back pain, a broken leg, a disease, and death, all SEEM different in their FORMS.

However, difference IS NOT reality or truth or sanity. Differences are fundamentally an ego thing.

So what do you think happens to your body when all of its "differences" are undone? Clearly it cannot even exist at all. If it is not being used to make differences real, then it is not being used to differentiate degrees of sickness.

It is DIFFERENCE between things that produces all forms of sickness and death. Or in other words, forms of SEPARATION. Total death requires total intense separation from Life, identifying the body as being so UNLIKE LIFE that it must be dead.

So on this spectrum, death is literally just an attempt to reinforce or EMPHASIZE how "unlike life" the body is. And that's a result of the MIND that is projecting and using the body, and ITS degree of belief in how unlike life it is. Death is ISOLATION from life, which confines you to and identifies you closely with being a body, because a body is a symbol of something STANDING APART from the whole.

When you believe you are NOT LIKE GOD, or you are not the way God created you which is in His likeness, you WILL produce some kind of "difference" in your mind and that WILL produce an APPEARANCE (illusion) of difference in the body. The body will start to look like it is not LIKE LIFE, and so will start to show up as falling apart and malfunctioning and dying.

The body ITSELF, in terms of its FORM, was made as an attempt to assert that what you are is DIFFERENT from all others. That's because "your body" is literally physically cut off from other bodies, does not look like them, has different qualities and seems not to be operated by any other minds, if you ARE this body then you are SEPARATE from others, and therefore you are UNLIKE WHOLENESS, and therefore you are not like LIFE, and therefore you are DEAD.

So the body itself is actually a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son, or the idea that the Son is DEAD because it has been separated out into illusions of distinct different parts which are unlike and disconnected from each other. This fragmentation of identity as FORMS OF DIFFERENCE is, however, an ILLUSION.

The mind does not HAVE to elect to SEE this way. It does not have to regard itself as confined to or IDENTIFIED BY the body or the way that this particular body is showing up versus those of others. The mind can elect to OVERLOOK the body, recognizing that it actually was made to SEPARATE, by its fundamental nature of appearing different and isolated, and it was designed as an instrument for ISOLATING YOU to one very small limited location.

The mind can elect to NOT BELIEVE that this isolated body form is actually representative of its identity. It can believe and perceive that this one body is not ITSELF, and does not limit it, and that the mind is not "identified as" the body. To do that however requires the undoing of mental beliefs in DIFFERENCES BEING REAL. And that means learning to OVERLOOK ALL DIFFERENCES and to not believe in them.

That means you have to learn to not be convinced that one APPEARANCE is actually TRULY different to another, that one sickness is more severe than another, or that even death itself is any more "true" than a paper-cut. When we believe in separation we believe in difference and therefore automatically start believing in the "hierarchy of illusions", which is TOTAL FICTION.

When you can learn to NOT pay attention to the ILLUSION OF DIFFERENCES, of forms, and LOOK PAST them, which DOES mean to FORGIVE them, you get into the kind of mind that recognizes that ALL forms are illusions and are all THE SAME, NOT DIFFERENT, and therefore any miracle that you would apply to one is THE SAME as would be applied to another.

This is what results in awareness that THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES. If death is not REALLY any different to a broken nose, then it should not in any way present any greater difficulty in healing than to stop the nose bleeding. Jesus in fact mentions in the Course that the idea of raising the dead should really be no harder than anything seemingly less severe. This does however require total faith and quite an advanced degree of NOT BELIEVING illusions of separation, or appearances.

ALL appearances of difference were made to DECEIVE and BLIND YOU. "Nothing so blinding as sight of form". The Holy Spirit CAN utilize the body as a holy temple through which it is only used for COMMUNICATION. Communication means extension, ie total SHARING, oneness, unity, IDENTICALITY, seeing that you and your brother are ALIKE in every way, overlooking all DIFFERENCES, and recognizing that the same Love that God put in YOU is also in your brother. This results in HEALTH and HEALING, because the belief in *separation* is the root cause of ALL sickness and death.

Without BELIEVING YOUR EYES, or rather, without believing that "differences are true", you can no longer believe that a certain form is any more true or difficult to heal than another. It also therefore means, that when you can demonstrate that THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE, and that the appearance of a difference - regardless of its extremeness - can be easily "ironed out" by a mind that does not BELIEVE in the difference (because it's an illusion), this can literally IRON OUT the difference IN FORM, producing a collapsing of the extremes of "different forms", the reversal of sickness, and even restoring LIFE to the DEAD.

The "erasing of death" should thus be natural to a miracle worker, and as easy as showing that there IS NO SEPARATION in any sickness. That sickness itself is merely an idea of fictional difference and a mind that does not believe in it can produce changes in APPEARANCE that represent NO DIFFERENCE, which causes sickness to literally disappear from the form because the mind is stronger than the body and stronger than all forms.

This also ultimately means, that once communication is whole and there is no belief in the LIE OF MATTER, and not being convinced by ANY illusory APPEARANCE of difference in form, this ENTIRE UNIVERSE must simply be cancelled out. If there cannot be any differences, and if all differences are illusions, and the entire fabric of MATTER is based on belief in one thing being separate or different from another, there literally CANNOT BE ANY MATTER, because there ARE no differences between things, and thus does this universe COMPLETELY DISAPPEAR once it is RECOGNIZED as an illusion. "Illusions recognized must disappear".

This is why there is no world and why God could not have created something that exhibits conflict and separation and death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mind is the mechanism of decision."

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

"God does not coerce."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The power of decision is my own. .... No-one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No-one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No-one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no-one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

"My Self is ruler of the universe. ... It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

"You may wonder how you, who are still bound to judgment, can be asked to do that which requires no judgement of your own. The answer is very simple. The power of God, and NOT of you, engenders miracles. The miracle ITSELF is but the witness that you HAVE the power of God in you. That is the reason that the miracle gives EQUAL blessing to ALL who share in it, and that is also why EVERYONE shares in it. The power of God IS limitless. And, being always maximal, it offers EVERYTHING to EVERY call from ANYONE. There is no order here. A call for help is GIVEN help. The only judgment involved at all is in the Holy Spirit's one division into two categories; one of love, and the other, the call for love."

- ACIM

Here (urtext) Jesus is talking about how God is the origin of miracles and how God's POWER is unlimited, how the power of God produces miracles through you and how they extend to everyone not just yourself. "A call for help is GIVEN help".

Again this has nothing to do with a so-called "shift in perception", because the power of God acts above and beyond our own limitations, and beyond perception entirely. Miracles, sourced in and BY God, transcend perception entirely and cannot have anything to do with perceptual changes or small corrections of thought.

In a previous section Jesus also speaks of how a miracle is evidence that an entirely other 'world' is being brought to this one, as evidenced by the complete lack of respect for the order of difficulty or ego hierarchies.

Miracles can only properly be understood from the perspective of looking "down" from a higher vantage point, a vantage point of unconditional love.

They cannot so easily be understood when lookup "up" from below, as one who is attempting to awaken. Those awakening do not understand love and cannot grasp or experience how a single thing - an expression of love - could encompass the entire scope of what miracles entail.

They are nothing more than emissions of love, coming from a higher level to a lower level, causing that which is lower to be raised up and brought back into the light. In doing so, "the dead" are raised back up to life.

It's all about the love. Real love, not special love.

Miracles of love are expressed from above to below "like drops of healing rain" which give life back to starved and thirsty creatures, restoring "life" where there appeared to be death.

Love is life-giving. Love has healing power. Love can undo and cancel the entire ego illusion, and everything to do with bodies and worlds.

Miracles are a heart-felt love expressed in softness and gentleness and depth, innocent yet strong, unhidden yet powerful. These expressions of love are like a healing balm for the mind, immediately loosening and dissolving all forms of lack.

Miracles supply a lack of love, with love, so that the life-giving presence of God is restored, producing healing. All forms of sickness come from a lack of love, ie separation from love, so miracles repair the lack and provide "life", producing health where there once was sickness and loss.

Miracles are the light which shine away all darkness with their presence. Nothing can withstand them. They know no order of difficulty because all expressions of love are maximum love - whole love, full love.

Love can be expressed to others and instantly provide the lack of love they've been experiencing, producing instantaneous healing. All suffering is the absence of love. Miracles express love in order to undo the absence of God.

God heals.

It may seem at first that all events in this world are random, sometimes negative, difficult, cruel and should not be happening. We try to avoid some events and promote others. We want the bad stuff to go away and escape into only the good stuff, to prolong the good stuff as long as possible and have some sense of control.

But one thing that has become glaringly obvious to me in recent weeks of turmoil and trust-development, is that there absolutely is a higher plan whose reach spans everything that happens here, including the timing of meetings between individuals and groups and everything that occurs.

The plan of atonement, or the universal curriculum, orchestrates all events, encounters and occurrences. "Those who are to meet will meet". The Holy Spirit has laid out this plan, and it includes both what seem to be positive and negative events, or rather, the re-purposing of them for awakening.

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that ***everything which happens***, ***all events***, past, present and to come, ***are gently planned by One*** Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal life."

We are willing to endure "trials" and "lessons" only because, in the much bigger long-term picture, we know that the outcome of these, when we elect to learn the curriculum of truth, brings us closer to God. No one in their right mind would deliberately choose to endure suffering and difficulty, except if they knew that such things would educate them and eventually persuade them towards a better way.

"***Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn*** presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you. ***In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face***, Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again." He would not leave one source of pain unhealed, nor any image left to veil the truth. He would remove all misery from you whom God created alters unto joy. He would not leave you comfortless, alone in dreams of hell, but would release your minds from everything that hides His Face from you."

This world is not a collection of random occurrences. I see it now more as a winding, twisting dream sequence, with threads of stories and encounters and happenings, where designated people are supposed to be exactly where they are, where environments and events transpire on purpose to present lessons, in the hope that we will use these situations with the Holy Spirit towards the goal of awakening rather than as a way to strengthen our belief in hell. The world is just one big school of classrooms in which to unlearn the lies of the ego. And all of this is planned, somewhat like a form of voluntary destiny.

Before our lifetime we consent to various such classrooms. We may agree upon a body, a family, a location, a lifestyle. We may even agree that certain physical problems arise at certain times, seemingly triggered by certain events. But we have to realize that behind these seemingly random events, such as a car-crash for example, there is orchestration. There is purpose. It is meant to happen, because these trials need to be revisited so that certain stimuli will be presented to offer an opportunity for spiritual growth. And we sign on the dotted line to say, ok, I will be willing to go through all this if it will lead me closer home to God.

Sometimes really awful stuff happens. If a person is in a car crash and even perhaps dies for a while, perhaps this is to facilitate that they can visit Heaven, be healed, be restored and enlightened to some degree, so that upon returning they are a new person and live in a new way, making possible new avenues of expression and help. We might think some things happening are horrendous and cruel but when it's part of a much bigger plan, even the most awful of occurrences might well be divinely intended, not to cause suffering but to create circumstances and consequences that are ultimately beneficial spiritually.

In the really big picture, everything that happens here is entirely designed and repurposed as a tool to bring you home. The whole world is one big rescue mission, gently trying to get us to become willing to see sense and let go of our ego toys. God has protected us and is using space and time to present a curriculum that applies to all entities here, using scripts and events to present lessons that we agree to, so that we will gradually learn of the truth and awaken from our sleep.

We would only be willing to go through difficulties if we knew that it was in fact a purposeful lesson, and one which would point us eventually in the direction of love and happiness. Lessons that make us grow and present opportunities for forgiveness. We learn by applying the truth and forgiving what seems to occur, which in turn collapses periods of time and scripts that we no longer need.

The appearance that events and encounters and meetings are entirely at random is complete fiction. The Holy Spirit has control over all of this, with his plan for salvation. As you atune to this plan and trust it rather than fight against events, it becomes more obvious that He speaks through a variety of persons, He works through a variety of happenings, and that regardless of surface chance, some things simply are meant to happen a certain way, and will, by His will.

How else could we develop trust than if it were true that there is a plan to trust in, an ability of the Holy Spirit and God to guide and direct what transpires, and not just some chaotic random mishmash of cruelty and crime that we keep trying to escape. To trust in the plan is to learn the curriculum. To overlook the chaos and see the order is forgiveness. Everything happening here is an intricate symphony of education and opportunities to choose once again. And all of it continually points us towards reunion with God.

A Course in Miralces says:

"23. Miracles make time and tide wait for all men. They can heal the sick and RAISE THE DEAD because man himself made both death and taxes, and can abolish both. Note: Tax also means "strain"."

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

"There have been many healers who did not heal themselves. They have not MOVED MOUNTAINS by their faith because their faith was not WHOLE. Some of them have healed the sick at times, but they have not RAISED THE DEAD. Unless the healer heals HIMSELF, he does NOT believe that there is no order in miracles. He has not learned that EVERY mind that God created is equally worthy of being healed because GOD CREATED IT WHOLE."

"The sick are healed as you let go all thoughts of sickness, and THE DEAD ARISE when you let thoughts of life replace all thoughts you ever held of death."

"Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death. "

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell. ... Here the curriculum ends."

The road to enlightenment really boils down to a matter of recognition. There's more than 100 references to "recognition" in ACIM.

"Why wait for Heaven? Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. The light is in them now. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all."

Here Jesus is saying that we are ALREADY LIGHT, alreadty holy and whole. We just keep DENYING that it is already true of us, like someone who doesn't want to admit what's true. We are covering our eyes and trying NOT to see reality.

What does recognition mean? It means you accurately and correctly discern and acknowledge what something actually IS, without any distortion or denial or illusions or attempts to change it.

This obviously means being AWARE of what it is, and so yields awareness, or awakening. To be awake to what something IS is to recognize its reality. To not recognize reality is to be unaware of what is real, which places the mind in a state of sleep or unconsciousness, in which it dreams a world of lies.

The interesting thing is that, within you right now, there is a holy, perfect, happy, peaceful, divine, innocent self. It's ALREADY THERE. And it is already true. God has in fact already established the fact of what you ACTUALLY ARE.

The only problem we have, is that our minds are currently in a state where we don't clearly acknowledge this about ourselves, we don't recognize it is in us already, and we don't seem to want it. We have REJECTED OURSELVES, and don't want to be who we are.

"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."

Part of the problem of not wanting it is simply because we don't recognize it. When you DON'T recognize something, you think it is something else. And now you've entered into illusions and confusion and insanity. It means you are out of touch with reality.

Accepting reality means coming into "contact" with it, rather than being separated off from it or distanced from it. Being in contact with reality is sanity and recognition of what is already true. Such a state of mind is mirarcle mindedness.

"Miracles are examples of right thinking. Reality contact at all levels becomes strong and accurate, thus permitting correct delineation of intra- and interpersonal boundaries. As a result, the doer sees the truth as God created it."

Atonement is the same. We are asked to accept the atonement. The atonement is an expression of the truth. We are simply asked to accept what is true, in terms of the truth as God established it. To accept what God has GIVEN you. Which is also to reclaim your inheritance.

"Innocence is not of your making. It is GIVEN you, the instant you would HAVE it."

"The remedy is NOT of your making, any more than YOU are." "God Himself gave you the perfect correction for everything you have made which is not in accord with His Holy Will."

We aren't even really asked to do anything special or elaborate. We're basically just asked to "know thyself". To be true to what we actually are. To recognize its truth, to acknowledge it as true, and to accept it.

This means that while we're NOT doing that, we must be in some kind of strange mental state where we're AVOIDING the truth, we want something ELSE to be true, and we've put our faith in things which are false. We've given reality TO illusions and lies, instead of letting reality be reality.

It surely can't be hard to simply turn within and acknowledge actual facts. A truth which can be experienced. To let go of all desires to have the truth be something it is not, and to merely accept what is true. To let yourself be as God created you. To stop trying to turn yourself and others into something they're not.

Enlightenment then isn't even really an activity, it's more like just a total surrendering and allowing what ACTUALLY IS to be what it is. Which also means allowing God to be God, and you to be you, and your brother to be your brother.

It's like, just giving up and stopping all the ego games of wanting things to be different to how they are in reality, and being willing to ADMIT that only the truth is true. To lay down all the defense and denials and ways that we try to INSIST that something else is true and real.

It was our insisting on not being okay with heaven, that produced this false world. It was our denial of God that produced our egotism and suffering. It was our wanting to be something we could never be, that placed us in bodies and space and time. And it was our attempt to oppose life that induced our own seeming death.

"You ATTACK the real world every day and every hour and every minute, and yet you are surprised that you cannot SEE it." The road home couldn't really be more simple. We just give up fighting against reality and become fully willing to accept and receive an "off the shelf" solution from God, take His truth to be our own, align with His will for us, and just return to living in your NATURAL state.

"To be without a body is to be in our natural state. To recognize the light of truth in us is to recognize ourselves as we are."

"By DEMONSTRATING to yourselves that THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES, you will convince yourselves that in your NATURAL state there IS no difficulty, because it is a state of Grace."

"Grace is the natural state of every Son of God. When he is NOT in a state of grace he IS out of his natural environment, and does NOT function well. Everything he does becomes a strain, because he was not created for the environment which he has made. He therefore CANNOT adapt to it, nor can he adapt IT to HIM. There is no point in trying. A Son of God is happy ONLY when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make."

"Health is the natural state of anything whose interpretation is left to the Holy Spirit, who perceives no attack on anything."

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.

There is conditional healing, and unconditional healing.

The ego's healing is conditional healing. It says that all problems are different, and so diagnosis is needed to analyze and properly identify the cause - from many possible causes - and that doing so will inform us what needs to be done to produce healing.

The trouble with this is that it makes sickness real, making it irreversible, then comes up with an explanation for it which does nothing more than justify why it is real, making it even more irreversible, and then is practically powerless to cure it. The ego then only has special magical solutions which mostly do not work, and which definitely do not cure. The ego does not REALLY want you to heal, and its efforts to both diagnose and "treat" sickness are actually efforts to MAKE YOU SICK. This kind of healing is not really a healing solution AT ALL!

God's healing is unconditional. God does not need to figure out which of many causes has produced a problem. He knows that trying to do this would make the problem real. He also knows that there cannot BE multiple causes, because He is the ONLY cause of what is real. He also knows that finding one of multiple answers, and prescribing one of many possible remedies, would only partially assist in its removal.

He instead holds firm in the knowledge that healing is permanent because healing is truth. He simply further expresses and extends His Power to demonstrate that it is true, through the miracle. He simply CURES the problem, showing that it is not a problem at all. He does not wait on diagnosis, He does not adjust his response based on the hierarchy of problems or the apparent difficulty. One problem, on solution. BAM! Gone.

As you perform miracles, you might have some sense that they may not be fully applied or that they might not work. This is because you are still of the belief that there is a separate will out there capable of working against yours.

But that separate will is just a portion of your own will that is working against yourself because you still believe that the 'cause' is outside of you. The secret tosalvation is that you but do things to yourself, and there is no enemy or external cause.

As you perform miracles, it may seem there is an enemy standing in the way, being defiant, tempting you with illusions of difficulty or seriousness. These are all lies. They are not really there.

There is nothing stopping miracles from being fully applied, directly, to correct and change and heal. Nothing can stand in their way.

It is not that you need to learn how to ask the world to be healed, or how to put in a proper 'request'. This isn't about making requests. You're not asking the dream to heal. You're telling it to BE a certain way. You command it.

And really, you do not command 'it'. There isn't really anything there TO command. Rather, you are bypassing it, overlooking it with complete forgiveness, and are simply re-writing it directly.

In authority, if you decide with God to re-paint a part of the world, you will directly apply that to the world and it will be transformed. You won't be saying to the world, oh, maybe if you like you can change for me. You will be FORCING it to change by direct will.

The will of God is not partial. It is not conditional. It doesn't just 'maybe' happen. It isn't weak. It doesn't just apply sometimes and fail other times. The will of God is permanent. It is already accomplished. Miracles are already accomplished. The re-writing of the illusion into a happier dream is already accomplished.

What could stand in the way of the authority of the Son of God but his own fantasies that something exists to stand in the way?

100% extension of Creation, outward, with power. There is nothing else to oppose it.

There is no ego. There is no hell. There is no evil.

Yesterday I lay hands on my wife's cramping feet, I commanded the cramps to go, Holy Spirit flowed and the cramps left. There wasn't a whole lot of fanfare. It just happened and it was done.

Miracle.

I noticed afterwards that it had worked seemingly easier than in past attempts. Something about me had changed.

Previously, as I attempted miracles, I still had a strong belief in sickness being real. I saw its removal as "difficult", and felt that I was going up against a formidable opponent.

It reminded me of how when I first started to pray to God, that I would be in much more of a begging mode, much more a victim, and quite powerless. I'd be in tears and pleading and begging but it wouldn't bring about much of a result. This is because I was not orienting myself properly as an extender of God's miracles, but was trying have something done to me. That's victim consciousness, and God will not attack.

ACIM also tells us about the authority problem, which is our attempt to "be God" in separation from God, to overthrow God and to replace Him with a false self. The more that we try to do this, the more we give "power" to the ego, but paradoxically this is also giving AWAY our true power - the power of God. The stronger the ego seems to become, the weaker we become. Taking authority away from God takes real authority away from ourselves.

Similarly, the extent to which we believe that illusions are reality, such as that sickness is real, problems are real, or that we have powerful enemies, reveals just how weakened we are. If we believe that illusions have power over us, that they are the truth (and the truth cannot be changed), then this "disables" us from being effective miracle workers.

I had previously attempted to go up against what I perceived to be a real enemy, a real sickness, a real difficulty, and it was this fundamental belief that produced the wrong kind of perception - a perception which blocks miracles. If I'm perceiving that, let's say, 70% of the truth is in illusions, then I only believe in God's power 30% and see myself as incapable of overcoming the problem. I can rant and scream at it all I want but it won't budge.

I will also keep looking at the problem to see 'if' the miracle worked, I will check it, I will be in a mode of diagnosis (ego), and I will have a lot of doubt. Here I am using perception to receive signals from outside of me to tell me IF something happened, instead of knowing from WITHIN that it MUST happen. With a perception riddled with fear - which means that you believe illusions are real - you are not wielding very much authority over them.

In the past few weeks I've been going through quite a breakthrough in terms of recognizing that ALL sickness is unreal, that the entire physical world is an illusion, and really withdrawing a lot of belief from it. It has reframed everything for me and is putting things in their proper perspective. It was very difficult seeming to decide to not believe in sickness anymore, flying in the face of what the whole world believes.

Following this, however, I noticed as I attempted a miracle that I had a much more miracle-minded attitude. I was not about to take no for an answer, was not checking to see if something happened, I did not pause to decide whether to do it, I told the problem to go and I meant it, and a greater sense of authority expressed itself through me.

As such, when you change your mind and believe more strongly that God's truth is the truth, and that illusions really are NOTHING, you take on and share more of the REAL authority of God once more. You have power OVER illusions because you are much less deceived by them. This makes you more miracle minded because now you are more aligned with Holy Spirit's mindset, are more empowered by the truth, are much less deterred by the illusions of orders of difficulty, and you simply believe far less that the problem/sickness has more power than you do.

Ultimately this will mean that you gain such authority in Christ, such alignment with God, and such certainty that illusions are NOTHING to you, that you literally can brush them away like they meant nothing at all. That is the kind of power that Jesus demonstrated. That's what happens when you have aligned yourself with God's truth and no longer perceive incorrectly that illusions are actually even a formidable opponent. Recognizing them as nothing, not taking them seriously, not believing they are real and not GIVING THEM any power, strips them of all possible defenses and prevents them from preventing the miracle.

As we reclaim our birthright in sharing the True Authority of God, relinquishing our attempt to have ego authority - which is really weakness and powerlessness - and surrendering to the truth, provides us with automatic access to the miracle-minded awareness of God/Holy Spirit, and thereby facilitates miracles. Instead of difficult miracles seeming to become harder, they instead become easier the less you believe the problem is real. Nothing can stand in the way of the Son of God.

You have authority over all illusions because of what you are and because of what the truth is. That authority is POWER, and that power can effortlessly disappear all sickness, death and suffering. It can disappear the body, the world, and the universe. The power of God knows no limits.

If someone else is having a problem, and you feel concerned, there is something mistaken going on in your mind.

There is actually an ego reaction, based on the hierarchy of illusions, which says that based on the perceived severity of the situation, you should be having a certain amount of reaction.

Just even perceiving that someone ELSE is having a problem, seems to be enough of a belief in a "cause" happening outside of you, even if it not perceived as happening TO you, to produce a sense of "effects" showing up in your mind.

If it's you believing that someone else's body is under attack, this would seem not to be about you at all. But it is, because your mind is having the belief in attack. And even if it's someone "not me" seeming to be attacked, just the acceptance that it is occurring is enough to cause your mind to generate fear thoughts.

So then the question arises, is it possible when presented with situations in which other people are suffering, to be completely unmoved by it. Is it possible to not have a reaction, to not go into fear, or into diagnosis mode, or attempting to react to what seems very real.

And then this further leads to, is it OKAY to not react? Is it okay to remain calm and peaceful and seemingly "disconnected" from what is supposed to be a "normal reaction"? Is it okay to be happy when someone is upset, calm when someone is stressing out, peaceful when someone is in pain, etc. That basically, your inner state and emotion and mental condition becomes NOT DEPENDENT ON the external world.

Somehow this means transcending the hierarchy of illusions, orders of severity/difficulty, belief in seriousness, problems seeming to be real, other people's problems seeming to be real, and sinking into a kind of detached "insulation" or self-contained independently chosen state of being, that isn't always the EFFECT OF or a REACTION TO what's happening in the world. The idea of being in a state which the WORLD did not cause, is quite radically new.

Can I become not involved. Can I remain untangled from the illusions. In the face of dramas, can I not buy into them. Can I remain happy and peaceful at all times, which seems very very alien to the state of being constantly tossed around on the ocean waves like a rollercoaster of stressful reactions. Can I become independent of the world's causalities, immune to them, invulnerable to them, such that I am literally no longer AFFECTED by anything. And such that whatever state I experience *I* have chosen, and the world has not caused to happen in me.

"I am not at the effect of the world I see."

1. Nothing real can be threatened because reality is PERMANENT.

2. Nothing unreal exists because unreal things are TEMPORARY.

3. If something can be threatened, it can be changed.

4. If something can be changed, and given nothing REAL can be changed, that thing ****MUST NOT BE REAL****

5. Only UNREALITY can be changed.

6. God, who is REAL, and permanent, and cannot be changed or threatened, CAN ONLY CREATE that which is permanent, and unchanging.

7. Anything that CHANGES in ANY WAY, is temporary, ***UNREAL***, and *****NOT CREATED BY GOD*****!!!!

8. God who is real, can only create THE PERMANENT. He can only create eternal life. If something grows, changes, transforms, changes form, or dies, it is NOT A CONSTANT STATE ("reality is a constant state"). Therefore it *CANNOT BE REALITY*, it MUST BE an illusion, and it DOES NOT really exist.

9. Nothing unreal exists. Anything that changes does not exist. Herein lies the peace of God.

10. God is at peace because NOTHING REAL IS CHANGING.

In summary:

1. If it changes, IT IS NOT REAL.

2. If it cannot be changed, IT IS REAL.

Use this to evaluate *EVERYTHING*. Ask yourself.

Q. "Can this be changed?"

If the answer is YES, *****IT IS NOT REAL AND GOD DID NOT CREATE IT*****

Example:

Does planet Earth change? Yes. It spins, it moves, it changes shape, it has oceans which flow, forests that grow and die, bodies that suffer and become sick, tragedies and horrors which transform and affect people and threaten things.

Therefore, EARTH IS NOT REAL AND GOD DID NOT CREATE IT.

If you can’t accept this.... either

a) you have some difficulty understanding simple logic

b) you are confused about whether something changes or not

c) you can’t see why "changing things" is unreal because you’ve never had a sense of anything truly permanent to compare it to

d) you are in denial

e) you do not want to give up the world and want it to be reality, so are having wishful thinking

f) you are just not ready to accept this yet, which is ok, but that doesn’t CHANGE THE TRUTH.

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

"you made death, and it is but illusion of an end."

"Miracles make time and tide wait for all men. They can heal the sick and raise the dead because man himself made both death and taxes, and can abolish both."

This world we seem to be in, is not really a world. It is an illusion of a world, hallucinated by an insane mind, imagining that something impossible exists. It is a meaningless world. It is not good or bad, or evil or holy, or positive or negative, it is absolutely nothing at all.

What we call "the ego" then picks out certain parts of this singular illusion, and says that some parts of it are more alive than others, and other parts more dead. We GIVE it this meaning. We say, ok, this form and shape and behavior means death, and other forms and shapes and behaviors mean life.

And so we assign death to certain states or conditions. We say ok, there's decay and decomposition and damage and seeming lack of life or motion, so we're going to call this death. And when there is motion and vitality and symbols of aliveness, we're going to call this life.

This is literally what you made up. You decided some parts of the one illusion mean death just based purely on appearances. As Jesus says, life and death then seem like opposites in the SAME illusory world, made of ONE substance, and you then decided within that scope that "death ends life". Or that some of the illusions cause other illusions to change and lean towards the "dead state" that you gave the meaning of death to.

It's all made up. There is no part of the illusory world that is more alive OR dead than another part. A dead tree is not really any more dead than a living tree. A dead body in a grave decomposing is really not any different to an exuberant newborn baby smiling at its parents. Nor is a healthy dude at a gym any more alive than a seeming sickly old woman in a hospital. It's all the same stuff.

The ILLUSION is that they are NOT the same. That's the whole trick of it. The suggestion that some FORMS MEAN SOMETHING DIFFERENT to other forms. That their FORM IS their meaning, and their meaning sets them apart as not the same.

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

"It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else BUT form will be perceived."

"The FORM it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from REASON's eyes."

"Therefore, He (Holy Spirit) OPPOSES differences in form as meaningful, and emphasizes always that THESE DIFFERENCES DO NOT MATTER."

In the big picture, ALL of the contents of the illusory world are EQUAL in the illusory nature, EQUALLY unreal, and EQUALLY nothing. There are NOT parts which are more alive, and there are NOT parts which are more dead. The body and the world are not alive, or dead. They are neither and nothing.

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

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

What this means is the body as a meaningless illusion in a meaningless world, cannot HAVE any properties inherent to it. The world HAS no inherent meaning. When you USE it for an ego purpose, you actually distort the body and steer it towards unnatural states which produces what appears to be physical sickness and death. But as we just said even these states are illusions equal to the rest.

When the mind uses the body to bring the word of God, or the perspective of sanity in which the world is all one illusion, to those who lack this awareness, ie when we love and extend God, we stop distorting the world into states of difference, contrasts, conflicts and opposites, and this lifts away from the "body image" the signs of sickness and attack and conflict. Thus the body "resurrects" to what SYMBOLICALLY is a state of health and life. But even this is still not really life.

There is no death because it only seems to happen in a made-up world with made-up meaning based on made-up forms. A dead body is no more dead in truth than what we call a living body. They are totally the same illusion. One illusion of strange separate things, to which we've assigned arbitrary meaning based on nothing in particular.

WHEN the mind can recognize this, it is no longer participating in the hierarchy of illusions, recognizes both "life and death" as the same one illusion, and now has power over ALL states of matter. It has become miraculous because it sees no order of difficulty. It is no longer believed to be any harder or more difficult or strange or intense or chronic or stubborn to make one thing change into another thing.

Then it becomes EASY to change one state of matter into another, just as Jesus demonstrated materializing food and converting a branch into a snake and back, raising the dead and so on.

"Appearances deceive BUT CAN BE CHANGED."

"You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed."

You become able to change material objects into any particular form, as part of your awakening to the fact that they are in fact ALL THE SAME. Overlooking their differences is forgiveness. Recognizing there is only ONE PROBLEM is forgiveness. Seeing the world as having no meaning of its own is overlooking illusions. Recognizing that a body IS NOT REALLY DEAD, and is no more dead than another living body, allows you to convert that body back to the living. Or at least to the symbolic illusion of living.

There are a number of stories in the book "The saints who raised the dead" which is a great read to hear about actual miracles. For example one saint visited a woman who was insane, and had attacked her children and killed them, and then was actually chopping them up and cooking them and eating them. And some of the parts had already been eaten. Totally greusome story yes. However, the saint arrived and, knowing none of these appearances were TRUE, performed a miracle and re-constructed the bodies of the children, putting all of the material back together into fully-formed, fully functioning, unharmed and seemingly totally alive and happy young kids again.

In another story, a man had died and was buried and had already been in the ground for several days starting to decompose. Surely this would mean that it was "too difficult" to resurrect the person to life. But a saint arrived and performed a miracle, recognizing that again the states and forms of matter meant nothing at all. And raised the body up out of the grave and recomposed it into a healthy living body, and the man walked away happily.

There are NO LIMITS on what your holiness can do because your holiness has the power of God in it, plus the awareness that this entire world is NOTHING, and so how can it be DIFFICULT to do anything? All forms CAN be changed precisely because they ARE illusions. Nothing here is permanent or fixed or beyond help. It is precisely because the world is NOT real that it CAN be changed by miracles.

"If sin were real it would forever be beyond the hope of healing."

"Yet nothing in the world of dreams remains without the hope of change and betterment, for here is NOT where changelessness is found."

You made death. You invented death. You decided it is death. You made it up, imagined it, labelled in, assigned it to certain forms, and tried to separate it out from other forms. It is not any of that. Death is no different than life in a world of singular illusion. Raising the dead should be effortless for someone who knows this deeply and uses it.

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

I have almost as much trouble figuring out how to forgive something now as I did years ago when I started the Course.

When the ego comes up with some problem, it seems to be just as confusing and just as obscuring and distracting. I still seem to have to 'start out' the forgiveness process in a state of blindness and ego allegiance and in the midst of a learning difficulty.

Each time a new lesson comes along, you can bet it's just as 'new' to me as lessons that I learned a long time ago. As the next layer of the onion pops into my awareness, it's just as confounding and unobvious and difficult to deal with as the last one was to begin with. Its a new challenge. A new deception. And when this is happening, it seems that everything I have supposedly 'learned' about ACIM is thrown out the window and I can't even remember how to do a basic forgiveness.

This can make it seem as though I have made no progress whatsoever, because each time a new lesson pops up its back to square one. I can accumulate an intellectual understanding of the Course and evolve my grasp of the metaphysics over time, but when it really comes down to 'how well can I apply it', not a lot has progressed. I know I have gotten better 'skilled' at it if you will, but each challenge is still challenging.

I guess this is because there is simply a lot of 'work' to do, a lot of correction needed and a lot of stuff to sort out. The sorting out can take a long time, and just because you already sorted out 15 boxes of junk and 3 boxes of 'keepers' doesn't mean the next box of junk is any easier to decipher. Here I am, still shoveling shit.

Its not glamorous. It's not what the ego wants or expects, preferring to 'make a constant upward climb' in really noticeable ways. It's not something the ego can master like, some course you can take where you master a module and move on. You're having to constantly reapply the same learning and find ways, in seemingly very real new situations, how to transfer your learning to this new scenario. It's always difficult. And the ego is always resisting doing it just as much if not more than before. It's an ongoing struggle.

Someday I presume the pile of shit will reach the bottom and there won't be any more shit to shovel. Till then, you gotta keep on digging your way out and finding that extra ounce of willingness and extre desire to open up to Holy Spirit and develop more trust. It does get better over time, but it never fails to amaze me how each new lesson is just as much as hassle as the last. There's a lot of layers to the ego onion.

Space suggests, something exists over here which does not exist over there. Everything in space is not whole, and is not the whole, and does not exist everywhere. Therefore it doesn't fully exist anywhere. Space is in fact the idea that nothing (illusion of something false) exists and everything (God) does not exist. It's the idea of God's absence, opposite to reality in every way.

Time suggests, something which existed just now, no longer exists. Nothing exists forever, everything is always changing, nothing is reliable or constant or permanent, and everything ends. It is the idea of death. It the idea that nothing last forever and therefore reality is in constant flux and HAS no reality. It is the opposite to eternity and the notion that Heaven, God, and the Son of God, have all stopped existing as they were and have been changed into something else. In time, nothing exists at all times, and everything (God) never exists at any single moment at all. It's the idea of not existing.

Some people seem to have great difficulty understanding why this makes sense and why this is true. Or rather, have trouble accepting it.

The reason being, there is great special value placed on all things that exist in space and time. The world, the universe, animals, trees, sunsets, mountain ranges, oceans, favorite coffee houses, buildings, cars, etc. None of these things exist outside of space or time, and none of them can exist without space or time.

If space were to end, it would become impossible for anything to exist in a specific location. Nothing could remain separated off as an object. There could be no individual trees, no planets, no stars. And if time were to end, nothing could move, change, grow, or die. Physical planets cannot be maintained without space and time. The solar system cannot move without space and time. And the human body is totally dependent on spacetime to exist and seem to live.

Without spacetime, there is no world, there is no solar system, no stars, no galaxies, no bodies. They cannot have a form of any kind without spacetime. It's not merely a matter of these things continuing to exist but being joined together by some kind of oneness. That's blatant confusion and a denial of the facts. Even the form of the atoms and particles making up the objects cannot continue existing at all without spacetime. All the atoms would disperse into everywhereness. All the molecules would disappear.

This is the central message in ACIM, that "there is no world". It's a dream, a fictional fantasy place, made of illusions, a denial of reality, a complete opposite to reality, and an attack up on reality. Space attacks Omnipresence. Time attacks eternity. They are completely diametrically opposed and nothing alike. This world is nothing like heaven. "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

There is no spacetime.

Sometimes, although we don't want anyone to suffer, and God does not will anyone suffer, ... .sometimes someone going through a "thing", a hardship, a suffering, is actually consentual and beneficial to the person.

There can be a great compulsion to stop it, solve it, take it away, make it better, avoid it, etc.... we are VERY avoidant of any threat to us. But in the big picture, these "trials" as they say are actually "lessons", which we've sort of agreed to go through in order to grow spiritually.

If we are in the business of just taking away everyone's troubles all the time, we might actually be denying them a tremendous opportunity for advancement.

How do we know that, perhaps a person becoming an alcoholic and hitting rock bottom could actually lead to them becoming a powerful advocate for healthy living and helping others to escape from it?

Or that, someone going through a horrible nightmarish experience of sickness might actually lead to new perspectives and opportunities and maybe even a new future career that ends up helping a lot of people? We have to be careful not to think always in such short-term aims, and look instead to what the purpose is in the LONG TERM plan of atonement.

Very often the things you go through give you a lot of wisdom and insight and personal experience, which "equips you" in a sense with perspectives and abilities and compassion for others who might go through something similar. And then you might find yourself using that to be helpful to them down the line.

You might for example have elected to be a really great therapist or something and, in order to do so, wanted to first-hand go through some horrible abuse situation which you had to experience and work through and heal, in order to find a way out, in order to become able to help others to find a way out. And without that, you might not have been able to be useful in that way, for the higher purposes of the atonement plan.

On an earthly level we often interpret any bad thing as bad and wrong and to make it stop. We insulate ourselves from problems and sufferings. We label all unpleasant things as unwanted. We try to make an idyllic life, comfortable and controlled, to shut out the chaos.

But in the big picture of the soul we come here to learn lessons, to grow, to advance towards God. The importance of returning to God in the long term, across even lifetimes, may be so significant that we would be willing to even go through hell and back if it meant we would find a way to rise above it when pushed to our limits.

A person might actually on a higher level be willing to go through tremendously difficult lessons because, in the big picture, they know what it is leading to. The potential for major spiritual growth. An opportunity to see the other side of a situation. The purpose of finding a different way to relate to others etc.

It's not like, God is there saying, you must suffer and I want you to go have a horrible disfigurement just so that you can learn, or some kind of cruel karmic punishment scenario. But because we have chosen to go away from God and into ego, we "need" lessons to help us to return to him. And that means we have beliefs that need undoing, and attitudes that need correction.

So we then find that the atonement plan is set up to use our "faults" and our unwillingness and our biases and blind spots and so on, as "lessons", which may appear at first like horrible trials and difficult challenges, in order to try to find a "better way". To find a way to make a better choice in that scenario so that in future we don't need to go through something like that. Or rather, that we stop making those kinds of forms of suffering because we've learned that they are ultimately not in our best interests.

So in general we can't be quick to judge whether something is a good thing or not. The most horrible looking through could well be very much consensual and very much asked for. If the soul knows that there is the POTENTIAL for massive growth and learning, it may in fact be WILLING on a deep level to suffer the most horrendous difficult challenges, because it knows that the payoff may be really really worth it.

So hats off to all you people who are and have gone through horrible states of hell and nightmares and abuses and victimhood and all manner of pain and misery. Because it may well indicate not that it was just some thing that "was not meant to happen" but rather, something that you consented to and were WILLING to experience because it would potentially have tremendous spiritual benefits.

No sane person in their right mind would want to choose any such trial or difficulty, but it's because we're NOT in our right minds that we DO choose these things, and the holy spirit REPURPOSES these things, in an effort to use them productively and constructively, to help us to make the best of it, so that it isn't all for nothing and a waste of time.

This is a more FORGIVING view of suffering, because it reframes it as potentially beneficial when used for a higher purpose. Instead of focusing on the thing itself through false perception, labelling it a dark and wrong and unwanted. We can USE anything for the purpose of becoming closer to God, and that's what all these "trials" are all about.

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life." UrW139L19

"Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you." UrT31H2

"The misuse of will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point." UrT2B69

"In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again." He would not leave one source of pain unhealed, nor any image left to veil the truth. He would remove all misery from you whom God created altars unto joy. He would not leave you comfortless, alone in dreams of hell, but would release your minds from everything that hides His Face from you. His holiness is yours because He is the ONLY power that is real in you. His strength is yours because He is the Self that God created as His ONLY Son. The images you make can not prevail against what God Himself would have you be." UrT31H3

"Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success." UrT18F1

"There IS no choice where every end is sure. Perhaps you would prefer to try them all, before you REALLY learn they are but one. The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another. Men have died on seeing this, because they saw no way EXCEPT the pathways offered by the world. And, learning THEY led nowhere, lost their hope. And yet this was the time they COULD have learned their greatest lesson. All must reach this point, and go BEYOND it. It is true indeed there is no choice at all within the world. But this is NOT the lesson in itself. The lesson has a PURPOSE, and in THIS you come to understand what it is FOR." UrT31D3

We need to learn to not believe anything we see in this world.

We must learn it is all FALSE. Nothing more than an illusion that isn’t really there, is completely powerless, and cannot resist your undivided will.

We must stop seeing people as bodies.

We must learn to overlook ALL FORMS, because they are deceptive illusions, images of lies which the ego made to cover up the truth.

We must walk around this world as though this world is not even here.

We must IGNORE every sign and signal which suggests that the ego’s "laws" are in effect and that they have real power.

We must learn to completely OVERLOOK absolutely every deceiving appearance, including all sickness (which is fake), all suffering (which is fake), all victimhood (which is fake), and even death (which is fake).

This is quite an unusual state to exist in. Being in a world but not of it. Being here and showing up as a miracle worker, BUT not believing anything you see. Not listening to any ego lies. Not believing the sob story of victims. Not believing the reasons people have for why they are sick. Not believing anything that isn’t OF GOD!

If it’s not aligned with God and God’s Will, and if it is not absolutely TRUE, then it is FALSE!

In this way, we BRING the truth, the light, the love, the power, and the will of God, TO those who falsely believe they "need help", and so shine upon them and HEAL THEM through the MIRACLE WORKING POWER OF LOVE.

Love overlooks all illusions of sickness and suffering because love is *forgiving*. It is not confused about what is real and what is an illusion.

As a miracle worker, YOU must learn to distinguish clearly what is reality and what is illusion. If you are thinking that someone‘s sickness is real, you have lessons to learn. Once you have learned that all sickness is a LIE, and there is no such thing as "real sin", you will be able to say as Jesus did many times, "all your sins are forgiven", because all of your OWN sins have been overlooked as false.

Love then becomes extraordinarily powerful. It can heal anything. There is nothing your holiness cannot do. Your willingness to fixate only on God’s truth and to NOT BELEIVE the ego’s truth at all, makes you extremely powerful. All of the ego’s laws are NOTHING to you. They are all entirely illusions, just puffs of smoke. So EASILY you will be able to bend them to your will, to bring healing to the sick, to restore sight and hearing to those in need, to raise the dead, and to move mountains, LITERALLY.

Love is all you need. Love is the power. And that means, you must accept the atonement for yourself so that you can be open to loving to such a high and truly unconditional degree. Unconditional love knows no orders of difficulty. You are UNLIMITED in what you can do.

Here are some steps and keys to performing REAL miracles. This is for real! I've already experienced success healing pain and leg cramps and emotional upsets with this approach in the past few days and I'm just getting started. Try following this process. Relevant ACIM Miracle principles are given throughout...

1) Acknowledge that God is unconditional love and loves everyone completely. Love is the opposite of fear. It is important to put all fear aside in order to work miracles. Opening up to LOVE will shine away your fears. "26 - Miracles represent freedom from fear. Atoning means undoing - undoing fear is an essential part of the miracle." "28 - Miracles are a way of earning release from fear."

2) Acknowledge that God's love is powerful and is more powerful than any other power, including any form of sickness. You must be willing to really believe that God CAN heal this, 100%. This may require a leap of faith. God's power is the only power, all other powers are powerless before Him and do not really exist. God's power, as light, shines away the illusion of alternative powers such as sickness/death/ego/body having any power over the Son of God.

3) It may be useful to remember there is no order of difficulty in miracles and no matter what a sickness looks like or how severe, that is irrelevant. God's power is greater and can heal all things unconditionally. "1 - There is no order of difficulty in miracles. One is not harder or bigger than another." "49 - The miracle makes no distinction among degrees of misperception."

4) Acknowledge God's love for you and the other person and feel it in your heart, whole-heartedly. Half-hearted love doesn't produce results. The process of performing a miracle entails prayer and communion with God in your right mind. "11: Prayer is the medium of miracles." "36 - Miracles are examples of right thinking."

5) Acknowledge that God has already healed everything, that Holy Spirit has already undone all consequences of the entire separation, and now 'in time' it's just a matter of catching up. What you 'see' as ego evidence of sickness is NOT God's truth. In God, there is no sickness and God wants to heal all sickness now

6) Being aware of what God already is (already loves you, already has healed you/other) makes you appreciative. Express gratitude to God for his love and healing which are ALREADY the truth. "33 - Miracles honor you because you are lovable."

7) Express gratitude to God for creating the Real version of you and the other person, your Holy Self, and be grateful for the properties of that true Self - innocence, perfect health, beautiful joy, lovability, etc i.e. look past the ego self to the Christ. Remind yourself of what the real truth is about you and the other person. "14 - Miracles bear witness to truth." "17 - Miracles transcend the body." "20 - Miracles reawaken the awareness that the spirit, not the body, is the altar of truth." "40 - The miracle acknowledges everyone as your brother and mine." "50 - The miracle compares what you have made with creation, accepting what is in accord with it as true."

8) Extend God's love by RECEIVING it and EXPERIENCING it for yourself and thanking God for loving you, and then allowing it to overflow from you to another. You will be a channel or bridge for it and God/Holy Spirit/Jesus will do all the actual healing FOR YOU and THROUGH YOU if you just stay open to love. "3 - Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love." "5 - Miracles are habits and should be involuntary." "16 - Miracles are teaching devices for demonstrating it is as blessed to give as to receive." "21 - Miracles are natural signs of forgiveness. Through miracles you accept God's forgiveness by extending it to others." "

9) Thank God for already healing the xyz sickness in yourself or the other person, and focus on gratitude for it having already been healed. Believe this healing is possible. Know it. "27 - A miracle is a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers." "29 - Miracles praise God through you."

10) If with someone, lay hands on the area of their sickness, or you can put your own hand on your own area, or just be open. Touching isn't strictly necessary but it seems to help focus and transfer spiritual power. "8 - A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service you can render to another."

11) Invite Jesus and Holy Spirit to come into you and feel their presence. This isn't the same necessarily as asking or requesting them to come in, it should be an open-ended invitation. e.g. Jesus I invite you to come into me and join with me. You may experience their presence in you. "44 - The miracle is an expression of an inner awareness of Christ and the acceptance of His Atonement."

12) Ask Holy Spirit and Jesus to go now into the person/area of sickness and heal it. But try to focus mainly on thanking them for doing so, rather than the idea that there is something still 'to do', because the latter involves a perception of separation while gratitude is immediate. Keep focusing on love. Stay in the love. Feel the love. Extend the love. The power of love should start to flow through you into the area/person. You might experience shaking or other sensations. "8 - Miracles are healing because they supply a lack." "9 - Miracles are a kind of exchange." "19 - Miracles make minds one in God." "38 - The Holy Spirit is the mechanism of miracles."

13) Centered in love, centered in God, centered in Spirit, you can 'command' sickness to be healed. It must obey because God has power over it and you are extending the authority of God. You can be authoritative and literally command it to leave. "Pain I command you leave this body right now, get out now" for example. Remember that half-hearted attempts do not work. Do not be afraid to be strongly assertive (which is not the same as being forceful). Be firm in your affirmation of truth and wholeness. "41 - Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles." "43 - Miracles arise from a miraculous state of mind, or a state of miracle-readiness."

14) Continue focusing on gratitude and thanking God, which opens up the flow of His power even more. Try not to focus on having to do anything yourself. You are not the healer. Your job is to stay connected to God's love and be open to extending His healing. "39 - The miracle dissolves error because the Holy Spirit identifies error as false or unreal." "42 - A major contribution of miracles is their strength in releasing you from your false sense of isolation ."

15) You can also thank Jesus and Holy Spirit for their healing. Remember it may appear the 'body' is being healed but really the mind is being healed - the body is inside of and made of 'mind'. Bodies are just ideas and images that can be corrected. All sickness is created BY the mind using attack thoughts/false thinking. "24 - Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death." "32 - I [Jesus] inspire all miracles, which are really intercessions. They intercede for your holiness." "34 - Miracles restore the mind to its fullness." "37 - A miracle is a correction introduced into false thinking by me [Jesus]."

16) They may tell you that the issue is gone, or healed, or maybe they will give you guidance to clarify what the issue is or what it's based on etc. During an experiment yesterday I simply heard "its gone", and the pain was gone. The Voice for God can and will direct you specifically especially when you are in the flow of performing miracles or 'ministering' truth to your brother. "4 - All miracles mean life, and God is the Giver of life. His Voice will direct you very specifically."

17) If needed you can repeat 'commanding' the issue to be healed, or to fall into line with God's truth, or whatever form of undoing of ego you want to verbalize. But know that it's not so much your mind or head that is doing something, it's your 'spirit', through your Higher Self. The ego is not a healer. "35 - Miracles are expressions of love, but they may not always have observable effects." "45 - A miracle is never lost. It may touch many people you have not even met."

18) When done, express more gratitude. And hopefully now you've experienced a miracle. "31 - Miracles should inspire gratitude, not awe."

I'm still fleshing this out but this is basically what I've learned is sort of the process... still refining it and simplifying it as I learn.

Very often, Jesus would say to me, "it's fine". And I would be like, "how is this fine?" I would be upset about something, there'd be some physical medical issue to deal with, some seeming tragic loss, something going wrong. How can it be fine? Then my wife died and once again he was like "this is good", "it's fine". And again I was challenged to try to be open to accepting this, somehow.

I see now that the reason that "it's fine", no matter what happens, is because there is a bigger picture. There is a journey that the soul goes through across multiple lifetimes. The soul is immortal and cannot be truly hurt or lost or damaged. It certainly can never die or be sick. So that radically changes the perspective on what physical matters really mean or whether they're fine or not. Souls use bodies for a purpose, and that is all.

Everything is "fine" because nothing can really hurt who we really are, and we're just using this world as a temporary classroom to learn lessons. Sometimes we leave the classroom and then return at another time, in another body, with other people, in another place with another life. It's all fine. It's even fine if the person seems to die. How can it really be wrong or a fault or something bad if it's part of the soul's journey, even what they want, even chosen, and even part of a much bigger plan of salvation? Death doesn't mean anything good or bad, it is meaningless.

Recognizing the sheer reach of the soul on its journey through many lifetimes, its involvement in multiple serious relationships, having multiple bodies, experiencing many locations and families, many sets of parents, many lovers, many children, many conflicts, etc, it's a vast and deep and far-reaching story. Souls come and go many times with many relationships.

The much longer-term purpose is that the soul wants to reunite with God and awaken from the dream permanently, and to that end it will practically be willing to experience anything and everything if it helps toward that goal. No matter what it looks like. That puts a very different perspective on whether the things that happen, the disabilities we have, the limitations, the hardships, are really "wrong" or whether they are for a bigger purpose that we consent to. And we must remember the soul itself can never be hurt.

We only think that something is wrong when we have a special-relationship kind of viewpoint. Our ego becomes invested in this world, in bodies, in physical relations, and identifying as a human body. And then all manner of self-interest arises, attachment to other bodies, wanting to avoid death at all costs, an entire culture built around bodily living etc.

But death really is just an exit from the world as the soul carries on and continues its much, much longer path toward God. In fact death can be a liberating event for many because it represents escape from physical suffering. It is only the "dying" and being trapped in a body while it malfunctions that seems to bring suffering. As the body appears to degrade and suffer and die it seems the person does also, but in truth nothing changes the soul. Only the mind needs changing.

When Jesus tells me enthusiastically that it's "good" that a person has died, or "its fine" that someone has gone through a sickness, or "okay" that someone has had an amputation, I trust it to mean that in the really, really big picture it really is fine. Jesus was telling me it was fine when the doctors wanted to chop half her leg off. I couldn't grasp it whatsoever, but I see now it really was no big deal, as far as the soul is concerned. Who cares about bodies anyway?

Yes it seems like temporary setbacks, as the world judges it. It seems like a horrible suffering and an awful tragedy, as the world judges it. Sometimes it seems completely unfair and horrifying and terrifying, as the world judges it. All revolving around trying to keep people bodily identified and staying in this world for as long as possible. But there is a much higher purpose, a much longer-term goal, and a much deeper willingness at work. And being here for a long time isn't even that important when you're a multi-dimensional, multi-lifetime being.

I once had a dream where I seemed to go through a tremendously long obstacle course. It was fraught with difficulty and cuts and scrapes and bushes and barbed wire and mud and all kinds of upsetting scenarios. It seemed to go on forever. It was like a long and hard struggle, seemingly filled with suffering and difficulty, and by the time it was done I was pretty much exhausted and traumatized.

But then I came out into a clearing, and a guide or angel was there. And I asked, why did I have to go through all that? Because it seemed pointless and cruel and stupid. And the answer was in the form of a question - "what purpose might there be that you would be willing to go through all that, if it meant that you could achieve a goal?" And I thought for a moment and realized, that if the goal were the return to God, and if I needed lessons and challenges to get me there, then I would be willing to go through just about anything in order to attain that ultimate prize, the ultimate reunion with my creator. Even if it meant what the world would think of as horrendous suffering.

That's the perspective of the soul - a willingness to endure hardships and seeming limitations and even sickness and death if it means, potentially, the opportunity for learning, growth, for developing holy relationships, and for ultimately awakening from the whole dream. Nothing happens without a reason or a purpose. And it's all designed to carefully, and consensually, lead us toward the end game of reunion with God.

There is an atonement plan specifically designed by God to get us home efficiently and as gently as possible, but it does mean we're going to have to go through some challenges. There is an entire curriculum at work, many people that have to be encountered, many events which have to transpire. All designed carefully through the Holy Spirit to guide us home as quickly as we are willing. A hard life isn't a wasted life, it's a life used constructively for significant growth towards the final goal. Anything here can be used for the Holy Spirit's purposes.

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life."

"All things are Lessons God would have me learn."

"It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive."

To me this has always meant that once you have accepted forgiveness for yourself, you now have the POWER to CAUSE others to be forgiven also, healing them and setting them free. That you can REMOVE THEIR GUILT.

It is not enough to just believe that "you have forgiven them", in that YOU now feel better, and THEY are unchanged. This is NOT a complete forgiveness. You must extend the healing to your brother also because "when I am healed I am not healed alone."

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself."

Sin is a pivot point. If you believe it is true and real, you must proceed to guilt. And guilt will force punishment through sickness, suffering and death.

If you believe sin is not real or true, you will proceed to innocence, a state of forgiveness in which it is recognized there is no sin. And in this state, there is no guilt, and sickness and death are impossible.

Therefore once you accept your OWN innocence, by recognizing you DID NOT SIN, and therefore are not guilty, and do not need to CAUSE yourself to suffer (secret of salvation)... you now can bestow the UNDOING OF GUILT in another. Just as Jesus had the power to "pardon the sins" of others and thus heal them.

Forgiveness then is the movement away from making sin real, towards making sin unreal. Which means it's a movement away from GUILT, towards INNOCENCE.

So to forgive another... which really should mean, to forgive them FOR them, so that you HEAL THEM for them, it must entail that you UNDO THEIR GUILT, by recognizing their innocence.

Holding firm to their innocence and guiltlessness, the fact they DID NOT SIN, shines a healing light into their mind and shines away their guilt. It reinforces their innocence and undoes their supposed sin. And as the "reality" of sin melts, so too does the guilt, and all the sickness, suffering and death.

The dead are raised, through the recognition of the total unreality of sin and guilt. Recognizing the innate innocence of your brother allows you to RESTORE his mind to innocence and thereby UNDO and REVERSE death.

"I was not mistaken. Your minds WILL elect to join with mine, and together we are invincible. You two will yet come together in my name and your sanity will be restored. ***I raised the dead*** by KNOWING that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God Created. Why do you believe that it is harder for me to inspire the dis-spirited or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles: YOU do."

One of Jesus's big teachings is. ... love your enemies. But I'm finding that a lot of people (largely less spiritual people) have a MAJOR issue with this.

Particularly around issues of abuse, victimhood, trauma, rape, child abuse, torture, those sorts of things. Things where it seems like the victim has been unfairly treated, where there has been violence and trauma and great difficulty. In amongst these unhealed wounds it is very hard to look upon the 'sinner' as sinless.

Jesus' teaching IS clear, that regardless, EVERYONE IS SUPPOSED TO LOVE EVERYONE.

That means loving your enemies, loving criminals, loving hateful people, loving bullies, loving rapists and murderers, loving hitler, loving terrorists, loving serial killers, all of it. Jesus loves all of them and is asking us to do the same. How many people are going to CRINGE at the thought of that?

Just because someone acts out from ego and does something stupid or crazy like hurting another, does not mean they are sinful. It does not mean they aren't calling for love and help. VERY likely the person is themselves a "victim" of some form of "un-love" from themselves and others, which has led to their current state, with which they need help and healing.

MANY people in this world would not say that they are willing to love someone who has done something horrendous. This is a DIFFICULT area for even seasoned forgivers. It's easier to forgiven friends and family and coworkers, much harder to forgive those figures who seem to represent tyranny and murder and horror.

The thing is, if we don't love these people, we are just as bad. What is our alternative, to hate them? But this is what many of us do. We hate the people that we think deserve it because of their crimes and behaviours. We don't want to love them, we think they don't deserve it. We want to see them dead. Well, what does that say about us, murderous hateful vengeful people? Do we want to be that?

It will take a lot to step up and be willing to forgive what appear to be sins and crimes and terrible acts. It will take a lot to forgive them because "they know not what they do", and to RECOGNIZE in them a call for love. To be able to discern, there is far more to the person than just this particular area of behaviour or egotism.

There is some good in everyone. No-one is purely evil. Everyone is welcomed by God. I'm often reminded that God loves ALL the people that I don't love, which is humbling. If God is loving them, why aren't I? I have to be willing to love everyone unconditionally and without reservation otherwise I am NOT BEING LOVING, which places me entirely into a category of a nasty hateful person. I don't want to be that and hopefully you don't either.

Jesus essentially teaches in the cours the difficult truth - that what is not love is murder. If you do not LOVE the murderers, you are murderous yourself. That's a tough pill to swallow because now it renders victims and sufferers as just as much murderous if they don't love their victimisers. A difficult lesson for sure. But we HAVE TO TRY to find a way to love everyone if WE want to experience love.

If you don't love them, you don't love yourself, because they are part of you.

"What is NOT love IS murder. What is not loving MUST be an attack." UrT23E2

"The prayer for enemies thus becomes a prayer for your own freedom." UrS1C5

"And happily your brother will perceive the many friends he thought were enemies." UrT27F6

"Do I DESIRE a world in which I have NO enemies, and CANNOT sin?" UrT21H6

T-11.VII.1."The world as you perceive it cannot have been created by the Father, for the world is not as you see it. 2 God created only the eternal, and everything you see is perishable. 3 Therefore, there must be another world that you do not see."

"C-4.1. The world you see is an illusion of a world. 2 God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. 3 Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. 4 Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. 5 But the time will come when all things visible will have an end.

C-4.2. The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. 2 And so they do. 3 For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. 4 While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"T-8.VI.2. The world can add nothing to the power and the glory of God and His holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. 2 You cannot behold the world and know God. 3 Only one is true. 4 I am come to tell you that the choice of which is true is not yours to make. 5 If it were, you would have destroyed yourself. 6 Yet God did not will the destruction of His creations, having created them for eternity."

M-20.5. "You see in death escape from what you made. 3 But this you do not see; that you made death, and it is but illusion of an end. 4 Death cannot be escape, because it is not life in which the problem lies. 5 Life has no opposite, for it is God. 6 Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life. 7 Forgive the world, and you will understand that everything that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real."

W-pI.14.1. "God did not create a meaningless world. ... What God did not create does not exist. 3 And everything that does exist exists as He created it. 4 The world you see has nothing to do with reality. 5 It is of your own making, and it does not exist.

"T-25.III.2. God's laws do not obtain directly to a world perception rules, for such a world could not have been created by the Mind to which perception has no meaning. "

W-pI.132.9"You are as God created you. 3 There is no place where you can suffer, and no time that can bring change to your eternal state. 4 How can a world of time and place exist, if you remain as God created you?"

T-7.XI.1."The world goes against your nature, being out of accord with God's laws. 6 The world perceives orders of difficulty in everything. 7 This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable."

"T-13.VII.1. Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself: "The real world is not like this. 2 It has no buildings and there are no streets where people walk alone and separate. 3 There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. 4 It is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. 5 There is no day that brightens and grows dim. 6 There is no loss. 7 Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever."

T-13.VII.2. The world you see must be denied, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. 2 You cannot see both worlds, for each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. 3 The sight of one is possible because you have denied the other."

T-14.V.1."Leave the world of death behind, and return quietly to Heaven. 9 There is nothing of value here, and everything of value there."

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys.

God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him.

He did not make two minds, with HEAVEN as the glad effect of one, and EARTH the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

This clearly tells us that God did not create the Earth because to do so would've required he be in TWO minds with TWO effects, which is impossible. Since Earth is opposite to Heaven in EVERY way, God would've had to have created two DIFFERENT creations, unlike each other in every way. This is impossible because everything God creates is the same in every way and like Him in every way.

God could only create ONE EFFECT coming from ONE MIND. He could only create ONE WORLD. And that world must be heaven. It MUST be heaven because love has no opposite, and only the creations of love (God) are real, and therefore the only WORLD that is real is the one God did create, which is Heaven.

Take your pick. Heaven or Earth. Which is your home? Do you REALLY want Earth when you could have Heaven?

Earth is nothing. Heaven is everything. Leaving the Earth behind and going to heaven you will gain everything and lose nothing. This world holds nothing that you want! A teacher of God will gladly give up all the pleasures of the world! This world is not your home! How can a place which does not even EXIST be your home?

As Jesus says:

"Go on to meet them gladly, and learn how much awaits you, for the simple willingness to give up nothing, BECAUSE it is nothing. The new perspective you will gain, from crossing over, will be the understanding of WHERE HEAVEN IS. From HERE, it seems to be outside, and ACROSS the bridge. But, as you cross to JOIN it, IT will JOIN WITH YOU, and BECOME ONE with you. And you will think, in glad astonishment, that for all this, YOU GAVE UP NOTHING! The joy of Heaven, which HAS no limit, is INCREASED with each light that returns, to take its rightful place within it."

Jesus also says we will watch the world (earth) disappear, together.

"Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there any time you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does. And then-and then-I cannot speak of that. A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death. This is the message of the crucifixion: there is no order of difficulty in miracles. This is the message of the resurrection. Illusion are illusions. Truth is true. Illusions vanish. Only truth remains."

Earth is illusion. It disappears. ONLY TRUTH remains. Earth does not become part of the truth. IT VANISHES. IT NEVER EXISTED TO BEGIN WITH!!!!!!!!

Earth does not exist. There is no world.

"Salvation lies in the simple fact that illusions are not fearful because they are not true. They but seem to be fearful to the extent to which you fail to recognize them for what they are; and you will fail to do this to the extent to which you want them to be true. And to the same extent you are denying truth, and so are failing to make the simple choice between truth and illusion; God and fantasy. Remember this, and you will have no difficulty in perceiving the decision as just what it is, and nothing more." - ACIM

We were born into an illusion in which all of the inhabitants believe the illusion is actually a real place. We came in with real-seeming parents living real-seeming lives. We lived near to real-seeming people living their real-seeming lives. Real-seeming things happened and we had real-seeming effects from it. And we just kept on going on this treadmill of alleged reality, confirmed by just about everyone that it is real and that the world is important and that we have very important things to do.

And then we got older and went to work at a job or started a company or received money some other way and thought that this was all important and necessary because the world was real. And bad things happened and we went through struggles and horrors and fear because it all seemed to real.

But this world is an illusion.

We entered into a giant illusion where everyone believes it's not really an illusion. Where everyone takes it seriously. Where were live in constant fear solely because we look at this illusion without recognizing it is just a bad dream. We think it's really happening. Real people seem to be getting hurt. Real people seem to be having ambitions and purposes and things to say and do. Real stuff seems to occur which nobody seems to be able to prevent. And then all this real stuff seems to really die. And it's just horrifying. IF you believe it's real.

You can' help but be afraid, as Jesus says, if you believe an illusion is reality. Every illusion is frightening because it claims something is true of God and of you which are not true. And IF they WERE true, they would be horrifying. It would be horrifying if it were true that you were separate from God, stuck in a body, waiting to die, ready to suffer, having to fight to stay alive, suffering along the way, only to end in the grave with nothing to show for it. Of course that's frightening IF it's real.

But this world is not real.

If you are going to progress with A Course in Miracles at some point you will have to start to really be open to the possibility that EVERYTHING in this world is an ILLUSION, and it is not real. It's a very different premise on which to base everything that happens here, and every interpretation of everything that happens. It frames everything very differently.

If it's an illusion that someone just broke their leg, then there is nothing to be upset about. And the leg can be easily reconfigured as a new leg as a result of the strength of knowing that broken legs are illusions. If we knew the world was not real, we would have NO REASON to be afraid, or upset, or guilty, or suffering. It seems like a tall order to question absolutely everything you thought was real, and to consider that perhaps it is not real at all. And that therefore it is not the truth, there is no truth TO it, and therefore it has no power over you.

The world is not left by death, but by truth. It is left by the recognition - the awareness - the true perception - that this world is an illusion and nothing more. If it is an illusion it cannot hold you captive. if it is an illusion, it cannot have really happened. So you cannot be its slave or its prisoner. You are free.

In A Course in Miracles, the truth is completely consistent. It represents a thought system of Oneness, in which everything correlates perfectly. There is no contradiction in Oneness or in the Truth.

Everything about the thought system of the Holy Spirit, of God, is completely LOGICALLY consistent. It is also true, that the thought system of the ego is completely logically consistent. The only difference is that the ego’s system is based on a fallacy, a premise which is not true - the idea that separation is real and possible with real effects.

Because the truth is 100% consistent, it is not necessary to guess, wonder, be confused, misunderstand, interpret, warp, figure out, avoid, speculate, or otherwise be less than certain about what the Course is teaching. This means the Course CAN be learned and understood with 100% consistency, 0% guesswork, and 100% certainty.

The Course itself is written in very exacting LOGICAL terms. Jesus contrasts what is true, versus what is false. This is very deliberate. Our main problem is we have CONFUSED what is true and what is false. We’ve mixed them up and switched them around. In our confusion, we NEED clarification as to what is actually true, and what is actually false. This is achieved by contrasting, in very black and white, clear, irrefutably LOGICAL terms, the difference between them.

e.g. "This is only this, and this is not that, therefore that is not this." This is logic.

e.g. "This is all that exists. That is the opposite of this. That does not exist." This is logic.

e.g. "Only heaven exists. Earth is opposite to heaven in every way. Therefore, Earth does not exist." (There is no world). This is logic.

e.g. "The opposite to love is fear. Yet love has no opposite. Therefore fear must produce a state which DOES NOT EXIST". This is logic.

Logical FACTS cannot be denied. They must be accepted if you want the truth, even if it means letting go of stuff you long held to be true, given that it is NOT consistent.

Jesus very specifically, and intentionally, uses extremely intensely black and white language where it is appropriate. He does not blur boundaries. He does not umm and ahh about what things mean. He is very intense in His absoluteness, certainty, clarity and consistency.

He very deliberately uses language which intensely draws lines between what is true, and what is false, so that we are left with as little confusion as possible. This *contrast* clarifies the DIFFERENCE between what is true and what is false in no uncertain terms. Jesus is deliberately extreme. This lends the Course much of its black and white, all or nothing, life or death "intensity". I have a hunch this is why many people experience *overwhelm* when reading the course, because it stretches the mind to extremes so much, and seems very "intense" because of the extreme contrast.

This is what we NEED, because our only perceptual problem is that we do not RECOGNIZE what is true, versus what is false. We do not recognize God (truth), because we think that when we see an illusion (lies) they are in fact true. This is because we’ve attempted to turn God into an illusion. We then believe illusions are God (ie real). This LACK of discernment between what is actually true and false, is the sole basis for our confusion and unconsciousness.

Just by the mere act of even exposing yourself to the "book" itself, reading its extremely LOGICAL words, its black and white CLARITY, you will experience CORRECTION. Simply from reading it, even if you don’t "get it" or do anything else with it. Simply reading for example something absolute like "there is no sin", is capable of inducing RELIEF. It is healing.

I can’t begin to tell you the number of times just merely reading phrases like this has melted me. The very FORM of the language itself is designed TO HEAL, by bringing CLARITY to what is true, and what is false, which corrects our false perception, undoes our confusion, and alleviates fear.

The very SPECIFIC, deliberate, intentional LOGICALITY of the Course is very important. Not only is it healing due to its ability to bring clarity, it also means that if you understand the logic *correctly*, it is completely CONSISTENT throughout the truth. Everything Jesus says about truth MUST be consistent with everything else He says. IT MUST.

If something does not seem to fit or correlate, it’s because there is some LACK OF AWARENESS of the LOGIC that is being expressed. This often is due to level confusion and false conclusions.

To put it simply, the Course contains a metaphysics which is a system of TOTALLY LOGICAL thinking, which transcends all words, and which is a "structure" so completely logical that IF you grasp even part of it correctly, you can RELY ON the part you learned and form ADDITIONAL CONCLUSIONS based on it, which are absolutely consistent with what Jesus is teaching. This, however, ONLY works IF you are perfectly grasping the LOGIC, otherwise you will make errors, which will produce FALSE conclusions and confusion.

This means, if you learn the METAPHYSICS, the "core" structure of reality and the ego, everything will "fit together" and be consistent. It will also build upon itself as you gain more clarity. You will be able to REFER TO that which you already learned which is 100% true, using it as a REFERENCE, to compare and contrast..... is this new information *perfectly consistent* with what you already know to be perfect truth, or not? In black and white terms, if it IS, it is true. If it is NOT, it is not true.

A grasp of the metaphysical LOGIC provides you with a tremendously powerful tool, because you can build upon what you already know is 100% true. This makes your grasp of truth STRONGER with every step. And this in turn makes the truth CLEARER. One seed of perfect clarity is all you need to be able to DEDUCE whether everything else is *completely consistent*, logically, or not.

This is your automatic barometer or "bullshit meter", for determining whether what people or the Course say is true or false. This means you do not need to "figure out" what is true. You ONLY need to come to CLARITY enough to see and understand LOGIC, so that you can let the truth itself tell you whether something is consistent with it or not.

Without something to refer to which is 100% absolutely true, we do not have anything TRUE to compare things to. There is no context or perspective into which to put things. That puts us in the dark. We will then be UNCERTAIN, lost, confused, unsure what the truth is or is not, and will then enter into tremendous debates trying to figure it out. And most of that time will be spent in either speculation, or make-believe, or wishful thinking, or ego-based conclusions, which are NOT CONSISTENT.

This is because WE are trying to author the truth, instead of ALLOWING the truth’s OWN built-in consistency inform us as to whether something is true, or something is false.

Since the full picture of "every topic ever talked about" is quite large and complex, it can take some time to logically compare and contrast what the course is saying in terms of its WORDS, versus making sure that the MEANING is completely CONSISTENT without contradiction when we keep everything ELSE the course says in mind.

We should realize that the whole truth is in every part of the course, but in FORM, often it SEEMS like taking one part of the course in isolation "means" something which it CANNOT MEAN, IF what the truth says elsewhere is true. If there is not a logical consistency, and if anything does not FIT PERFECTLY into the overall picture, into the thought system, SOMETHING IS IN ERROR.

What we need to learn about the Course, is that the metaphysics are ONCE removed from the truth. The words in the course are TWICE removed. Transcending the words is the only way to learn what IT MEANS. Or in other words, the logical FACTS of the Holy Spirit’s thought system have absolutely no wiggle room for interpretation or denial. Only the truth is true.

It is our job only to DISCERN CORRECTLY what is true, and what is false. This can ONLY be accomplished by a full appreciation of the METAPHYSICS, not the words. The words should only be there to reveal pieces of the truth and to point to aspects of the LOGICAL CONSISTENCY. If what we are reading is confusing or does not 100% comply with the rest of the truth, we are in error.

One of the biggest struggles with learning the Course’s metaphysical foundation, is when we THINK that our grasp of the Course’s statements IS logically consistent. If we are actually 100% onto the truth, which is possible, then good for us. If we are "off", but believe we are "on", THIS ITSELF is due to a CONFUSION about what is true, and what is false.

Anyone with an ego WILL BELIEVE that they already know what is TRUE. This is of course a trap. The ego is no different to God this way, in that both stand by whatever is true. The only difference is the ego believes something is true which actually is FALSE. It will defend it just as vehemently as God would, believing that to do so is to protect "self" and continue logical consistency. The problem is since the ego is blind to truth, and therefore limited and incapable of seeing the WHOLE truth, it comes to false conclusions based on its LIMITED awareness of information.

When the ego is believing it knows what is true in the course, defending it "to death", its blindness MUST make it mistaken. It will believe it knows or gets the course. But the ONLY way to grasp what the Course REALLY MEANS, is to have a PERFECT GRASP of the LOGICAL CONSISTENCY of the METAPHYSICS. Otherwise if you have DIFFICULTY with PERFECT LOGIC, you will come to false conclusions. Everything else is storytelling, fiction, interpretation, ego opinion and guesswork. And a whole lot of confusion.

The question then is, whethere YOU are truly being LOGICALLY CONSISTENT in every way possible on every Course topic. If there are "holes" in the logic alone, this is the only criteria for being in error. Not because of someone’s experience or authority or way of writing or years spent doing the course or how many workbook lessons or how proficient with miracles or how old you are or how publicly recognized.

The ONLY barometer for whether you are grasping the Course CORRECTLY, is that you can SEE a highly UNIFIED picture, in which all pieces fit perfectly, with NO CONTRADICTIONS, and an ability to DISCERN even the subtlest of nuances. Fortunately, the metaphysics TELLS YOU what somethig MUST MEAN, based on what is LOGICAL. You can rely on it, depend on it, and refer to it.

And you are supposed to. THE TRUTH IS YOUR GUIDING LIGHT. IT tells YOU what is true. The metaphysical logic TELLS YOU whether a given course quote means one thing or another. Not the ego’s ability to figure it out. Not a person’s prowess or personality. Only the truth is true.

There IS only one true metaphysics. There IS only one truth. Jesus HAS given a PERFECTLY LOGICALLY CONSISTENT COURSE. If we do not SEE the logical consistency, it’s because of our ego. Use that as a MIRROR therefore to show you where you MUST be in denial, with a willingness to be MISTAKEN, so that if the Course says something is TRUE, and it is consistent, you must ACCEPT IT. That means dropping your ego’s personal opinion.

We do not get to decide what the truth is. God established the truth. The metaphysics of the course reflects the truth. The WORDS of the Course are BASED ON the metaphysics. Grasp the metaphysics and none of the words will confuse you!

For example.

Fear is the opposite of love. Yet love has no opposite. An opposite to love must produce a state which does not exist.

This is LOGICAL. Similarly, Heaven has no opposite, "earth is opposite to heaven in every way", therefore IT IS PERFECT LOGIC to say that "earth does not exist." The logic itself tells you this must be true.

For example.

What is not love is murder. Anything which is not 100% perfect love, is murder. Even slight disagreements or even "agreeing to disagree", which is an illusion of peace, IS MURDER. You can deduce WHY this makes sense, if you look at the logic, and why this is *black and white*.

In the thought system of Oneness, what applies to you applies equally to everyone. There is nothing true about you which is not true about everyone. Everyone shares the truth (God). In truth, logically, you cannot attack your brother WITHOUT directly attacking yourself. DIRECTLY. Because what is true of them, INSTANTLY and ALWAYS is true of you. If they are hurt, you MUST be hurt. If you "cause" them to change, YOU must experience the effects.

...WHICH MEANS LOGICALLY.... if there is a thought system in which something applies to an other which does NOT apply to you, a separation has been introduced. This separation MUST logically come between you and your brother. It then means, what applies to you, SEEMS not to apply to them. SO.... if you were to attack your brother, it would SEEM, you can "cause them" to experience effects, which YOU do not experience! This is 100% logical.

This therefore means, in the ego thought system, you can seem to attack/cause your brother and ESCAPE ALL CONSEQUENCES (effects). This LITERALLY MEANS, logically, you can "get away with attacking", ie, escape the attack, ie you can attack without being affected. With no repercussions. This is PRECICELY the meaning of "getting away with murder."

And this is why, if there is any SHRED of belief that what appleis to someone else does not apply to you, because you are not ONE, that you are not perfectly equal in every way, you ARE being MURDEROUS! Hence, logically, what is "not love", MUST be murder, even if it seems to be a tiny degree of difference. Every argument on this forum is murderous!

Every difference of opinion is murderous! People being in separate bodies is murderous! This also means, the logical truth of the Course REDEFINES the meaning of "murder", by clearly demonstrating FOR US what murder MUST BE. Murder is not ONLY one person stabbing another to death. It is ALL degrees of attack.

It is also easy to logically conclude, that even though in a thought system of "cause being separate from its effect" (Father separate from Son), even if it SEEMS like you can get away with murder, YOU DO NOT. Because it is TRUE, that the thought system of Oneness ALWAYS APPLIES. Oneness has no oppposite, so its thought system has no true opposite. Which means, logically, even if you think you CAN get away with being murderous, YOU DO NOT escape the effects of what you cause! Therefore, you ARE attacking yourself when you attack your brother, and your body WILL suffer and be sick if you use it to attack others. Not my opinion. Perfect metaphysical logic.

All of this is LOGICALLY DEDUCED. It is a perfectly logically consistent conclusion. THIS MUST BE what the course says is true. This is METAPHYSICS. There is NO opinion here. This is not my personal viewpoint. If you see ANY logical fallacy, by all means let us know so that we can find a TRUER and MORE CONSISTENT truth.

It is possible to use simple logic to understand EVERYTHING that Jesus is telling us in the Course, in terms of what the Course MEANS. This DOES include the correct recognition of what ANY kind of terms mean, including often hotly contested CONCEPTS such as "worlds" or whether God could have created the Earth or what the Earth even IS. It SHOULD tell is EXACTLY whether there can be multiple sons and what perception IS. LOGIC can even tell you what death must be, and explain WHY the separation‘s "end result" was the manifestation of FORM as a "physical universe" with illusory planets and bodies. This is concludeable by LOGIC ALONE with zero opinion. The ONLY correct meaning of what these things really are, MUST BE LOGICALLY CONSITENT. Otherwise it is conjecture, aka ego bullshit.

The same is true for all Course theology, all creation stories, determining whether there are multiple sons or God, how the entire ego thought system functions, what is heaven, what is not, and everything in between. The only question is, WHAT IS LOGICALLY TRUE AND CONSISTENT?! The Course’s TRUTH is absolutely 100% consistent.

If we are not seeing HOW it is consistent and something seems not to fit, it comes down to our ego - our own ability or lack of to LOGICALLY RECOGNIZE what is true, vs what is false. If we have difficulty with logic, or dealing with black and white statements, we WILL have difficulty understanding the course, and MUST come to false conclusions. That too is part of the logic.

It is also true, that the Course CAN be learned, the Truth is NOT obscure, the Truth is NOT mysterious, it IS possible to understand what Jesus means on ALL topics, and there should be NO confusion or disagreement about what Jesus is teaching. The only conflict comes from different ego’s attempting to have their truth be the one truth. Only the truth is true. We can ONLY ACCEPT IT, together, in agreement. We cannot MAKE IT.

Learn the metaphysics, and you will see what the Course is really saying, meaning, intending, and what is TRUE. This will transcend ALL words, all people’s opinions, even your own. If all you want is to let the truth TELL YOU what is true, you will learn the Course. To learn it REQUIRES that you put aside all of your own ego, otherwise you will misunderstand it.

"The Course" is not in the book. It exists as metaphysical states of mind whose relationships and interconnections are 100% logically defined. Everything about the ego can be described with perfect logic. Even creation is logical. Jesus is nothing if not EXTREMELY LOGICAL, because only that kind fo black and white clarity will show you what is TRUE, and what is FALSE.

IF we were to only ever talk of *metaphysics*, there would be no ROOM for opinion and no room for the ego. Then there will be peace.

Sometimes bad things seem to happen. And usually our reaction is to want to get rid of them, stop them, prevent them, fix them.

But we have spiritual lessons to learn. And usually a lesson means that something starts out appearing to be something unwanted and upsetting. It seems like something has gone wrong.

Especially if this wrongness involves someone close to you or someone you're in a special relationship with, or someone you feel protective of or attached to, you'll feel compelled to want to 'take away' the problem.

But whatever it is that's happening, even if it looks bad, typically it is part of a person's 'script', and it is meant to be happening. It is something that was chosen at some point. Because this thing is happening, many things are going to be learned. It may seem painful to learn them, and indeed unwanted. That's in fact the ego resisting awakening.

So bad things happen, people come along to attack and provoke you, things go wrong, and shit hits the fan. This stimuli provokes and triggers stuff in YOU that represents areas of your unconsciousness. Maybe a sense of guilt that you have not released causes you to feel guilty that the person is suffering, and then you try to fix them instead of deal with your guilt. Or maybe the person attacks you such that you feel you cannot love them, and yet, this is your challenge to learn to love them in spite of their attack, as part of your lessons in unconditional love.

Lessons are not usually very pleasant. And the ego has this propensity to try to create and maintain the illusion of a nice, tidy, 'nothing is going wrong' life. This isn't a life where you genuinely are invulnerable or genuinely are experiencing a smooth flow of beautiful divine guidance, but rather a state of 'ignorance' and unconsciousness and specialness where all challenges to the ego's status quo are avoided.

So we develop this reflex reaction of wanting to 'take away' someone's pain, solve someone's problem, fix the situation or restore it to what we think it's supposed to be - i.e. free of anything 'going wrong'. But maybe what we're actually doing, is taking away the person's lesson. And maybe that will keep them asleep. And maybe that's not helpful.

And so this may mean, learning YOUR lessons that are being triggered by the problem you see in someone else. If you are upset, that's your lesson too. Someone else's lesson may be triggering lessons for you. And they might've chosen to experience those problems JUST SO that you will have an opportunity to wake up, by facing your own lessons in response to it. There are people who come into this world with disabilities and so on to 'teach' others to be more loving, patient and understanding, and they can't teach that if their disability is taken away.

So we need to learn our own lessons and that means, learning acceptance, learning to let go, learning unconditional love, etc... that MIGHT include bringing healing to the person through those more aware states of consciousness. Maybe you're meant to learn YOUR lessons in reaction to the other person's apparent difficulty, SO THAT you become able to heal the other person. And maybe if you don't do that, and you focus on fixing them, you won't ACTUALLY be able to help them.

All is not as it seems on the surface.

Ok so you might be feeling like you're incapable, always making mistakes, are clumsy, can't communicate with people well, or problems just keep happening that you can't seem to solve. But it's not just you. It's a systemic problem of the world in general.

The world is just fundamentally difficult.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."

"Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

This also ties into the laws of chaos. Basically in the separation from God we invented all kinds of levels, degrees, amounts, variables, contrasts, divisions and differences.

This has set up an entire landscape of what we can only describe as a mismashed chaotic jumble of disjointed pieces and conflicting differences. Everything is in contrast, nothing gels, everything conflicts with everything else, the whole continuity is broken and every form seems to beg for a different response.

We automatically have made physical obstacles, difficult terrains, awkward weather, speech deficits, communication problems, incompatible personalities, loss of function, broken behaviors and dysfunctional relationships. Not to mention that pretty much everyone is insane.

This just automatically makes the whole world fundamentally a difficult place to be. Everything involves effort and struggle, adaptation and interpretation. You have to always have caution and be careful lest you perhaps hurt yourself. Who knows what crazy lune you might run into or what strange problem is going to erupt out of nowhere.

So don't take these things personally to mean something is wrong with you. It's not "just you" that has to struggle navigating this awkward environment. I used to beat myself up for being poor at communication until I realized the entire world is set up to break it. It's an imperfect world where nothing really works effortlessly or easily.

When we are not in heaven, or out of the body in spirit, we are in an environment that is fundamentally a strain. It is unnatural to us. In fact all things physical are totally opposite to our true nature. They are alien to us. It's like trying to live on an alien planet that you have no clue about, and no-one gave you the manual or prepared you for it.

So don't worry if life seems to just keep on sucking. It's just how the world is. We are tasked with recognizing this, then laughing at it and forgiving it. Because a world made by mistake can't help but be mistaken.

"Grace is the natural state of every Son of God. When he is NOT in a state of grace he IS out of his natural environment, and does NOT function well. Everything he does becomes a strain, because he was not created for the environment which he has made. He therefore CANNOT adapt to it, nor can he adapt IT to HIM. There is no point in trying. A Son of God is happy ONLY when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make."

"Thus is Christ's strength invited to prevail, replacing all your weakness with the strength that comes from God, and that can never fail. And thus are miracles as natural as fear and agony appeared to be before the choice for holiness was made."

"God is my strength."

This is a relatively "new" idea to me and perhaps to others. But this is a very powerful and significant component not only of miracle working but of fulfilling your function as a powerful Son of God.

There is a strength in you. The strength of Christ - the strength of the Holy Spirit - the strength of God. God put this strength IN you by giving it TO you in your creation. You HOST His strength. Therefore, what seems to be YOUR strength, is actually HIS strength. HE makes you strong. HE gives you power!

Whenever you attempt to do anything based on your OWN strength, you really are depending on littleness and weakness. And this little weakness is NOT very strong. It has not much power in it and is not very capable. Depending on your own strength makes you AFRAID, because your own strength is tiny and insufficient and not really capable of doing or dealign with much at all.

As you are developing trust, putting aside your authority problem, and coming to DEPEND ON God, opening up to the fact that God is in you, at your inner altar, and as you progress through the lessons etc, you'll encounter this idea that God is your strength. And that Christ lends you His strength. And it is their strength that makes miracles possible through you.

When you are trying to be a miracle worker, if you look at it like you're the one who has to muster the strength, courage, power, to accomplish a miracle, and you're going to have to be very brave and strong in order to "make something happen", not much is going to happen. Because really this is a state of fear and an attempt to be brave in the face of insurmountable difficulty and weakness.

A key element in miracle working has to be that you have opened up to recognize and allow and invite the power of God to be in you. Which means making room for the power of God/Holy Spirit/Christ IN you, to BE strong FOR you. To be your strength. Rather than relying on your own strength. Their strength is OFF THE CHARTS unlimited power. And it is their strength that gives miracles their unlimited power.

So your function isn't to be "strong on your own" or some kind of super hero. The hero is always attempting to be an amazing miracle worker with super powers. But really to ACTUALLY perform miracles you need to depend on the strength of God and allow HIM to have the strength to accomplish the task. He is the one who will supply your strength and make YOU strong. Without Him you are too weak to give anything or accomplish consistent healing.

So this idea that your strength is given you by God, that God SUPPORTS you, strengthens you, makes you powerful, but not OF yourself, is key in both miracle working and awakening.

The holy spirit is planning all events that transpire!

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good?" UrW135L19

The holy spirit smoothing the way ahead of you and removing obstacles!

"He will go before you, making straight your path, and leaving in your way no stones to trip on, and no obstacles to bar your way. NOTHING you need will be denied you. Not one seeming difficulty but will melt away BEFORE you reach it. You need take thought for nothing, careless of everything except the only purpose that you would fulfill." UrT20E9

The holy spirit producing physical manifestations which can be seen with the physical eyes!

"You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you CAN see His MANIFESTATIONS. And UNLESS YOU DO, you will not realize He is there. Miracles are His witnesses, and speak for his Presence. What you cannot see becomes real to you only through the witnesses who speak FOR it. For you can be AWARE of what you cannot see, and it can become compellingly real to you, as its presence becomes manifest THROUGH you. Do His work, for you SHARE in His function. As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares HIS with you on earth." UrT11H4

The Holy Spirit smoothing your way in the world!

"The Thought of God protects you, cares for you, makes soft your resting place and smooth your way, lighting your mind with happiness and love." UrW165L2

The Holy Spirit materialising a healed body for you!

"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS." UrT27B3

The Holy Spirit assisting with the healing of others and speaking through your body and sending people to you!

"The Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist. He makes healing PERFECTLY clear in ANY situation in which He is the guide. The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION. He needs no help for this. He WILL tell you EXACTLY what to do, to help ANYONE He sends to you FOR help, and will speak to him through you, IF YOU DO NOT INTERFERE."

The Holy Spirit undoes the consequences (symptoms, manifestations etc) of your wrong decisions!

"I do NOT feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM. I WILL to let Him by allowing Him to decide for God for me." UrT5I20

The Holy Spirit solves all problems for you!

"The Holy Spirit will answer EVERY specific problem, as long as you believe that problems ARE specific." UrT10H9

The Holy Spirit arranges things for you!

"Once you accept HIS plan as the ONE function that you would fulfill, there WILL be nothing else the Holy Spirit will not ARRANGE for you, WITHOUT your effort." UrT20E8

The Holy Spirit work miracles through you!

"The power of God, and NOT of you, engenders miracles. The miracle ITSELF is but the witness that you HAVE the power of God in you." UrT14F7

The Holy Spirit guarantees that specific people will meet!

"Therefore, the plan includes very specific contacts to be made for each teacher of God. There are no accidents in salvation. Those who are to meet will meet, because together they have the potential for a holy relationship. They are ready for each other." UrM4A1

The Holy Spirit is the co-maker of the world along with you!

"There is another Maker of the world, the simultaneous Corrector of the mad belief that ANYTHING could be established and maintained without some link that kept it still within the Laws of God." UrT25D4

"The Maker of the world of gentleness has perfect power to offset the world of violence and hate that SEEMS to stand BETWEEN you and His gentleness. It is not there in His forgiving eyes. And THEREFORE it need not be there in yours." UrT25D8

Imagine you go into a room which is just completely empty, with pure white walls, ceiling and floor. There is nothing in the room.

This room is a holo-deck, or a holographic projection room, in which very believable and real-seeming objects can show up. They can even have physical properties like weight and inertia and can be moved around and interacted with.

So you're standing there in this empty room and suddenly a chair appears out of nowhere. You go over to it and it looks incredibly realistic. You actually believe it's a "real chair". You're like, how did this chair get in here? You touch it and it feels solid, and you pick it up and move it a bit. It makes a slight noise as the legs scrape on the floor, and then you sit on it. It supports you. Very realistic. Very lifelike.

Except that it's just a hologram. It's just an illusion of a chair, being projected there by some kind of "system" that's running unseen. But it's so convincing, you're certain it's a real chair.

Another chair appears out of nowhere and sitting in this chair, there suddenly appears some person. This person must've been there all along, you reason, trying to justify how your perception can have not noticed them before, because they seem real. Their body looks real, it moves and breathes and has a pulse. The person is looking around, fidgeting and wondering what's going on.

The thing is, this other person is someone you know and that person is sick, or they have a disease, or a problem, or some kind of suffering or lack, or maybe they are dying, or are very emotionally upset. You see them, and you're like, wow, that seems so real. It really seems like that person is there, having these issues, and that it's all very tangible and realistic. You're so convinced you don't even remember that they are being projected by the same unseen system.

So then, because you know this person and they are unhappy or unhealthy in some way, you have this reaction, or a whole bunch of reactions about them. You believe their sickness is real, because it looks real, and you can maybe even see and touch it, or can see how it seems to be affecting them. And your reactions compel you to want to help or have sympathy or fix them or do something to make their suffering stop. All of these are reactions to the belief that they really are sitting there, having an unhappy time, and yet all along you don't realize - that person is not even really sitting there. It's a holographic projection of a body, just like an image in a dream. It's coming from somewhere else.

You build up this whole set of reactions and counter-measures and attempts to solve the real-seeming problem, so convinced that it's really happening and there's a real danger or threat to that person. But there isn't. It's just an image. It's not a real sickness, it's a holographic sickness. It's not real damage to their body, it's just a projected image. It's not real suffering, it's just a fictional suffering. Some system somewhere unseen is projecting all of this and making it seem very real and convincing. It's totally made-up.

Suddenly you see in the corner of the room a doorway, outside of which sits a computer, and this computer is actually projecting the images that are in the room. You can see beams of light coming from it, making the person appear, making the chairs appear, and then you notice it even making your own body appear. Your own body is even a holographic image coming from somewhere, and it's not even really there.

Realizing this, you RECOGNIZE that these images are just illusions being projected, and are not REAL. They are made up. The joke was on you. You believed them and fell for it. The other person isn't even really that body that you saw. YOU aren't even the body that you thought you were. The chairs don't even exist. It's all a trick. What you thought was real sickness was just an illusion of sickness, a holographic projection of sickness. It was nothing more than a flickering image like from a movie projector. It had no reality to it, no truth to it. It wasn't doing anything, or causing anything. It could've been switched on or off in an instant, or even removed entirely at the flip of a switch.

A little light lights up on the computer and the image of the other person suddenly disappears. In their place, another body shows up - the same person, but in a state of perfect health. This remains for a moment as you marvel at it, thinking that they are now a "real healthy body", and you have another reaction - a positive reaction but a reaction nonetheless, that the other person has been saved. But this is false as well.

And a second later the computer projects yet another image of the person back to being a sick body again. Your heart sinks, as though the whole terrible nightmare is happening over again. But then 2 seconds later, it flips back to a healthy body again. You suddenly realize again, all of these body images are not reality. None of them are true. None of them are who the person is. And the appearance of sickness is completely fictional and meaningless. If it can be switched on and off at will, there is no victimhood whatsoever.

Seeing where the dream images are coming from, who is projecting them, the falseness of their illusions, and not buying into the deception that they are REALLY THERE, frees the mind to SEE and RECOGNIZE illusions for what they are. That other person you know who you think is really sick, is not sick at all. Their body is part of a dream you are dreaming. Their sickness is not even really a real sickness. It's just a made-up image. It could be switched off in an instant. In fact Jesus tells us in the course that if we were to stop believing the lie, there is not a single sickness which would not be cured instantly.

We need to learn to recognize the nothingness of what IS nothing - this entire dream world and everything in it. It's all just a big dream. We're DREAMING! This is not reality. It is not real at all. Nothing in this world is true. It's all pretend. There is nothing of any more importance than anything else, hence no order of difficulty in miracles, because it's all just "movie" that's being projected. The mind projecting it can chop and change any part of it in an instant. It can flip between images of health and sickness simply because the body is an illusion, and what lies beyond the illusion is free of all sickness.

This is why we need to learn to recognize that sickness/disease/suffering/upset/death etc is not REALLY HAPPENING. And there is nothing about it which is so heavy and fixed and irreversible and seemingly insurmountable, that it can't be just flipped on or off at will. We need to learn to BELIEVE and PERCEIVE that all forms, and as a lesser group, all sick forms, are nothing but temporarily momentary images projected by a mind, and given the appropriate willingness and clarity of perception, those forms can be changed fully and instantly right now. We must overlook the illusions of how these forms of sickness/distortion are difficult or severe or life-threatening. That's all an illusion. Death is no more "difficult" an illusion to change than a pimple on your face. The FREEDOM to do this is what Jesus is teaching us, by helping us to SEE clearly that illusions of difficulty are completely false and don't mean anything.

Nothing I see means anything, because nothing I see in this dream is anything at all. It's all one thing. One dream, one illusion, showing up as illusions of forms and differences and a hierarchy of illusions. The hierarchy is FLAT! There is no real hierarchy. Cancer should be no more difficult to correct than a bloody nose. It should be effortless to change a car into a tree. This world has no power to prevent this capability. But while we believe the illusions that have been projected and are convinced there is such a thing as "real sickness", or "real death" or reasons "why you can't", then we are believing in the ego thought system and have not restored cause and effect to its proper order (your mind causes, the world obeys). And if we can't do this, we still have level confusion, and are sick ourselves.

When we categorise the world, or split it up, or label it as different, or use its form to dictate what it means, we're failing to recognise that ALL ILLUSIONS ARE THE SAME.

"Nothing I see means anything."

"Make this year different by making it all the same."

If we for example see a sick body and give it a meaning of being real and worse and bad and more frightening, we've driven a wedge between things to keep them apart.

If we see a dead body and we believe it is a picture of awfulness and tragedy and horror, compared to the other bodies, we're trying to push it and separate it off and designate that it means something different to the healthy ones.

All these psychological differences, all the ways we put things in categories and groups, all the extra meanings we pile on top of stuff to distinguish them and say they're not the same, causes us to get lost in the illusion.

One thing seems to be not the same as another thing. One form seems more important or more serious or more threatening than another. The shape of something seems to mean something different to the shape of something else. These all add up to a huge complicated hierarchy of categories.

If we for example think that people are bodies and not souls/minds, and we start valuing bodies, and start wanting bodies to continue indefinitely, that bodies are people. ... and then start to become afraid that the bodies are in danger, and are falling sick, and dying, we've now fallen for the illusion. We start trying to protect the body and keep it instead of recognising the big picture.

A dead body is no more real than a living one. A sick body is no more meaning something true than a healthy one. A large body, a small body, a young body, an old body, a male or female body, a body of a certain nationality or ethnicity, none of it really means anything.

"The death of an illusion means nothing."

The shift that has to take place is a change in perspective and premise. The whole system of spacetime, physicality, matter and bodies, has to be regarded as not real. The whole thing has to be put into ONE category, not divided up or pitched against each other. One single category that says that the properties of one thing is the same as another. That none of it is real.

There then can be no PREFERENCE for one thing over another, no favoritisms, no specialness, no special favour towards certain people, no marginalising or closing off or favouring one group over another. It all has to be ironed out and equalised. No special expectations, no special need to have certain things be a certain way, no resistance to things being in a given form, etc.

The perspective of miracles is that there is no order of difficulty, because there is no perceived structure in the world. The mind becomes unconditional, with one response of love to everything. One singular category, one mind, one will, one perspective, one vantage point, one self, one recognition of everything here as false.

All of the sense of one thing being more important or valid than another has to go. And while it's true that it does not matter whatsoever whether a body is alive or dead, it is also true that in terms of usefulness a healthy body can be a symbol of eternal life. A healthy body can testify an example or image that depicts a higher truth. But even the healthy body is still part of the same equality of unreality with a dead body.

In fear, we make life a one-way street, where we want to avoid anything and everything that might destroy us as a body. But in love, love allows bodies to come and go, suffer and die, shift back and forth between states, and has no actual real preference for any of them. It recognises that the soul/mind beyond the body is untouched, unchanged, perfect in all ways, eternal and can never die. And in that view bodies don't mean anything at all.

While recognising that bodies mean nothing, and it does not matter whatsoever whether they are sick and dead or healthy and seeming to represent immortality, we can still use them as teaching devices in which they do need to be in symbolically healthier states in order to demonstrate healing and forgiveness. But we must still remember that in the larger context, in the big picture, they are all equally nothing. Then we are not attached to whether they come and go or change their form, and no longer fear death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world is difficult to deal with, because it is completely opposite to reality.

"And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

"He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"The world was made that problems could not be escaped.""In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."

It would be challenging enough if this world were just a LITTLE bit unlike reality. You could maybe deal with it better if it at least resembled it in some obvious way. But physical form was designed to COMPLETELY deceive you.

"Nothing so blinding as perception of form."

So instead what you are faced with, every day that you wake up, is a picture of a world which demonstrates utter impossibilities, complete violation of God's laws, constant threats to the existence of what was previously immortal, visual proof everywhere you look that death is real and attack is possible, and just a constant barrage of problems and things going wrong.

How anyone can deal with this on any level is incredible.

Fortunately sometimes "life" seems to throw you some bones and maybe there is a temporary reprieve in the suffering, or you can hole up in your house to create a false sense of security, or maybe just avoid all the bad stuff as much as possible. But this doesn't really make it go away or stop happening.

Then ACIM is saying to us, that not only is this entire world designed to represent an impossible, blasphemous opposite to God's nature, it is also your job to somehow laugh in the face of it. To overlook all its faults and inherent murderousness. To find a way to look at it such that, outright horrendous attack and evil are actually "not that". That somehow you're supposed to even recognize that your body's senses are lying to you, that there is not even one speck of the world that is doing anything other than tempt you into hell.

To say it's not easy to rise above it, is an understatement. Threats of death are happening all the time. And if it doesn't seem to be going to hell for you, it's going to hell for someone else. And then you're temporarily thankful that you're not the one getting it this time in a world of punishment.

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

Can we just, take a moment to acknowledge, how HARD it is for all of us, to try to rise above a world which is so vehemently anti-christ and anti-life? This is no easy feat. The truth may be simple but it is by far not simple at all to fly in the face of everything an entire world tells you is true. We're all doing the best we can and sometimes it can be very difficult.

Somehow there is a light at the end of the tunnel, a hope that we have to keep holding onto, a promise of redemption and salvation. A trust that is developed in the Holy Help. And a victory over death. We keep striving forward because we are so deeply attracted to God and want to be Home. And ultimately that is what will pull us back to heaven's reality, regardless of how much the world tries to pull us down. We who MADE it to pull us down, need merely recognize we no longer want to do that, and we are free.

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

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

"He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

The world's got issues. But do you think the world will ever not have issues?

Certainly it's not actually able to be problem-free. Problems are its nature. They arise from differences, which produce incompatibilities and difficulty. And then from that we get things acting against other things, and before you know it hell breaks loose.

You can try to fix it up and solve some of its problems but at best it will only ever be temporary. And even the things you fix will develop problems. It all requires constant maintenance because it can't help falling apart at the seams.

It might be better to accept that the world is fundamentally flawed, than to keep fighting to try to force it to look like it can be perfect. No matter how hard we try to make it work better, it still will always have issues. The fact that it is based on space and time means it is based on murderousness and destruction and impossibility.

We'd probably be better off psychologically admitting that the world is just a broken system which can NEVER work right. Because then we can stop resisting its nature, and stop the futile insane efforts to work against its nature. You can't get blood out of a stone as they say.

If you can accept that the world is a limited system, designed to destroy itself, to eat itself alive, to undermine its own existence, filled with incompatilities and conflict and self-destruction, then you can let it have its ways.

The payoff isn't that you somehow solve unsolveable problems and make things seem better, it's that you psychologically enter a state of greater acceptance and allowing. It's not that you have to accept that the world is perfect - it isn't. But if you can accept that it is imperfect, and always will be, you drop all of the insane attempts to turn it into something better.

Acknowledging its brokenness and its dysfunction and its self-attack and recognizing that this is the ONLY way it CAN function - it was designed to be like this - allows you to be more forgiving toward it. You can recognize it is simply following orders and carrying out the desire of impossibility, conflict, nonsense, contradiction and frustration that it was designed to do.

At least then you can be in a state of greater peace and sanity and acceptance rather than trying to force something which CAN NEVER WORK, to work better. Then you can let go of the insane idea of saving it, against its will. And funnily enough, that will save it from projections of sin and guilt more than the impossible attempt to turn it into heaven.

The world is not heaven and it will never ever be heaven. It is opposite to heaven in every way. If you let it be heaven's opposite instead of mistaking it FOR heaven, you will enter a state of mind in which you can be closer to heaven within yourself.

Because to be heavenly you have to not resist reality, and have to accept atonement. So if you use the unacceptable world to reach acceptance, then you'll get into a more heaven'y state within. And when you'll project that out and see it reflected in the impossible world. And now you can linger for a while in a world which doesn't seem quite so intolerable, but only because you admit to just how intolerable it is.

You cannot convert a world that was designed to oppose the laws of God, into a world that obeys them. Separation is its foundation, not oneness. Everything in it is driven by relativity, not the absolute. You can't even have atoms and molecules bodies and planets without a separation idea. Let it have its separation and its murder and its death and don't deny it. You can't fight with its nature, there's no point.

The world was made to die and to follow death's purpose. It was made so that you cannot escape problems. It was made so that nothign ever works right. It was made in order to act like a prison and to keep everyone isolated. It is not meant to function perfectly or heaven-like or to be free from cruelty. Everone keeps trying to dress it up and figure out what went wrong to try to stop it happneing again, it it completley futile. All that leads to is a straight-jacket.

Let what dies die, it's not supposed to last forever. Then in the allowing you can be free to live.

Perhaps one of the greatest miracles of all performed by Jesus was simply that He made his body permanently disappear. He did not die because He was not his body at all. His body didn't lay in the tomb rotting. He - immortal Spirit, Christ, made the body disappear completely because he no longer believed in any of the illusions that it was made to uphold. He did not have to "go through death" in order to exit the world. As ACIM says, the world is not left by death, but by TRUTH!

He had withdrawn absolutely all belief in separation, all belief in the body being the cause of anything, all victimhood, all belief in being at the effect of the world, and that means the body to Him had absolutely no further sense of apparent reality. He knew it was - LITERALLY - nothing at all. It wasn't that it still existed and was something special, or a special communication device (that was a pre-ascension state). He recognized the complete absolute truth, that there is no world and there is no body. It is NOTHING other than an illusion that isn't real.

And with that, His body literally disappeared from existence. This was the final demonstration, the final statement, that He had overcome death, that He was not a body at all, and that the body is just an illusion.

It is our task, similarly, to learn to DISAPPEAR the body, to learn to disappear sickness, to disappear death, to overcome all material laws, to reverse every sign of sin, and to recognizing that all of the things of this world are literally NOTHING. They are not a special something, or a God-filled something, or a real-something, or meaningful, or important.

"There is no world. This is the central thought the Course would aim to teach". Quite literally, Jesus's disappearing of His body foreshadows the "Disappearance of the Universe", which WILL happen when the brotherhood is again united in truth, because this world is NOTHING more than an illusion and God did not create it.

You do not need a body to exist. You do not need this world to exist. You are Immortal Spirit, forever.

Below is the quote from Jesus where He described this from the additional material given to Helen.

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was. And that is what "rolling the stone away" means. The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body’s nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear.

I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body’s worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand. But now I talk to you and give you the same message. The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you awaken and decide to dream no more. And you still do have the power to make this decision as I did.

God holds out His hand to His Son to help him rise and return to Him. I can help because the world is illusion, and I have overcome the world. Look past the tomb, the body, the illusion. Have faith in nothing but the spirit and the guidance God gives you. He could not have created the body because it is a limit. He must have created the spirit because it is immortal. Can those who are created like Him be limited? The body is the symbol of the world.

Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there 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.

A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death. This is the message of the crucifixion; there is no order of difficulty in miracles. This is the message of the resurrection: Illusions are illusions. Truth is true. Illusions vanish. Only truth remains.

These lessons needed to be taught but once, for when the stone of death is rolled away, what can be seen except an empty tomb? And that is what you see who follow me into the sunlight and away from death, past all illusions, on to Heaven’s gate, where God will come Himself to take you home."

Here is even more proof.

God created free-willed individual souls. That is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE if God is purely a concept of "no parts" or "a single thing". Even ONENESS cannot mean "one thing", because a "one thing" does NOT create "separate beings" as quoted below. Nor can the son of God dream WITHOUT God being part of the dreaming, if they are literally "one".

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, NEVERTHELESS CREATED SEPARATE BEINGS WHO HAVE EVERYTHING INDIVIDUALLY, but who want (free willed) to share it to increase their joy. Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it. That is why God Himself CREATED YOU. Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and that is what creation MEANS."

"If you believe that ALL THE SOULS THAT GOD CREATED ARE His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One (does not mean no souls), then every Soul MUST be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness (still many parts which share) DOES transcend the sum of its parts (see, there are parts). However, it loses this special state as long as any of its parts (more parts) are missing. This is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved UNTIL all of the INDIVIDUAL PARTS OF THE SONSHIP have returned. Only then, in the true sense, can the meaning of wholeness be understood."

So you can see, if you can accept this, that God DID create individuals, and Jesus even goes so far as to say "separate beings". He also says the sonship contains multiple parts. This kind of thing just is totally incompatible with ideas of oneness, singularities, non-dualities, "God is and nothing else is" etc.

The truth is though, it's not a question of EITHER God is Oneness OR God has created parts.... it's actually that BOTH ARE TRUE. There is a oneness, as in a SHARING, BY PARTS, which does not undo the fact they are parts. This sharing allows them to AGREE WITH God's Will, freely.

More pertinent quotes:

"To be egocentric IS to be despirited. But to be self-centered in the RIGHT sense is to be inspired, or in the Soul."

"Projection (creation), as defined above, is a fundamental attribute of God, which he also gave to his Son. In the Creation, God projected his Creative Ability out of Himself toward the Souls which He created, and also imbued them with the same loving wish (or will) to create."

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in him."

"The Soul, because of its own likeness to its Creator, is creative. No Child of God is capable of losing this ability, because it is inherent in what he IS."

"Right perception is necessary before God can communicate directly to His altars, which He established in His Sons."

Here is the clincher, Jesus stating that GOD GAVE FREE WILL TO ALL HIS SONS:

"In this sense the creation includes both the creation of the Son by God, and the Son's creations when his mind is healed. 8 THIS REQUIRES GOD'S ENDOWMENT OF THE SON WITH FREE WILL, because all loving creation is freely given in one continuous line, in which all aspects are of the same order." - ie the son MUST have the freedom to CHOOSE to WILL, otherwise he does not have freedom and is not like God. God therefore HAS CREATED individually free-willed sons.

Through struggles with being shy and sensitive and antisocial and so on, I gradually have realized that there is something fundamentally "estranging" about people's bodies.

When I go out and I see people's physical bodies, there is a fundamental disconnect. There's my body over here and this big gap between and their body over there - it is just experienced when taken at face value as a separation - a gaping divide between individuals, making us seem remote and distant and unlike each other.

Just the mere fact that their body has "differences" or seems like a wall of solid flesh, all by itself, IS a "form" of MAKING it seem as though the person is different to me and therefore IS NOT ME, and therefore there is some kind of separation or rift between us.

People in bodies seem confined and isolated and cut off from each other. It's as if we are supposed to be joined and sharing in the same place together, but instead, there is a huge distance physically between us, yet alone the fact that they are imprisoned in a physical form which they wear like a suit of isolation, which keeps them in and keeps me out.

I always thought there was something majorly wrong with me that I could not relate or connect with people. That communication was fundamentally difficult. That I feared strangers and was put off by appearances. I thought that I just wasn't good at it or there was something I just wasn't cut out to do.

But now I see that in fact, bodies are part of the ego's DEVICE to try to ENFORCE separation, by identifying brothers as strangers, with significant illusions of differences in appearance, in order to portray us as UNRELATED and isolated from each other. It's written into the physical form ITSELF. This was the purpose of the body.

So now I can cut myself a bit of slack, that my difficulty connecting with people isn't just about me as such. The physicality of bodies is a severe limit imposed on communication by the belief in separation.

Brothers/souls are supposed to commune with each other fully and share space and overlap each other in unity. Bodies were made to isolate and to stop us from connecting with each other.

The challenge as I see it now isn't so much learning how to relate to bodies better, but how to see PAST bodies to the person WITHIN, to the soul, the christ, the real person hidden underneath the illusion of form, to connect with their MIND, and to share love with them that BYPASSES the physical in order to bring about healing and the UNDOING of bodies.

It entails learning that people are not bodies. Bodies are fundamentally AGAINST communication unless used PURELY for communication mind-to-mind (temporarily), and therefore I need to learn to interact with brothers/souls with love and really thoroughly learn to look PAST (forgive) all illusory appearances of body forms. To relate soul-to-soul and heart-to-heart and mind-to-mind, not form-to-form.

Bodies are illusions. They are not people. They are also not sick on their own. They are not the thing that needs healing as such. The body does seem sick but it's a *secondary* sickness - the "original" sickness (in mind) is hidden behind appearances. I had been targeting healing at body parts only for Jesus to remind me that the person is not a body... making me realize I was aiming the healing at entirely the wrong target, lol. People are not bodies. "I am not a body, I am free". Tough lesson. Long lesson. But I'm getting there.

What appears to be strangers, are in fact brothers in disguise.

Each thought system starts with a logical premise, which determines everything that comes from it, which are perfectly logical conclusions. This is true of both God’s creation and the EGO’s world, which are logical outcomes.

The separation from God followed NEAT, LOGICAL steps. The thought system of the ego is run by impeccable logic, just as God’s thought system is. The outcome of each system depends entirely on its logical premise. At the CORE of A Course in Miracle’s metaphysics is PURE LOGIC.

If you can understand the logical premise of each system, and if you can follow the progression of logical conclusions based on that premise - which is IMPECCABLE LOGICAL REASONING, you will correctly understand ALL of the metaphysics of the course. Where everything fits. The TRUTH about the entire separation from God, states of awareness, what is true and false, what is real or unreal, who created what, how the systems MUST function etc.

It is all TOTALLY LOGICAL. If you struggle with logical reasoning you may have difficulty SEEING the logic or following it.

This literally means, that states of mind, states of separation, the making of the body and the world, all of the mechanics of special relationships, sin and death, the nature of the physical universe and its laws, ALL OF IT, is a LOGICAL CONCLUSION. Correctly discerning what the logic IS, HOW it progressed, and WHY that makes SENSE, is the key to accessing the core metaphysics in the course. Once you do this, you can refer to this metaphysics as a cheat-sheet, a reference to TELL YOU, what ANY statement in the course MUST MEAN, where it fits, and what JESUS MEANS. GUARANTEED.

"T-23.II.21. From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos must follow. 2 It is because it follows that it seems to be a LOGICAL CONCLUSION; a valid STEP IN ORDERED THOUGHT. 3 The steps to chaos DO FOLLOW NEATLY from their starting point. 4 Each is a different form in the PROGRESSION of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror and away from truth. 5 Think not one STEP is smaller than another, nor that return from one is easier. 6 The WHOLE DESCENT FROM HEAVEN LIES IN EACH ONE. 7 And WHERE YOUR THINKING STARTS, THERE MUST IT END."

"The ego's LOGIC is as IMPECCABLE as that of the Holy Spirit, because your mind has the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects."

"The Holy Spirit USES LOGIC as easily and as well AS DOES THE EGO, except that His CONCLUSIONS are not insane. 5 They take a direction EXACTLY OPPOSITE, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death. 6 WE HAVE FOLLOWED MUCH OF THE EGO’S LOGIC, and have SEEN ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSIONS. 7 And having seen them, we have realized that they cannot be seen except in illusions, for there alone their seeming CLEARNESS seems to be clearly seen. 8 Let us now turn away from them, and follow the SIMPLE LOGIC BY WHICH THE HOLY SPIRIT TEACHES the SIMPLE CONCLUSIONS that speak for truth, and only truth."

"The Kingdom is the RESULT OF PREMISES, JUST AS THIS WORLD IS. 2 You may have carried THE EGO’S REASONING TO ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION, which is total confusion about everything. 3 If you really saw this RESULT you could not want it. 4 The only reason you could possibly want any part of it is because you do not see the whole of it. 5 You are willing to look at the ego's PREMISES, but not at THEIR LOGICAL OUTCOME. 6 Is it not possible that you have done the same thing with the premises of God? 7 YOUR CREATIONS ARE THE LOGICAL OUTCOME OF HIS PREMISES. 8 His THINKING has established them for you. 9 They are exactly where they belong. 10 They belong in your mind as part of your identification with His, but your state of mind and your recognition of what is in it depend on what you believe about your mind. 11 Whatever these beliefs may be, they are the PREMISES that will determine what you accept into your mind."

"Look calmly at the LOGICAL CONCLUSION of the ego's thought system and judge whether its offering is really what you want, for this is what it offers you. 2 To obtain this you are willing to attack the Divinity of your brothers, and thus lose sight of yours. 3 And you are willing to keep it hidden, to protect an idol you think will save you from the dangers for which it stands, but which do not exist."

"In one sense the ego's fear of God IS AT LEAST LOGICAL, since the idea of Him does dispel the ego."

You might not be used to telling illusions what to do. You are more likely conditioned and used to a certain degree of victimhood, or powerlessness, which means that you allow stuff outside of you to seem to have power, or to have a say in what happens against your will.

Or to put it another way, you are used to listening to the ego. You're used to believing appearances. You're used to letting the world tell you what is happening. You're used to believing that these illusions are real and that they dictate what you are going to experience.

With divine healing, your attitude has to be different. It has to not listen to the ego. It has to not pay attention to appearance. It has to cut through all of the incoming signals from the ego illusion, ignore them completely, and demand and command the illusion to do what you want it to do.

So because of your mental conditioning in which you are very used to being quite wishy-washy about situations, where you sit on fences and maybe 'ask' life to change, you have to get out of that PASSIVE mentality. You have to stop paying so much attention to what your senses tell you and stop acting like a weak victim.

So this can actually take some practice to overcome and push past that conditioning, that way of using your mind that you've been so used to. It takes practice to learn whether you are actually fully COMMANDING that something change or be healed, versus whether there are elements of .. indecision, doubt, fear, uncertainty, paying attention to how things look, being caught up in the seeming reality of it, having reactions based on how the situation appears, etc... you have to weed all of that stuff out.

You need to become a finely tuned, PURIFIED, focused, clear, direct, certain, creative and firmly expressive miracle worker. You need to have authority. You must not lay down and just let the illusion, sickness, or whatever walk all over you with how much power it seems to have.

There is no order of difficulty in miracles, which means one miracle is not more difficult than another. But it ALSO means, MIRACLES ARE NOT DIFFICULT! Miracles are meant to be EFFORTLESS! In fact one of the miracle principles speaks of how miracles shouldn't be under conscious control, which speaks to how we need to be a conduit or bridge for the miracle to flow across without interference. But if our bridge is only half-built and stops short of fully extending into the illusion, to fully DELIVER God's promise of divine healing, then the effects will also fall short.

So experiment. Take time to speak TO the problem and tell it what you want it to do, explicitly and directly, not taking no for an answer. You have to be firm, and you have to be very clear. This takes some refinement. I've found that I tended at first to 'ask' problems to go. This does not work. I found that I would describe the problem. That doesn't work. I found that I would talk about the problem, to myself or others or to God. That doesn't work. I found that I would then talk about what I wanted to happen in a kind of future tense, but that also did not work. You have to tell the problem directly, NOW, in first-person immediate language, in a commanding way, "sickness, leave right now. Go! Get out!". You have to CONFRONT IT, which takes some balls especially if you are a people pleaser ;-)

I've found that it took several attempts and various failures to learn how to be commanding. It was not natural to me at first. I was too passive and uncertain and afraid. I would buy into doubts too much, like wondering if it would work or what would happen. We cannot be like that. We are representatives of God. We are like his policemen, enforcing his law. We have to be AUTHORITATIVE. And illusions MUST obey. But if you are not authoritative, illusions and sickness and all other forms of suffering will STAY because you are failing to give it a direct order to leave. If you don't use very direct commanding language, which is vague and wishy-washy, you will see 'reflected back' in the dream mirror vague results or half-hearted responses.

Illusions must respond to the commanding confidence of Christ.

In all cases, when Jesus healed the sick and so on, he always gave a very direct command. "Get up and walk". "Lazarus, get up and a live". etc... these are not requests. They are powerful commands. And that is how power flows across them. Words are a transit system for the communication and flow of God's power. You have to speak to the problem and tell it what to do.

"For truly I say to you, whoever SAYS to this mountain (notice the SPOKEN command), 'Be removed and be thrown into the sea!' and does not doubt in his heart (no fear, no uncertainty, completely belief and confidence), but BELIEVES that what he says will come to pass (believing it is a very important part of conviction), he will have whatever he says" (Bible, Mark 11:23).

Oneness does NOT mean you do not have a self or free will.

ACIM quotes:

God, Who encompasses all being, created beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. (T-4.VII.5:1)

God created His Sons by extending His Thought, and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. All His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other. (T-6.II.8:1-2)

Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite. (W-pII.11.1:1)

God knows His children with perfect certainty. He created them by knowing them. (T-3.III.7:9-10)

In the creation, God extended Himself to His creations and imbued them with the same loving Will to create. (T-2.I.1:2)

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. (T-4.VII.6:7)

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….God's extending outward, though not His completeness, is blocked when the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one. So He thought, "My children sleep and must be awakened." (T-6.V.1:5,7,8)

When the Atonement has been completed [and we are back in Heaven], all talents will be shared by all the Sons of God. (T-1.V.3:1)

When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed…the Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless their creations and keep them in the light of joy. (T-5.I.5:5,7)

The Holy Spirit promotes healing by looking beyond it to what the children of God were before healing was needed, and will be when they have been healed. (T-5.II.1:2)

God has but one Son, knowing them all as one. (T-9.VI.3:5)

It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts. However, this is obscured as long as any of its parts is missing. That is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all the parts of the Sonship have returned. (T-2.VII.6:1-5)

It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness does transcend the sum of its parts. However, it loses this special state as long as any of its parts are missing. This is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all of the individual parts of the Sonship have returned. Only then, in the true sense, can the meaning of wholeness be understood.

One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth. Yet do these thoughts make clear the meaning of creation? Do these words bring perfect clarity with them to you? What can they seem to be but empty sounds; pretty, perhaps, correct in sentiment, yet fundamentally not understood nor understandable. The mind that taught itself to think specifically can no longer grasp abstraction in the sense that it is all encompassing. We need to see a little, that we learn a lot. (W-pI.161.4:1 8)

When you are told what is natural, you cannot understand it. The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you. (T-16.II.3:2-3)

When the mind clearly recognizes that CAUSE is in the mind, and Cause is God, and that the mind extends God's will, God's Power can extend forth to enact miracles.

This means, that God has FULL power over illusions. Or in other words, God is not a victim of illusions and God does not pay any attention to what illusions say can or cannot occur.

Let's talk about it in terms of authority. God is the One Authority. When we are fully aware of and aligned with God, we too inherit Authority. We are now representatives of God, or you could say, a "Teacher of God" or "Advanced Teacher of God".

With authority, you have commanding authority over all illusions, all ego, and all deception. This includes all sickness, and death. If you say that something will happen, it MUST happen. If you command that something be healed, it MUST heal. It must fall into line with your authority.

Now, in this authority there is no sense of paying attention whatsoever to ANYTHING that illusions appear to say. It is as if being blind to illusions (overlooking them completely, which is true forgiveness), not listening to ego, giving absolutely no credit to any grounds for fear, and not even really paying attention to even what the eyes and ears are telling you is happening in the illusion.

None of the things of the illusion, world, body, sickness etc, none of them are important because none of them have CAUSAL POWER over God and His Son (you). The world is NOTHING but an effect. It MUST fall into line and be/do what YOU command it does. This is why there is "no order of difficulty in miracles". The authority you have as a representative of God/Christ, does not listen to the world of form in any way whatsoever, believes in no ego, and completely ignores appearances. Instead it simply ENFORCES GOD'S WILL (that there be healing etc). And there's nothing the ego illusion can do to stop it.

Now, when someone is a victim, what this means is there has been a great reversal of cause and effect. There is also a DIS-EMPOWERMENT. There is a listening to the ego, a paying attention to illusions, a making illusions real, a becoming afraid because of how frightening the illusion SEEMS to be, and a taking it seriously. This is all of course to do with listening to the ego, which means, listening to what the ILLUSION is telling you. What the world is telling you, what the body is telling you, what the sickness is telling you.

So for the victim, what this means is, their attention has stopped being fixated on God, and is now fixated on the world/ego/body and all of its reasons 'why' (justifications, rationalizations) something cannot be healed. All of those reasons are bullshit. They are all temptations. They are all deceptions. We are to NOT listen to them. But for the victim, in the victim's mind, they perceive causal power as outside of them, separate from them, inaccessible, and acting AGAINST them instead of for them. And as such, they perceive and believe, that form/illusions/ego has power over God. This is the reversal of cause and effect.

This is also the AUTHORITY PROBLEM, because the victim has a mistaken sense of who has authority over whom. The ego/victim having authority over God is POWERLESSNESS. Weakness. Fear. Failure. The ego's attempt to be God is its attempt to block God's authority (which some would call aligning with 'hell'). It is also an ignorance of YOUR real authority, which is extended to you by God. A victim is not AWARE of their authority, and that's why they experience themselves as being weak and vulnerable and victimized, and at the same time believe they have a false authority over God.

So, the entire point of waking up, as it were, is the transition from victimhood, where you are allowing the world to dictate "what is" (i.e. to dictate to God a resistance against God, the authority problem, which tries to assert that God has no authority here), to a state where you are ABSOLUTE CAUSE, recognizing the world is ONLY an effect, and therefore it is absolutely under your power and MUST absolutely comply with any change you choose to make to it. And yes, when you are in this mind of cause (Holy Spirit onwards), you CAN change the world/dream/illusion because you have total authority over its deceptions. You recognize the world is a LIE, and therefore it has no power over YOU.

When the Son of God commands with authority and firm conviction and lack of fear and with strong belief (all of which are required!), that the illusion MUST do something, the illusion WILL comply. But it won't comply if you do not have this unshakeable certainty. It won't comply if you are in doubt. It won't comply if you are listening to the ego and fearing that there is a level of difficulty here beyond what can be changed. It won't comply when you listen to your own uncertainties or when you start to 'change your tune', trying out different words and so on. This means you've allowed the illusion to start to encroach on your authority/territory and invade your mind and you're starting to listen to what it's saying and are taking it seriously. This is dis-empowerment. Victimhood.

Your word is your 'wand', and you need to speak to the illusion and command it to heal and so on. You need to exercise your authority over it. Reversing cause and effect back to their proper orientation (which is a correction of level confusion also), doesn't just mean, oh, now you realize cause is 'in' your mind and you're not at the effect of the world. It LITERALLY means, there is now ONLY cause in your mind, and the world is ONLY effect, and IT MUST OBEY. It doesn't just mean the world still has some kind of fixed nature or objectivity, and that your subjective perception is now unaffected yet still 'passive'. It means you are now in command, in charge, you have dominion over it, and you tell it what the fuck to do.

That is how it is possible to enforce God's will, to enact healing, to raise the dead, etc. People being dead bodies is an EGO ILLUSION, a part of the dream world that attempts to put on a really big 'show' about how this is more powerful or important than God. God has power OVER it, and when you are aligned with God's power, YOU have power over it, to literally reverse death. It means not believing a single shred of the ego illusions, appearances, any state of form, any reason 'why' something cannot be changed, or anything else that comes 'from' the illusion/form/ego/body. If you are listening to form, you are listening to the ego. If you are tempted by the severity of form's condition, you are listening to the ego.

This is why we must become single minded, one minded. Absolute certainty. We must have firm 'belief' i.e. conviction that it is TRUE, that healing can, must, and will occur... even in the sense that it HAS occurred and therefore the ego MUST represent this healing, e.g. by the body image 'demonstrating' that there has been no attack. Jesus instructs us many times to demonstrate our brother has had NO EFFECT ON US, which means anything outside of you has NO POWER to do anything to you whatsoever, YOU hold all the causal power, you are NOT at the effect of ANYTHING in the dream (and therefore must be 100% responsible and 100% free of victimhood). We are to demonstrate that the Son of God - you - are NOT at the effect of the dream, the world, sickness, death, the ego's forces, agents of hell, deceptions or lies.

This isn't just about getting our mind straightened out and getting things into their proper order. Once cause and effect are CORRECTED, all the powerlessness that you thought you had will be replaced with POWER. All of the fear that you had will be replaced with CERTAINTY. All of the victimhood you had will be placed with CONVICTION. And you will become CLEAR that everything in form, everything of 'level 1' of the dream, is UNDER YOUR COMMAND. This isn't passive. This means you are an agent of God, you extend God's power (because you stop resisting or blocking it), and your alignment with love produces CONSTANT NATURAL MIRACLES. Where do miracles occur? THEY CORRECT THE ILLUSION (world/body/dream), NOT just the inside of your private inner world.

Miracles are "miracles" because they are 'supernatural' acts which come from a place of inner causality, BEYOND the world, via a clear alignment to and experience of the 'metaphysics' of the truth, and which therefore ABOLISH all of the ego's laws and have absolute power over everything in this world. This means it can defy all sickness and death, it can defy the laws of physics (e.g. Jesus walking on water), it can defy all forms of lack (feeding the 5000), it can defy all disease (healing the blind, raising the dead etc), because we have POWER OVER ALL OF IT.

This is not a drill. This is for real folks. And it's going to be up to you, once you access that authority and power and certainty and clarity, experientially, to decide when and where you might 'exercise' your miracle-mindedness. Maybe you will perform no such miracles. Maybe you will perform many. But they will be natural and effortless and unlimited. Just look at Jesus as an example. He performed even more miracles than are mentioned in the bible. He performed miracles DAILY! And as Jesus tells us in the urtext, "each morning ask me what miracles you would have me perform today, and help me to perform them." Every day folks!

It's a Course in MIRACLES because it's a Course that will lead you to God and will set you free and miracles are your RIGHT!

Amen.

There is a fundamental difficulty in choosing anything in this world. Everything in this world lacks everything else. Everything has taken a side, has separated itself off, has made itself different, and does not have what other things have. This means that nothing is whole, nothing has everything, and nothing is perfect.

There is a fiction perpetrated that suggests you can have it all, get it all, win everything, find the best, be the best, choose the best option, be on a perfect diet, get the perfect body, etc. These are all make-believe, achieve a dream, conquer the world etc.

The separation even applies to colors. Red lacks green, blue lacks orange, and yellow lacks purple. In order to get one color you have to lose its opposite. Picking one color denies aspects which other colors have. So none of the colors are the perfect whole divine color. And you can drive yourself up the wall trying to choose the best one.

So then as you're trying to choose between options, you find yourself in a state of paralysis. You seek to make the perfect choice, the best choice, and to entirely win and succeed in whichever choice to make. But the truth is that whichever thing you choose, will lack something. Whatever option to take, it's going to be defective and limited and lacking.

This drives you nuts, when you're trying to decide what is the best course of action, or the right thing to buy, or the most appropriate selection, or whether to do one thing or another. Both options appeal with equal potential, and with equal lack. Neither of them is completely ideal. So then most of the time you end up throwing your hands in the air and "settling" for whichever one seems the least offensive. Or whichever one seems to have more pros than cons.

I'll just go with this one. I'll settle for that one. I guess this one will do. That one's probably good enough. So then you learn that in this world you usually have to lower your standards, be willing to accept that everything is limited, be okay with scarcity and sacrifice, and realize that every single choice is a compromise. You cannot get anything without losing something. That's how it's all set up.

Some people will have higher standards and will try to fine-tune the selection process. They will have in their minds the idealistic idea that some choices are actually completely perfect. That you can win without losing. That you can gain without loss. That you can get without having to give. And much of society and industry is geared towards trying to maximize the "return on investment". To get as much of what seems perfect and ideal, with as little loss as possible. There's an art to it, but it can never succeed.

If you are perfectionistic, thus, usually because you see yourself as imperfect and are trying to find what you think you don't have, you'll find this familiar. It drives you nuts trying to ideally look for the absolute best possible outcome, the most amazing toy, the completely perfect choice. It literally can make you more insane by expecting, or rather misunderstanding, that the world has the capability of offering you something that is whole and complete. It can't.

You will feel far more at ease and sane about your interactions and goals in the world if you can recognize that, fundamentally, all physical matter is a state of partiality. It's based on separation, so everything has only a small portion of the whole. Each item is lacking something that the other items have. If you go for the TV with the bigger speakers you lose out on the TV with the cool remote. You can't win everything. You can't have it all.

If you can accept that every choice in the world falls short, every option is incomplete, every possible outcome is not ideal, and realize this is just how a world of separation must be, then you can stop fighting with it or setting yourself up for disappointment. As jesus says in the course, "the world has disappointed you since time began." That's because everything it promises, it fails to deliver. Everything it gives you, it takes away.

"The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

Nothing in the world is whole. It was designed to reject wholeness. Space is an assertion of the idea that nothing is everywhere and the everywhere (God) is nowhere. Every object, every piece of matter, every physical attribute, every choice, is divided. It is only because there has BEEN a division that you even have two things to choose between, and each of those options is only half of the whole. So at best, any choice you make leaves you empty handed, second-guessing, and wishing you picked the other one. And surely the best of the best will bring you salvation!

The world is two-faced, just as the ego is. It gives and takes away. If you gain you lose. If you win you lose. If you get you lack. If you want not to share anything with anyone you end up with nothing. What you get is taken from you. What you accomplish is destroyed. What you build comes tumbling down. Nothing lasts, nothing is whole, nothing completes you. That's how this world is. The sooner you accept that this is its nature you can work within its limits and use it for a higher purpose without trying to expect it to suddenly act like heaven. Pigs will never be able to fly.

Beliefs seem to be something we're supposed to be undoing and getting rid of - at least false ones. And the Course says that you do not necessarily need to have a belief about the truth because it's kind of a given. It doesn't require some kind of extra effort or separate attitude in order to maintain it and it's not something that you make or can put extra energy into to give it reality.

Beliefs usually are something the ego has taken ahold of and is attempting to make real things which are not true. It attempts to feed the belief and build it up and create a stronger illusion. It tries to bring to life that which cannot live, and create a sense of being convinced that this artificial belief is the truth. These kind of beliefs we need to undo.

But as we transition our sense of trust away from the ego and toward God, and as we let go of the sense of truth that we invested into the ego's beliefs, we instead start to place our trust and faith and "belief" if you will, in God's truth.

It also comes down to whether or not you believe that you are worthy of God's love and whether you therefore are worthy of receiving God's blessings. If you don't believe you are worthy of God's love, you will not be able to believe that other people are worthy of it either.

But this is not black and white, because you can begin to put your trust in God and learn to have faith in God's truth even if at the moment it seems distant or hidden behind walls of doubt and illusion. Just because you are not yet fully aware or still believe in sin or have your own problems and false beliefs, it doesn't mean God is disempowered at all.

In fact, God and Holy Spirit and Jesus are permanently miraculous and are absolutely ready right now to perform miracles. For them, miracles are happening all the time. And as you begin to reach out to them in faith, putting your trust and belief in their truth being true, this forms a kind of bridge which connects you to their minds, even if right now you are still vague about them or don't understand them and are not having a direct experience of their fullness.

Forgiveness begins to overlook the illusions and you start to build a relationship with them. This relationship, even if at first it seems minimal and fragile, can be enough for you to participate in performing miracles. They are capable of working with you and using you to extend God's love and healing, even if you yourself are still working on your own spiritual path.

To produce a healing, however, it does require at least some amount of belief that God's truth is true. The degree to which you believe in it is largely the degree to which you will allow and accept God's power to work through you. There is no order of difficulty in miracles, but there is kind of an order of difficulty in terms of you believing in your ego and using the ego to attempt to interfere with or block the miracle.

To put it another way, you could be attempting to perform a miracle and saying that you want it while, at the same time, in various ways, your ego beliefs are causing you to ask for something else. And you end up producing results but the results are not the miraculous-seeming results you hoped you were asking for, and instead you just expressed the ego. Then since the ego's will is not really a will at all, nothing seems to happen.

You do need therefore some amount of belief in God's truth being true, in order for you to accept for yourself and allow to extend through you, God's healing power. It is not enough to stand before someone or even remotely and begin to command their healing or to send them loving vibes. You might be assuming that you automatically "believe" simply because you believe intellectually that you can be miraculous, but the amount of your heart-felt believing may be significantly lower than where it needs to be. You will therefore have doubt and fear and be unsure if it's going to work, which will come against the miracle and discourage you from being convinced that it can happen.

So it can be helpful that when you go to perform a miracle, you actively remind yourself that you must BELIEVE that God is going to heal. This in a way seems like making an "effort", only because at the moment your belief is divided and you have to sort of pull yourself out of the ego *temporarily* in order to exhibit a clearer sense of certainty that God's truth is truth.

This will at first seem like a strain of sorts or that you really have to push the envelope of how much you FEEL that you believe it, and the ego in you will try to thwart your efforts. But as Jesus has said, he who asks BELIEVING that he receives it will be given whatever he asks for.

At some point, when you are very thoroughly purified of the ego, and are very certain and strongly convinced of God, your level of what you genuinely believe in will be much higher. You will trust God. You will believe God's word. You will be constantly overlooking ego illusions, including the illusions of sickness and death and real sin. Not just in theory but actually experientially, LIVING it. Walking around in that awareness and knowledge. Expressing it ALL the time.

And then you will not have to make effort to perform miracles because you will naturally, in your HEART, believe deeply that God's will is real and true. You will believe it with your whole heart and your whole being. It will therefore be NATURAL for you to be miraculous. It will be your natural state of being. You will be expressing miracles left right and center every single day, BECAUSE you have a very strong BELIEF, a very strong faith and knowing of the nature of God and believe and trust in HIS power and ability to heal anything.

We have to be honest with ourselves as we learn and experiment with miracles, as to just how much we really do believe God. Don't underestimate how much of a stretch it might be to go from where you're at to where God is at. The ego has long been our trusted company and it can take a LOT of purification and forgiving to truly rise up to the level of Christ.

You do not need christ-level belief in order to facilitate miracles, because Holy Spirit only truly needs a little willingness and your mind only need to be partly corrected. Once you have established SOME faith in God's truth being more true than the ego's truth, miracles will start to become possible, perhaps small ones at first, perhaps minor healings, and you will have a lot of failures and frustrations.

But keep trying and keep learning to BELIEVE firmly AS you do it. That is very important. You can't just get it in your head, your HEART has to feel it and trust it and choose to believe God over the ego.

If you will practice simply switching your belief to high-intensity and back to your regular level, you will see what I mean. Just close your eyes and imagine you're going to heal someone, and then go through the motions of what you think you would do without any particular effort to really believe in it. Like, just saying some words or pointing your hands or whatever.

Then reset and try it again, but this time, BEFORE you start, and sustaining it throughout your effort, make an extra special effort to really STRONGLY BELIEVE that God is going to heal. As soon as you ignite this stronger belief, you should feel it, you will notice it feels like you begin to radiate something. It's almost like you switch on your system and your whole energy field engages and you begin to connect with something beyond yourself.

Then while sustaining that strong heartfelt, whole deep feeling of believing that what you are going to say is TRUE, and that it is backed up by God's love, then proceed with your healing actions such as commanding healing or making statements of truth to speak truth into the situation.

I did this MYSELF today, FOR myself, directing my statements towards some significant sinus pressure and headache that resulted from eating an ice-cream sundae. And the POWER of what Holy Spirit did in me while holding a stronger belief was significantly more noticeable, and I did come away with almost no symptoms left.

I could feel how this was different to simply "showing up" and going through the motions. Too many times in the past I did some of the physical actions of a miracle process and said the words and tried to be commanding or powerful etc but I didn't deep down BELIEVE and I had forgotten entirely to activate belief and to be coming from God's love. I was trying to do miracles intellectually or to treat it like a way to change appearances using appearances.

It's not enough to just assume that you are already fully equipped for miracles, which is the ego's assumption that IT is already whole, and that therefore YOU are already fully in your belief and capability. No. There is more to you which the ego has suppressed, and you are probably not yet acting from a place of pure love and empowerment. You will need to question your belief that you are at your fullest connection to God right now, and learn to open yourself up more and more to His love and to the atonement and to being willing to accept it for yourself so that you can forgive and heal others.

There is a greater strength which you might yet have not even tapped into, and it might require you to really reach out to God and really stand your ground and be CONFIDENT in a way that you might not be comfortable with yet. The extent of your belief in the ego is what holds you back and limits you, and you are walking around with those beliefs ACTIVE in you all the time. So either you have to deliberately poke your head out of the ego's delusion and force yourself to believe more strongly, or continue the longer-term goal of refining your deep acceptance of God's truth.

Eventually, you will simply become so certain of God's ways, and so sure of His nature, and so convinced about the justification for LOVING people - including yourself - that you will automatically BE in a state of strong belief in God, and therefore you will very naturally and EFFORTLESSLY perform miracles. Your word will move mountains, heal the sick, raise the dead, and more.

But for you to believe, truly believe, that God is love, and that you are loved, and that you are justified in loving others, and that you CAN love others STRONGLY and without reservation - i.e. unconditionally - you are going to have to undo all of your own false ego beliefs in sin and guilt and fear and death at some point. They do interfere with your faith and diminish your effectiveness at facilitating miracles.

The miracle itself is unconditional, but your genuine willingness to perform it fully and with wholeness and power depends on your trust and openness with God. If you yourself don't believe you deserve love or healing or forgiveness, because of your belief in your own sinfulness, then you will not be GENUINELY and AUTHENTICALLY willing to extend that blessing to others. But if you have at least forgiven yourself to SOME degree, you WILL be able to begin practicing miracles - literal miracles, and you WILL start to see results.

So go ahead and keep working on your purification and forgiveness, but practice also believing in God's power and believing that God DOES will healing an WILL heal. It all is unlocked when YOU decide to ACT like God would act and therefore align yourself with His will and step out with confidence. As you decide to act according to God's Law, enacting His truth and demonstrating His Flawless Reality, He and all of Heaven will rush in to SUPPORT you, help you perform the miracle, assist in healing, and will empower you.

These are steps of faith. You have to act as if you believe it will happen and that you will be backed up, and the backup will come. Because it is God's love that empowers all miracles and your willingness to love will bring them forth for others.

Gradually as you demonstrate God's power, not only for others but for yourself, you will learn by witnessing the effects of the truth, having shown them to yourself through the miracles you have performed. And this will inspire you and encourage you and teach you that what you believed in was really there, that God really does perform supernatural healing, that you truly CAN do this, and you ARE authorized to do it even if you're still working through your own illusions and beliefs in the ego. You gotta start somewhere.

If you truly believe in God's love, you will BELIEVE that He can heal, and you will allow the healing to move through and around you. If you don't believe in God's miraculous power, then you will not believe in miracles and you will not see miracles through your hands. It's as simple as that.

Learn to believe that God is supernatural, loving, generous and in divine health. Learn to believe He has not become sick or damaged and neither has anyone else. Learn to believe that you made sickness and death and can abolish them. And learn to believe that God's love will move even if you yourself don't yet FULLY believe in it.

You MUST believe in miracles if you are to believe in God!

*BELIEVE* AND IT WILL BE GIVEN YOU!

The aspects of the Earth that you don't like, the things you are not fond of, the stuff you say is bad and wrong, the people you think of as guilty and sinful, are these really a part of the world?

Actually this is a combination of two things. The earth with its contents, plus your attack thoughts and judgements. "You're wrong" is an attack. "They're guilty" is an attack. "That's cruel" is a judgement.

It requires even an upheaval of all your values because now we're saying that even the things most people would think of as [insert your label for evil here], is in fact not that. Not unless you make it be that with your labeling.

So now we're saying that you can take the basic "raw material" of the world and give it a totally different meaning. What if you were an alien who just came down to earth and had never seen it before, know nothing of the culture, had never met a human, and had no clue what anything meant?

Things which are considered wrong, bad, evil, heresy, in some cultures, is actively embraced in others. Generally speaking in the UK, people who exercise are often labelled as vain and self absorbed. In the USA exercise is embraced much more openly as acceptable and a part of being youthful. But this is all made up.

When I moved from the UK to the USA I had to go through a huge transformation and reconfiguration of what I thought was good or bad or right or wrong or valuable or valueless. There was a whole different focus on what was 'normal' and acceptable.

It's the same with the whole world in general. We've made up our social rules and our cultures and our belief systems and our evaluations of what everything is. We've made up all our values and our protests at things we don't think are right.

Love has to find a way to look upon even hell and torture and murder and war and sacrifice and abuse and sickness and death without for a moment accusing it of sin or guilt or making it wrong. That's not a popular thing to do amongst the insane, and it appears to BE insane to suggest you could think of horrors as not horrors.

The course is indeed asking us to recognize that pain is pain and suffering is suffering and so on, but at the same time to forgive them and love them away. To translate them into something higher.

I think we don't want to even consider this because the notion of all the bad stuff not being bad, seems insane. And all the stuff people consider normal or natural, is in fact unnatural. And all the standards are bullshit. And all the social rules are invented. And there's not even really a valid moral system. It all has to be thrown out.

Only the Holy Spirit's true judgement of the world can see it correctly and judge it accordingly.

"To learn this course requires willingness to question EVERY value that you hold. Not one can be kept hidden and obscure, but it will jeopardize your learning."

"It cannot be too strongly emphasized that this course aims at a complete reversal of thought."

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell. Love is no longer feared but gladly welcomed. Idols have disappeared, and the remembrance of God shines unimpeded across the world."

"The illusion of orders of difficulty is an obstacle the teacher of God must learn to pass by and leave behind. One sin perfectly forgiven by one teacher of God can make salvation complete. Can you understand this? No; it is meaningless to anyone here. Yet it is the final lesson in which Unity is restored. It goes against all the thinking of the world, but so does Heaven."

"Today's idea, completely alien to the ego and the thinking of the world, is crucial to the thought reversal which this course will bring about." "To give up all problems to one Answer is to reverse the thinking of the world entirely."

"The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment. The world will end with the benediction of holiness upon it. When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."

Right now, living in a human body with an ego, your experience is that you are separate from God. As if you are somehow outside of God. As if you are living in exile in some kind of separate world that seems to exist in a dimension where God doesn't exist.

"You are at home in God, dreaming of exile"

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning."

"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts."

If you are not experiencing that you are in heaven, and are not with God, at home in reality, and instead find yourself in a body, it means your mind believes in this exile and sees itself as though it is "outside of heaven."

It's not really possible to be outside of God, but in the separation from God we had this idea and belief that we CAN exist without God, outside of heaven. This produced a sense of being in exile, which literally was a belief in existing "outside" of God in some external world, which in turn produced the entirety of spacetime and all its contents. As if a kind of world outside of heaven itself, set apart from it and designed to keep God on the other side of some kind of wall.

"To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

So now in your experience, there are certain things which belong to God, which are found only within God, and are a part of him, which you must therefore have difficulty accessing.

If God is on the other side of the wall, hidden in what seems to be an entirely different dimension of reality, beyond space and time in heaven, and if you consider yourself to not be squarely rooted and at home in God, then you're going to find it hard to experience the properties of God.

Some things ARE God, thus belonging to God, and there is no substitute for them, no other source, and no way to have them or experience them WITHOUT including God. That includes happiness, joy, love, peace, eternal life, power, certainty, fearlessness, wholeness, reality, identity etc. So if you are seeming to live in some kind of world "outside" of heaven, away from God, you are pretty much cut off from these things.

What that means is, you're going to have to find a way to move closer to God, including God, sharing with God God's nature and properties, if you want to have any of the things that can ONLY truly be found within God. It's like God is this whole other Kingdom that is outside of spacetime that you need to find a way to access, in order to gain access to love and happiness and peace etc. You have to, essentially, go there, if you want to have those things.

"Infinity is meaningless WITHOUT you, and YOU are meaningless without God. There IS no end to God and His Son, for we ARE the universe."

Before you entirely disembark and zap yourself out of spacetime completely, however, you can take steps to move closer to God, and thus to allow God to enter into and share your mind. It's possible to bring a taste of heaven to your earthly experience, such that God can be mostly in your mind, and mostly seen in everything you see.

What happens here is a kind of phasing in and out. The physical world is gradually phasing out, along with its bodies and objects, while the nonmaterial spirit world is gradually phasing into your awareness. The more you attune to God the more you tune out of the physical, including physical sight.

"This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight."

So you start to see more of God, so to speak, and less of the world. The world becomes a thin transparent veil, turning invisible, as God's world become more and more visible. In terms of your perception, it will seem as though you are looking on what lightly remains of your perception of the physical world through more spiritual loving eyes, which of course renders that physicality with greater forgiveness and love.

"Miracles are a kind of exchange. Like all expressions of love, which are ALWAYS miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses the physical laws."

This is only possible because the physical is phasing out and love is taking over. Eventually the exchange results in the world disappearing from view entirely, replaced by the face of Christ, in which the world is forgotten and the veil that seems to separate you from God's dimension lifts and you find yourself eventually awakened in heaven.

To experience joy and happiness and love and peace, you have no option but to include God more and more in your mind and awareness. There is no way to have light without it, no way to see without him, no way to love without him. Nor will you be loving independently on your own, you can only love by sharing God's love. So as you love, it's not just you loving, it's you plus God loving, you extending his love. You can't even muster a "separate love".

Lesson 127 "There is no love but God's."

"Alone they are nothing. But in their joining is the Power of God."

"You are not frail, with God beside you. But WITHOUT Him, you are nothing." "Of yourselves you can do nothing, because of yourselves you ARE nothing. I am nothing without the Father, and YOU are nothing without me because by DENYING the Father you deny YOURSELF."

In my ongoing exploration and practice of performing healing miracles, I gradually chisel away at the reasons why it is or isn't working, and gradually refine the process. I guess it's like learning anything, like how to drive a car or how to sing.

At first you do all kinds of things that aren't necessary and produce mistakes and problems. Gradually you UN-learn various things you were doing that were interfering.

Lately I'm moving more towards trusting Holy Spirit Himself to teach me about it, rather than trying to the find answers in other people's teachings about it, especially as I'm gradually seeing more and more inconsistencies in what other people have said.

One of the key aspects of miracle healing is, apparently, an element of belief. I've heard people talk about how you must believe first in order to receive. It is said biblically that he who asks, believing that he will receive, will do so. And this is also reflected in the Course.

I'm discovering that BELIEVING that it is TRUE that healing will occur, or indeed, that it HAS occurred (per God), is a key part of this "procedure".

Previously, I would attempt to do a miracle and say various things and use my hands and so on, with some amount of conviction that it was "possible" for this to work. But at the same time, I still was looking and waiting to see IF it was working. This means focusing on the presence of signs of change, first, instead of focusing on belief first. It means I'm making the error real, instead of overlooking it.

So if the sickness or problem is the error, or the form of error, and if I'm looking AT it trying to undo it, I've kept it real and am believing the ego's illusion. Therefore I am not in a mode of forgiveness.

Here I'm finding there is a really interesting, almost double-interpretation of what the Course says about miracles and forgiveness. On the one hand there is forgiving illusions for the sake of your own sanity and so on, mind correction, BUT, also it's seeming more and true that this APPLIES not only within my little body mind but also "OUT THERE" in the greater mind.

That means, forgiveness can be applied externally from my separate self, just as much as internally. That means, there are illusions of sickness outside of my body, as much as there might be such things inside. When I see errors (sickness) in someone's body, if I think that illusion is real, I am basically failing to forgive. If I am to UNDO that illusion, it isn't going to simply mean that I change my perception about it within my mind and it gets fixed within ME, within the scope of my separate self, but that it is supposed to ALSO get fixed out there in the larger dream.

The illusion of sickness in the other person is supposed to get corrected and undone and disappear, just as it would if it were inside my own form. Therefore, as part of the miracle-working process, which applies WITHIN AND WITHOUT (which are both the same), I need to OVERLOOK the person's sickness by not focusing on it when I am attempting to heal them. This also means that, as Jesus says, the miracle is intended to heal BOTH of us and not just my private inner world.

If when I attempt a miracle with Holy Spirit, I am looking not with a mindset of believing in truth, but with a mindset of believing that the error is in the person's body is real, then I am not going to see a miracle. This was something I was getting wrong, because I felt that IF a miracle were to happen with the person's body, I would actually be SURPRISED. That's not a good sign. That indicates that I don't REALLY believe that it's going to happen, and therefore I don't REALLY believe in God or that it CAN happen, yet alone that it WILL and MUST.

So I've been asking myself this question, do I REALLY believe that this person's given sickness, whatever the target is, do I ACTUALLY believe that it really can and will be healed? And in this, I have to be really HONEST with myself. And honestly, some of the things that I've been trying to heal, I did not really believe could be healed. Even if I was trying fairly earnestly or making a fool of myself. Deep down, I wasn't really totally certain or convinced that it would work, I was relying more on wishful thinking and hope than on faith and knowing.

So what happened was, I found myself ready to do a "remote miracle", on my own with Holy Spirit, away from a person, and what came to me was that I should not try to heal the thing I thought I would tackle, because I'm not ready. I don't believe it enough. The illusion of that particular "error" being real is too strong at the moment, so I don't have enough belief that it can be healed. So I was directed by Holy Spirit to work on a different issue, which he specifically named. And I noticed that I FELT that I believed it WAS possible for this other issue to be healed. I'm not sure if its to do with the order of difficulty issue - hierarchy of illusions, that for some reason I have less baggage and blockage relating to that particular ailment, but it seemed more POSSIBLE for me to believe in its healing. So I did that.

And then Holy Spirit told me to "cancel". So I did a forgiveness process canceling the belief that anything about the sickness was true or real. Gradually Holy Spirit's energies flowed more and more intensely, and I found myself BELIEVING that it was happening. That the healing WAS being received, and that it WAS fully given. And I did not feel like I would be surprised if it worked. Instead, I felt that it was, as Holy Spirit then said, "done." He said it was "fully given."

Believing that the healing can and will be done is very important, because it's the same thing as you believing that the forgiven mind is true and that the person is innocent in this area. Just as much as if it applied to myself. It's not so much I think that the believing in it itself gives it any kind of power, BUT, that I am placing my faith and loyalty SOMEWHERE, so either I am believing in the truth of God's healing, OR I must be believing in the ego's lie of sickness. So which is it going to be? I need to ACTUALLY BELIEVE that God's truth is the truth and that, therefore, there MUST be healing.

I think I'm on to something.

"I could not atone for MYSELF ALONE. Listening to one Voice implies the decision to share It in order to hear It yourself. The Mind that was in me is still irresistibly drawn to EVERY MIND CREATED BY GOD, because God's Wholeness is the Wholeness of His Son. You cannot be hurt, and do not want to show YOUR BROTHER anything except your wholeness. Show him that he cannot hurt you and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself. This is the meaning of turning the other cheek."

"Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being, He encompasses all things. NO MIND (implying there are many) holds anything but Him (therefore he created many minds)."

"Miracles make MINDS one in God. They depend on cooperation because the SONSHIP is the SUM OF ALL THAT GOD CREATED. Miracles therefore reflect the laws of eternity, not of time."

"God speaks for you in answering your question with these words: I walk with God in perfect holiness. I light the world, I light my mind and ALL THE MINDS WHICH GOD CREATED ONE WITH ME"

"ONE CHILD OF GOD (implying there are many) is the only teacher sufficiently worthy to teach ANOTHER (there are many!). One Teacher is in ALL YOUR MINDS, and He teaches the same lesson TO ALL. He always teaches you (one such mind) the inestimable worth of EVERY SON OF GOD, teaching it with infinite patience born of the infinite love for which he speaks."

"The Holy Spirit is the spirit of joy. He is the Call to return which God blessed THE MINDS OF HIS SEPARATED SONS. This is the vocation of the mind."

"Let us not wander into temptation, for the temptation of the Son of God is not Your Will. And let us receive only what You have given, and accept but this INTO THE MINDS WHICH YOU CREATED AND WHICH YOU LOVE. Amen."

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I don't know about you guys-n-gals but it sounds to me very clearly that there are MULTIPLE SONS and MULTIPLE MINDS. And that the presence of multiple minds is completely natural and normal because God CREATED THEM. Therefore EACH ONE has its "own mind". Each mind may well be "one" or in harmony with other minds, but there are still many minds, and each still has its own potential to choose whether to do God's will or not.

This is why some parts of the Course refer on ONE LEVEL to the ONE SON OF GOD, and on another level to the MANY INDIVIDUAL SONS (or souls).

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References to BROTHERS who are one with God:

"You are afraid of God because you fear your BROTHER. This BROTHER who stands beside you still seems to be a stranger."

"Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only BROTHER to the world. Forgive him your illusions, and behold how dear a BROTHER he would be to you. For he will set your mind at rest at last and carry it with you unto your God."

"To know your BROTHER is to know God."

"Miracles unite you directly with your BROTHER."

"One moment of real recognition makes everyone your BROTHER."

"Any BROTHER with whom you have a limited relationship, you hate."

"Don't deny yourself the message of relief that every BROTHER offers you now."

"It is not up to you to change your BROTHER, but merely to accept him as he is."

"In your BROTHER is the light. See him as sinless, and there can be no fear in you."

"The miracle enables you to see your BROTHER without his past, and so perceive him as born again."

"Your BROTHER does not have to be aware of the Holy Spirit in himself or in you for the miracle to occur."

"What you acknowledge in your BROTHER you are acknowledging in yourself, and what you share you strengthen."

"The miracle acknowledges everyone as your BROTHER and mine. It is a way of perceiving the universal mark of God."

"Because the miracle worker has heard God's Voice, he strengthens It in a sick BROTHER by weakening his belief in sickness, which he does not share." (again confirmation that your brother can refuse healing even if you are healed)

"Where there is love, your BROTHER must give it to you because of what it is. But where there is a call for love, you must give it because of what you are." (similarly again, you give love to those who lack it)

"How willing are you to forgive your BROTHER? How much do you desire peace instead of endless strife and misery and pain? These questions are the same, in different form."

"Trials are but lessons you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one. In every difficulty Christ calls to you and gently says, My BROTHER, choose again."

"If you attack error in another, you will hurt yourself. You cannot know your BROTHER when you attack him. Attack is always made upon a stranger. You are making him a stranger by misperceiving him, and so you cannot know him. It is because you have made him a stranger that you are afraid of him. There are no strangers in God's creation."

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your BROTHER did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in that view are all your sins forgiven. What is sin, except a false idea about God's Son? Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. What then is free to take its place is the will of God."

"Not one does Christ forget. Not one He fails to give you to remember, that your home may be complete and perfect as it was established. He has not forgotten you. But you will not remember Him until you look on all as He does. Who denies his BROTHER is denying Him, and thus refusing to accept the gift of sight by which his Self is clearly recognized, his home remembered and salvation come."

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It seems to me what the One Son of God, as Christ, is considered a BROTHER to the MANY SONS, who were also created (souls?) as extensions of him/god, ... and that at times the course refers to them on an equal footing because they are made of God-stuff equally, even though Christ appears to be a "larger" identity than the individual sons. But Christ+the individual sons make up "the sonship". So the sonship is not just the individual sons, it also includes the one son, and all are considered equal brothers in that sonship.

The idea that the world is just a dream, may sound very simple. But to fully and completely embrace it is a very tall order. If the world is just a dream, it changes your ENTIRE relationship to everything, to all people and object and events and places. Every single happening is framed differently, every interaction has a different meaning, and every piece of physical matter is up for question.

To accept this idea intellectually is very easy. It makes a lot of sense. If you can see the logic behind it, that we made this world as an opposite to God, and is therefore not real, you can accept that as making sense.

But to live it, to deep dive into it, to apply it everywhere and at all times, to remember it in the midsts of all happenings, to use it in all relationships, and to completely uproot all previous beliefs is long term challenge.

For me, the seemingly logical and clear conclusion that the world is not real, has become so refined and polished that I can see nothing to contradict it. Like, it makes total sense on paper. However, I still have a vast repository of "other beliefs" which have been convinced otherwise over time.

Beliefs in bodies being real. Beliefs in being a body. Beliefs in other people being bodies. Beliefs in events happening. Beliefs in seriousness and importance. Beliefs in value and priorities and hierarchies of difficulty. Beliefs in justified reactions and ego emotions and normality and human nature. All of those things scream that the world is real.

So what I find is that although I understand it in theory, my mind and beliefs still are quite uncertain about this idea. I go towards it a little more only to find other beliefs springing up into awareness saying, "but what about....". And every SINGLE one of those beliefs is rooted in the belief that the world is reality. The basic opposite premise of the dream. Each one of them signals and testifies that this is not just a dream.

So the mind then finds itself pulled in two directions. One direction pulls toward the seemingly glowing new "idea" or light, that it's true the world is just a dream and nothing is happening and no-one has ever sinned. And the other direction pulls towards the old worn out darkness of nightmares and hell, that there is sin everywhere and no hope for salvation.

"Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success."

"If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind. I can teach you, but only you can choose to listen to my teaching."

I will go towards the light of the truth, and the ego mind will go into doubt, which is fear. It will say, but what about this, and what about that.... there will be an uncertainty and a "not sure about this" and a "can this really be true?". There is a DIS-BELIEF.

"Ultimately, space is as meaningless as time. Both are merely beliefs. The real purpose of this world is to use it to correct your unbelief."

And the fact is that EVERY single opposition to the truth has to be uprooted and corrected and dispelled in order to have NO OBJECTIONS to accepting the atonement. If there is even a slight reason why you might not trust the truth, or suspect that it is false, or have a slight confusion about whether it is true or false, then you will not whole-heartedly accept the salvation it offers. Atonement can only be fully accepted through TOTAL willingness and certainty.

So I keep "naturally" checking and re-checking, looking at what the course says, reminding myself of its facts, re-considering the possibility that I might be mistaken about this new idea. I can't help but be "open minded" about the possibility that it is WRONG, because my ego already believes it is wrong and this pulls me into entertaining its possibility. And until I am wholly certain of its truth, which has to run VERY deeply and fully, this will keep happening.

"Until this distinction is made, however, the vacillations between free and imprisoned will cannot but continue."

These vacillations are to be expected for anyone who is attempting to awaken from the dream. If the world IS a dream and we have been believing it is NOT a dream, but a reality, then our entire way of believing and thinking and perceiving is going to have to go through a 180-degree transformation. Or as Jesus puts it, the upside-down thought system has to be turned right-side up, and that means nothing short of a complete reversal of your thought system and "world view".

Reversing your thought system WILL entail nothing less than realizing that everything you thought was what you did NOT want, you want. Everything you thought was evil, is good. Everything you thought was good, is evil. And all ego beliefs which claim a lie are actually claiming something else. It requires a tremendous sorting out of what is TRUE and what is FALSE, and in this endeavor you WILL be mistaken throughout the process. Which is why it requires a little willingness to consider the possibility that something else might be true, beyond what you currently believe.

I approach and I retreat. I get closer to accepting and then the ego fear pops up. I use the confusion as an opportunity to find more clarity, and then advance forward again. Each time becoming a little and more convinced, not just in theory but in practice, in direct experience, of the world's unreality. Because if what ACIM says is true, then "awareness of dreaming" and "the body is a dream" must become my new reality, before I can go home to God.

One thing is for sure, the road home to God is winding with spluttering false starts and lurches and gradual progress."I can but choose to wander off a while, and then return. Your loving Voice will always call me back, and guide my feet aright.""He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again."

"Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream"

"The Second Coming is merely the return of sense."

Recognize this. The body was made to have permanently false perception. To be permanently unforgiving. It is absolutely incapable of ever forgiving anything. All it can do is sense what it detects seemingly in the world, and report it back as REAL. It cannot question it. It cannot rise above the battlefield. It will NEVER see reality. It cannot get even the slightest glimpse of real light or real truth It is permanently fixated on the physical form of objects, utterly blinded by them and incapable of seeing past them. It takes the form of objects as utter reality and meaning. It is completely convinced by the hierarchy of illusions, orders of difficulty, levels of problems and all manner of suffering. And to the body, every difference or change is real.

Every sickness appears utterly real to its senses. Every death is seen as undeniable proof of termination. It is tempted by literally everything it looks up or senses. It has never made even the slightest progress towards forgiveness, and it never will. It cannot step out of hell, it cannot wake up, it cannot even begin to suspect there is another reality, and it will not ever look upon God. What was made in vegas stays in vegas, and the body is MADE OF unreality.

This is just what the body is. It is a limited piece of biological machinery designed to deceive. It has one specific function of turning illusions into reality. It is an embodiment of the belief that separation is possible, and implements that belief. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh".

It is a reality inverter. It absolutely shuts out all trace of reality and light and truth and God, and only allows illusions and unreality and falsehoods to pass through its filters. And as false things pass through its filters, it regards them as the whole truth. What is false is seen as true, what is unreal is seen as real, and what is evil is seen as holy. This is because it was in an attempt to swap all the properties of what is true with what is false.

The body is a polarizer. It takes what is not true and makes it seem true. It takes what is true and makes it seem false. It denies God's Kingdom of heaven and opens itself up to hell. It makes itself "invulnerable" to eternal life and makes itself vulnerable to death. It is the very idea of exposure to death and to hell, to murder and sin, to suffering and fear. It is the inside-out expression of the desire to be unnatural and uncreated.

The body is always going to be like this. You can change the purpose that you use it FOR, but you cannot change its nature. You cannot make the body see reality, or wake up, or know what's true, or discern facts from fiction. The body is limited. It was made TO limit and to remain limited forever. It is the "lens" through which hell is looked upon and regarded as real, and not for a single second will any body EVER gain access to the light of reality.

The body ALWAYS sees with UNFORGIVENESS. It is absolutely locked into false perception. It constantly makes all unreal things real to itself. It cannot forgive, overlook, see past, recognize, correctly judge, discern, or recognize anything. It is blind to reality, and sees only unrealities.

And because the body itself is made of that same unreality, an unreality seeing an unreality registers as "truth". The body thinks an unreal world is true because unreality is the body's truth. Two negatives seem to make a positive. It does not see the world as opposite to its own nature, and so regards it with agreement. Even though both the body and the world are false. And this makes it utterly biased toward always regarding unreality as real.

The body will not ever show you God. The body will not allow you to be with God. The body will not bridge the gap to God. The body cannot open your mind. The body will never ever see the light of truth, or the real world, or heaven. The body cannot have visions of God or Christ. The body will never see Christ in your brothers. It is NOT CAPABLE. And it will always be incapable. And it cannot love.

The body is only what it is. It was made to confine and to limit and to imprison. You cannot use a prison to experience freedom from prisons. You cannot use handcuffs to know what it's like to be unlimited. You will not EVER turn the body into an awakened being, or get it to look upon reality, or make it able to forgive anything whatsoever. It cannot even BEGIN to forgive because it is absolutely PERMANENTLY HARDWIRED into hell.

There must be a better way, yes? There must be ANOTHER WAY TO SEE. There must be some way that your MIND can choose away from the body and experience without it. A way to escape from hell. There has to be freedom FROM the body. "Do you want freedom of the body, or of the mind? For both you cannot have." If you want your mind to be free, it has to be free FROM the body. The body itself cannot be free because the body IS imprisonment. And there's no point polishing a turd.

We have to then learn to recognize the body for what it is and what it is not. The body is a JUDGER and a condemner. It is an accuser. It cannot stop judging sin to be real. It cannot stop testifying to the proof of sin. The body is utterly selfish. The body is so locked into unreality that the ego actually sees the body as its ally, something it is in "agreement with", because both the body and the ego identify hell as reality. That's why the body became the ego's "chosen home."

As Jesus says, we have to leave the desert. The body has to be transcended and the mind has to open up to ANOTHER WORLD, another vista, through another sight, which does not depend on the body at all. It has to get out of the box and step out of limitation. And if you are going to forgive at all, it CANNOT be that the body forgives. Your mind has to overlook what the body shows it and recognize it as false. Only if all of hell is false can heaven be true.

"Real vision is not only unlimited by space and distance, but it does not depend on the body's eyes at all. The mind is its only source."

"Miracles are teaching devices." And "to teach is to demonstrate". And "The mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this."

There can't be demonstration, unless something VISIBLE happens. A body gets cured, a lump disappears, a wound is healed, damage is corrected, etc. These are demonstrations. And miracles can produce these demonstrations. And they do almost all the time. Which is why it says miracles may not always have observable effects - which really means, almost always they do. OBSERVABLE - something changing which people can SEE with their eyes.

Similarly "You cannot see the holy spirit but you can see his manifestations" - he "manifests" as things changing at a physical level, which you can SEE, such as the body shaking or going through a change in appearance of form. And it is by these VISIBLE demonstrations that you can learn that HE DOES EXIST. I experience these manifestations EVERY DAY and I have shown it live on camera in my videos. The Holy Spirit can do stuff to the body.

The people who think you should never be trying to heal the body or move objects in the world with the mind etc (moving mountains) are level confused. They want to be in the world, with suffering, while pretending to be on a higher level where there is no world. Here, in this world, miracles are used to heal minds AND bodies. And unless the body is healed, forgiveness is not complete. "Forgiveness is not complete unless it brings healing to both yourself and your brother." "A miracle of healing proves separation is without effect."

So long as there are symptoms, signs, damages, breaks, hurts, bruises, wounds, growths, distortions, malfunctions, showing in the body, these act as PROOF that there has BEEN ATTACK. In other words, they act as proof of sin. AND they testify and assert that because these are *effects*, something external must have caused them, ie your brother. And so "sick bodies are accusers". The only way not to accuse, project, or blame your brother of sin, is to not show him a picture of crucifixion, ie an image of a broken body. Which means the body must be restored to health in order to teach "with a power greater than a thousand tongues" that he is exonerated. In the world. With the body. "The miracle would leave NO proof of guilt to bring you witness to what never WAS."

"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS.

***Show THIS (body) unto your brother***, who will see that ***every scar is healed***, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you. ***Here is the (physical) proof that he has NEVER sinned***; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind. That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

and

"To witness sin and yet forgive it is a paradox which reason cannot see. For it maintains what has been done to you DESERVES no pardon. And, by GIVING it, you grant your brother mercy, but ***retain the proof*** (bodily damage he caused) he is not REALLY innocent. The sick remain accusers. They cannot forgive their brothers AND themselves as well. For no-one in whom true forgiveness reigns CAN suffer. ***He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes.*** And thus he MUST have overlooked it, and removed it from his own. Forgiveness CANNOT be for one, and not the other. Who forgives IS healed. And in his healing lies the PROOF that he has truly pardoned, and ***retains no trace of condemnation*** (physically) that he still would hold against himself or any living thing.

Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to **demonstrate** they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins ***have no effect*** to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which **CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely.*** *** In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors.**** LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. ******A broken body***** shows the ***mind has NOT*** been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

When Jesus performed demonstrations, such as raising the dead, or calming a storm, or converting a tree into a snake and back, or multiplying food etc, these demonstrations were teaching devices. If you see (witness) this occurring, your whole view of what you think constitutes "a tree" or "a snake" is seriously brought into question, if you can see them being as Jesus says "so easily changed". The mind is intensely educated by such a demonstration because everything it ever experienced before as "limitation" and "solid matter" and "things that are impossible" (orders of difficulty) are blown out the window, making you question your whole reality. This is the power of demonstration. Miracles show that BECAUSE physical objects etc can be CHANGED, they MUST be illusions, and this weakens the mind's belief in them.

And no this is not a spectacle. The statement actually says that if you THINK that a miracle IS a spectacle, YOU ARE MISTAKEN. And that trying to USE miracles to INDUCE belief, is a misunderstanding of their purpose, because they are for believers by believers.

It's surprising how many course students either don't see this teaching, have not recognized it's even saying this, or don't want to accept it. "Miracles break all the laws of this world." "The mind, being sane, heals the body".

Ok I thought I'd have fun with an overly long title ;-)

There is something that some ACIM students do, which I find quite annoying. I shouldn't. But I do.

Ok so ACIM has "levels" in it. There are contexts. There is the bigger context of God/Heaven/Creation, there is the context of the separation and everything inside the ego's world (the "real world" or forgiven world at best). And there is the context of mis-perceiving the world you made (making the world seem like hell).

What happens is, you can be talking about one of the lower levels, discussing some topic, and someone comes along and "trumps" everything you say, by jumping out of context to the higher level. This makes it almost impossible to hold a conversation about anything.

For example, you could be talking about performing miracles and healing people and raising the dead etc, and someone will come along and say "there's no point doing that, bodies don't exist". Or, "there is no world, why bother healing anyone". Or, "its an illusion so whats the point" sort of thing. What's happening there is LEVEL CONFUSION, where they're believing the larger context of truth at a higher level, while still being AT a lower level, and then using the higher-level information to modify whether to do or not do something on the lower level. Classic level confusion.

But what really drives it home, is the ego benefit that doing this has. It means you can jump "higher" than someone else's statements by switching levels. You get to "one up" them by superceding the entire context of the conversation, overriding everything that is said, not because it seems true but because the ego uses it as a weapon or device for "winning" against others.

Trying to find this "higher ground" of "bigger truth" so that arguments can be won. Even if it's totally off-topic. The benefit to the ego is that this makes the person intellectually arrogant, condescending, righteous, sacrificial, cold-hearted and ignorant of the miracle-working that we're supposed to be doing while in the world. And if anything even hints at implying that "there are bodies" or anything remotely like that, they're all over it like a swarm of ants.

It has led many people to this kind of cold-shoulder attitude about the world, in which these higher-level statements are used as "defenses" and denial, to deflect away any suggestion that there's any point doing ANYTHING to help anyone else. By shifting levels either mid-conversation or mid-sentence, the person is able to overthrow the conversation and grin happily at having seemingly blown up all reasoning.

I've found over time that such people generally seem to have "difficulty" comprehending or discerning or recognizing "context", especially if they are not aware that the course contains levels. It is also near-impossible to explain to such persons why they are doing this. I've met some people who will focus so heavily on the "higher level truth" in such total denial of ANYTHING to do with a lower level - the world, dealing with bodies, healing others etc, that they will not let you even say a single thing about the lower-level without it being "corrected" and evaluated as wrong.

They come across as cold, arrogant, uncaring and lacking empathy. I've had to block some of these people because I find them to be emotionally abusive, often aggressive, stubborn, righteous and unwilling to listen. It's as if to say "nothing happened, so any discussion of anything happening is an error". It's used as a defensive weapon of false logic to justify doing nothing in the world, helping no-one else, and basically disappearing off on a cloud and leaving everyone else behind. Honestly, it is SELFISH, egotistical, and separating.

Some of these same people also tend to become quite "non-duality" focused, which is a view in which there is only one son and there is no-one else to help, nothing else to do, nothing to heal, etc. It's unfortunate, and it's not just that they are so advanced that they understand the levels and where and when they are switching levels and why, or that they even show a willingness to stay within context.

They literally are blind to it and will just position themselves intellectually on the "side" of the higher truth in an effort to reject, separate from, attack and conquer anything remotely "down to earth". I also find that these same people seem to have trouble with reasoning and logic, and so the metaphysical foundation of things is obscure to them. They will brush aside any rational statements by switching levels and trumping the discussion through denial. The level of denial is generally high and somehow they've used denial to "deny the world" and the body, rather than really being willing to properly heal it. They seem stuck in their heads.

Anyway... just one of my pet peeves at the moment. Something to forgive of course.

"A sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct. This sense of separation would never have arisen if you had not distorted your perception of truth, and had thus perceived yourself as lacking."

Before the separation there were no problems. There was no sickness. No death. No war. No lack or suffering. No pain or fear. No guilt. No sin. Nothing. There was only joy and love and creation and peace and light and truth and celebration.

Recognize this then. ABSOLUTELY EVERY problem or difficulty in this world is symptomatic of what happens when you leave God. EVERYTHING.

Everything in this world is MADE OF "God’s absence". MADE OF IT. ***It IS the separation***. It is not something that was "tacked on" after separation, it is the separation ITSELF. The direct and unavoidable RESULT of trying to exist without love.

All sickness and all death are nothing more than an aspect of you being separate from God. These things did not happen for any other reason. There was NO CAUSE whatsoever other than the causality in Heaven, prior to the separation.

Problems, sickness, death, suffering, it is all a manifestation of "being without God". All needs that have arisen are there ONLY because we are LACKING GOD. Every form of sickness is the absence of God. All forms of death are the absence of Life, and God is life. Every war and every conflict is arising because of the absence of God.

To in any way suggest that your return to God/truth will entail the retention of ANY PROBLEM, any form of sickness, suffering, lack or death, or even this world itself, is absolute bullshit. ALL of this "stuff" IS THE SEPARATION. When there is no separation, there IS NONE OF THIS.

There is NO PROBLEM other than the separation from God. There IS nothing happening in this world that isn’t symptomatic of trying to be away from Him. EVERYTHING here is the RESULT, of pushing God away.

You do not have a problem paying bills. You do not have unfair sicknesses caused by improper diet. You do not have struggles with coworkers which is their fault. You do not have issues with people on facebook groups. The separation from God IS THE ONLY LACK YOU NEED CORRECT. You have a problem with GOD, not with this world. This world is the FORM of your problem with God. And there is **no problem** love cannot solve.

"Let me recognize my problems have been solved. If you are willing to recognize your problems, you will recognize that you have no problems. Your one central problem has been answered, and you have no other."

Every question that you have, every fear, every doubt, every problem, when you are EXPOSED to God, if you try to commune with God, none of those questions become answered. What happens instead, is all your questions DISAPPEAR. They simply vanish. Every question was a form of fear arising from the ABSENCE of God. When He shows up, the entire foundation for those questions no longer exists.

When you go to God, you are SOLVING every problem you have. When you join with God, His MERE PRESENCE is the SOLUTION to every issue in your life. Because every single issue in your life, no matter how it APPEARS, or how specific it seems to be, or how confined it seems to be, or how much it seems to be about specific people and not others, IT IS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY OF THAT.

Pushing God away introduces lack. Pushing God away introduces fear. Pushing God away makes you feel guilty and want to die. Pushing God away is the source of ALL ILLNESS. Pushing God away is the source of every war and every single death that has even taken place in this dream.

Every aspect of every nightmare is the result of the "darkness" that seems to come about when light is absent.

All financial problems are a lack of God. Every argument arises from a lack of God. All injuries are a lack of God. Every disease is a lack of God. All problems in your job are the lack of God. Everything you attack or judge is the result of the lack of God. There is not a single problem in this world that is anything other than a symptom of God being absent. Upon his "return" to your life, it simply all will disappear because it was all made of his absence. This is a metaphysical fact.

Loving with God = eternal life. Trying to exist without God = suffering and death.

You do not have any other problem other than not being with God. All you have done is you have pushed away the provision of every need you could possible have. You have rejected life. You’ve separated yourself from effortlessness and from being natural. You’ve tried to deny eternal life and immortality. You’ve attempted to suppress all power and creative potential. You ONLY have a shit life because you’ve shut God out.

There is no other problem to solve. And this problem ONLY HAS ONE SOLUTION. The ONLY solution to EVERY problem in the world, is love. God Himself. The restoration of your willingness and awareness of the presence of God in your life, in your mind, in your heart, in your being. LOVE SOLVES EVERYTHING. Not only does it solve everything, it is THE ONLY WAY to solve ANYTHING. There is NO OTHER ANSWER.

You cannot be happy without God. You cannot live without God. And in truth, you cannot be separate from God either. So all of these problems you have, cannot be real problems. They must be illusions of "being separate from God". A dream of "what might it be like without love". This dream fortunately is NOT THE SAME THING as "separation really happening". It’s just a great big IDEA. Wake up. God still loves you and that’s forever. And that’s all you need.

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God. His Love is blotted out in the idea, which holds it from awareness like a shield held up to obscure the sun."

"It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms"

"All forms of sickness even unto death are physical expressions of the fear of awakening."

"One thing is sure; God, Who created neither sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. He knows of neither sin NOR its result."

"The shrouded figures in the funeral procession march not in honor of their Creator, Whose Will it is they LIVE. They are not FOLLOWING it; they are OPPOSING it."

"And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body THEY dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, OFFERED to sin to feed upon, and keep ITSELF alive. A thing condemned, damned by its maker, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself."

"You who believe you can condemn the Son of God to this ARE arrogant."

"The arrogance of sin, the pride of guilt, the sepulchre of separation, all are part of your unrecognized dedication to death. The glitter of guilt you laid upon the body would KILL it. For what the ego loves, it kills for its obedience."

"Death, were it true, would be the final and complete disruption of communication, which IS the ego's goal."

"Those who fear death see not how often and how loudly they CALL to it, and bid it come to SAVE them from communication. "

"For death is seen as SAFETY, the great dark savior from the light of truth, the answer to the Answer, the silencer of the Voice that speaks for God."

"Yet the retreat to death is NOT the end of conflict. Only God's Answer is its end."

"My brothers, children of our Father, this is a DREAM of death."

"In its exaltation (the body), you COMMANDED it to die, for only death COULD conquer life. And what but insanity could look upon the defeat of God, and think it REAL? "

"Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction."

"What seems to be FEAR of death, is really its ATTRACTION."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do. Remember, though, that to do this IS blasphemy"

"Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator."

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

"No-one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No-one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No-one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. No one dies without their own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose."

"Would you not rather live than choose to die? Living is joy, but death can only weep. You see in death escape from what you made. But this you do not see; that you made death, and it is but illusion of an end. "

"Death is a thought which takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you."

"Here is the Will of Father and of Son defeated finally, and laid to rest beneath the headstone death has placed upon the body of the holy Son of God."

"Unholy in defeat, he has become what death would have him be. His epitaph, which death itself has written, gives no name to him, for he has passed to dust. It says but this: "Here lies a witness God is dead." And this it writes again and still again, while all the while its worshippers agree, and kneeling down with foreheads to the ground, they whisper fearfully that it is so."

"The idea of the death of God is so preposterous that even the insane have difficulty in believing it. For it implies that God was once alive and somehow perished, killed, apparently, by those who did not want him to survive. Their stronger will could triumph over His, and so eternal life gave way to death. And with the Father died the Son as well."

"There is no death, for death is not Your Will."

"But if he chooses death himself, his weakness is his strength."

"For death is not of the real world, in which everything is eternal."

"How can some forms of murder NOT mean death? Can an attack in ANY form be love? What FORM of condemnation is a blessing?"

"Men are afraid of blasphemy, but they do not know what it means. They do not realize that, to deny God, is to deny their own identity, and in this sense, the wages of sin IS death. The sense is very literal; - denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT."

"Sickness and death entered the mind of God's Son against His Will."

"If the intent is death, what matter the form it takes? Is death in any form, however lovely and charitable it may seem to be, a blessing and a sign the Voice for God speaks through you to your brother?"

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

"For the wages of sin is death, and how can the immortal die?"

"Death is a human affirmation of a belief in fate."

"You but choose whether to go TOWARDS Heaven, or away to nowhere."

"Death cannot be escape"

"A dream of death is not left by death but by truth."

At times I get this sense that when "life lessons" come along, they are not so much "optional lessons" or just painfully difficult trails and struggles,, but rather, that situations and circumstances happen "on purpose" as a kind of "conditioning". A kind of reprogramming.

You are exposed to these conditions and the conditions change you. Rather than that, like, you have to learn by making decisions and picking up facts and figuring something out mentally. You kind of inevitably end up learning something almost as if the situation "forced" you to. But of course, you have free will still.

It seems at times these lessons are more like... corrections... in the form of three dimensional spatial scenarios and interactions and happenings .... as if, some larger being is putting stuff in front of us that it knows will change us in a certain direction. That it is in fact, a form of healing? That you can't really fail to "learn the lesson", you just "go through it" and come out the other side changed.

It seems also that whenever Holy Spirit tells me some difficult situation is a lesson, before I would've thought of that as annoying as hell, and confused about what I have to learn. But lately when He says this, I almost get that this is a clue telling me "it is educating you" "it is correcting you" "it is steering you" "it is prompting you to change your mind in a good way"... almost "it's happening to you, choose God".

Like, this situation and your way of dealing with it and so on WILL lead to you discovering new things and developing more trust and opening up to new truths. Sometimes when I get through a lesson I might've learned something new about working miracles or had some deep insight or it produced a major catharsis or something.... and so when the lesson is "happening", I might more easily consider, "somehow, this is leading to growth and making me better off".

Like, the lesson is a "nudge in the right direction" regardless of how it appears, and you always come out the other end "better off". Because what I see and know now versus what I didn't know at the beginning of a recent "trial" I could never have imagined would be the outcome or insights gained as a result of going through the difficulties.

You could almost think of life situations as little "scenarios", little holographic 3D classrooms, into which you enter and are exposed to, and the classroom itself molds and shapes you and steers you in a certain direction. And generally speaking you will learn whatever you are ready to learn, freely, while passing "through" that chamber of conversion.

It really reminds me of the dream I had just recently where I was going through all kinds of trials, obstacles, escape acts, problems and people chasing after me, running through different rooms and stuff, ending up in an open area where the "host" of a game show (Holy Spirit) showed up as this woman... who asked, "what is it that is so valuable to you that you would be willing to go through all this to attain it"? And the instant answer in my mind was HOME... Heaven... I would be willing go through all these trials and life events IF it would in the very long term picture actually POINT me in the direction of home.

This also ties in with what I've heard about writing our life scripts before we incarnate... we literally choose to go through various things, those who are to meet will meet, we choose our family and major life events etc, even our enemies and people we will clash with. Even our serious illnesses and accidents etc. Even when we are likely to "die" ie leave the classroom. And then we come in and "go through it all" like it's a real "pain in the ass you wish wasn't happening", but in the big picture, somehow, using these difficult scenarios as a way to guide us home to love.

And the only reason the life events SEEM like trials, or difficult, or stressful, or upsetting etc.. is because of our ego. Our egotism and "what we need to learn" or unlearn is what makes the situations into a challenge. It's why we sort of "need" these lessons. So that we can move closer to love and way from ego choices. To that we will will surrender. And sometimes the lessons are so annoyingly fucked up that the only thing you are left able to do is surrender and give up and let go. And that's a good thing. lol

This makes me think of this...

"W-pI.135.18. What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? 2 Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. 3 But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. 4 While you made plans for death, He led you gently to eternal life."

and

"Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you. In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face, Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again." He would not leave one source of pain unhealed, nor any image left to veil the truth. He would remove all misery from you whom God created alters unto joy. He would not leave you comfortless, alone in dreams of hell, but would release your minds from everything that hides His Face from you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt."

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

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

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

"There are no laws but God's."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one. The miracle is the one thing you can do that TRANSCENDS order, being based, NOT on differences, but on equality."

"Miracles make time and tide wait for all men. They can heal the sick and raise the dead because man himself made both death and taxes, and can abolish both."

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

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but ****has the mark of death upon it****. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

Jesus here tells us that this world, Earth, which comprises homes and cities and roads etc, has the mark of death upon it. That even from the start, even when it was made, it already had death and disappointment infused into it. It was made in an idea of death, being the idea of the opposite to eternal life. This is because "Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem." and so an illusory world is really a dream 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****."

Recognize then that by death he's talking about the fact that everything in spacetime, including spacetime itself, is founded on the idea of an interruption to life, or an attempt to change the eternal into the temporary. Things coming to an end. Things changing over time. Things decaying and rotting and dying. Things becoming sick. Things lacking and sacrificing and losing. Even things growing and transforming. All various forms of limitation. A limit on life and on eternity. A notion of "not forever".

One thing that I've been doing lately is just accepting the fact that this world's laws, the laws of physics, are just automatically set up to fail. Chaos becomes possible because of the way that objects interact with each other seemingly randomly. Your car breaks down. Objects fall on the ground. You bump into things. Stuff breaks. Your new toy has a mark on it. Your clothes wear out. Your food rots. Your house needs repairs. Your kitchen smells bad. And your clothes are all dirty.

We could struggle against such things as if we have an expectation that the world can be perfect or free from defects. And some people try to control the world and twist it into an illusory palace of perfection. But the problem is, it can't be that. It is fundamentally rooted in the idea of death, of interruption and inconsistency and difference and change and transformation. All the royal castles crumble. Always there is the drive to become something it's not now.

If we try to expect that we can make a life where these things are avoided, or you can make a little oasis or illusion of safety and security, you really are in denial. Sooner or later the grim reaper is coming to look for you and yours. Either in terms of bodies dying or in terms of melting your phone or sickening your pets or scorching your grass or breaking your flowers or freezing your toes or puking in your shoes or whatever.

"Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

It's better to recognize this is the way of the world, based on its laws. It's just how it is. It's how this whole system, this whole universe, functions. There's no point in being mad about stuff breaking, or things falling on the floor, or stuff getting trapped in the door, or physical objects doing their quirky strangely annoying things, especailly when you're in a bad mood. They kind of can't help it. They are governed by rules that force them to "behave" this way, like they always will. Even in a forgiven world, the cookies still crumble.

I've been finding a lot more patience and forgiveness in just accepting that this is the functioning of this whole world. It just is broken from the start. The laws of physics are simply "at it again". Gravity is messing with you. Forces and energies are messing with you. And none of it is really "personal" because it's just doing what it does blindly and mindlessly. To expect it to ever not be like this must be some kind of insanity because a separated world cannot help but act this way.

We do need to accept that we did in fact make a fundamentally broken world. A world that does not really function properly according to the laws of God. A world where stuff is pretty much destined to change and break and grow old and die eventually. Where things collide and conflict and seem to attack, and where you can seemingly even be hurt - a notion which is utterly impossible in heaven's reality.

"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." "The laws of chaos govern ALL illusions. Their forms conflict, making it SEEM quite possible to value some above the others."

Jesus is clear that you cannot really want this world, because it is not a perfect world. It is not heaven. It was made in a mad idea of rebellion against reality. It is a protest against harmony and peace. It was made to attack God and to attempt to depict the death of his creations.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD. The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it YOU look upon with love."

"Here is the world you do NOT want"

We have to be willing to look at this. The world is not EVER going to satisfy you and make you happy. It is not ever going to give you what you want. It is not ever going to feed your properly. It is not ever going to make you well or heal you or fix your problems. It has a neverending supply of madness and problems and difficulties. ALL its roads are pointed towards change, dissolution and death. Even planets and stars and galaxies die off eventually. And problems are completely built into its chaotic systems.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."

"Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

The world does not really give you any real choice, because ALL of its options are rooted in death. This isn't a pessimistic or negative view either. It is an honest and truthful view. The entire system was set up on a basis of separation and attack. Everything about it is aimed towards punishment for original sin, trying to bring about the death of life and the end of God.

"The ego's laws are strict, and breaches are severely punished. Therefore, give no obedience to its laws, for they ARE laws of punishment." "The laws of sin DEMAND a victim. WHO it may be makes little difference. But death MUST be the cost and MUST be paid."

"Sin calls for punishment"

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

"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. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

Can you accept that everything in this world was set up to die, right from the start? That this its inherent NATURE? Because only by looking at that and recognizing "there is no way out", on its terms, can you be willing to seek for a better way.

This is just how the world is set up. There is no point in denying it. There is no point in expecting it to behave differently. The laws of physics work how they work. The only reason we become angry about stuff breaking and things failing and attacks happening and so on is because we have an unrealistic expectation that the world isn't going to be like this. That somehow in the world we can make a little safe corner where the bad things don't happen, to fend off death and keep attack at bay. Good luck with that delusion.

Now, of course if this were the only state of affairs then we would indeed be screwed. But fortunately we are not stuck inside this closed-loop of hell. There is another way. There is another perception and another belief and another reality. This other way, however, isn't a rose-tinted glass of pretending in denial that the world isn't a world of death. Nor is it a form of denial that says it's okay that things die and suffer. Or an attempt to dress up the world or to expect it to be something it's not. The world can't work because it began with an impossible goal.

We can become miraculous, in that we can in fact override the laws of death. We can overcome the laws of physics. We can see past what the world was made to see. We can see with a mechanism of vision that doesn't depend on the physical eyes. We can overlook and not hold the world against itself, or condemn it for its shortcomings. We can recognize that a world made in error cannot help but be mistaken. And we can disregard notions that the world is real in its sin and attack. Indeed we are supposed to do this in order to be forgiving and to be set free from suffering.

For me lately, I have been doing a lot of physical stuff. Rearranging the house, buying and assembling new furniture, throwing out old stuff, cleaning, organizing, moving things around, and to some extent enjoying new stuff. But I've also become aware that all of these things are already fundamentally limited in what they are and can be. I'm not in denial or pretending that they can be perfect.

The furniture with the dents in it, the gaps between the planks of wood, the poorly written instructions, the missing parts, the slightly wrong color, the stuff that doesn't fit, the wrongly shipped item, the misunderstood specs, all the ways that there is shortcomings and failures and forms of death. Lacks of perfection and order.

But I feel mostly unbothered by all these things because I am no longer expecting the world to be capable of better. It is not capable of being perfect, so I now accept that "good enough" or "less than perfect" is the best it can acheive. And then I can let it go instead of trying to find perfection where it is impossible.

We made a broken world. It can't fix itself. And it's not capable of taking on a form of perfection. It will not ever fully satisfy us. And even in forgiveness where it is seen beyond and reflects heaven, even then it still falls short in its forms and its functioning. Ultimately, the world cannot make you happy. It cannot give you peace, or take it away. It cannot be the cause of anything. Nor can it really have any meaning of its own.

At best it can reflect meaning you give to it, and that is all, because by itself it is an empty void. We made a meaningless, chaotic, broken world, and we need to simply recognize this about it. The world is not our home.

"When he is NOT in a state of grace he IS out of his natural environment, and does NOT function well. Everything he does becomes a strain, because he was not created for the environment which he has made. He therefore CANNOT adapt to it, nor can he adapt IT to HIM. There is no point in trying. A Son of God is happy ONLY when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make."

The sooner you realize this the better, provided you also realize what CAN make you happy. What makes you happy is to laugh at the fundamental brokenness of the world. To realize the WHOLE THING is limited and false and can't do what you hoped it could do. The whole world is handicapped and disabled, falling short and incapable of eternal life. That's all it can be. And yet there is another world, a world we want, where this need not be.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur. The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one."

"But we are thankful, too, the need is done to walk the world of limits, and to reach the Christ in hidden forms and clearly seen at most in lovely flashes. Now we can behold Him without blinders, in the light that we have learned to look upon again."

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it into another world. Yet the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT. And what you call with love WILL come to you. LOVE ALWAYS ANSWERS, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made, but do not want. The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

"God's teachers can have no regret on giving up the pleasures of the world. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Does an adult resent the giving up of children's toys? Does one whose vision has already glimpsed the Face of Christ look back with longing on a slaughter house? No-one who has escaped the world and all its ills looks back on it with condemnation. Yet he must rejoice that he is free of all the sacrifice which its values would demand of him. To them he sacrifices all his freedom. To them he sacrifices all his peace. And to possess them must he sacrifice his hope of Heaven and remembrance of his Father's Love. Who in his sane mind chooses nothing as a substitute for everything?

I was asking God sincerely last night, that He heal a specific person. I explained that this person had been limited for a long time with suffering and needed help. I went to quite some lengths to detail the things they were experiencing and why it was all so unnecessary. I finished with a definitive question, can you please just heal them? What do you think God's answer was?

No.

I wasn't very happy about this. I confessed that I'd been trying to get healing for this person for a long time and just wanted to be helpful, so how was it possible to be helpful?

I was then told that when someone is ready, they will receive it.

Then Jesus popped in, and what I was shown was that everyone is choosing* everything* that happens. Even down to the suffering they experience or the things they seem not to want. It's all chosen, deliberate, intentional.

This then revealed the question, is it then possible to help anyone if they don't choose something themselves? How can anyone get any kind of help when they are not able to choose their own healing?

Jesus then spoke to me about how there were several villages which He had to pass by where He could not perform any healing whatsoever. He said the people were so adamant in rejecting Him that they did not want anything He had to offer. He had to respect their decision and move on.

He then told me, clarifying, that love isn't forceful. That you can't force someone to heal against their will. You can offer love and love has tremendous power to heal, IF there is some amount of willingness to receive it.

There is a correlation between how 'open' someone is to receive, and how much they may receive. Not because there are orders of difficulty in miracles, but because to truly RECEIVE the benefits, the person has to be WILLING, otherwise love cannot enter where it is not welcome.

Jesus reminds me now of the saying, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

I also was then reminded of a couple of parts in the Course where Jesus says, that if you are ready and willing Jesus will help you, but if you are not, he will wait until you are. I also was then reminded that God has infinite patience and while He is willing to welcome us immediately, we may not yet be willing to allow it, putting up defenses against it.

God's love is powerful and it is unconditionally given, and it can heal miraculously. But people can choose whether they want to accept it or deny and reject it. Being on planet Earth we've for the most part rejected it, which is why we're asleep. It's not that a tremendous miraculous power isn't being given, it is given all the time. It's that we don't want it.

I felt sad about this, because it means that certain people are choosing not to want to be helped. And that meant, I was going to have to let go and "allow them" to suffer for longer, due to their own unwillingness to receive help.

But then Jesus commented that their situation was a lesson, meaning that it wasn't a loss or necessarily an unfair suffering as such, it was actually an educational tool which was being used to help the person learn the truth, no matter how it looks. In that sense, it is helping them, but also in that sense, they "need" the lesson in order to learn to be open to receive healing.

Our desire to take away people's lessons, given the ultimate truth that no-one needs to suffer for any reason, can compel us to want to fix and heal and help and to stop people's suffering. But there is some lack of wisdom there. Time is needed. The person may simply not be ready or willing yet to be able to accept the help.

It's not that you help can't help, or that it can't do something for the person that they must do themselves. A person with serious disease could approach Jesus and have some faith and ask Jesus to help, and He could remove the disease - something which they didn't seem to be "able" to do. Miracles are gifts from those who temporarily have more given to those who temporarily have less.

This means that a person doesn't have to necessarily "choose" the entirety of the healed state all on their own. If they have enough willingness or a little faith, or even just a little willingness, the "open door" can be used to bring in much more help and healing than the person could muster on their own.

We can get help from outside, which really brings us to the point that the Holy Spirit is here as our Divine Helper. He can help in powerful, "supernatural" ways, IF we are willing and ready to receive that help. And that actually often entails surrender, more than a 'doing', in order to be open to receive the help.

Help is available, love loves to love, and love heals. But if we reject it and don't want it, it will not "hurt us" by doing something to us that we don't want, and even healing and help can be experienced as unwanted.

This is a difficult lesson for me and probably for many. We want to take away the suffering of the world. People are dying. Bad things are happening. But these are our own illusions and our own issues and reactions to perceptual errors that we need to correct.

There is a plan in place, the plan of the Atonement, which Jesus is in charge of. He knows who is ready to receive miracles and He can direct us to those people at the right time.

The idea that we can use our EGO to go around healing people "against their will" left right and center is really the ego's attempt to use the Power of God for its own entertainment. I'm not in ANY way saying not to perform miracles for people, just that they need to be properly framed in service to God and respecting "free will."

This does mean realizing that you might not be able to help a whole group of people if they are not really willing enough to be helped. Which means that miracles aren't imposed upon people against their will, they must be receptive to them, and if they're not then.... you don't get to work miracles for them.

I was also then told by Jesus that something I needed more of in order to be more miraculous, is to trust God, and the key point that God must be involved for miracles to happen. Holy spirit - God's Voice/expression - is the mechanism of miracles. He must be a part of it. And that means, miracles don't come from ourselves as some special power that we gain, although it is an "ability" which we can develop.

While ACIM, as a book, is a collection fo words, these words are twice removed from reality. They are symbols of symbols.

Jesus, who wrote the material, was not operating on a level of symbols upon symbols, or even a level of symbols. He is operating from a level of total awareness and experience of truth. He is in heaven, and wrote the course material from that perspective.

What you have to realize then is that the words in the book are just expressions from a higher state. They are a sort of translation. So if there is some kind of truth or principle and it's talked about in the book, it may be presented in several different ways, using various words. Because the words aren't the starting point of the truth.

For example Jesus touches on the topic of forgiveness hundreds of times, and many of those statements say practically the same thing. There are even some sentences which are worded almost identically. Yet they appear different in form just because they use different words.

It's important to realize that the words in the book are NOT the highest level of truth, or the origin of that truth. They are expressions OF truth, turned into symbolic form.

For example if Jesus is expert on the topic of forgiveness, he could write literally 1 million books solely on that topic, all using a plethora of words and coming at the same teaching from a variety of angles.

Although he might choose certain words to try to represent the subject matter, that doesn't mean the words chosen are doctrine or some kind of perfect representation. Because you have to remember that they are not only removed from reality, they are part of a strange ego-generated language and is trying to work within their confines so that the people who speak that language will be able to get some measure of coherent meaning from it.

Many of us begin learning the course from the bottom up, starting in the darkness and trying to find our way to the light. We have some pieces of the puzzle but not all, and based on various clues and consistencies we gradually piece together a clearer picture of what it's saying or means. And that can take a long time to sort out what it means without any contradictions or confusion.

Just because the course says something in one passage that doesn't mean that's the whole truth either. Because Jesus may say something in another passage which either clarifies it or seems to contradict it. This is because each set of words are jut one form or expression, and each expression may have nuances or implications or suggestions of meaning which, if taken too out of context or in isolation, may lead to false conclusions.

You can try to think that the words are the meaning, but this isn't always true, and quite often you'll see people quoting isolated passages as if they are the whole story. Since Jesus is coming from a singular whole truth, the course should be considered a kind of holographic projection of that, and that means there is fragmentation and differences and in some cases there may appear to be things which don't seem to add up.

Jesus has gone to great lengths to try to ensure that the course words are as unambiguous and consistent as possible, but the nature of the beast is that words are limiting and sometimes this adds some confusion.

It's important to gradually realize that beyond the words, and prior to the words, there is a state of truth and an entire logical system of metaphysics. For example the idea that the world was made as an opposite to reality. That's a simple metaphysical concept and you could put that into a million words to express it.

As you "see through" the words, read between the lines, and look to the deeper meaning, you're gradually going to find yourself moving beyond the words of the course entirely. Once you SEE the underlying metaphysical basis for what he's saying and why he's saying it, and therefore what his statement MUST mean regardless of their words, then you are really starting to see the "course beyond the course". The higher form of it.

In a way, this means that you have to "forgive the course", you have to overlook its forms and not be deceived by the appearance of its words. Just as much as anything else. It's easy to get hung up on trying to preserve the perfect words or read the earliest edition or whatever but that's all surface fluff. The real meaning behind it is way deeper than any of the words and any of the editions.

This is also why it's important to foster a personal relationship with Jesus and Holy Spirit and to get truth from the horse's mouth rather than getting lost in the book. Logically it makes more sense to speak to the author who is an expert, than to get lot in confusion based solely on some words on a page.

Once you grasp the logical concepts, they transcend the words. And then you can look at the words and you can see where Jesus is expressing FROM and what he's getting at and therefore, logically, what the words must mean. And this can be quite eye opening because then you'll start to compare and contrast the clearly logical meaning of the metaphysics against the English-languge expression or discussion "about" that metaphysics. And this begins to highlight the ways that they can at time be a little different in form. But the higher metaphysics is more accurate than the language-form of it.

One of the problems people have with the course is the sheer mass of words, the holographic scattering of subject matter, the seeming visiting and revisiting of topics, and the difficulty getting through the density of all that language to try to really get a clear view of what's behind it all. And what's behind it is actually very simple and organized and clean. What began as seemingly a huge collection of cryptic statements, few of which were believed or made sense, you end up with a massively stripped down and very simple foundation.

It takes a lot of sifting through the sheer weight of the course material to come to realize just how simple and logical the underlying metaphysics is. It's kind of like a sculpture where you have to continually chisel away at the rough details and the seeming differences until gradually a clear picture forms. And what them emerges is simple and beautiful and clear and well formed.

This is why it's important to learn not to get too hung up on what is written in the book. The form of the words can become a distraction away from the meaning. Some people get really hung up on what it says, taking words and phrases in isolation and thinking that they represent the whole meaning. This is because the ego believes that form IS meaning. The form of the course is not its meaning, however. Its meaning comes from where it CAME FROM, and the form it took in it expression is just a symbolic version of that.

There is a truth beyond words. There are structures and relationships between things that underly their English-language expressions. There is a metaphysics deeper than any page of the text. And as you move closer toward the deeper meaning you also more closer toward experiencing it. This is all part of the purification process. All part of undoing the seemingly elaborate complexities of the ego and replacing them with the sheer simplicity of God's truth.

Miracles, and "the miracle", being a reflection of heaven's laws, are also holographic in nature. In that, the whole is in every part, and every part is whole.

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

What this means for miracles is that THE miracle, the overall miracle or atonement, is the one whole. And at the same time, there are MANY miracles, each individually part of that whole, and each one containing the whole. Miracles are not BELOW "the miracle", they are WITHIN it.

Each ONE of them is part of the atonement, and is the whole atonement. There is one miracle, and many miracles. You can see this idea reflected in these statements:

"The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings ***the laws of another world to this one.***" (therefore the miracle and miracles are based on the laws of heaven, which are holographic)

"The miracle is the one thing you can do that TRANSCENDS order, being based, NOT on differences, but on equality." (Notice it says the ONE THING, because the miracle is a reflection of oneness or unity. It transcends differences, representing the whole of all miracles.)

"Miracles are NOT in competition, and the number you can do is LIMITLESS." (Notice that there are MANY miracles. Individual miracles. Yet, they do not COMPETE. All things in spacetime which are different and many DO compete. But miracles DON'T compete precisely because they are ALL THE SAME, because they are ALL WHOLE - and the same whole.)

"They can be simultaneous and legion." (multiple miracles exist together as concurrent wholes WITHIN "the miracle". They are alongside each other, just as souls/sons in the sonship are equal brothers. And they are legion in that they all work together because they are united by wholeness, and ARE each other.)

Then Jesus gets super-specific about the holographic nature of miracles:

"There is ONE miracle, as there is ONE reality. (refering to wholeness) And every miracle (there are simultaneously many miracles) you do ****contains them all**** (because each miracle is ALL miracles), as every aspect of reality you see blends quietly into the one reality of God."

It's clear here that Jesus is supporting the idea of there being ONE miracle, AND simultaneously supporting the idea of there being many miracles. EVERY individual miracle IS every other individual miracle, and all the miracles are ONE. AT the same time. Nor does the one miracle undo the many miracles, nor do the many miracles prevent the one miracle. Because miracles are all about SHARING, which is the law of God - that the one is many and the many are one.

Here is another way that Jesus refers to their holographic properties:

"Miracles are a part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness which, when completed, is the Atonement."

Here Jesus references how the miracle extends to all parts of itself. In that, one miracle is really a gift to the WHOLE sonship. Note that in ACIM, "miraculousness" or "miraculous" nature is really a term which, IMO, directly refers to the holographic nature of reality, and thus of all miracles. "Miraculousness" means the ability for one to be two and two to be one, while being simultaneously two and one. It transcends limitations.

"Why should you worry how the miracle extends to all the Sonship, when you do not understand the miracle itself? One ATTRIBUTE is no more difficult to understand than is the whole. If miracles ARE at all, their attributes would have to be miraculous, being PART of them."

All miracles are PART OF the one miracle, and thus all individual miracles are "the same". Also it is because they are all the same, that there is no order of difficulty. Here are some more quotes supporting this idea of the one being many and the many are one.

"Christ's vision is the miracle in which all miracles are born. It is their source, remaining with each miracle you give, and yet remaining yours."

"The miracle is A LESSON IN TOTAL PERCEPTION. By including ANY part of totality in the lesson, you HAVE included the whole."

"A little hindrance can seem large indeed to those who do not understand that miracles are all the same."

"God's miracles are as total as His Thought, because they ARE His thoughts."

"God and HIS miracles are inseparable."

"Every miracle you offer to the Son of God, is but the true perception of one ASPECT of the whole. Though every aspect IS the whole, you cannot KNOW this, until you SEE that every aspect IS THE SAME, perceived in the SAME light; and THEREFORE one."

"For in the miracle of YOUR relationship, WITHOUT this barrier, is EVERY miracle contained."

"Accept His Word and every miracle has been accomplished."

"In every miracle ALL healing lies, for God gave Answer to them all as one. And what is one to Him must BE the same. If you believe what is the same is different, you but deceive yourself. What God calls one will be forever one, NOT separate. His Kingdom IS united; thus it was created, and thus will it ever be."

Quite often we are driven by a desire to stop being affected by the world. We all want to get away from suffering and find some peace.

We initially see ourselves as an EFFECT, and we see CAUSE as outside of us. We want somehow to get away from these causes. So we try to stop thinking of ourselves as being affected by the world.

This leads to a belief that if we can just stop being affected by things we'll be okay. It begins a journey of a kind of WITHDRAWAL, where we start rejecting and weeding out the world from our experience.

This can lead to what seems to be a place of peace, where we are convincing ourselves that we're "okay with" anything that happens, that we don't mind if there is sickness, we're okay with death, we don't want to change the world we just want to let it happen.

This seems like a form of acceptance, as though atonement, because when we stop resisting the world we can be more accepting of it, more allowing. And somehow there is some peace to be found by not fighting with it all the time.

In essence, you find a state of what seems like peace by "not minding what happens". But at the same time, there is something missing here.

Originally you were seeing yourself as EFFECT, and the world as CAUSE. As though you are dreamed by the dream. So you then sought to run away from the cause or find a way to try to transcend it. You wanted to stop being an effect, but you didn't necessarily want to take on being a cause.

This seems to happen quite a lot, where people focus so much on not being affected that they don't realize that they are supposed to be BECOMING THE CAUSE. If you're not going to be the effect, you have to be causal. But many people seem to gravitate toward not being an effect WITHOUT being causal.

"This is a course in CAUSE, and NOT effect."

This results in a state where a person seems to be okay with suffering, still has pains and sickness, does not prevent the body from dying, has no real ability to work miracles, does not heal others, and generally has an attitude of sitting on a fence minding their own business.

It's almost like a disowning of power in a whole other way. We are in fact supposed to be owning up to being the cause of everything, admitting to being the dreamer of the world, taking back the power of God, seeing ourselves as immortal beings that can't be victimized or hurt, having immense strength, reclaiming the power to work miracles, and proceeding to demonstrate this.

But the people who get themselves kind of backed into a corner hiding under a rock and calling it peace, don't seem to be interested in this. Their whole goal is to escape and get away from things and go on a spiritual vacation. There becomes great aversion to anything that looks like it might point in the other direction.

Going toward the world, going into the world, doing anything, performing any miracle, healing bodies, demonstrating the power of God, being supernatural, anything like that is written off as noooo... we don't want to go there, that's the path back into the darkness. That's going to take us back closer to the world again and we want to get away from it.

But that's what's asked of us. We can't pick and choose. We either have to be effect or cause. You can't just drop causation entirely. Sitting on a fence in peace and having no power to cause anything in the world to change is a whole new breed of victimhood.

I think people maybe don't realize how much power the power of God entails, how strong it is, what it is capable of. It is immense and vast and deep and unlimited. And we are to demonstrate this power on earth, using it as Jesus did to teach and to show that the laws of physics are a lie, that bodies can be healed, that suffering can be alleviated by this power.

Most of all we are to reach a point called resurrection. Resurrection is the surmounting of death. It means having so much power over death that death cannot happen. Also that so much life is being asserted through that power that it can convert dead things back into living things. If a person is reaching what they call a state of peace but cannot raise the dead or show that death has no power and no cause, they are not in a state of resurrection.

"There have been many healers who did not heal themselves. They have not moved mountains by their faith because their faith was not WHOLE. Some of them have healed the sick at times, but they have not raised the dead. Unless the healer heals HIMSELF, he does NOT believe that there is no order in miracles. "

There is no order of difficulty in miracles, which means raising the dead is supposed to be effortless for us. When miracles like this are not happening around a person and the person is claiming peace, if they are claiming peace while having a sick body still, if there is a double message of peace + suffering in any way, then that person isn't really claiming ownership of being Christ and they have not reclaimed the power of God.

They are still victims. They just are very quiet passive victims that don't want to take the leap to actually owning up to the power of God. We are meant to be strong powerful beings for whom nothing is impossible, nothing is too hard, nothing is too great. We are to be masters of our minds and masters of the world. If we can't stop death then we are still victims at the effect of the world.

"What do you think "the meek shall inherit the earth" MEANS? They will literally take it over because of their strength."

Innocence is not weakness. Innocence is power.

"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."

"You are safe in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of waking to reality."

The world we're in offers no safety. It is a world of threat, danger, risk, attack, conflict, vulnerability and damage.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"The world was made as an attack on God."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin for only if there were a body is sin possible."

"The world provides no safety."

We may attempt to make the world safe, but only by shifting illusions. We build barricades, walls, buildings, wear clothing and shoes, make cars and houses, use safety devices, take precautionary medicines, try to eat right etc, in efforts to hold attack at a distance.

This is an attempt to create an illusion of safety in a world which is fundamentally a realm of attack. And sooner or later it will find a way to penetrate all your defenses, resulting in inevitable death.

"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."

"W-pI.153.1. You who feel threatened by this changing world, its twists of fortune and its bitter jests, its brief relationships and all the "gifts" it merely lends to take away again; attend this lesson well. 2 The world provides no safety. 3 It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. 4 It attacks, and then attacks again. 5 No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus.

W-pI.153.2. The world gives rise but to defensiveness. 2 For threat brings anger, anger makes attack seem reasonable, honestly provoked, and righteous in the name of self-defense. 3 Yet is defensiveness a double threat. 4 For it attests to weakness, and sets up a system of defense that cannot work. 5 Now are the weak still further undermined, for there is treachery without and still a greater treachery within. 6 The mind is now confused, and knows not where to turn to find escape from its imaginings."

The reality of God is not like this. Heaven is a realm of total safety. In God, there can never be a threat, danger, attack, hurt, suffering of any kind, damage, degradation, vulnerability, risk, difficulty or any kind of death. No precautionary measures are needed, no defenses, no planning of the future, no carefulness, no concern and no fear.

In God you are safe. In God you cannot be hurt. In God there is nothing to be afraid of. You are safe in God right now.

It is helpful to just dwell on this for a while. Dwell on the fact you are safe in God. Feel what that feels like to be completely safe. It does not require any special defenses, it doesn't require you to hide in the darkness trying to protect yourself, it doesn't require you to be afraid of the next attack so as to help yourself plan for it, nor do you ever have to run away in fear.

In God you are completely safe and protected, beyond all violence, beyond all sickness, beyond all death. In God you are embraced in a warm and gentle love which holds you safely in its arms forever. In God you cannot be touched by even a twinge of concern for your life. And to think that your eternal permanent immortal life could ever by threatened at all, is clearly insanity.

"Nothing real can be threatened."

"It is only your awareness that NEEDS protection, because your BEING cannot be assailed. "

"Rather teach your own perfect immunity, which IS the Truth in you, and KNOW that it cannot be assailed. Do not protect it yourselves, or you have believed that it IS assailable."

"And can he be assailed by dreams?"

Being in the safety of God is nothing like this world. It is a state far beyond the reach of the ego. There is no war that can even encroach upon it. There is no threat or danger of sickness, suffering, decay or malfunction. There is no need for any protections or to hide from anything. Everything can be fully joyfully gladly expressed out in the open without fear of attack or murder.

You are completely safe in God right now. The world is nothing but a dream of exile, a dream of being not in God's safety. As you develop your awareness of your safety in God, even while in this world, you can experience a sense of safety even in the midsts of the world's attacks. For this safety recognizes you cannot be attacked, because you are immortal.

Then although you walk in the valley of the shadow of death, no evil shall you fear.

"I am in danger nowhere in the world.

W-pII.244.1. Your Son is safe wherever he may be, for You are there with him. 2 He need but call upon Your Name, and he will recollect his safety and Your Love, for they are one. 3 How can he fear or doubt or fail to know he cannot suffer, be endangered, or experience unhappiness, when he belongs to You, beloved and loving, in the safety of Your Fatherly embrace?

W-pII.244.2. And there we are in truth. 2 No storms can come into the hallowed haven of our home. 3 In God we are secure. 4 For what can come to threaten God Himself, or make afraid what will forever be a part of Him?"

In this world, nothing gets done unless you put in some effort. And that's a chore, meaning that making stuff requires work. This isn't really natural to us - we are creators. We should be able to cause things to happen just by will alone, by mind power.

But we made the world as a result of being unwilling, which means it's not a world of will, it's a world that seems unwilling to do anything. So you have to then force it.

When bits of trash fall on the ground, they will stay there forever, unless someone does something to pick them up. If you want to "create" something here, which really means making something, there is now a craft to it, which requires skill and effort because all the objects are different.

At first, the thing you want to make doesn't exist at all, you have a blank slate, an empty canvas, a nothingness. You have no idea what it will be like, but you have to start somewhere. This is daunting, to take nothingness and make it into something.

The process of making is a process of translating higher-level abstract mind-stuff into form, which is an act of materialising, or at least sculpting and forming and reshaping and assembling and building from parts and pieces and materials.

To make anything, you have to take it from an idea to an implementation. But at first, you will have no idea how to do that. You will have to push, and force, and try to wrangle stuff to get it to become a bit more finite, more concrete, to nail things down, commit to decision, to move things forward and see it "take shape" as it turns into form.

That can be difficult because it means trying to take an empty nothingness and somehow "make" something out of it, which means having to put limits in place, define things, make lots of decisions, design and plan, and gradually refine it.

You start with a basic template perhaps, a vague idea, and you start somewhere and put some pieces roughly in place, but it's not finished and you have a lot to figure out. You don't even as yet know how it's going to end up, because you don't as yet understand how to even move forward with it.

So in order to push it forward you have to do some work on it, because if you don't it will just sit there, lifeless and doing nothing, because you're really make it out of death. And even if you do a bit of the work, it's not finished, it will just stop whenever you stop, because it has no real life of its own. It can't become anything until you force it to.

So then making becomes an act of forcing and applying effort and energy and attacking the thing to overpower it and coerce it into taking on a certain form, as an accumulation of actions. And gradually as you apply this effort you reshape the thing and refine it and it starts to turn into something.

Eventually with enough time and effort you can get through the seeming brick wall of nothingness, through all the uncertainty and difficult lack of definition, and pin things down. It's a process of taking something in the mind and trying to make it physical. You have to physically go through the motions, apply the tools, click the buttons, do all the little annoying steps, in order to get to the end result. Sometimes this can be painstaking.

This is a translation process, and it takes time. And unless you keep hammering away at it, it won't happen. Again and again you have to keep gong back to it to do more to it, to keep building, to keep growing it, to keep moving it forward toward the goal, otherwise it just sits there lifeless and incomplete. And no-one's going to do it for you or come along and rescue you, unless maybe you pay them.

And then once you complete the thing you're making, when you think it's good enough, and done, maybe you're happy with it, and maybe you recognize it's ended up a bit shit anyway. Because the things we make in form and from materials in spacetime are all very limited and strange and not really like the level of mind where anything is possible. Have you seen people's DIY disasters?

You have to make do and tolerate limits and put up with imperfections, to accept choices for one color and not another, to go with some option that partially works and know that the other options had something you're missing. What you end up with is a strange collection of stuff that is very limited and unwhole and imperfect, but it'll have to do, because that's as good as physicality gets. You're forced to have to "conform" to form, which means accepting limits and separations and exclusions.

This is all unnatural for the mind and soul, because it means trying to work within the confines of a very awkward system of limits, in which every little part of the thing you're trying to make has to be undertaken personally and with effort and force, to sculpt it and mold it and make it be something. That takes a lot of time and patience and commitment.

You can easily be put off when the next step is unclear, when you don't have the experience, when you don't know how it's going to look or what's going to work. When you have to figure things out as you go along, and the whole thing seems like you're just winging it, making it up as you go.

And then when you get to the end you don't even know if what you made is really the most ideal or best it could be, because you didn't have the foresight to be able to produce perfection. And what you then made is quirky and odd and maybe partly does the job. They you'll probably have to go back over it and fix stuff and polish it up, to do more work on it based on hindsight.

Making is certainly a strange process. But without making, nothing in this world gets done. The world just stays much the same way as it is. Your "life" stays stagnant, your home remains undecorated, your projects remain unfinished and you end up stuck in a rut. If you want things to be different in form, you have to take action. Physical action and effort. You have to try.

Compare that to heaven where to create you simply will what you want to exist and there it is, perfect and whole and complete, instantly effortless, with no time or space involved, no forcing or constant refinements, just simply direct perfect results every time, and joyfully so. How very different that is to getting anything to happen in spacetime through labor.

This is why life is a bit of a chore, and why sometimes people just can't be bothered to do the work. It's tiresome, unless you can find some way to enjoy the process itself, enjoy the craft, or feel some sense of accomplishment or purpose to why you're doing all that work. Maybe if it's of service to others you can feel better about it. Life here is hard work, in general, because the world is difficult in general. But maybe it can be repurposed and seen in a better way.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."

"You still could not will against Him, and that is why you have no control over the world you made. It is NOT a world of will, because it is governed by the desire to be unlike Him. And this desire IS NOT WILL. The world you made is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless "laws," and without meaning of ANY kind. For it was made out of what you do NOT want, projected FROM your mind, because you were AFRAID of it."

I feel more relaxed and peaceful, which I think is a result of looking at the world's system of failure, unrelenting attack and constant problems.

There was always an effort to resist the world going wrong, a constant tension of trying to stop bad things happening, an expectation that things should be going well all the time, and a desire for nothing to ever turn sour.

These were all forms of denial and wishful thinking. An ignorance about the system of the world and how it functions. It was rooted in a mixed belief that the world was even capable of sustaining anything. That it should, that the norm of life should be that the world "works well", and that problems are occasional annoying exceptions.

If you look at the fact that the world is utterly bullshit and hell-bent on inevitable destruction, that all its roads lead to death, that it disappoints at every turn, and it is literally incapable of being free of problems and difficulties, you actually get more of a sense of its "true nature". Instead of the fanciful denial that attempts to insulate us from it.

We spend a great deal of time and effort trying to make the world more tolerable. We build fancy homes and cities to try to shut out and ignore the weather. We try to farm foods more carefully to avoid contamination. We're told to do healthy things and exercise so as to avoid health concerns. We're told to make money so that we don't starve to death.

And so the drive of "civilized society" is really a REACTION to the fact that the world is raw and wild and cruel and unrelenting in its onslaught of carnage. We've become quite good at making it more "comfortable" and "safe", to a degree, in an effort to make hell more palatable, trying to tame its wicked ways. To form an oasis in the desert where we can be insulated from its "nature" and distanced from its ravages. Even though NONE of this prevents the destruction of all these things.

If we drop all that and just recognize the way the world is, and not just the planet but also the whole fundamental fabric of spacetime, then we can see that it was made to function a certain way. It cannot do what it was not designed to do. Its nature has to remain opposite to heaven otherwise it will cease to exist. It must BE different and separate otherwise it cannot appear to exist at all.

So it has to maintain this system of destruction at all times. If we let go of expecting it to be otherwise, and undo this denial that tries to constantly fight against it, or has an expectation that it's supposed to turn out well at the physical level, then when its nature just "does what it does", we won't be so upset. And we won't have to keep resisting it all the time, or fearing it.

The fear really comes from the "hope" or wishful thinking that it's not going to do what it always does. That it's not going to attack or destroy or make things difficult. And then when it does we're seemingly in shock and upset because our expectation has been destroyed. Without the blindness of believing the world can function like heaven, or that it can operate peacefully, or that it will ever be devoid of its devouring deadly nature, we can actually be more at peace about it.

In sense this a form of acceptance. Not accepting that the world is real and true, since only atonement should be accepted and only heaven should be validated. But an acceptance that the world, as it is, is just the way it is, and it cannot help its nature. A recognition that it's just always going to fuck up and destroy everything, because that's the only way it can function. And then in recognition of this we can actually laugh at it and not be so disturbed or surprised or shocked when everything goes to hell again.

This isn't the same as "expecting the worst", because you can get yourself into a belief that this world is real and it always is just negative and depressing, and therefore there is no hope or alternative. But you can expect the worst in the sense of realizing that the world can't be anything BUT the worst, due to its attacking nature, and can separate your relationship with it into a space of laughing at its hilariously flawed ways. We are, after all meant to learn to laugh at the mad idea that has produced this world.

As I sit here I'm looking out the window - not a perfect window but a dirtied stained window - upon an environment in which the leaves on the trees are all dead. The grass is browned and half-dead as a result of the snow that covered it. The weather is cold and unrelentless. The brickwork on the buildings is uneven. The light of sun is blocked and producing shadows of darkness. Roof tiles are missing. Rocks are weathered and decayed. Electrical power boxes are slightly mis-aligned and a strange ugly color. And the somewhat mutilated fir trees are struggling to stay alive.

But is this unexpected for a world where all things must die because time is change and change is death? No. This is the only way it can be. It is hilariously faulty. Ridiculously tragic, and quite a mess. The world is really kind of like a giant trashcan filled with broken pieces and old rotten shite.

Can it be otherwise? It cannot. It can never be otherwise. The dust of dead civilizations will always be blown by the winds of hate in this world. And recognizing this is its nature can actually set you free. Free from the horrible suffering that results from believing it could be any other way. And free from the constant efforts to put some extra lipstick and bandaids on the corpse, trying in vain to turn a tired old world into a new one. In a sense, let the dead bury the dead, and let death be, that there may be life in the mind.

We are to forgive the world, yes. To do this we have to want another world. We have to tune into another reality. Beyond space and time, a world of light and eternal life. A world where the laws of God do not permit suffering, difficulty, problems or death. And then we bring that wholistic perspective with us as we shine its light upon the broken world and see it from a loving perspective. We don't have to condemn the world in order to see that it is inherently broken. We can forgive it for being the way it is, only because it IS broken. And in forgiveness we can laugh it away.

"The world will end in an illusion, as it began. Yet will its ending be an illusion of mercy. The illusion of forgiveness, complete, excluding no-one, limitless in gentleness, will cover it, hiding all evil, concealing all sin and ending guilt forever. So ends the world that guilt had made, for now it has no purpose and is gone." "The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment. The world will end with the benediction of holiness upon it. When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be."

"The world will end in joy because it is a place of sorrow. When joy has come the purpose of the world has gone. The world will end in peace because it is a place of war. When peace has come, what is the purpose of the world? The world will end in laughter because it is a place of tears. Where there is laughter, who can longer weep? And only complete forgiveness brings all this to bless the world. In blessing it departs, for it will not end as it began."

Innocence is goodness. If guilt is equated with evil, then innocence is equated with good. In order to forgive someone or something requires looking for the good in them - looking for their innocence. Seeing their harmlessness, their gentleness, their holiness and their perfection.

"Dream softly of your sinless brother, who unites with you in holy innocence. And, from THIS dream, the Lord of Heaven will Himself awaken His beloved Son."

"The good" is also combined with love, and light, and power, and strength. It is the realm of miracles. In effect, evil is a breakdown, malfunction, failure, weakness and a loss. So its opposite, good, is all that can actually work, solves all problems, repairs all sickness and resurrects.

"The good is what works" is a sound though insufficient statement. ONLY the good CAN work. Nothing else works at all."

The Holy Spirit also represents the state of forgiveness and the miracle, as the power of God which performs miracles, as the healer as the resurrector. Therefore seeing the good in your brother for example also equates with seeing the Holy Spirit in him.

"And now I place you in His hands, to be His faithful followers, with Him as Guide through every difficulty and all pain that you may think is real. Nor will He give you pleasures that will pass away, for He gives only the eternal and the good. Let Him prepare you further."

Jesus encourages us to find the good in things. To "look on the bright side". To make of the world a forgiven world where all is seen as innocent and harmless and guiltless and sinless.

"Have you been similarly grateful to each other? Have you consistently appreciated the GOOD efforts, and OVERLOOKED mistakes?" Indeed forgiveness puts you in touch with your true nature, brings you closer to God, aligns you with your soul, and reawakens the power of God in you. It is your natural divine function to create the good and to do only good.

Ultimately "the good" is God, and anything of God is good. The world, as an illusion, is not good, and can at best only reflect God's goodness. Moving away from evil takes you toward the good of God. And in God, everyone and everything is good.

"Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and the holy. Do not lose sight of this."

""I am blessed as a Son of God."

Herein lies my claim to all good and only good. I am blessed as a Son of God. All good things are mine because God intended them for me. I cannot suffer any loss or deprivation or pain because of who I am. My Father supports me, protects me, and directs me in all things. His care for me is infinite, and is with me forever. I am eternally blessed as His Son."

"You have been told that everything brings good that comes from God."

"And as you gave your trust to what is "good" in him, you gave it to the "good" in you. In terms of concepts, it is thus you see him MORE than just a body, for the "good" is NEVER what the body seems to be."

"By focusing upon the "good" in him, the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight, and will at length be seen as little more than just a shadow circling round the "good.""

"And look upon the "good" in him, that you may not be fearful of your "evil" thoughts, because they do not cloud your view of him." "ALL things work together for good. There are NO exceptions except in the ego's judgment."

"Man will ultimately look upon his own creations, and will to preserve only what is good, just as God Himself once looked upon what he had created, and knew that it WAS good."

"For what God gives can only be for good. And I accept but what He gives as what belongs to me."

"God is said to have looked on all He created and pronounced it good. No, He declared it perfect, and so it was."

"Something good must come from every meeting of patient and therapist. And that good is saved for both, against the day when they can recognize that only that was real in their relationship."

"And so there is a place for all relationships in this world, and they will bring as much good as each can accept and use."

"We look on everyone as brothers, and perceive all things as kindly and as good."

"The real world can ACTUALLY BE PERCEIVED. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing ELSE. For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM. The ego sees SOME good, but never ONLY good. That is WHY its perceptions are so variable. It does not reject goodness entirely, for this you could not accept, but it always ADDS something that is NOT real TO the real, thus CONFUSING ILLUSION AND REALITY. For perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth AND illusion you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

"The perception of goodness is not knowledge, but the denial of the OPPOSITE of goodness enables you to perceive a condition in which opposites do not exist."

"What would give you the ability to be aware of all the facets of any problem, and to resolve them in such a way that only good can come of it?"

"But "good" and "deprivation" are opposites, and CANNOT meaningfully join in ANY way."

"Any ability that anyone develops has the potentiality for good." "Nothing good is lost, because it comes from the Holy Spirit, the voice for Creation. Nothing that is not good was ever created, and therefore CANNOT be protected."

"There is always some good in any thought which strengthens the idea that life and the body are not the same."

"The Resurrection demonstrated that NOTHING can destroy truth. Good can withstand ANY form of evil, because light abolishes ALL forms of darkness."

"It is secure in certainty that obstacles can not impede its progress to accomplishment of any goal which serves the greater plan established for the good of everyone."

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life."

"Now close your eyes and see him in your mind, and look at him a while. Try to perceive some light in him somewhere; a little gleam which you had never noticed. Try to find some little spark of brightness shining through the ugly picture which you hold of him. Look at this picture until you see a light somewhere within it, and then try to let this light extend until it covers him, and makes the picture beautiful and good."

"The laws of God work only for your good, and there ARE no other laws beside His."

"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.""

"He will remove all faith that you have placed in pain, disaster, suffering and loss. He gives you vision which can look beyond these grim appearances, and can behold the gentle Face of Christ in all of them. You will no longer doubt that only good can come to you who are beloved of God, for He will judge all happenings and teach the single lesson which they all contain."

"The Holy Spirit USES time, but does NOT believe in it. Coming from God, He uses EVERYTHING for good, but does not BELIEVE in what is not true."

"Out of Love he was created, and in Love he abides. Goodness and mercy have always followed him, for he has always extended the Love of his Father."

"You can do ANYTHING I ask. I have asked you to perform miracles, and have made it VERY clear that these are NATURAL, CORRECTIVE, HEALING, and UNIVERSAL. There is nothing good they cannot do."

Many ACIM folks appear to struggle between two sort of 'camps', in regards to whether to change the world or not.

There are many passages and quotable concepts in the Course which could be used to back up either viewpoint.

I think though the main reason people struggle with this is because the EGO has tremendous difficulty understanding anything outside of its backwards perspective.

For example, to the ego, control brings you freedom. It says that if you control things more, you'll be able to prevent all the things you don't want to happen, and enforce all the things you do want to happen. You'll 'get your way', and that means life will seem to be doing what you want it to do. And that is its interpretation of what freedom is.

The truth, which the ego cannot grasp or accept, is that control DIMINISHES your freedom, because it separates out some parts (of yourself ultimately) from others, sets them against each other, and elects to support only one of the two parts. Now your choices are diminished. In other words, if you choose A or B, once you've chosen, the other choice goes away, and now you are 'stuck' with the choice you made. This is freedom to the ego, but to your Real Self this is imprisonment.

So when you use the ego mind to try to understand a very basic principle like ACCEPTANCE, this I think is where the community's viewpoint hinges and stimulates controversy. It's because the ego does not understand HOW it could be possible that you can be accepting, or just working on changing how you perceive the world, and not be passive. So this is what it all pivots around.

Really these are the two conflicting attitudes of the EGO:

1) Accept everything as it is, don't try to change anything, be passive, work on your own mind, change your mind ABOUT the world, study in secret, don't tell anyone you're doing the Course, keep miracles to yourself, interpret miracles as shifts in your own perception only, and generally lay down any kind of 'interference' with the world as you go within. This is EGO because the ego has now separated you from the world, has isolated you to your body/mind with the justification of hundreds of Course quotes which SEEM to support its argument. This is EGO because the ego can't ALLOW there to be acceptance without interpreting it as SACRIFICE, i.e. the giving up of control which the ego thinks means like 'I need do nothing' i.e. I will literally stop expressing anything in the world. This is SPIRITUAL CONSTIPATION! You'll be stuck in your head and paralyzed from exerting the will and power of God. You will be disabled. The ego sees acceptance as disempowerment and disability, and this inspires all thoughts of how this kind of 'attitude' is the correct way to do the Course.

2) The second ego interpretation is that you aren't meant to just dwell on fixing your view of the world, but you're meant to change the world. Except that, to the ego, this means, using the ego to change the world. This turns into control. It turns into spiritualization of the world. It becomes the ego's party where all egos are invited to 'act spiritual' or to pursue special causes or use your ACIM learning to 'attack' what is. The EGO can't understand whatsoever how it could be possible to express something in the world and have it be ACCEPTING of the world at the same time. It does not get this. So if you were to express or exert or change the world, this is now considered 'unacceptable' to the Course theology, and therefore rejected by many students. And yet those who accept this idea then go on to shy away from some of the seemingly contradictory statements about acceptance or doing God's will or changing your mind and so on. This again is another ego play to flip your mind around a polarity of DUALITY, so that you stay within the ego thought system, and keep interpreting the course WITH the ego.

Neither of these camps have the truth.

Truth is of the Holy Spirit and his mind functions in a completely different way with rules that apply to all and which has no duality in it. The Holy Spirit has a completely different understanding of ACCEPTANCE. He has a completely different grasp of whether you are 'for or against' doing stuff in the world, knowing that this is a dualistic question. Holy Spirit would not see your 'accepting things as they are' attitude as being SEPARATE from 'being empowered to do God's will and heal the world'. And therefore, Holy Spirit supports BOTH camps combined, which completely defies the ego's logic.

It is possible to be accepting without that having to mean, you cut yourself off from the world or disappear into your intellectual correction of perception. It is possible to be accepting of what 'is' or what appears to be happening, while at the same time having the power and will to CHANGE IT. Because... after all, IT is just an effect of what's going on in the mind. IT is a dream that YOU are dreaming. So this has to mean, you can accept what you have made, but you can also make something different. So this division of separation in the community is really only there because the EGO has gotten ahold of the Course and DOES NOT understand the Holy Spirit's viewpoint or thought system.

As always with ANY polarizing, dualistic, separating set of questions, in which it seems that neither side seems to 'get it', this ALWAYS means that "there has to be a better way" and there always IS a third option. It's that third option that comes from Holy Spirit. Another way not just of looking at the situation, but another way of looking at HOW you look at looking at the situation.

You can accept without being controlling, and yet exercise tremendous freedom to intercede. "I [Jesus] inspire all miracles, which are really intercessions. They intercede for your holiness." - principle 32. "35 - Miracles are expressions of love, but they may not always have observable effects." - principle 35, which also means miracles USUALLY have observable effects, meaning they change the world.

There is not a contradiction here. The contradiction is in the ego mind that cannot understand this. It can't get it because the ego can only see WITH separation. It is blind to Oneness or true meaning. Any separation in the community has to be founded in the ego.

The idea of death was made as the opposite of the idea of God. The separation from God was total opposition to God's nature. It's an assertion that God does not exist, blotted out and dead.

Whatever attributes God has, death is the idea of the total absence of all of those attributes. A total lack of life, of love, of happiness, of peace, of sharing. Anything that God is, death opposes.

"The thought of death is ... the opposite to thoughts of life." UrW167L8

God is creation, and so death is destruction. God is permanent, and so death is change. God is love, and so death is murder. God is reality, and so death is an illusion.

In order to oppose God, the truth must also be opposed. That which is false is asserted as true. True and false become swapped. The truth of God becomes a lie, and the lie of death becomes a reality.

As a result, all of the attributes of God are assigned to death, while all the attributes of nothingness are assigned to God.

Death is now seen as inevitable, real, permanent, eternal, irreversible, powerful, known, true, dependable, trustworthy, welcoming, wanted, attractive, loved, salvation, peace and happiness. God is now seen as uncertain, changing, vulnerable, hateful, vengeful, nothing, meaningless, lifeless, mindless, unloving, destructive, dark, murderous, unwanted, rejecting, an enemy, selfish, unsharing and unreal.

The result is that we have a belief in death, which takes on every possible form. It takes on physical form, as well as in the form of changes of mind, states of feeling, types of thoughts and senses of identity. Every illusion, all of space and time, every perception arises in the idea of God's opposite.

"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." UrW163L2

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?" UrM28A1

Anything less than the true nature of God is a form of death. This includes any sense of unhappiness, any notion of attack, any kind of sickness, any temptation, any desire for bodies, any false perceptions, any fear or guilt, any idol worship and any way that you see yourself and others as less than having eternal life.

There can't even be atoms and molecules and bodies and planets without the idea of death. Death is change and change is time and time is death. To be separated from life, from God, is to enter into an illusion of dying. Spacetime is the idea of the death of God, in which God appears to not exist.

"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him." UrW230W32

"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." UrM28A6

Every aspect of ego, every form of separation, every unloving relationship, every body worship is all a form of death. If you believe in anything but God's reality you believe in death and are trying to die. We came into this world precisely because we wanted to play with death and to pretend that we can die. We are immortal beings, making a world that is always dying in which we can pretend to die.

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you." UrW191L9

Undoing death is resurrection. To resurrect is to side with eternal life and reject every form of death. Sickness, which is "a little death", must be forgiven and reversed. Death of a body must be reversible. And an entire world rooted in death must be undone. Without the idea of death, spacetime cannot exist. And without death, there is no world and no separation from God.

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it into another world." UrT12G3

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God. His Love is blotted out in the idea, which holds It from awareness like a shield held to obscure the sun. The grimness of the symbol is enough to show it cannot co-exist with God. It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms, where worms await to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction. Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life." God is insane, and fear alone is real." UrM28A3

"The idea of the death of God is so preposterous that even the insane have difficulty in believing it." UrW163L7

"There is no death. The Son of God is free." UrW163

"There is no death, and we renounce it now in every form, for their salvation and our own as well. God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death and see the life beyond." UrW163L8

"There is no death, for death is not Your Will. And we abide where You have placed us, in the Life we share with You and with all living things, to be like You and part of You forever." UrW163L9

I've been finding lately that turning to love is a problem solving solution. That being in a state of love can in fact solve anything. And this has to mean unconditional love, in terms of it solving any problem in any situation, regardless of the circumstances.

Just feeling a sense of love inside myself, actually has the corrective power to keep me out of fear. It provides a feeling of safety. But it even goes further to influence others and my relationship to them positively. It's like being in a state of prayer. Praying to send love to others, to solve problems.

It seems so simple but it also seems so difficult to consistently trust that turning to love will solve every problem. We're so used to trying to solve problems through so many varied means, so many different forms, different approaches, ways of relating, actions and reactions, that the one thing which solves them all equally becomes obscured.

The ultimate lesson seems to be learning to trust that love can and will solve everything, if we would just turn to it for everything, depend on it for everything, and trust it in all situations to be the solution. After all, God who is love gave the Holy Spirit who is love, to solve the one problem, which led to the illusion of many problems. And in His love all problems are solved equally with the same loving response.

Love simply works, and corrects every error in every way necessary. It is miraculous in its unconditionality and complete denial of the many varied forms of suffering.

A few quotes...

"Your holiness, then, can remove all pain, can end all sorrow, and can solve all problems. It can do so in connection with yourself and with anyone else. It is equal in its power to help anyone, because it is equal in its power to save anyone. If you are holy, so is everything God created. You are holy because all things He created are holy, and all things He created are holy because you are."

"This course is a beginning, not an end. Your Friend goes with you. You are not alone. No one who calls on Him can call in vain. Whatever troubles you, be certain that He has the answer, and will gladly give it to you if you simply turn to Him and ask it of Him. He will not withhold all answers that you need for anything that seems to trouble you. He knows the way to solve all problems and resolve all doubts. His certainty is yours. You need but ask it of him, and it will be given you."

"It is NOT difficult to understand the reasons why you do not ask the Holy Spirit to solve ALL problems for you. HE has not a greater difficulty in resolving some than others. Every problem is the SAME to Him, because each one is solved in just the SAME respect, and through the SAME approach. The aspects that NEED solving do not change, whatever FORM the problem seems to take. A problem can appear in MANY forms, and it will do so while the problem lasts. It serves no purpose to attempt to solve it in a SPECIAL form. It WILL recur, and then recur again and yet again, until it has been answered for ALL time, and will not rise again in ANY form. And ONLY then are you RELEASED from it."

"The Holy Spirit offers you release from EVERY problem that you think you have. They are the SAME to Him, because each one, regardless of the form it seems to take, is a demand that someone suffer loss, and make a sacrifice that you might gain. And, when the situation is worked out so NO-ONE loses, is the problem gone, because it was an error in perception, which now has been corrected. One mistake is NOT more difficult for Him to bring to truth than is another. For there IS but one mistake; the whole idea that loss is possible, and COULD result in gain for anyone. If THIS were true, then God WOULD be unfair; sin WOULD be possible, attack be justified, and vengeance fair. This ONE mistake, in ANY form, has ONE correction. There IS no loss; to think there IS, is a mistake."

"Here is the answer to every problem that confronts you today and tomorrow and throughout time. In this world, you believe you are sustained by everything but God. Your faith is placed in the most trivial and insane symbols; pills, money, "protective" clothing, "influence," "prestige," being liked, knowing the "right" people, and an endless list of forms of nothingness which you endow with magical powers."

"In quietness are all things answered, and is every problem quietly resolved. In conflict there can BE no answer and no resolution. For its PURPOSE is to make NO resolution possible, and to ensure NO answer will be plain. A problem set in conflict HAS no answer, for it is seen in different ways. And what would be an answer from one point of view is NOT an answer in another light. You ARE in conflict. Thus it must be clear you cannot answer anything at all, for conflict HAS no limited effects. Yet, if God gave an Answer, there MUST be a way in which your problems are resolved, for what He wills already has been done."

"The one remaining problem that you have is that you see an interval between the TIME when you forgive, and will receive the benefits of trust. This but reflects the little you would keep between YOURSELVES, that you might be a LITTLE separate. For time and space are ONE illusion, which takes different forms. If it has been projected BEYOND your minds, you think of it as time. The nearer it is brought to where it IS, the more you think of it in terms of space. There is a DISTANCE you would keep apart from one another. And this space you see as time, because you still believe you are EXTERNAL to each other. This makes trust impossible. And you can NOT believe that trust would settle every problem NOW."

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

In the beginning of the ACIM Workbook, we're instructed to look around the room and tell ourselves, indiscriminately, that this thing we're looking at doesn't mean anything. And we're asked not to be selective in what we apply it to, applying it to everything equally. This EQUALIZING is what's important.

I'm finding that this basic idea is core to the process of mind training in order to awaken from this world. Basically, our minds have become very used to fragmenting everything into separate boxes, with separate labels.

We become blinded by perception of form, and we take the form of something to determine its meaning. Yet we've given it all the meaning it has. Differences and shifts and changes all seem to stand out as separate and exclusive. One thing is not another etc. And before you know it we have 1000 different responses to 1000 different things and never are we simple unconditional.

But the mind is not supposed to be in this kind of viewpoint, with a massive complicated hierarchy of illusions, with multiple different reactions and responses, treating one thing differently to another, adapting and changing based on circumstances etc. These are all unnatural for the mind which must be unconditionally constant in order to be healthy.

As we peruse the room and identify that one different seeming object is really to be treated no differently than another, we're beginning the process of collapsing the hierarchy of illusions, undoing the belief in separation, dispelling the illusion that one thing is NOT the same as another, and are gradually reprogramming the mind to be less conditional.

For me a huge way this has recently come to light is in the idea of the death of a body. On the physical level the ego world says that a body has been utterly destroyed and irreversibly erased from existence. But on the spiritual level the person still persists in eternal life. And they can't both be true.

Given that God would never allow one of his immortal creations to ever be destroyed, and there is no power greater than God's to overthrow his will, death is an absolute lie. The body's demise means absolutely nothing. It does not mean a person is dead, it does not mean God's son is destroyed, and it does not imply anything. Death is ultimately meaningless.

"The death of an illusion means nothing."

So then if you look at this closely and see that death cannot have a meaning, it causes nothing and has no effect, it is completely meaningless. And this then means that it doesn't MEAN anything DIFFERENT to a living body. And both of those bodies do not really mean anything.

"Nothing I see means anything."

It's in this erasing of the MEANING of separation, whereby you isolate something and give it a different unique meaning compared to something else, that the mind begins to split and fragment. Believing in separation plays out as believing the seeming messages we get from separate different objects.

It's as though the whole of physical unreality is screaming constantly to tell you that this one thing IS NOT another thing, this thing is NOT the same, this thing has unique properties, this one's red and that one's green, this one's bigger, that one's smaller etc. All constantly tempting you to believe that EVERYTHING is separate. And this couldn't be more OPPOSITE to how the mind is supposed to function.

When we see objects meaning something unique we are deceived by illusion, blinded by form, deceived by temptation, lost in a dream, and find our mind to be imprisoned. When we EQUALIZE forms and give them the SAME meaning, recognizing they have NO meaning of their own, that's when mind is entering a state of unconditionality, which means love.

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal."

So then we look at a body that seems dead and we do not assign it any meaning. And we look at bodies which seem alive and we do not assign them any meaning. And we recognize that both types of bodies are not really different in their meaning, or in what they are. They are both illusions, both unreal, both in ONE category.

Consider then that the mind in this state is a very cohesive whole unified mind. It's not a mind that goes putting labels on everything, putting things in separate boxes, emphasizing differences, or thinking of the things of the physical world as unique.

It's a mind that has ONE state, one feeling, one undivided will, one power, one wholeness, one unconditional action. It treats everyone and everything with the same singular completely still peaceful loving relationship. It responds to everything in the same way, and sees no "orders of difficulty".

Such a mind is not deceived by forms. Such a mind does not really pay any special attention to things which seem different, more important, less important, more serious, less serious. It has learned to see that both living and dead bodies are the same one illusion, the same one lie.

On a way then, the waking mind is finding a way to be whole and unmoved by the world, always constant and honest, always peaceful and loving. It doesn't buy into any temptations, it doesn't fall for the appearance of something seeming easier or harder, bigger or heavier. It finds a way to transcend all differences. And it really is about psychological transcendence. Completely disregarding the appearance of any differences of form whatsoever.

Such a mind isn't finding a way to see that the forms are ONE, or that God is the forms. It isn't finding oneness in them as such. It's transcending them toward the oneness that is behind and beyond them, a oneness that the forms don't even touch or influence in any way.

Because mind becomes whole and unified and loving and disregards differences, it sees in a sense a "reflection of heaven" - a unified transcendental perception - looking upon the physical separate objects still but NOT believing them, NOT falling for their forms, NOT blinded, NOT regarding them as truly different or true at all. But seeing them with a unified mind can't help but see unity IN PLACE of the differences, reflected there.

Cars are still separately driving down separate roads. Bodies are still separately walking down separate streets. Dogs are still barking at separate cats. But the healed mind is not deceived by how any of these things look. The healed mind becomes transcendental of all separate forms, all separate labels, all separate distinctions and differences.

So really in the start of the Workbook we're basically in at the deep end, starting off running, because we're already practicing this simple idea - getting the mind to wean off interacting with the world from a complicated chaotic jumble of vantage points, and shifting toward a singular vantage point which pays no attention to form whatsoever.

Its an odd idea really. Adopting a state of mind which is centered on a singular oneness, and unchanging wholeness, an unconditional love, rather than being 1000 separate things to 1000 separate people. Just being you, knowing thyself, unmoved and unchanged and unaffected. Simple and unified. Ignoring all separations and divisons. Having no belief in the false illusion of the material world at all. A wholeness of mind from another world.

"And what more transcendent aim can there be than to recall the Way, the Truth and the Life, and to remember God?"

"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 resurrection is the complete triumph of Christ over the ego, not by attack, but by transcendence. For Christ DOES rise above the ego and all its works, and ascends to the Father and HIS Kingdom."

"Would you transcend YOUR prison and ascend to the Father?"

"Communion comes with peace, and peace MUST transcend the body."

"Then lay aside the body and quietly TRANSCEND it, rising to welcome what you REALLY want. And from His holy temple look you not back on what you have awakened FROM. For no illusions CAN attract the minds that have TRANSCENDED them, and left them far behind."

You are outside of the world, looking in upon it from the outside in. From this perspective, the body is given no value at all. The world is recognized as completely fictional. The body is used temporarily only as a tool for sensing the vibrations of the illusory world, so as to detect its current configuration and seemingly interact with its inhabitants.

At no point is the body mistaken for your self, nor awarded attributes it does not have. It is not regarded as spiritual or scared or special or worshipped. All sense of personal use of the body has gone. It is rendered nothing more than a functionless instrument through which light may flow into the dream as the light of the world.

In this view, the body is not mistaken even slightly for your sense of self. It's appearance says nothing about who or what you are. Its particular configuration or attributes make no statement whatsoever as to your true nature or creative abilities. It is merely a picture, a portal, into a fake world, through which you briefly peer in order to look at the surface of objects and see bodies moving around.

You recognize that everything the body senses is not real or true. It picks up on vibratory signals of a world that seems to be there but which is not. It shows you pictures of this pretend world, registers sound vibrations, and even seems to be able to touch the surface of imaginary objects. But there is no delusion that any of these things really exist or that these signals are conveying the truth. All they do is relay messages about what seems to be there, but which is not believed in. And so the mind does not use the body to "sense reality", it uses it only to sense unreality.

The dream world continues to depict scenes of fighting, abuse, conflict, physical and mental sickness, trees, buildings, storms, war and chaos, and all manner of activities. Flowers growing and dying, birds eating, fish swimming, and every imaginable form of forms changing form.

The mind observes this through the body senses which register perceptions of such things occurring, but the mind is not deceived by any of them. It knows it is witnessing a lie, a false world, a temporary fiction, which has no inherent truth and absolutely no reality. And it uses the body thus only to temporarily interact with those who see themselves as bodies, that there might be communication, teaching and healing, to guide them similarly to the recognition of a sane perspective on this world and on the bodies they utilize.

For now the mind is standing on the outskirts of the world, not immersed and not lost within its illusions. It is no longer tempted by appearances. It knows with certainty that nothing is happening here, and even when the ego demonstrates its prowess in manufacturing scenes of horror and destruction, these happenings have no influence over the mind. It reacts not and is unmoved and undisturbed by such illusory occurrences. And it continues to look past all of them to the real truth, which these appearances once hid, to the real light and the real show, which is occurring beyond the world entirely.

The mind then has lost interest in the world. It has come to recognize the world has nothing to give. It has surrendered all investment in the world and all attempts to believe it can do or achieve or give anything of value. It is recognized as nothing but a distractor device, made of denial, pretending to be something but is ultimately nothingness. There is no further worshipping of idols, there is no emotional investment, there is nothing that it wants in the world, because it knows the world has nothing to offer. It is nothing but a prison for insane minds who come to suffer and die in dreams of pain. And it is clear there is no such thing as sin.

Such a mind is the light of the world and has come to bless, only because it recognizes the truth and does not fall for the traps and illusions of a world of errors. It does not believe anything the body witnesses or suggests is happening, and realizes the limitations of the senses. It uses them only to serve to the extent they are able and is under no delusions that they represent reality or its experience. The body is known to be only what it is and nothing more, and it is nothing but an illusion. It has no life nor death.

From this view, the world is recognized as nothing. A sphere of un-happenings and illusory events. All events are nowhere. All changes wrought are substance-less. Not one thing occuring has any truth to it. Not even the dying bodies are really dying, nor the sick bodies really sick, nor the living bodies really alive. It is all the same, one illusion, one picture of strange objects and interactions, none of which are real or true.

The hierarchy of illusions has been flattened, and along with it the illusion of orders of difficulty. Nothing is regarded as more or less important or valuable than another, nor more difficult to reverse or change or heal. Nothing is given to the world but the love that would dispel it. And no meaning is attributed it beyond the meaning of forgiveness. Every occurrence has no effects. Every cause seen as an effect of dreaming. And nowhere is there a real consequence believed.

Only for a time does the teacher of God occupy a body thus, using it as a scalpel to dissect the illusions of the world and see beyond them to the truth. The mind no longer loses sight of what is true and real beyond the world, fixated on the reality of light outside the dream. There is no longer deception or temptation capable of inflicting suffering. And not one single aspect of the world has the power to do anything.

The world has been forgiven, overlooked, and not believed. The body is nothing and unnecessary. All the pleasures and pains of the world have been surrendered as useless futilities designed to waste time and avoid the truth. Death has no further appeal, for it is realized it accomplishes nothing real at all and is a worthless pursuit. No one in their right mind chooses to make such demonstrations occur, and what use is a dead body as a tool for communication and healing?

As a teacher of God, you have one foot in the world, but your spiritual eye perceives the light beyond it. Your mind is aligned with the truth but your body is doing body things. You don't fall for the ego's tricks, nor do you react to its worst attacks. You know that nothing can affect you because you have remembered what you are. You are as God created you, and you live outside of the world in another world of light, a world untouched by sin and danger, out of reach of war and pain.

Nothing can disturb you because you are safe in God. The dream of exile is nothing but a strange dream where strange things don't really happen. Where nothing can be believed. And where there is no truth. It is but a desert, arid and empty, a lifeless container of nothingness. And not once has it changed anything real or true. You come a while to offer a message from beyond, to remind your brothers what they believe is not true. You set them free by example and demonstration of your freedom from the world's evidence of irreversible sin. And they see in you a light shining from beyond your body.

This world isn't real. It is not your home. It is false. Nothing in it is true. It holds no value. It is not what you want. And eventually you will learn to recognize it as nothing, realizing that to gain all of heaven you are giving up nothing at all. And not one memory of the dream world will linger as you awaken beyond the world into the reality of the Kingdom. For everything you ever thought happened was nothing and nowhere. Only love is real and only the living world of light is true. And in this light you will know what you are and have always been.

"W-pII.14.1. I am God’s Son, complete and healed and whole, shining in the reflection of His Love. 2 In me is His creation sanctified and guaranteed eternal life. 3 In me is love perfected, fear impossible, and joy established without opposite. 4 I am the holy home of God Himself. 5 I am the Heaven where His Love resides. 6 I am His holy Sinlessness Itself, for in my purity abides His Own."

The world can't really be held responsible for its nature. It was given its nature by those who made it. It was made for a purpose to serve them. And it functions exactly as they wanted it to.

Its makers wanted the world to be a place opposite to heaven in every possible way. Whatever was true of heaven, the world we made had to be unlike it in the most extreme ways possible.

Whereas heaven was light and strong and eternal and perfect, the world we made HAD to be dark and weak and temporary and imperfect. There was no real choice in this. Certainly the world itself had no choice in this, because it didn't make itself.

We wanted an opposite to God, an opposite to heaven, an opposite to eternal life. So we made an unreal dream of death and unhappiness. A dream of mortality and impermanence in which all things are infiltrated by death and destruction. A world opposite to creation where creation is impossible.

"Creation is impossible in this world."

The world cannot help this. It was made to be like this. Its nature is the only nature that is even possible as an opposite to heaven. It HAD to be this way in order to be different to the Kingdom.

It's not like the world can actually choose to be heaven, or have a nature that is exactly the same as heaven. Nor is it possible that the world is actually electing which nature to have. It cannot make this choice. It is something we made, and isn't the creator of itself.

This is also why the ego - something else we made, is forgivable. It is just as forgivable as the world because it did not make itself. It has the nature it has simply because it could have no other nature. A device spawned from an idea of separateness COULD ONLY lead a state of selfishness and isolation, exclusion and limitation.

The ego itself had no say in this. In fact it has no say in its own nature. In this sense it too is not responsible for being the way that it is. It was forced to be this way by its makers. And now it is true to its nature and follows the laws assigned to it.

The ego cannot really be accused of therefore doing bad things on purpose as though it could actually ever choose not to. It isn't a device for truth and salvation, nor is it a mind that can make a decision. It certainly isn't its own author, even though it has invented a story about a false God that it thinks made it.

The ego HAD to be the way it is because this is the natural outcome of an idea of separateness. Separateness never looks any other way or functions any other way. The world and the ego and the body simply CANNOT function any other way. They were given a function when they were made and they cannot deviate from it. The reason being that this function derives from a premise which has never been altered.

So in a sense we can't really hold the deeds of the ego, or of bodies, or people, or the world, against them. They are being faithful to their nature. They are just ticking over like a machine which was designed to function a certain way. They cannot do anything about it.

"The ego's voice is an hallucination. You cannot expect the EGO to say "I am not real."

The world cannot suddenly decide to be nice to you. The ego cannot suddenly tell you what the truth is. The body cannot suddenly be immortal. Objects cannot suddenly transcend spacetime. They are all locked into a system. It's a system-wide state of laws and rules by which they were made, they always abide, and they can never escape.

They cannot escape themselves, nor can they offer salvation from themselves. They are not going to change their minds. They are not going to take on a different nature. They are always going to keep running and operating on the same dysfunctional basis because that's the nature that was given to them, and they know nothing else. Nor are they capable of anything else, just as a tool or device can only do what it was designed to do.

So while the world and the ego and bodies attack and murder and destroy, in a sense they cannot help it. It's what they do. It's all that they do. They don't know how to do anything else, nor can they be taught to. Nor can they be kept while they are transformed into something better. They can only ever keep on being the way they were always going to be from the start.

Because they do not know what they do, they are forgivable. Because they did not create themselves, they are forgivable. Because they can only function in fault and failure because they were supposed to, they are forgivable. Because they can't help but break and disrupt and distort and skew and deceive and destroy, they must be forgivable. They aren't doing it "on purpose" out of optional spite, nor are they doing it on a basis of being free to do anything else.

The world can only destroy, and it can only deny, and it can only lose, and it can only fail. That is its nature. It can only disappoint and it can only fall short and it can only hurt. That is its nature. It can only be at war, it can only decay, and it can only die. That is its nature. It was born to die, and never to live except for death.

We cannot hold its nature against itself when it doesn't even have the slightest say in its nature or behavior. We cannot redeem the ego. We cannot redeem the world. The world cannot be saved in this sense because it cannot stop functioning the way it does even if "it wanted to". It is helpless. It is powerless. It has no causal choice. It can make no decisions. It is weak and vulnerable and fearful and nothing. So it can't really do anything of its own volition.

The world and the ego are nothing but puppets on a string being dangled by sons of God playing with sharp-edged toys. The world and the ego won't stop trying to kill you off either. Nor will they suddenly turn perfect or operate with holiness and happiness. The world is a pointless depressing hopeless place because all its roads lead to death. It doesn't know how to live, it only knows how to die. You can have pity for it in that sense. You can even have compassion for it.

"Shall we not put away these sharp-edged children's toys? How soon will you be ready to come home?"

The world will never be other than what it has to be in order to fulfill the function of separation. And the ego will never have a loving truthful nature. They are lost because they are loss. They are faulty because they were not made with love. They are broken because they were not given immortality. And they can only but disappear.

I forgive the world for being true to its maker. I forgive it for being incapable of real change. I forgive it for not knowing how to function better. I forgive it for being only capable of disappointment. I forgive it for attacking and destroying mindlessly and without consideration. I forgive its determined mercilessness, driven solely by its inherent function and its blindness to anything else. I forgive its evil which does not know what it does. And I forgive it for ever seeming to be needed, for a purpose of attack, from which it cannot deviate.

There is no spiritual ego. There is no sacred planet. They don't exist and never will. How can you hold a dream against ITSELF when YOU are the one who dreamed it into existence? It is what you want it to be, and it does what you wanted it to do. And until you stop dreaming it will continue to be a dream of death.

"It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life."

"Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life." God is insane, and fear alone is real."

"The world goes AGAINST your nature, because it is out of accord with God's laws. The world perceives orders of difficulty in EVERYTHING. This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable."

"The ego cannot make this choice because of the nature of its origin."

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

"You see the world which you have made, but you do not see yourself as the image-maker. You cannot be saved from the world, but you can escape from its cause."

"The whole purpose of this course is to teach you that the ego is unbelievable and will forever BE unbelievable."

"the world will never give a gift that is not made of fear"

"Everything the world can offer promises some joy that it will never give." "Your ego and your Soul will never be co-creators" "the body may become his chosen home, but it will never be his home in truth."

"The body's eyes will never see except through differences."

"These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see."

"The body's serial adventures, from the time of birth to dying is the theme of every dream the world has ever had. The "hero" of this dream will never change, nor will its purpose."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there is a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place?"

"For the ILLUSION of love will NEVER satisfy you. But its REALITY, which awaits you on the other side, WILL give you everything." "It costs the world we see, for the world will never again appear to rule the mind."

"There IS no meaning in the form, AND THERE WILL NEVER BE."

"Hold onto nothing."

Loss is self-induced suffering. It is a feeling of not getting what you want, like a childish temper tantrum. It's produced by the demand that things should be the way you want them to be, at the same time as them NOT being that way.

There is a sense of space and time, a gap, a separation, between what you seem to want, and what is. This gap is produced by two anchors. One anchor is the thing which is already gone, has left, has died, doesn't exist, is now in the past. The other anchor is your WANTING that thing to be not gone, to be still here in the present with you.

The stronger you want something to be a certain way, and the greater the contrast between that and how things actually are, the more you will suffer and feel despair, a feeling that something you really want strongly has been taken away or denied to you. But this is because YOU are denying how things are now, and so experience as though you are being denied something. If you deny, you will be denied due to the golden rule.

Wanting is actually denial, in which you are denying that things are the way they are, instead of accepting the facts. It is an unwillingness to accept the "reality" of what has changed. If something or someone has left, they have left. This is a fact. But if you want it to not be this way, you are in denial.

This denial produces lack, which produces neediness, which produces desire and wanting. If you are wanting, it means you do not have something - wanting=lacking, as in "you are left wanting." But wanting masquerades as an attraction or desire to have something, which the ego uses as a substitute for love. Wanting is part of specialness, and wanting is a way of saying "I do not want this."

When something leaves, it has left. It is in the past. It is not here. This is a fact. You should allow it to be free to be gone. But if you cannot accept and allow this fact, you will resist it. This resistance is like insisting that it shouldn't be this way, it's not right, it's not fair, you don't "want" it, because you want things to carry on as they were.

This insistence that worldly things NOT change, is in direct contradiction to the nature of all things in this world - which is that they AWAYS change, and sooner or later they "die" (change). It is their nature to change because they are illusions, and illusions are always temporary, with beginnings and endings alike.

Trying to make changing things NOT change, is an attempt to control "reality" and deny what has changed, because you "want it thus." It also means you are trying to give permanence to something that is not permanent, such as body or home or whatever.

"Dreams are perceptual temper tantrums, in which you literally scream, 'I want it THUS!'"

When things have changed, and you have not accepted that they have changed, you are denying the change. You do this to try to suggest that - if you hold on, if you resist, if you don't want the change, if you keep wanting things strongly to be the way they were, then you'll actually stop the thing from going away, you'll stop it from leaving, you'll stop the loss. This is like a desperate pleading that something doesn't leave when it's already left.

When this involves the seeming loss of a person - really just a change in the status of the body - you can resist and deny that they've gone, because you believe that by doing so you'll prevent their death. You try to keep them around by holding onto them, attaching to them, wanting them. And it seems counter to your desires to have to question whether you should even "want them" anymore, as if that would mean itself the loss of what you want.

The thing is, that the stronger you deny what has changed, the more you go into denial, the more you will feel that you are being denied something. It could take the form of you being in a different country with an inability to travel to see your family at christmas for example, and just because you are denied access, it creates a sense of a rift or gap or spacetime, a distance of separateness, which induces horrible feelings of despair - which we call loss or grief.

The intensity of the loss is really in proportion to how much you are denying and holding onto something which is not there. The more you want to keep it and not let it go, the more you feel awful when faced with the fact that it has already gone. And indeed the desire to keep it around is a way to NOT SEE that it has already gone, because you do not WANT that to be true. You want the person to still be around etc.

So there becomes this mismatch between... what is in front of your face as the "reality" or configuration of the illusory world right now, and what you PREFER that it be. If you prefer that your dead partner or family member be still in a body, and they are not, that is a contrast between what is and what is not. That contrast is a separation of spacetime, which turns into a pit of hell and despair.

Jesus in the course is leading us to learn to let everything go. To hold onto nothing. That means letting everything that is in the past be in the past. It means not WANTING to control whether something seems present or not. It means not DENYING what is happening now.

Ultimately there is a plot twist here, in that the use of denial to deny that something has gone, which places focus on something that is past and amplifies the sense of its absence while simultaneously focusing on it, takes you away from the PRESENT. And so the denial of death for example becomes a way to choose it and thus to avoid life. Being in a state of despairing loss is a way to not live in the present moment, and instead to focus on what is NOT present.

Eventually we have to get to a place where we are so detached from whatever seems to come and go, recognizing that all illusory things like bodies and places are indeed just transient fleeting things, in no way deceived into the idea that they can be permanent or last forever. When you are a "under no illusion" that temporary things are temporary, then you become able to accept the illusion's transient nature, and can ALLOW it to be the way it is.

Essentially the antidote to loss and grief is then is to learn recognize the that you are in denial and cannot allow things to be the way they are, you have to stop wanting something that you cannot have, let go of the thing so that it CAN go, allow it to move away from you, accept that it is gone and not present, give it freedom and set it free so that it can come and go without your controlling it (conditional love), and therefore reach a point of acceptance and freedom.

When you can GIVE freedom to the thing that has gone away, you can RECEIVE freedom for yourself that enables you to "move on." If you do not let the thing itself "move on" ie into the past, away from you, then you will not be able to move on either. If you deny the thing its nature of change and temporariness, you will feel denied by the way that the illusory world keeps changing in ways that you do not want. But as you come to allow the thing to go, you will allow yourself to live and be set free. And as you can accept that the thing HAS gone, you can set yourself free by accepting where you ARE in the present. Life and living is always in the present, not the past.

Essentially it all boils down to something very simple. Let all illusory things leave when they leave, live in the present, and stop trying to "stop change" from happening. Find away to accept the circumstance that you "do not want" rather than fighting against it and "wishing" it were different. This is a kind of "sobering up".

Do not BECOME attached, which will only set you up for loss when you find you have difficulty allowing the cord to be severed when the thing leaves. Non-attachment doesn't mean no life or relationship it just means not being confused about whether illusory things are permanent or temporary. People are not bodies. Places are not your real home - which is in God. Everyone in spirit are always joined to each other forever.

Accept that all temporary things are temporary, let them all come and go, and you will enter into acceptance. This is simply a willingness to accept the FACT of what has changed. In acceptance you will be in the present, because you have let all past things stay in the past instead of trying to drag them into the present as baggage. This acceptance opens the way to the acceptance of that which IS permanent, as changeless reality, in which nothing real is ever lost, no-one created ever dies, and there is no possibility of despair.

We are all a part of each other in God. You are the person you think you lost. Everyone is you. There is no death and no separation. Everyone is everyone forever.

"Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God."

Quite a lot of quotes here about LETTING the Holy Spirit do stuff for you and through you…

“I will step back and let Him lead the way.”

“Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him Judge what the response should be. So is he healed, and in his healing is his pupil healed with him.”

“Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven.”

“Let Him fulfill the function that He GAVE to your relationship by ACCEPTING it FOR you.”

“When you feel the holiness of your relationship is threatened by ANYTHING, stop instantly and offer the Holy Spirit your willingness, IN SPITE of fear, to let Him exchange this instant for the holy one which YOU would rather have. He will NEVER fail in this.”

“I rest in God today, and let Him work

In me and through me, while I rest in Him

In quiet and in perfect certainty.”

“Trust all things to Him. Let Him reveal all things to you, and be you undismayed because you are His Son.”

“The unredeemed cannot redeem. Yet they HAVE a Redeemer. Attempt to teach Him not. YOU are the learner; HE the Teacher. Do not confuse your role with His, for this will NEVER bring peace to anyone. Offer your empathy to Him, for it is HIS perception and His STRENGTH that you would share. And let Him offer you HIS strength and HIS perception, to be shared THROUGH you.”

“He gives the miracles my dreams would hide from my awareness. Let Him judge today. I do not know my will, but He is sure it is Your own. And He will speak for me, and call Your miracle to come to me."

“The Holy Spirit will teach me this, if I will let Him. And I will understand it is impossible that I could have a problem which has not been solved already.”

“Let Him be Judge of what you are, for He has certainty in which there is no doubt because it rests on Certainty so great that doubt is meaningless before Its Face.”

“Let Him be Judge as well of everything that seems to happen to you in this world. His lessons will enable you to bridge the gap between illusions and the truth.”

“Let Him evaluate each thought that comes to mind, remove the elements of dreams, and give them back to you as clean ideas which do not contradict the Will of God.”

“Follow His light and see the world as He beholds it. Hear His Voice alone in all that speaks to you. And let Him give you peace and certainty, which you have thrown away, but Heaven has preserved for you in Him.”

“The CAPACITY to empathize is VERY useful to the Holy Spirit, provided you let Him use it in His way. His way is very different. He does NOT understand suffering, and would have you teach IT IS NOT UNDERSTANDABLE. When He relates through you, He does NOT relate through the ego to another ego. He does NOT join in pain, knowing that HEALING pain is NOT accomplished by delusional attempts to ENTER INTO IT, and lighten it by SHARING the delusion.”

“The Holy Spirit asks only this little help of you. Whenever your thoughts wander to a special relationship which still ATTRACTS you, enter with Him into a holy instant, and there, LET HIM RELEASE YOU. He needs only your willingness to SHARE His perspective, to give it to you completely.”

“Call upon Him, for Heaven is at His call. And LET Him call on Heaven FOR you.”

“God's Voice alone can tell you how to heal. Listen, and you will never fail to bring His kindly remedy to those He sends to you, to let Him heal them, and to bless all those who serve with Him in healing's name. The body's healing will occur because its cause has gone. And now without a cause, it cannot come again in different form. Nor will death any more be feared because it has been understood. There is no fear in one who has been truly healed, for love has entered now where idols used to stand, and fear has given way at last to God.”

“The teacher of God must, however, learn to use words in a new way. Gradually, he learns how to let his words be chosen for him by ceasing to decide for himself what he will say. This process is merely a special case of the Workbook lesson "I will step back and let Him lead the way." The teacher of God accepts the words which are offered him and gives as he receives. He does not control the direction of his speaking. He listens and hears and speaks.”

“And now I place you in His hands, to be His faithful followers, with Him as Guide through every difficulty and all pain that you may think is real. Nor will He give you pleasures that will pass away, for He gives only the eternal and the good. Let Him prepare you further. He has earned your trust by speaking daily to you of your Father and your brother and your Self. He will continue; now you walk with Him as certain as is He of where you go; as sure as He of how you should proceed, as confident as He is of the goal, and of your safe arrival in the end.”

“I place you in His charge, and let Him teach you what to do and say and think each time you turn to Him. He will not fail to be available to you each time you call to Him to help you.”

“They will not hear another voice but yours, because you gave your voice to God and now you rest in Him, and let Him speak through you.”

“I do NOT feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM.

I WILL to let Him by allowing Him to decide for God for me.”

“It is the message that the Holy Spirit is holding to the mirror that is in HIM. He recognizes it, because he has been taught his NEED for it, but knows not where to look to FIND it. Let him, then, see it in YOU, and share it WITH you.”

“Then turn to Him who shares your function with you, and let Him teach you what you need to learn to lay all fear aside, and know your Self as Love Which has no opposite in you.”

“He is the strong protector of your innocence, which sets you free. And it is HIS decision to undo EVERYTHING that would obscure your innocence from your unclouded mind. Let Him, therefore, be the only guide that you would follow to Salvation. He knows the way, and leads you gladly on it. WITH Him, you will not fail to learn what God wills FOR you IS your will. ”

“The Holy Spirit points quietly to the contrast, knowing that you will finally let Him judge the difference FOR you, allowing Him to demonstrate which MUST be true.”

“The Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist. He makes healing PERFECTLY clear in ANY situation in which He is the guide. The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION. He needs no help for this. He WILL tell you EXACTLY what to do, to help ANYONE He sends to you FOR help, and will speak to him through you, IF YOU DO NOT INTERFERE.”

“But the Holy Spirit, too, has use for sleep, and can use dreams on BEHALF of waking, if you will let Him.”

“Your creations are protected FOR you because the Holy Spirit, Who is in your minds, knows of them, and can bring them INTO your awareness whenever you will let Him.”

“The Holy Spirit knows NO-ONE IS SPECIAL. But He also perceives that you have MADE special relationships, which He would purify, and NOT let YOU destroy. However UNholy the reason why you made them may be, He can TRANSLATE them into holiness, by removing AS MUCH FEAR AS YOU WILL LET HIM.”

“For here is both his pain AND his healing, for the Holy Spirit's vision is merciful, and His remedy is quick. Do not HIDE suffering from His sight, but bring it gladly TO Him. Lay before His eternal sanity ALL your hurt, and LET Him heal you. Do not leave any spot of pain hidden from His Light, and search your minds carefully for any thoughts which you may fear to uncover. For He will heal every little thought that you have kept to hurt you, and cleanse it of its littleness, restoring it to the magnitude of God.”

“Leave, then, what seems to you to be impossible, to Him Who knows it MUST be possible, because it is the Will of God. And let Him, Whose teaching is ONLY of God, teach you the ONLY meaning of relationships. For God Himself created the only relationship that HAS meaning, and that is His relationship with YOU.”

“Thank God that He is there, and works through you. And all His works are yours. He offers YOU a miracle, with every one you LET Him do through you.”

“But the Holy Spirit has saved its meaning FOR you, and if you will LET Him interpret it FOR you, He will restore what you have thrown away.”

Your natural condition is that you are a powerful, loving, mind-causal, capable, miraculous being, who can do literally anything.

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles."

That "nothing" is utterly literal and all encompassing. Anything you can possibly imagine you can do, no matter how radical.

When there are blocks to awareness, these blocks are blocks to this natural ability. It is a block to love, a block to power, a block to will. A block to awareness is a form of denial, which is part of a split mind. And a split mind is willing against itself, which cancels out the power of the will because it's now a divided will, working against itself instead of being undivided and unopposed and powerfully causal.

There is a lot of emphasis in ACIM on removing these blocks. In fact, most of the course is aiming towards the removal of the blocks rather than the "teaching of the meaning of love" which it says is impossible. "Love goes out because of what it is, but you are needed that it can begin" speaks to how you need to give back your willingness to love so that you aren't blocking it, but the love and power in you naturally EXPRESSES when it is unblocked.

The thing is, a vast majority of course folk see this emphasis on block removal and think it is the entire course. To the point where they are constantly focusing on "shifting perception", undoing their false beliefs, stopping judgements, etc to try to heal their minds. Which is valid, and we are supposed to be doing that. But the emphasis on this process, which is "the work" that needs to be done one way or another using whatever process, the REASON for doing this work starts to become eclipsed and forgotten and denied.

What happens when the blocks are removed, is that the flood gates are opened and the power of God starts to stream out. The will becomes unopposed, whole and powerful. Thought begins to express causally with the power to make things happen. The blocks are literally like resistances to allowing the power to come out. They are a reluctance to EXPRESS love. When the blocks are removed you NATURALLY become more loving. The lovingness and power are already there underneath or behind the blocks. When the blocks go, the love expresses and you get back in touch with being miraculous, powerful and capable. Capable of moving mountains with your mind.

"Miracles are natural and should be happening all the time. When they don't, something has gone wrong" (awareness is blocked).

"Miracles are everyone's right but purification is necessary first" (block removal - purification - must be done first in order to REVEAL the miracle working power).

So there are really two parts to this. You first remove the blocks by doing "work" (purification)and THEN when the mind is free enough the light is free to shine. The Holy Spirit can extend through the body. Mind can extend to and join with other minds. Separation can be undone and erased. And it is this EXPRESSING (all expressions of love are miraculous) that a vast majority of ACIM students are missing, ignoring, hiding from, even not wanting.

It has resulted in a widespread belief that all you have to do is basically do this work, undo the blocks, and then sit on a cloud in a state of happiness and peace DOING NOTHING. NOT EXPRESSING. NOT BEING MIRACULOUS. It's a very "safe", self-help-ish way of going about it. People think you just need to get rid of these false beliefs and attain a STATE of mind in which you will dwell with no further need to do anything. This state of mind is "miracle mindedness". Right mindedness, true perception, atonement etc. And the course very much DOES focus on attaining that state. And you could say it's a state of acceptance.

But the part that a lot of people are missing, afraid of, avoiding, in denial of etc, is the EXPRESSING. The stuff that happens when the blocks are gone. The fact that you become part of the atonement plan and perform miracles all the time every day. The fact that you now regain the power of the mind and will OVER the body and the world. The fact that you can now move mountains, heal the sick and raise the dead. That you can DO ANYTHING. Even things which BREAK the laws of physics.

"Miracles break all the laws of this world." "What the holy spirit allows you to do is clearly not of this world." "You cannot see the Holy Spirit but you can see his manifestations." "Your mind has the power to make worlds."

This is the aspect which I find very commonly LACKING in a vast majority of teachings and interpretations, especially those that focus on "accepting the world" or "accepting what's happening".

The "going within" and "doing nothing" becomes a trap, which completely ignores the outward expression, miraculous power, ability to heal others, the performing of miracles etc. I just don't see enough people talking about this part of it. The whole REASON for doing "the work" AT ALL is to get the blocks out of the way so that you can perform miracles all over the place! It's not just about you and about your ego becoming peaceful.

It's almost as if people think they have this state of "peaceful non-activity" lurking buried underneath a stockpile of ego stuff, and all you need to do is uncover it and then settle into this peaceful, non-expressive state, where you dwell forever. This is a complete failure to recognize the real NATURE of that peaceful state, the fact that it entails the POWER OF GOD, the fact that it EXTENDS naturally, the fact that it goes out and expresses and HEALS, and the fact that you naturally WANT to share it with everyone and help them to experience this natural state as well. THAT is what the Great Crusade is about.

"The purpose of the Atonement is to restore everything TO you. (That is, to restore the awareness. Later clarification.) You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did." (your natural state isn't just peace and non-action, it's having everything and being able to do everything)

"Having been restored to your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself." (you accept the atonement NOT to ignore everyone, but to become PART OF A LARGER PLAN TO HELP OTHER INDIVIDUALS).

"You now share MY inability to tolerate the lack of love in yourself ***and in everyone else***, and MUST join the GREAT CRUSADE to correct it. The slogan for this Crusade is "Listen, Learn, and DO." (this is not voluntary, Jesus says you MUST help others)

"This means: Listen to MY Voice, Learn to undo the error, and DO something to correct it. The first two are not enough. The real members of MY party are ACTIVE workers." (It is not ENOUGH to not "do something"! You must ACT in the world).

I cannot comment on whether particular teachers are doing this or not. Maybe some teachers are in support of this also but often it sounds not to be the case. Many avoid the supernatural aspect of the course. There is a lot of fear surrounding the power of the mind.

"It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains. It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not the real reason why you don't believe it. People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them. "

I just want to make sure we're not JUST focusing on purification/work, we're also clearly focused on what is NATURAL to us, the expression of the power of love and the willingness to help others. It's not just about attaining miracle mindedness, it's about MIRACLE WORKING. And you don't even BEGIN to perform miracles until AFTER a large amount of blocks to awareness have already been removed. Until love can express, you are not miraculous. But when the blocks are gone, you ARE miraculous. And now you can be OF SERVICE TO OTHERS.

It can be very therapeutic to just listen and be still and judge not while someone expresses themeslves. This is the essence of being forgiving.

"Forgiveness … is still, and quietly does nothing. … It merely looks, and waits, and judges not" - ACIM

When we all have egos, we're all so busy not listening. We're too busy broadcasting and transmitting illusions and stories to make ourselves special.

Even if you're in a conversation with someone and you're supposedly listening, you're probably still not FULLY listening because you're not in a state of forgiveness.

Instead you're starting to mentally engage with what was said, are starting to process it, are chewing on it, judging it, judging the person, thinking about what to say, having memories of your own personal story, resisting the person and hoping they will shut up soon, etc. All of these activities mean you are not being forgiving, but it also means you are not fully listening. You're not paying full attention. You are not being fully present because you're lost in your own ego.

So then when the person speaks, they sense this. They know in the mind/energetic level that they are not being heard. They know that there are limits and boundaries in place, which you put there, which are your attempts to make them stop and shut up. Especially if you start to offer advice or talk over them or try to stop their expression. Maybe their expression is very ego and it triggers you and you just want it to stop because you can't just be still.

The result of this is that the person does not feel permitted to fully express themselves. They don't feel that you are listening, that you recognize them deep down, that you really care unconditionally, or that you even want them to continue. They will take these cues, consciously or not, and it will stop them fully expressing.

We are all so used to walking around in a world where everyone is always broadcasting that we feel terribly constipated with ego energies, feelings and expressions, which are not being ALLOWED to fully express. Nobody is listening! And that's because everyone has egos and are not in a state of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a state of mind of stillness and listening and allowing and presence and non-judgement. That's the state that we're sorely lacking in this world.

This state is a state of "holding space". It means that you are so still and clear and non-judging and present that you simply allow and listen and permit everything. You do not resist, you do not get caught up in your own thoughts, you don't get lost in your own reactions, and you don't try to stop the person. If you do this for someone and you let them just express, you will notice something really interesting happens.

Not only will they express themselves and all their ego stories, feelings and thoughts, but they will seem to really go overboard, over the top with major ego expression. Given permission that it's okay to express fully, as proven by your forgiving willingness to listen and be present, it all just comes flooding out. The person doesn't even quite know why they are doing this. They can seem to become "very ego" while they do this. YOU MUST NOT try to stop that. It's good. They are venting. Maybe for the first time someone is finally fully listening to their heart's pain and they can therefore finally let it out and let it go all the way.

People are natural expressers. Even if it's ego shit coming out and totally bullshit, they still need to express it, and not being in a situation where it's safe and okay - unconditionally okay - to be as ego as they like, it just stays stuck inside.

Also when you are in a state of holding space and being fully present with the person, where you are actually giving your FULL ATTENTION while simultaneously backing totally off from expressing anything of your own, this creates a kind of "space". That is, your intense attention connects to the person where they are, and the fact that you are totally withholding your own expression creates "space" in between the two of you. It's a space that you're not flooding with your own expressions, because you are RECEIVING.

This space is held by the mind and can actually be an energetic presence. You form it with your EMPATHY. In True Empathy you are listening intently and sharing awareness and unconditional acceptance, WITHOUT ENTERING INTO the person's problem. This is TRUE empathy. Empathising without engaging or joining in or making real the illusions that flow out in any way. And that doesn't just mean be quiet on the outside, you must be totally present and attentive INSIDE your mind as well, otherwise you are distracted with ego and are not listening.

And because there is a kind of law that nature fills a vacuum, their ego is SUCKED OUT. It pours out to fill the space. Or to put it another way, your willingness to FULLY RECEIVE allows them to FULLY EXPRESS. The person may not even realize they are really digging deep and sharing all their deep dark secrets and even stating embarassing egoic "secrets" that they never told anyone. Onlookers might judge them and label them as evil! But you have to let it just flow out into the space. Just listen, fully. Give your full attention in silence.

After the person has "finished" expressing, having been heard deeply perhaps for the first time ever, and having aired tons of dirty laundry and guilt and everything in between, they will tell you... if you succeeded in this .... they'll tell you, they feel TREMENDOUSLY PEACEFUL. They got it out! They finally could let it all out and let it go instead of having it shoved halfway down their throat by everyone else who is too self-absorbed to ever give them permission to fully express.

I have done this before, by accident. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was doing it. I recall a person at an old job who started to brag. He was a natural bragger. But as he did, instead of wanting to shut him up as such, I just paid attention and let him get on with it. I held space, sort of accidentally. And he just kept going, and going, and going. He really really vented, and started even telling me about all these secret exploits and perversions that he'd been doing, just a great big giant ego brag. He didn't even know why he was expressing so much, he just kept going! An onlooker judged him, not understanding what was happening, telling him that he should stop talking because he was making a fool of himself. But it was a HEALING.

And then,..... he wound down, and he said, he couldn't believe how peaceful he felt. He was shocked at how calm he was. It was simple. Pay full attention and be fully present without your own mental noise.

Also, if a person is quite shy or sensitive, introverted or has difficulty or fear expressing themselves, this is like GOLD. If you are like this, you know that you are very much put off by the loud intensity of everyone else's expressions, and usually you will only express yourself to one individual in a secret corner when no-one else is looking. Only if there is near silence do you feel permitted to make sound, to speak, or to express yourself. You are really sensitive and everyone's just "regular" level of expression is experienced as like LOUD. Like, they're shouting all the time and don't really want to hear you at all. And especially if the person is domineering or controlling or takes over expressing for everyone, you can bet you will just shrivel up into a hole of loneliness.

That's why sensitive people become so quiet and shy. In their spectrum of expression, they are drowned out. Loud intense or even just regular people can "shut down" sensitive people and make them even shyer, because they're never really given an opportunity to BE HEARD. People won't shut the fuck up for long enough to let them express their soft gentle expressions!

If you say to a shy sensitive person, that you're going to be totally quiet and just listen and that they can go ahead and just talk and tell you anything... anything at all, just go ahead and I'll listen quietly.... that's like GOLD. If you will trust that as a sensitive person, you will then start to express yourself, and you'll keep going, and going, and you'll explore and uncover all kinds of things that you could never tell anyone. It's SO healing and cathartic. To be heard in this overly broadcasting ultra-loud ego-screaming world, it's absolutely treasure. It touches a person. It heals them. Sometimes as a sensitive person I wish the whole world would SHUT THE FUCK UP for long enough for me to express myself.

(I WILL BE HEARD! Thanks for letting me express that, lol)

This is also partly why my expressive energies have diverted themselves into the silent, unhurried expression through typing and writing.. ... people don't shut you up when you put it down on paper.Mostly. Until they start reading it, hah. Then it's "that's too long to read, shut up". .. ie, I can't read all that text... when will *I* be able to talk about myself! lolol

Anyway. Hold space for people. It is thoroughly deeply healing. We should have healing circles where we do nothing but let people express silently. This is partly how it's set up in Alcoholics Anonymous and AlAnon and other programs with a "no cross-talk" rule... although it should be extended to a "no mental chatter either" rule. No ego.

Be quiet. Be present. Listen. Let people be fully acknowledged. This is an expression of true forgiveness.

Remember, this is part of being truly forgiving. And having the opportunity to PRACTICE this is an opportunity to be forgiving. As Jesus said:

"Forgiveness … is still, and quietly does nothing. … It merely looks, and waits, and judges not" - ACIM

"Lesson 253 "My Self is ruler of the universe. ... It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. ******What happens is what I desire.***** What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation. Otherwise, the miracle will be necessary to set the mind ITSELF straight."

"He will go before you, making straight your path, and leaving in your way no stones to trip on, and no obstacles to bar your way. NOTHING you need will be denied you. ****Not one seeming difficulty but will melt away BEFORE you reach it.****"

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

What is a miracle? Why would anyone want to heal the sick?

Miracles arise from a state of mind which is truly forgiving, which doesn't mean a mind which "needs to forgive" but a mind which recognizes there is nothing to forgive. Such a mind recognizes that God's truth is true, that illusions are illusions, and is not deceived by appearances of form.

It is only possible to perform a miracle if you are able to get your mind out of the ego's thought system and into the Holy Spirit's thought system. The miracle itself MAY shift perception if the person needs forgiveness still, but the shifting of the perception is not the miracle itself as such. The shifting of perception to Holy Spirit's thought system is what is REQUIRED IN ORDER TO become able to perform a miracle.

If you are shifting perception, i.e. correcting errors in your perception, then you are still in a process of PURIFICATION. As Jesus says in the miracle principles, miracles are everyone's right but "purification is necessary first". What is this purification? It is the PROCESS of what you call forgiveness, which is the weeding out of what is false from what is true, otherwise known as the correction of perception, or shifts in perception. That is required FIRST before you can become miracle minded. When a person first begins the Course and does their first half-baked error-prone forgiveness process, experiencing a slight shift in perception, is that a miracle? No.

Jesus as an example, Jesus was in a very advanced state of mind when he performed miracles. He did not perform these miracles IN ORDER TO shift his perception and to wake up. He had already purified His mind and His mind was now in alignment with Holy Spirit, clear about what is true and false, and not deceived by the illusions of sickness and death. He had already shifted his perception to correct true vision BEFORE becoming able to perform miracles. Accessing the mind of Holy Spirit facilitates the miracle, because the Holy Spirit is the mechanism of miracles.

He was already there. He performed miracles BECAUSE he had shifted his perception and woken up. As the principles say, miracles acknowledge the Christ in you. You can't truly acknowledge Christ when you are still sleeping and in need of forgiveness, and having a "shift in perception" as a stepping stone along that journey of purification is not going to necessarily be enough to bring about a miracle. It can bring about a correction, or an adjustment of perception, and a partial awakening, but this is in PREPARATION for being miraculous. If this were not the case, new students to the Course would be raising the dead on day 1.

Jesus performed miracles to heal the sick and raise the dead, among other things (multiplying food, walking on water and so on), in spite of the fact that He knew that the world was not real. He was very clear that the body is not real, that sickness is an illusion, and that God's truth was the only truth he depended on. He was not deceived by forms and He knew the miracle principle that there is no order of difficulty in miracles - because miracles recognize that all illusions are equally unreal. He was not deceived by the ego's illusions that one thing is harder than another.

It was BECAUSE Jesus knew illusions were just illusions, that He was miraculous. Being miraculous requires that you are clear about what is true and false - that God's truth is true and the ego's truth (illusions) are not reality. It is that certainty and clarity and sanity which allows the miracle to happen at all. The miracle overlooks form completely (which is complete forgiveness). It denies the illusion any power to prevent healing, and thereby is capable of defying all rules and laws that the illusion would exhibit, such as the laws of physics, biology, chemistry etc.

Jesus's ability to overlook form and to recognize the truth clearly, allowed Him to be miraculous. When He performed a miracle, He was not necessarily in need of having a "shift of perception". If there are only so many shifts in perception that you can have before you are fully awake, you would run out of miracles! And yet miracles are natural, they are supposed to be happening ALL THE TIME, otherwise something has gone wrong. They happen all the time when there are no illusions in the way to block them, rather than the idea that they only happen as removals of those blocks.

Yes they might remove blocks to awareness, but they come from a place of love, from a place of NO BLOCKAGE, where love is unlimited and miracles are completely normal and natural all the time. Jesus would've run out of blocks to awareness a long time before being able to perform the countless miracles that He did, if miracles were only shifts in perception. His perception had already shifted TO the miracle minded right mind of the Holy Spirit, and because of that He had UNLIMITED miracles at His disposal.

You might find it odd then that Jesus performed powerful miracles regularly, in spite of the fact that in order to perform miracles you have to recognize the world is an illusion. Why would He attempt to heal sick bodies if He knew sickness was an illusion? Why would He bother raising the dead - literally bodies which were dead - if He knew that the world was just an illusion? Why bother to help illusory bodies in a dream?

Some people use this as an explanation for why healing the sick is not important or something Jesus would do. Yet Jesus did it. What they don't understand is the paradoxical nature of this. Similarly there is a paradox whereby when you are forgiving, truly forgiving, there is nothing to forgive. You fore-give in order to prevent perceptual errors, so that there is nothing to forgive. Forgiveness is a constant state of mind - a forgiving attitude - not a process of purification. It's the permanent state of Holy Spirit's mind.

So the ego would logically deduce that there is no point raising the dead or healing the sick because they are illusions, and Jesus was very very aware that they were illusions. BUT the truth defies the ego's logic. The truth bypasses it. In the truth, miracles are extensions of love which are a service to OTHERS.

Miracles adjust spacetime in order to facilitate a greater closeness to God and an experience of love, as well as being teaching devices that help others to awaken. They correct illusions, not just illusions in the mind but illusions AS the world. Bodies are illusions just as much as thoughts and perceptions, since the body is IN the mind. They are just as correctable as faulty vision. Why would you correct only illusions in the mind and not recognize the body and the world are also in the mind, thus avoiding their correction? This is because most body-identified humans do not realize that the entire body and world is also an illusion and is also IN THEIR MIND.

When you become miracle minded, it is because you recognize that illusions are just illusions. It is that recognition that ALLOWS you to perform miracles, because you can't wield God's power if you don't believe God is real. To believe God is real is to recognize that illusions/world/body/sickness/death is NOT real. That's HOW you make these things disappear, through your not fueling them and not believing in them.

So when you become miraculous, it is in the recognition that miracles are not NEEDED as such, because nothing has gone wrong, everyone is innocent, everyone is immortal and eternal, and there isn't even any real problems to fix. AND YET, the miracle is still present. Jesus still performed them in spite of His advanced awareness of the unreality of the world, and BECAUSE of that awareness. He didn't just sit on his laurels like, oh, I know there's nothing to forgive and no real problems so I'm just going to sit back and let everyone suffer. That would've been cold and intellectual.

Instead Jesus went out to the people with an open heart and mind, knowing sickness and death had no power over Him, and demonstrating left right and center - teaching - that these things were not real by example. He was helping his brothers. He was healing people because He LOVED them and because He had a HEART engaged with the truth, not just an intellectual understanding. And He knew that even though there was no "real" need for healing or miracles because bodies were not real, OTHER PEOPLE believed they were real and were in a state of suffering. He was being loving by alleviating their suffering and simultaneously teaching them through demonstration that the body was not real. He didn't just take away people's suffering, He showed also how THEY could take it away by masterfully showing how it was done.

So to the ego, miracles make no sense. It makes no sense to heal the sick if the body is not real. It makes no sense to raise the dead if people aren't really bodies and they're supposed to be making the body disappear. But all things can be used as teaching devices and miracles are a maximal service to others. It says so in the miracle principles. Jesus could've raised a million people from the dead if he wanted to, but also He recognized that people needed to learn of this capability themselves as well and so was using miracles to teach (demonstrate) what the truth is.

This is why miracles are not just shifts in perception. They are not just corrections in your own mind, which is a process of purification. They are not just forgiveness, which is a process of progressively undoing belief in illusions. And they are not ineffective or unpowerful. And they are not reserved only for the "private" waking up of individuals.

As Jesus teaches, Love must be extended in order to be REAL. It is the nature of God's Kingdom and reality that it has no PRESENCE unless there is extension happening. It has to radiate and be shared. Sharing is the key element, and miracles share love with your brother. They unify your mind with theirs and correct BOTH of you, if there is any correction needed. Jesus didn't need that correction because He was already done with it. But He still corrected others and was TRULY HELPFUL.

The Course states (in its less edited-out versions) that miracles ENTAIL a shift in perception from illusions to truth. This means that you must shift your perception INTO a state of mind which recognizes truth in order to perform a miracle. It does not mean that the miracle shifts your perception, or that the purpose of the miracle is to shift your perception. You HAVE TO shift your perception into Holy Spirit's perception so that you become miracle minded in order to become miraculous.

He asks us now to continue His mission and help the brotherhood to awaken, by sharing and extending and expressing love to everyone, to be "active workers" in His plan, and to perform miracles on a daily basis. He even says in the urtext (later edited out) that we should be asking Him every day what miracles to perform. Note also that He instructed His disciples in the ways of miracles and told them to go out and heal the sick and raise the dead, which they did. Why would he tell them to do that and why did they do that and why were they able to do that? Because it was LOVING and because that love made it possible. So why wouldn't they?!

Miracles also affirm the truth in you, since you share in them, and so by performing them for others it reinforces for you the truth of God's reality, giving you additional faith and conviction and clarity that the body is not real and can be overcome. Death can be overcome. A Course in Miracles is not "armchair spirituality" where you just contemplate it behind closed doors and discuss it on Facebook. We are to be powerful workers of miracles helping Jesus in His plan of atonement for the great awakening - the great crusade.

Jesus performed miracles. I will perform miracles.

God's Kingdom is the level of primary reality. We then made a SECOND world, with the power of our minds. When we made the world we also invented all the rules of the world, all of the laws of physics, all of the ways spacetime would function, and populated it with every object and body and planet and galaxy.

What this means is there are now two levels. There is the level of source, actual reality, and then there is the lower level of the world. The lower level is sometimes referred to as a lower-order reality. This lower level was made, well within the confines of what is possible for the higher order to accomplish. It was a limited mis-creation, is filled with limitations, and its rules are completely invented restrictions.

We who live within this lower order world, who take it at face value, might believe that this world is first-hand reality. And we might believe that the very strictly enforced laws of spacetime physics cannot be broken. We accept all kinds of limitations as being "normal" for this universe. There are so many things that seem impossible, so many things which proceed according to certain rules... it's "just the way thing work here".

But what we might not realize is that this world is not primary reality, its laws are not actually the most fundamental lowest-level limitations, all limits are artificial, and every single "impossibility" is an illusion. In science now the holographic theory is starting to point to this, recognizing that this world is NOT primary reality but a secondary by-product, and is therefore once removed from source.

There are a couple of good analogies. The first is that of a movie director. The director is outside of the movie at the level of what we'll think of as actual reality. The director decides to piece together a set, to populate it with characters, to assemble a scene and make it appear as though certain stories are playing out.

The director will even play a bit with the rules/laws, perhaps they will devise some illusory special effects which LOOK as if they are believable when you look through the camera and don't see all the strings being pulled and all the behind-the-scenes stuff that is going on. And the illusion depends on not seeing the secret workings of the scene in order to maintain believability. To the casual observer, the romantic tale playing out in the movie is believable and "happening". Limitations are accepted as normal and not questioned.

But the movie director could decide to do something completely outside the realm of this little illusion. They could decide to suddenly walk onto the set in front of the camera. This would blow the whole illusion of a scene set in the 1950s. They could decide to move the camera to see the set from a certain vantage point that reveals the buildings aren't real buildings. They could "break" the laws that seem to run the world.

Another analogy is that of someone who builds 3D CGI scenes in a computer. At first the scene is empty. The modeler wants to make a scene where a CGI car crashes into a lamp post. They put the car into the scene, then the lamp post. But there are no laws in place to govern any kind of collision. There is no physics. They have to tell the computer what they want to happen.

They have to invent some physics laws and implement them, so that it SEEMS that when the car touches the lamp post the post bends in a way that makes it look AS IF the car caused the damage. And perhaps the front of the car needs to be remodeled to make it appear AS IF it has been dented.

They also have to make the car move, define how fast, and configure every parameter of what happens. It's sort of similar to how a child plays with a toy car and pretends the car crashes and has to make the object it crashes into move as well to pretend it caused something to happen. In truth the car does not cause anything to happen, the lamp post is not at the effect of the car, and there is no "real damage". It's all pieced together to make an illusion. To seem as if it's believable. There is no actual cause and effect here.

It's possible for the modeller to decide to do something to the car which would "break" the normal laws of physics. They could make the car float, they could change its color, they could turn it into an apple. These would be "unbelievable" to someone who bought into the illusion of the scene, and would appear miraculous.

Which is another point. Within this world we're used to living in, we believe there is cause and effect on the horizontal level. That a brick thrown through a window causes the window to break. One thing is a cause, another thing is an effect. And sometimes the thing that caused becomes affected. We buy into this as if it's a closed system. As if the dream that we caused is causing us.

But in truth, the director has VERTICAL causality over the movie scene. The 3D modeller has VERTICAL causality over the entire contents of the what happens. And so too the MAKER of this world has entire power OVER everything that happens in this world.

Since you MADE PHYSICS, you can BREAK it. You can decide, hey, I am under no laws but God's, I am not bound WITHIN the laws of physics, I made the laws, I will transcend them and break them. I will do something OUTSIDE the laws. I will walk on water, breaking the law of gravity. I can ignore gravity because I made gravity myself. Since you are above, beyond, and outside of, the level of the laws, you have the FREEDOM to exercise your will to bend, break, and totally override the rules.

You who made the world are PRIOR to the world. You are able to pull the strings. You can do thing to the laws and the scene that the laws and the scene itself says are impossible. Things which cannot seemingly be undone or reversed, are reversible with miracles. You can control space and time. Your mind has power over matter. You can literally move a mountain. You can reverse death and sickness. There is nothing beyond your ability to rewrite the dream. You're the dreamer, YOU call the shots.

When you break the laws of the world, the effects or "what happens" is seen by the natives as "miraculous". Or "impossible". When you walk on water, breaking gravity, this seems impossible. Such a demonstration shows that because you are DOING IT, the law of gravity must be an illusion. This is why "miracles are teaching devices."

Also since miracles "do the impossible", this is often why many people do not believe in them as being capable, as if such things are just "magic", as a way to try to explain why miracles CANNOT BE supernatural. This is due to a belief that the world is real. Those to have fallen for the illusion of the lower-order scene are convinced by appearances and made-up laws and believe they cannot BE broken.

Demonstrations of your power over the world reveals that all the limitations and laws you thought you were bound by, you are NOT bound by. When a few loaves of bread and some fish are multiplied out of nowhere to feed 5000 people, this seems miraculous. But he who is operating on laws OUTSIDE the laws of this world is merely exercising their freedom. Anything goes when you are literally above the law!

When a dead body is suddenly resurrected to life and the person starts walking around as if nothing happened, this is considered a miracle by the people who anticipate that death cannot be reversed. In total defiance of all the laws of this world, the laws of decay and time and chemical decomposition, can be broken. Even bodies that have been dead for years can be resurrected. Even when the pieces are scattered and decayed and beyond help. This should not be considered "difficult". There is NO order of difficulty.

You are not bound by ANY LAW of this universe. It is all an entire level removed from the level at which you exercise your creative freedom. This world is further down the chain of causality than the starting point, and you at the starting point can therefore change your mind and change the whole world. It doesn't matter how irreversible, solid, permanent or impossible something seems to be, all of that is overridden when you operate from a higher level of causality.

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

Since you are operating from a level above the world, you are having vertical causality over the world. You even cause the causality of the word. You cause the causes, and the effects. You set up the causes and the effects to PRETEND that the causes caused the effects. You can violate the illusion of causality at any time. You are above the world. This is why the coures says:

"41. The miracle is a learning device which lessens the need for time. The sudden shifts from horizontal to vertical perception which the miracle entails..."

Vertical perception is a state of seeing yourself as prior to the world, above the battlefield, causal over everything below, overriding all horizontal causality, under no laws but God's. Miracle working ENTAILS shifting INTO vertical perception, SO THAT you can be miraculous. What you then perform FROM vertical perception breaks the laws of the world. Miracle mindedness is vertical perception.

Since super" means above, and "natural" is of course to do with the nature of things, super-natural means "above nature". Being above the nature of the world. Beyond and above the laws of the world. This is why miracles are rightfully "supernatural". At least in terms of looking at them from below. In truth they are completely natural and should be happening all the time. Miraculousness is actually the NATURE of God's Kingdom, which has UNLIMITED POWER.

Everything that is of God is supernatural and naturally so. "God's miracles" "You are a miracle" "You are a miracle not of your own making" "Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life" "The miraculous nature of the soul" "Miracles are a universal blessing from God" etc. Being miraculous is natural, being UN-miraculous is UNNATURAL.

Being BOUND by the laws of space time is UN NATURAL. And the NATURE of everything within space time is NOT NATURAL. What we affectionately call "mother nature" is OPPOSITE to the nature of God. "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way." And "miracles are natural and should be happening all the time. When they aren't, something has gone wong."

So being a miracle worker means being supernatural. Miracles are supernatural acts. They CAN BE spectacular. "A miracle is MISUNDERSTOOD when it is REGARDED as a spectacle". "The use of miracles to INDUCE BELIEF is a misunderstanding of their purpose. They are for and by believers." Nothing wrong with throwing a mountain into the sea. Nothing wrong with materializing objects or turning a snake into a branch. Nothing wrong with multiplying food and walking on water. Nothing wrong with reversing death or sickness and giving eyeballs to those born without them. This is *natural*.

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

Miracles express from above and outside of the nature of this world. They are supernatural, and what they are capable of IS UNLIMITED.

"Your mind has the power to make worlds."

"There is nothing your holiness cannot do."

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world."

"Miracles reflect the laws of eternity, not of time."

"I am under no laws but God's."

"one point already tells you that miracles reverse the physical or lower order laws."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. "

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you can see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His results, you will understand where He must be, and finally KNOW what He is."

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

When the mind dreams, it is capable of projecting any kind of image at will. It does not require time in order for anything to "evolve" within the mind's projected images.

The mind doesn't have to wait for time to pass, for its projected images to develop certain states or conditions. It is able to project NOW, absolutely any image.

It can project NOW an image of sickness, an image of a body which seemed to have aged, an image of a baby which was just born, an image of a body in great condition, or any kind of body at any point in "time", with absolutely NO NEED FOR TIME TO PASS in order for that body to ARRIVE AT that condition. It is projected in its "whatever state", RIGHT NOW.

You can easily see this at work when you dream at night. When your dream BEGINS, an entire environment can show up complete with what appears to be qualities and properties which, in time, would have to have taken many many years to establish.

That environment isn't "brand new" looking. It isn't the beginning of evolving an environment. It isn't the start of civilization. It isn't the beginning of the universe. Instead, the mind projects NOW images of bodies already in a state of decay, environments which must allegedly have been "built" by people over time, trees which must have "grown" in order to become as large as they seem, and events which allegedly could only come about through an entire sequences of prior events.

The mind puts all of this in place NOW. It does not take for you to dream for 100,000 years in order to have a dream of a planet Earth in which you are walking around. The dreaming mind INSTANTLY projects what APPEARS to be forms at a certain point in time, with a certain condition. It therefore instantly also invents HISTORY, all of the prior events which SEEM like they must have happened in order to lead to THIS moment. And yet, you only started sleeping an hour ago, and here you are dreaming of a world which has been around for a billion years.

With this in mind, realize this about your current mind also, in your waking states. As Jesus says, your waking dreams and nighttime dreams differ ONLY IN THEIR FORM. The mind that you have now is dreaming NOW, it is projecting an entire universe NOW, it is making images of stuff which "must have taken a very long time to arrive at" NOW, without having to go through ANY of that time.

Therefore, realize this. Whatever is showing up NOW, is an ILLUSION of something which took a very long time to evolve. ANY state of existing in form can be projected INSTANTLY. Any environment, any body state, any experience, any condition, any sickness, any objects, any condition of objects which allegedly have developed wear and decay and weathering can all be projected NOW, afresh, to LOOK LIKE they have been around for a million years. It makes you wonder, if history really exists, doesn't it?

And guess what.... your mind is projecting YOUR BODY in exactly the same way. The way that your body is showing up NOW, HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE PAST. And the key to understanding this is to understand what a decision is.

The ego's illusion is that, at some point in time, you make a decision. You make this momentary decision and something happens. This decision is then "locked into" in the past and cannot be changed. This is the idea of irreversible sin which you can do nothing to undo, and have to just suffer the consequences going forward. The consequences of this decision then seem to carry over into the future, over a long period of time. For example, it may SEEM as if, in time, you hurt your leg, and thereafter, your body had "leg problems", which seemed to sustain over time, and was "because of" this event which happened in the past. THIS IS NOT HOW DECISIONS WORK.

When you decide something, it means that you are typically choosing a new BELIEF. You are, essentially, making a change of "direction". Like turning corner. You establish a belief in your mind, which you have made be your "new truth", and then you KEEP THAT BELIEF. Because that belief is kept in your mind, it is CONSTANTLY REPROJECTING whatever that belief would produce.

So if a situation comes around where you choose and create an illusion of your leg being hurt, and you then put in place a belief that your leg is hurt, that there were "real consequences", you will KEEP THE BELIEF OVER TIME. Your mind will then continually REPROJECT a damaged body over, and over, and over, and over again.

At any given moment, the body has no existence of its own. At any given moment, the mind is projecting a BRAND NEW IMAGE, an out picturing of an inward condition. At any given moment, the body you had "just now" has DISAPPEARED, and it has been REPLACED with an entirely NEW PROJECTION.

An analogy to this is a digital movie. Movies are comprised of "frames", which are still images. Each frame is a snapshot of a given state of images. The projector (mind) SHOWS one image at a time. It shows a picture of a body in a certain state, then the frame ends, and is removed, and then the NEXT FRAME REPROJECTS an entirely *separate image*, nothing whatsoever to do with the previous image, showing a DIFFERENT PICTURE of a body.

Since this happens very very quickly, at every quantum of time, this creates an ILLUSION OF ANIMATION. Also, and this is the really key point... if the mind keeps projecting a very SIMILAR IMAGE across multiple frames or moments, it creates ****AN ILLUSION**** that there is something "consistent" or "continuous" present "over time".

This ILLUSION leads you to believe that there is some object, some form, which exists "through time". And because it seems to exists through time, YOU start to believe that IT HAS A LONG-TERM EXISTENCE OF ITS OWN. That somehow it is a "thing", an "object", a discrete ENTITY, that somehow continues on existing ON ITS OWN. *This is entirely an illusion*!

The course tells us that at NO point in time does the body really exist, being either an anticipation of the future, or a memory of the past. This is the illusion I am talking of. The *appearance* that some "thing" continues over time and therefore, is a consistent "thing" IN TIME, being maintained OVER TIME, that has ITS OWN EXISTENCE. The body does not have its own existence. It is a temporary IMAGE, which is SWITCHED OUT constantly, BY THE MIND, and replaced with a new image, every tiny instant of time.

Now. Realize then, that when you make a decision, forming a belief, you KEEP that belief in place OVER a long period of time. You keep it in the mind. The mind is a projector of the body "image", and the presence of a false belief in the mind will project an image of that false belief. It is not projected ONTO the body. It is projected AS the body. The body is not a discreet thing in its own right. Therefore, the mind DISTORTS its perception and PROJECTS a distorted, malformed, corrupted, disabled, limited, damaged picture. It therefore shows up as a picture of a BROKEN BODY, proving that the mind has not been healed because the mind believes separation is truth.

IF YOU KEEP that belief "over time", your mind will keep continually REPROJECTING body IMAGES (yes plural, over time, billions of them), which will create the ILLUSION that there is a "long term sickness". It will also create the illusion that the "cause" of the sickness was way in the past, at some single moment in time. IT WAS NOT. This is the ego's attempt to pretend that sin is in the distant past, you can never go back to the past to change your momentary decision, and therefore you are stuck with the consequences FOREVER. This is a bullshit lie, because this is not how decisions work and you can CHOOSE AGAIN AT ANY TIME.

The cause of the sickness is the content of the mind *NOW*. The mind NOW has a belief in sickness and NOW it is projecting a sick body. And the mind is perfectly capable of creating ANY ILLUSIONS OR IMAGES necessary in order to make it seem consistent, justified, believable, obeying "ego laws", even showing seeming evidence from "the past", or changes "over time", because the mind - just as when you DREAM at night, is perfectly capable of creating an ENTIRE UNIVERSE RIGHT NOW as an INSTANTANEOUS PROJECTION. Th year 2017 IS NOT the result of all previous years of "evolution", it is being projected NOW, including every sign and "evidence" that it SEEMS like it took billions of years to evolve to this point. That's an ILLUSION. The dream is being dreamed IN THE PRESENT and automatically INVENTS pictures of "there must have been a past" AT THE SAME TIME.

So, in terms of miracles of healing, what needs to happen is that the mind is healed of ITS BELIEF in some lie, some false ego belief. This false ego belief had been MAINTAINING LONG TERM SICKNESS showing up AS a sick body, because the MIND was "sick" for a long time. It had nothing to do with moments in time or one-off decisions. Decisions ARE CONSTANT. You change your mind by changing which ROAD you start walking down, and a you KEEP walking down that road ENDLESSLY until you change your mind and take a different direction. That's how decisions really work.

So if you seem to have "long term sickness", it has absolutely nothing to do with the body itself, it has nothing to do with the past, it has nothing to do with anything that happened outwardly over time, it has nothing to do with the world, it WAS NOT CAUSED BY ANYTHING EXTERNAL, it is ONLY being caused "now" by the beliefs that you are holding onto NOW, REPROJECTING that body image to look "similar to before", because the BELIEF is still similar to before. If the belief has not changed, what is projected is not going to change either. And that creates the illusion that the body is a "thing" in its own right which gets "its own sickness" and "has a mind of its own".

This ILLUSION of long-term sustained bodily conditions is responsible for deluding people into the belief that the sickness exists ON ITS OWN, or that the body ITSELF gets sick, or that something happens TO the body, or that the body is happening TO the mind. It is also entirely the reason why people who believe THE ILLUSION of continuation of the body, also believe that the body's condition WILL CONTINUE TO BE SICK, when the mind wakes up. This is EGO BULLSHIT! It is not true whatsoever. It's entirely an illusion.

There is NO REASON why the body should stay sick if the mind is healed. The ONLY REASON the body is even appearing WHATSOEVER, is because the mind is projecting it. The body is not showing up as a result of you "being born in the world." Your parents did NOT create your body. Your MIND put YOUR BODY into your mother's womb and manifested its form entirely ON ITS OWN, without any "real" processes occurring on the part of the mother. Everything to do with "having babies" is part of the ego's ILLUSION that what you are is born FROM THE WORLD, and not from your mind.

Since your mind is PROJECTING your body image RIGHT NOW, afresh, every moment, a complete new projection, complete with all the "stored beliefs" and "kept self-attack" which the mind is holding onto, causing the body to SEEM to show up again and again and again in roughly the same "form".... there is absolutely NO REASON WHY your mind could not project a COMPLETELY PERFECTLY HEALED BODY RIGHT NOW. This is what miracles are capable of showing!

That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind, proves the mind MUST be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this!

The mind PROJECTS the body. Every instant. Every moment. As an outward picturing of what the mind believes IN THAT MOMENT. The body does not show up FOR ANY OTHER REASON or as an effect of ANY OTHER CAUSE. The body is not caused by the world, or by matter, or by forms, or by anything external. Mind makes the body.

So guess what happens when you change your beliefs in your mind? Guess what happens when you undo your belief in separation from God? Guess what happens when you stop believing in attack? The body will CONTINUE to SHOW UP AS a projection of the content of your mind, but because your content has changed, the body that shows up WILL BE DIFFERENT!

It is entirely possible, therefore, for ANY AND EVERY alleged form of sickness, TO BE HEALED INSTANTLY! Jesus says this himself: "The patient could merely rise up without their aid and say, "I have no use for this." There is no form of sickness that would not be cured at once." Realizing that your mind's projections are occurring IN THE PRESENT, and that the past DOES NOT EXIST and has no influence over the present, should show you (if you get this), that when your mind changes, your body image MUST CHANGE. Your mind WILL project a different image, to reflect the change in beliefs.

The body CANNOT STAY SICK if your mind changes its beliefs. It cannot stay sick because IT HAS NO LIFE OF ITS OWN and it is purely a mental projection. Nothing else can make the sickness stay. Nothing else in the world or in time can cause the sickness to stay. THERE ARE NO CAUSES outside of the mind. The body is a results of YOUR DREAMING IT!

This should tell you that there is absolutely no grounds whatsoever for believing that sickness in the body will "stick around on its own" when you wake up, that somehow you will become "at peace with sickness", that you can be "happy about dying", that "sickness will stay" when the mind is healed, that you need to learn how to be at peace "in spite of sickness", or that it's even the teaching of the course that sickness is real and will CONTINUE ON ITS OWN when the mind is in a state of enlightenment. ABSOLUTE LIES! Makes no sense whatsoever, is absolutely untrue. This is NOT what happens. This is not how the mind works. Believing any of this bullshit demonstrates that your mind HAS NOT BEEN HEALED, because it means you believe in a reversal of cause and effect, your mind is continuing to maintain defenses against truth, and therefore the mind CANNOT BE AWAKE.

The state of the body is a DIRECT REFLECTION of what the mind PUTS OUT THERE, based on ITS BELIEF SYSTEM and the content of its sense of SELF. The body is a depiction of "this is what I think of myself". ALWAYS. It never deviates from that, it has no will or mind or power of its own to choose otherwise, NOTHING can make it change against the mind's will, and there are NO CAUSES external from the mind that can influence it's condition. NONE. Mind is cause, body is effect. Period.

THIS HAS TO MEAN, that when the mind TRULY and genuinely overcomes its obstacles to peace, is TRULY genuinely healed of beliefs in separation, uses of the body for attack, defenses against truth, long-term false beliefs and so on... the body that "shows up" being projected out from the mind's inner condition, MUST, *ABSOLUTELY MUST* show up as in PERFECT UNDISTORTED HEALTH!

I quote:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all." - ACIM

Key term here.... "CANNOT BE SICK" when the mind is holy. CANNOT. Will not maintain sickness, has no sickness, literally is IMPOSSIBLE TO BE SICK PHYSICALLY if the mind is healed. I know many people have resistance to this idea and think it's either not important or an incorrect focus or not what atonement is for. But atonement WILL BRING HEALING TO THE BODY because the mind that is holy will only project a holy image, i.e. an image of wholeness - a body which is not lacking or limited or broken in any way. If the body continues to show up as sick, something IS WRONG WITH THE MIND. Or to put it more accurately, the mind will STOP PROJECTING A SICK BODY and will only project a healthy body. Healing doesn't happen TO the body, it happens to the mind and the mind projects the body form to match.

This is law. This is how mind functions. The body is the mind's projection, it's dream. It ALWAYS CORRELATES to the state of the mind. Healed mind MUST only project a healed body, a sick mind MUST only project a sick body. This is also why Jesus teaches that we are meant to DEMONSTRATE THAT WE CANNOT BE HURT BY OUR BROTHER, by only ever showing him a HEALED BODY, proving that whatever he did or even tried to do, HAS NO EFFECT on your body because it has no effect on your mind, and your mind is totally in charge of what kind of image it projects. This therefore proves, if you are holy in mind, showing only a holy body, that your brother IS INNOCENT, through PROOF, because his attack DID NOT CAUSE YOU OR YOUR BODY TO CHANGE!

For miracles, there are no orders of difficulty, there is no hierarchy of illusions, and there is no PAST that has power over the present. Bodily states have nothing to do with time, and nothing to do with history, and nothing to do with the body seeming to be a "discrete thing" that someone can point to over time and say, that's a consistent object in its own right. It is not. It is a freshly projected DREAM, right now, this instant. When the instant is being projected from a mind of holiness - the miracle of the mind will completely dissolve and NOT PROJECT an image of sickness.

When the miracle occurs therefore, which is a movement towards God and an undoing of separation beliefs in the MIND, the body MUST SHOW THE CHANGE in some way. It can't refuse it, it can't block it, it can't prevent the projection of the mind's healed condition. The body has NO POWER over the mind whatsoever. It has to OBEY. And so this means it is ENTIRELY POSSIBLE, as Jesus said above, that if there is an instant of a miracle, shifting to a vertical perception and undoing the illusion of separation, which means letting go of a long-term belief, the mind CAN be healed INSTANTLY, and therefore it CAN project an image of the body having been healed *INSTANTLY*. One moment there was terrible sickness and suffering, the next moment it was simply not there. One moment the body seemed practically DEAD as a picture of the mind's belief in death, the next moment it was showing up as "alive", to represent the fact the mind is now ALIVE.

Instantaneous! No delay whatsoever. Miracles in this way produce a skipping of TIME, they completely ignore ego laws, pay no attention to the past, have no regard for illusions of difficulty or severity or importance, and create an interval of time in which there is a shift towards God, into invisibility, which is why they heal THE MIND, which then projects a healed body IMAGE. This can happen absolutely instantly. One instant there was terrible sickness, the next, gone. Healed. Boom!

The illusion of a continuous body with continuous sickness is entirely within the LEVEL of the ego's dream. Miracles and the power of the MIND OVER MATTER, extends from an entirely higher LEVEL where the mind is the CAUSE of everything that shows up AS THE DREAM. Bodies that move, mountains that move, planets that move, is all being DREAMED by the mind. It has no will of its own. It has no effects of its own. There is literally nothing that your HOLINESS cannot do. There is nothing your MIND cannot do. Mind NEVER LOSES its creative power, even IF it is mis-creating images of false bodies on false planets in a false universe. Even IF it is creating an illusion of time, history, the past, a future, or anything other than realizing WE ARE PROJECTING ALL OF THIS ENTIRE UNIVERSE THIS INSTANT. It did not come from the past. It is happening in this illusion NOW.

Just as in our dreams at night, which differ only in their form, the waking world, planet earth, and all the people in it, are being projected NOW, in whatever condition they seem to be in, because the mind projecting them has false beliefs NOW, which MIGHT be similar to beliefs it had "just a moment ago", creating an ILLUSION of things being maintained over time. Nothing is being maintained over time but a KEPT BELEIF which has not been let go of. Time is an illusion. There is nothing keeping us asleep and nothing keeping planets in motion other than the mind CHOOSING TO DO SO OVER TIME.

There is no reason whatsoever in all the universe why you cannot be completely healed and whole in physical form and mind, RIGHT NOW. If you were to choose this, it would happen for you, right now. If you are showing sickness, and if you've had sickness for 30 years, it is because you are believing in sickness RIGHT NOW. It's got nothing to do with the past or anything that came before. NOTHING. You create your "reality" by creating your DREAM of what you want to be true RIGHT NOW. History has no power over the present - that's an ego illusion.

At no point in time does the body really EXIST, because it is only ever a projection in the NOW, not in time, and it does not even really exist in the now. A mind which has BELIEFS IN SEPARATION, will project a picture of a self WHO IS SEPARATE. This is what we call "the body". It's not a body. It's the MIND showing up with "body-formed" CONTENT, AS its BELIEF in being a separate individual. Such thoughts take "form". The body APPEARS because the mind is regarding ITSELF (spirit) as limited and separate in some way. It has false beliefs and a false sense of identity. This is what MAKES THE BODY.

To put this even more clearly, how you think of yourself is how you will SHOW UP. If you regard yourself as sinful and guilty, you will show up with a FORM OF SIN AND GUILT. As the course says, "the body is the idea of sin made real then projected outwards"!.... Literally this is what I've been saying in this post. if your mind believes "you" are "made of sin"... YOUR MIND will manifest an "image" of a "sinful self", which will "appear" as what people call "a body". That image is not really who you are. But it's what you think you are. Whatever you think you are, you will show up AS! If you think you are AN ILLUSION, you will show up AS AN ILLUSION. That's what makes the body appear. If you do not believe you are an illusion AT ALL, you will show up as - HAVING NO ILLUSORY BODY AT ALL - pure spirit.

WHEN the mind no longer has *ANY* false ideas about its identity, has no beliefs whatsoever, is aware of God, and does not believe in ANY form of victimhood, reversal of cause and effect, that the world is ANYTHING but your OWN DREAM, and that it is ALL coming from YOUR MIND, THEN.... what happens to the body? IT DISAPPEARS COMPLETELY!

A mind which is being entirely true to spirit, true to the true nature of YOURSELF, will show up as. .... TRANSPARENT! Transparency means total honesty. Total willingness to be aware of and ACCEPT WHAT IS, as it is, which means, no distortions, no illusions, no thoughts to the contrary, no limitations placed on SELF, and therefore the mind PROJECTS ETERNITY, projects LOVE, projects abstract God, projects LIGHT, projects absolute total lack of "forms of error", and therefore, STOPS PROJECTING A BODY. To those in the world, this will appear as though the body DISAPPEARS ENTIRELY. To the mind that is disappearing the body, IT IS NOW AWARE that the body WAS ALWAYS based on false beliefs, and has NO REALITY of its own, and NEVER EXISTED, and HAS NO TRUTH, and is not being KEPT by the PAST or the WORLD or any other cause outside of the mind. Therefore the mind stops supporting it, stops MAKING IT, and it stops showing up at all!

This is how Jesus made his body DISAPPEAR, as given in the "extra notes to Helen" after the course, where he stated that he finally recognized the last illusion - that death was not real, and therefore, had no further need for the body, and therefore, caused it to DISAPPEAR, because all that was TRUE, all that could REMAIN, was pure spirit at one with its mind, fused with God, in absolute eternal truth and atonement. This is how YOU LEAVE THE DREAM. Through truth, not through death, not through sickness, not through suffering, not through the body going through a death process. Through making it VANISH, because the mind HAS NO ILLUSORY CONTENT IN IT, and therefore STOPS PROJECTING THE BODY!

There is no body. There is no world. There is no sickness. There is no death. There is no sin. There is no guilt. There is no fear. There is no separation. There is no time. There is no space. There are no forms. There is no planet earth or physical universe. There is no consistency over time in the world. There are no sicknesses which last on their own. There is no life or power or will or mind in the body or in the world. The world has no effect and is not the cause or the birthplace of anything.

You do not need a body to exist because you are IMMORTAL SPIRIT. You are as God created you, AS SPIRIT, not as an ILLUSORY BODY IMAGE. You are not a projection of a sick mind. You are ONLY IMMORTAL SPIRIT. This is the only truth about you. Everything to do with the body is a lie.

The body will and MUST become "healthy" BEFORE you awaken. It cannot stay sick if the mind is to be healthy. A healthy mind WILL project a healthy body. The body must go through "becoming healthier" "over time" as the mind gradually is healed. Sicknesses must fall away "over time". A sick body is proof that the mind IS FURTHER REMOVED from God than a healthy body. "A broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." This is why, before awakening, bodies WILL and MUST become healthier, and therefore health will be enjoyed more, and healthy bodies feature in HAPPIER DREAMS, which precede awakening.

Making the body healthier per-se is not the ULTIMATE goal, because the body ITSELF is a picture of separation and sickness. But before that ultimate goal is reached, the body WILL BE HEALED and sickness WILL be undone and the dead WILL BE RAISED and all forms of "things which cannot be undone" will be undone.

I quote:

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given unto you in Earth and Heaven. There is nothing you cannot do."

Miracles CAN DO ANYTHING, CAN HEAL ANYTHING, CAN REVERSE ANYTHING, even death. If miracles could not undo death, we would be STUCK HERE FOREVER. There is NOTHING your holiness cannot do. You are the Son of God! You are not at the effect of the world and you are IMMORTAL.

In heaven, we are powerful creative beings and co-creators with God. The proper use of our creative power is constructive and cooperative and aligned with God's will. We create only perfection, beauty, happiness and eternal life.

"Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and the holy. Do not lose sight of this."

"In reality, this is his ONLY choice, because his free will was made for his own joy in creating the perfect."

God gave us freedom to create, but that freedom includes the potential ability to TRY to use freedom to imprison freedom, to create something without extending God, to will that we be unwilling, and to deny reality.

This mis-use of creative power that essentially runs against the very nature of creative power itself, produces what's called a "mis-creation". It results in nightmarish hallucinations of impossible things happening, a world without God, a place of suffering and mortality. These "creations" are the result of mis-guided, insane, contradictory, amateurish and childish uses of creative power.

"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."

"The creation of the Soul itself has already been perfectly accomplished, but the creation BY Souls has not."

The stuff we mis-create (make), which includes spacetime and Earth and bodies and death, is like a lower and more primitive form of expression. It's really an attempt to create a dead-end, or a world which cannot co-create and cannot live forever.

We use our infinite power to create an uncreative world that we do not want. We're still being essentially creative, but we're creating stuff that isn't ultimately real or true or alive. The "content" that we come up with isn't aligned with God's nature. Like we've "devolved" somewhat and everything we create is lacking in some way (lack of love=sin - a world of sin).

"Miscreation is still a genuine creative act in terms of the underlying IMPULSE, but NOT in terms of the CONTENT of the creation."

"The instinct for creation is NOT obliterated in miscreation. That is why it is always invested with reality."

"You are much too tolerant of Mind-wandering, thus passively condoning its miscreation."

"While the miscreation is NECESSARILY believed in by its own creator, it does not exist at all at the level of true Creation."

"Both the Separation and the fear were MISCREATIONS of the mind, which have to be undone."

So essentially mind has one of two "modes", it can either create constructively in line with God and love, or it can mis-create which produces fearful things which seem to lack perfection and do not last.

If we completely leave out any sense of judgement about miscreation being wrong, or a sin, or something to be guilty for, or to attack the miscreation or condemn it in any way, we would see that it is simply a mistake. It is just a mis-use of the mind by someone that doesn't recognize the futility and self-deception and pointlessness and confusion that is inherent in trying to create the uncreateful.

We could look upon such miscreations, such as Earth, without any judgement. We could think of it as like the creation of a child that has not learned or perfected or mastered its abilities yet. It makes things which are broken, primitive, don't work, contradict themselves, are full of limits, are ugly, designed to malfunction and to fall short.

And then we could consider what God's attitude would be as a loving parent. God would not condemn or hate or judge harshly what had been mis-created by the child. He would recognize the shortcomings, the mistakes, the limitations of what had been made, but would see it as at least a "good first effort" by his children, with potential for improvement. And he would encourage them to continue perfecting the use of their creative power.

"It is curious that the perfect must now be perfected. In fact, it is impossible. But you must remember that when you put yourselves in an impossible situation, you believed that the impossible WAS possible."

If we think of the world therefore as "somewhat bad, not all that bad, a good try" ... recognizing it for what it is and is not, realizing the mistakes inherent in its making, we can be what we call "forgiving" toward it.

Forgiveness could be described as a loving attitude that you have towards something unloving. A less limited viewpoint towards the limited. A more inclusive mindset towards something made to exclude. A less judgemental or attacking perspective on something which was made as an attempted attack on God.

Instead of the world being seen as a horrible hellscape, or as a half-empty cup, we can see the half-full cup and at least give the son of God credit for "trying" (lol). Even if that trying involved some failing. We can let the world be the limited broken thing that it is, while being mindful to "do better in future". To master our creative power and to create greater higher works of art that are more aligned with God and more in-keeping with sanity and harmony with eternal life.

God doesn't condemn or judge our mis-created world. But he would rather that we return to co-creatorship in heaven with him to create only the eternal and the loving.

"God offers the world salvation; your judgment would condemn it. God says there is no death; your judgment sees but death as the inevitable end of life. God's Word assures you that He loves the world; your judgment says it is unlovable. Who is right? For one of you is wrong. It must be so."

It sounds like maybe we have a guilty conscience for what we think we've made, doesn't it? A guilt over an attack on God, a guilt about having mis-created, a hatred of what we mis-created, a sense of shame and fear that the hideous thing we made is lurching at us and trying to kill us, even though we are its maker. It's like we made a terrible mistake (a supposed sin) by mis-creating, and it induced guilt, and now we're living with the fallout of believing God would hate us for it.

Jesus also warns us that if we somehow regard the world as a sin, something to be hated, even destroyed, then we're actually denying the fact that we have very powerful minds that can create entire worlds. We need to acknowledge what we HAVE "created", even if it was in a spirit of fear and murder (unmiraculous creation), as being a not-entirely-evil "first attempt" that at least demonstrates the sheer power we DO have to create, even if WHAT we created falls short in so many ways.

"...it is not necessary to protect the mind by denying the un-mindful (physical). There is little doubt that the mind can miscreate. If one denies this unfortunate aspect of its power, one is also denying the power itself.)"

Earth and its surroundings, spacetime, is simply something we've mis-created in a mis-use of our divine power, in a form which is unlike what God would create, and of a nature which tends to attack itself. It is seemingly partly creative and partly destructive, partly good and partly evil, partly light and partly dark. It's an expression of the belief that an opposite to God is possible, even if such a belief is mistaken.

What we created (made, dreamed, hallucinated) is not real and cannot last. But for what it is, it at least shows that we do have infinite power and we did come up with something. And we keep mis-creating horrible nightmares as we go along. It's just that we need to create higher, better, and more loving creations. We need a higher prayer, a higher song, a better way, a more beautiful content.

Meanwhile, in our forgiveness of what we did mis-create, we must find a way to acknowledge and respect its maker. Even if we did "a shit job of it", it at least reveals some of our qualities, here and there. There are aspects to the world which are symbolic of light things, as well as dark things.

There are some forms of beauty, forgiveness is an earthly form of love, bodies can be repurposed to serve the mind, and perhaps the decrepit shit-heap that we came up with isn't entirely devoid of traces of the son of God's perfection. Even in subtle ways perhaps there is a trace of beauty, of order, of health, of cooperation, of peace, and of love, intermingled with the mis-created forms.

"Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release."

"All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently across chaos, and removing all illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God's perfection."

We made a chaotic universe, complete with every imaginable form of limitation and difficulty and problem and struggle. A world whose nature and laws are not the perfect unity and harmony of heaven, and which indeed attempts to be as opposite and lacking as possible.

But we still must look on the brighter side and find the proper higher interpretation of it. The way God would look upon the rudimentary and somewhat laughable deformities made by an inexperienced child. The world is what it is, complete with all its faults and partial symbols of heaven. And it will end, because it mis-created as an idea of limiting existence and life.

In heaven perfection is even greater, even more broad, even more natural and ever-present. It is the absolutely perfectly divine expression of a perfect creator. And it is your true home in which you co-create absolute perfection and beauty with God.

"Forgiveness is an earthly form of love which as it is in Heaven has no form. Yet what is needed here is given here as it is needed. In this form you can fulfill your function even here, although what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still."

"From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home. And there, he knows that he has ALWAYS rested there in peace."

Everything about practicing the Course could be described as moving "backwards". Accustomed to how the ego operates always "forwards" this can at first seem counter-intuitive and a difficult "direction" for the mind to operate in.

Purification and correction are entirely geared towards a backwards motion, such as retracing your steps, seeking inward rather than outward, undoing, reversing, collapsing, deflating ego, re-winding time, digging deeper to find the true inner cause, looking "behind", getting to the core of oneself, going within, taking attention away from illusions, becoming whole, acknowledging what already is, accepting what is already true, receiving what is already given, lifting away layers of false belief, recognizing things for how they are, taking back projections, claiming responsibility for yourself, re-owning yourself, coming back to center, un-ravelling, seeking back through time to when beliefs were formed, reversing the effects of sin, cancelling, deleting, removing, restoring to a former state, moving backward to before any sense of something happening, returning to innocence, becoming aware of love which is already present, listening, receiving, accepting, allowing, reversing sickness and death, resurrection etc.

Notice that all of these procedures take you from being externally focused to focusing within, in the direction of yourself. The truth is inside of you. All of these actions return you to yourself.

Now, the ego is the total opposite of this in every way. The ego wants to always add something, increase denial, hide stuff behind new layers of illusions, implement things, find success, seek outside yourself, lose yourself, forget who you are, move away from yourself and God, project, attack, point a finger of blame away from you, destroy others, fight with an opposing will, acquire, get, consume the external (food etc), implement magical solutions which undo nothing, add lie upon lie, twist and distort things out of recognition, get rid of sin onto others, disassociate from yourself, believe that cause is outside of you, see yourself as an effect of the external, positioning yourself as a victim of something separate, pursuing wild goose chases and dead ends, running away from God, becoming alone and isolated, losing your mind and sanity, fragmentation, making others responsible for your existence, trying to get someone else to choose for you, trying to get someone else to love for you or to wake you up, going to sleep, living in ignorance, becoming unconscious, entering darkness, achieve, strive for goals, develop an image, accumulate and build stuff that never existed, fill the emptiness with idols, idol worship, seeking external salvation, believing that things outside you can save you and solve all problems, being sick as a result of an external cause, dying by someone else's hand, listening to the ego's counsel, making things worse, an eye for an eye, waging war, murder, etc.

Notice that all of these actions are in an outward direction, away from yourself. They are all designed to disconnect you from God and put distance between you and God and therefore between you and yourself. They take you away from yourself and place every attribute of yourself outside of you into someone else's hands.

The main difficulty I find is that having been in the ego mindset for such a long time, my mind has sort of become very used to or unconsciously has formed habits whereby the mind moves in a direction away from myself. It pursues the external and thinks in externalizing ways. It's like there's all these arrows pointing outward and it seems to make the mind "flow" in that direction automatically. Even normal "thinking" processes seem to head in the direction of the external and these are just accepted as automatic or "normal".

So then when we come to the Course, our mind is coming up against a set of truths and techniques which are all INWARD pointing, and basically flowing in totally the OPPOSITE direction to the ego's thought system. They all point towards God, towards your true self, towards what is inside of you already. Even just the simple idea that you need not seek to find love or teach love because that is what you are but that you need to REMOVE the obstacles you've built against it. We are not accustomed to REMOVING anything. We're accustomed to believing that we LACK God and therefore need to go seek for specialness and ADD it to ourselves in order to "become" loving or spiritual. That's totally the ego, KEEPING its belief in sin and hiding it and then pretending to try to find solutions to it externally, where solutions do not exist, and thus building layer upon layer of denial and failure. It's all the authority problem, believing we can add to or change God's creation into something better or more true.

So it's quite difficult to get the mind to even move in the direction of thinking inwards, thinking upwards, thinking IN REVERSE, or thinking towards what ALREADY EXISTS within you. To think in reverse means to go from where your mind is at to what came BEFORE it, rather than going from where your mind is at and proceeding forwards to some kind of next step. It seems alien. It seems unnatural at first. It seems to take steps that bring all of the illusion into question, all assumptions are undermined, and all beliefs have to be examined and exhumed and tossed out, all values are brought into question, every attachment has to be surrendered, all external structures are collapsed, and your whole life is brought into question. And that's not what the ego wants at all, and it's not how we're used to thinking. To question everything, to question sin and sickness and death. To assume nothing, and to believe nothing that even our body's senses are telling us. To travel backwards up the chain of causality to where we came from.

You are already as God created you, you are already love, you are already perfect, there is NOTHING you can add to God's creation or Kingdom other than to increase what is already in it, which is perfect joy and love and happiness. And you are already WHOLE, already complete, needing nothing, lacking nothing. All of this other stuff that you keep trying to deal with by ADDING or CHANGING layers of illusions, are ego solutions and ways of dealing with this, really attempts to hide it even more.

So like, something happens and your ego steps in with a reaction and says, oh my God, this thing is so externally real, it is really happening, and the future is going to suck, so I better do something about this. I know, I'm going to do this and that... and then comes up with a long list of reactions and plans and solutions which it is going to DO, to tackle what it itself made real, as though something really occurred. It creates this entire "chain of thought" or train of thought, which goes from "here" to way off in the distance down all kinds of twists and turns, taking you away from presence. We need to stop the train before it even leaves the station, get off it, and then look backwards down the tracks to where we CAME FROM and go in THAT direction, undoing, backtracking, reversing and returning, inwardly and upwardly BACK to the truth, BACK to the answer to end all questions, and BACK Home to God.

To think with Holy Spirit is to think BACKWARDS. This requires us to initially STOP and put the pause button on. Freeze-frame things. Freeze the entire scenario and just observe what it contains, from a big perspective. And then start to REVERSE the steps we have already taken, to backtrack, to look at our real hidden motives (secret sins/hates etc), and to UNDO layer upon layer of false beliefs and projections and stuff that we basically tried to ADD to ourselves already, that has led to us witnessing a falsely perceived situation. But this seems awkward and counter-intuitive - or at least counter-ego. It's therefore essentially all about letting go and letting God, relinquishing attachments, surrendering to what is already true, accepting God as God is, returning to yourself, and becoming EMPTY of all the stuff that you "added" to yourself to try to make yourself become something you are not - different to how God created you (and how you still are, buried under the ego lies).

To question... "has this even really happened" - that's a totally backwards step which brings into question any ASSUMPTION that the ego has made, and digs way deeper into what is happening than to react to it and try to fix it or attack it with Course quotes or to deny it with fake positivity or to build a spiritual ego to defend against it (and keep it). To stop and go backwards, to ask, is this even real? Why do I believe this? Where is my perception coming from? Why have I chosen this? How did I put this in place myself? Who am I really underneath this? Is this really true of me? Not ACCEPTING stuff into your mind.

As Jesus says, whatever you accept into your mind, it becomes real to you. The ego automatically is just accepting everything "into" the mind like a black hole sucking the life out of everything. We have to learn to stop that, to think in reverse, and to cancel the ego, to go within, to reverse our thinking processes and develop this new "inward direction" which flows away from illusions and towards the PRE-EXISTING truth and love within us, which is already there and is already perfect. To ACKNOWLEDGE what is already true and accept it, rather than trying to REPLACE it or cover it up or deny it with stuff we MAKE (invent/add) with the ego.

At first this kind of backwards thinking is not at all easy for the mind to do. It seems like the mind has become "wired" to think forwards with the ego, outwardly. But gradually over time as you "practice" this and go through this PURIFICATION process, digging out and releasing old pain, getting to the bottom of things, finding yourself, taking back your power, returning to responsibility, accessing the power of choice, accepting atonement, it becomes easier because there is less of your own ego-aligned will working against you.

It's like you're literally learning how to reverse the direction of flow of a river. The mind has become separated from Spirit and is flowing out all by itself, broadcasting its own ideas and trying to replace God's creation with something of its own. That needs to be totally reversed and undone. We need to go back within and reconnect with God and plug ourselves back into the service of Spirit. It takes time to break out of the unconscious habits of flowing outward with the ego.

And there is a paradox here. Funnily enough, the more you go within and withdraw your projections away from the external and get to the core love that's already in you, THEN that's when love starts to radiate out from you. You don't become loving by trying to give give give without receiving.

You must receive inwards first. It's more like, you become a light bulb, the switch goes on, and you simply stay CENTERED and rooted in your true self, in Spirit, and you RADIATE from there, staying in that center at all times, instead of going away from yourself or abandoning or losing yourself. To the ego giving is a loss of yourself. To Spirit, giving INCREASES and you not only keep/hold onto your inner real self but you also SHARE that and it extends out on its own. Love extends because of what it is, without your help.

So to be more loving, stop dwelling on the external or on trying to sacrifice yourself or martyr yourself. Return inward to access awareness of love's presence and then simply SHINE from within. This is how God creates, by shining and radiating and sharing and extending, remaining true to Himself and still complete and anchored within Himself. He does not lose Himself in the process. This is how the Kingdom is increased. This is what it means to be the light of the world. To shine from within rather than to lose yourself. To become an intensely bright light which goes out from within. You have to BE WITHIN first in order to do that, and stay there. This outward shining is CREATION, and it is the same thing as sharing and extending. It is how God created you to begin with. And in that light you have never stopped being God's innocent child.

"The world goes against your nature, because it is out of accord with God's laws. The world perceives orders of difficulty in EVERYTHING. This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable. "

Ok. First of all you need to realize the nature of God, in order to realize why this world is totally opposite to his nature.

God is omnipresent. That means "god is everywhere" or present everywhere. But if you think of God perhaps in terms of taking up "space", you might be tempted to think God is a giant object the size of the universe. And from that you might think, PART of God is over there on that side of the galaxy, and another PART of God is over here on this side. But this is not how God is.

All of God, his entire being, all of his mind, all of his self, every part of his entire existence, is FULLY PRESENT, right here in this specific location. AND YET.... at the same time, simultaneously, ALL OF GOD, his entire being, all his mind and self and existence, is "over there" in that other specific location. And in fact in all locations. God defies the limits of spacetime.

He does not compromise. He does not lack. He does not exist based on rules where if part of him is in one place, that part cannot be in another place. That's not his law or nature. God transcends every kind of limit and way in which you think all of Him couldn't possibly be showing up in multiple locations at once. He is totally unlike anything you know in this world.

Now. Let's contrast that against the physical world and the nature of physical matter.

In this world, I think you'll agree, that when an object is in one location, it is not in another location. If I am sitting on my chair, I am not sitting on the couch. If you are driving down Main street, you are not driving down Washington street.

In this world, there is compromise everywhere. There is limitation everywhere. Nothing is shared. No two people can have the same thing at the same time. There isn't anything that can be both FULLY here, and FULLY there. Everything is forced to be partial, limited, finite, restricted to ONE location, and SEPARATED OFF from all other locations.

Here in this world, I cannot give you the contents of my wallet, without lacking it. Here, to give is to sacrifice. Giving here is loss. And by this I mean, at a PHYSICAL LEVEL. Physical sacrifice and loss. It's taking place at the material level regardless of your perception. I cannot give you 100% of my bottle of cocacola and have anything LEFT to drink myself. There is no REAL SHARING. There is no state in which we BOTH can have EVERYTHING at the same time.

And what this produces is a world where the DIFFERENCES OF FORM paint a picture of scarcity, sacrifice, competition, lack, loss, incompleteness, un-wholeness, limitation, contradiction, attack, an inability to share, disconnection and disassociation between particles of matter, nothing ever being in the same place at the same time, nothing overlapping, nothing being joined, nothing being ONE.

Physical matter is a picture of "what is it like, to be TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the nature of God". What is it like, if God were to be NOT fully present anywhere. What would it be like, if limitations were placed on omnipresence so that if all of something is in one place, there is NOTHING LEFT to be in another place. This runs totally contrary to God's nature.

So then the physical forms themselves, are MADE OF, and are locked into, a representation of something UNNATURAL, a system or a state of existence where there are separations everywhere, everything is fundamentally different, forms do not share anything, everything is isolated and excluded. Trying to get any piece of matter to SHARE, would result in an atomic explosion and death.

"The world was made as an attack on God."

The attack is accomplished by making a world which DENIES Him, "the world was made as a place where God could not enter", which shuts out his nature, and which paints a PICTURE of THE TOTAL OPPOSITE to heaven. It is a picture of the annihilation of God's nature. It is a picture of the attempt to murder LIFE, by splitting everything apart, sharing NOTHING. Sharing is LIFE, because life extends and is one. Without any sharing, there is no life. Physical matter is DEATH. It is the picture of crucifixion of God's sin, it is made of the idea of the absence of reality, the absence of life, the absence of innocence, the absence of holiness.

It is a world of sin. PHYSICAL SIN. A picture of what SIN looks like, in form. Forms of error. Every physical object is an ERROR. Every physical object, in its form, in what you think is its "natural" state, which is 100% unnatural, is depicting a MISTAKE, an error, a sin. The idea of death and separation. The idea of differences being reality, and coming between God and himself, and splitting him up into fragments.

This is what sin IS. It's the idea that nothing is one. That death has replaced life. That omnipresence does not exist. That God's nature is NOT the nature of existence. That there is an outcome, a result, which is UNLIKE GOD. That it is natural for forms to murder each other. That just even an apple sitting on a table "not hurting anyone", IS SINNING. Its very FORM, is sin. It's shape, attacks other shapes. It lacks what other shapes have. All the fruits in a fruit bowl are a state of ATTACK and rejection and denial. They are all DIFFERENT, competing with each other, failing to be whole, failing to be holy, failing to be complete or full or identical to anything else. They all hate each other and do not want to join.

In Heaven, everything is created in the image and likeness of God's nature. All of his sons are identical in their nature. No-one has anything that the others don't have. There is SHARING, and overlap, and co-existence, and total oneness and intimacy. All things are JOINED. There is communion and communication. Real connection. Access. Everyone is everywhere. Everyone shares everything with everyone else. It is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the physical world of forms where every single spec of matter is SEPARATED OFF and isolated. Isolation is attack, attack is sin.

In this world, everything OPPOSES everything else. No two physical objects agree. There is no identicality. Even just a pile of stones sitting on the ground, are depicting SIN. They seem harmless but they are showing an image of "what is it like if the nature of God is totally opposed." They are nOT NATURAL. They are NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THERE. The stones are split apart from each other. They share nothing. There is a total communication breakdown.

When the Son of God put a fence around a part of his mind, he isolated off a part of the mind and tried to exclude it from SHARING WITH the whole rest of existence. He formed a body to SHUT OUT all other participants in the sharing of heaven, to not share anything WITH them, to stop them from sharing HIMSELF, and to stop himself from sharing THEM. This created a kind of isolated bubble in which he seems to be the only one who exists, and a nothing else exists within him. All others are excluded. God is excluded. And this produces a state of being SEPARATE - a separate self, which is ALONE and imprisoned by form.

ALL PHYSICAL OBJECTS DEPICT THIS STATE, whereby even an apple is the idea of "something existing all by itself cut off from everything else and sharing with no-one." No other object is allowed INSIDE the apple's space. Everything else is kept outside. There is no SHARING. The apple is a picture of isolation and loneliness. Of a separate self. Every PARTICLE of physical matter, every atom, every subatomic particle or quark or quantum or whatever, is an idea of SEPARATION. Separation seeming to have taken on a FORM. The form of sin and error. MATTER IS SIN. And it's sin because it's INSIDE YOUR MIND, because your mind is BIGGER THAN THE UNIVERSE having an idea WITHIN itself of a dreamworld made of death.

Even spacetime itself is the idea of sin. That there could be a space, or a container, in which some of what exists is in one place, but not in another. That something is withheld from sharing. That there is SELFISHNESS. Every physical form is selfish. It is a picture of being alone. Every form is lonely. Every BODY is a fence surrounding part of the mind, put there to shut it off from the rest and keep it isolated. Every single body, including humans and animals and insects and rocks and planets.

Time is the idea that something is different and separate now from what it was a moment ago. This is a total attack on God's nature. God is always the same. "Reality is a constant state." Anything which changes through time is an attack on eternity. It is sin. Time and space are ideas of sin being real.

If we boil it down, sin is the idea that cause and effect have been reversed. It's the idea that you are not an effect of God. It's the idea that you can cause real effects in reality against God's will, effects which are so permanent that they seem "solid". Jesus refers to "the granite block of sin" which the body's eyes CANNOT SEE PAST. All physical forms are blocks of sin.

So if sin is cause-effect reversal, the WORLD, which is a DREAM, is the idea that you are not the dreamer and the dream is dreaming you. When you believe that the world is the cause of you, you WILL perceive it as "real sin". Only when you do not BELIEVE what your EYES are showing you, recognize all FORMS as illusions and errors, and look PAST them to the truth with REASON, only then do you stop being tempted to believe the dream is the cause of you, or that the world is not "really sin". This is forgiveness. It's the recognition that in truth, at the level of true perception, the world is just a MISTAKE, not a real sin.

We made the world from sin, in sin, as sin. Its physicalness is sin. We made it to tempt us to believe in sin. We made the body to fixate on sin and SEE IT as if its real all around us. "The world is false perception." The body's eyes see WITH permanent false perception. IF you believe the eyes, you WILL line up your perception with the eye's images and believe what you see is REAL. And now sin is real to you. If you DON'T believe your eyes, and you stop believing in sin, you will STOP seeing the eye's images as reality. This takes you out of false perception. You now recognize the world, which was made to depict sin and death and crucifixion, is "just a mistake". Forgiven. The forgiven world is the world of sin recognized as just a mistake.

This recognition doesn't stop the world from LOOKING LIKE FORMS, however. It doesn't stop the world being run by ego rules of separation and sacrifice. It doesn't stop objects from not sharing with each other. It doesn't stop an apple from "resisting" being one with an orange. It doesn't stop the picture of crucifixion from still holding the FORM of the idea that God's nature is a lie. The body's eyes CAN ONLY look at sin and error as if real. Physical forms, while they seem to exist, WILL ALWAYS be a picture of crucifixion and sin! Their very NATURE runs contrary to God's nature.

But to see a picture of Christ instead of a picture of hell and sin, our MIND has to learn not to believe the APPEARANCE OF FORMS. To realize that physical matter is LYING. Physical matter is attempting to claim that God is not here and does not exist. It is trying to shut God's nature out so that you do not SEE God as he really is. So you have to learn, this PHYSICAL FORM, IS NOT TRUTH. It is sin and death. A picture of death. And all forms are forms of death, not life. They are death forms. Jesus talks of how they SEEM LIKE LIFE. But they are not. Animal's bodies are NOT REAL LIFE. Human bodies are not real life either.

This world is an illusion, based on sin. "You cannot behold the world and know God." If you are seeing FORMS, and if you are believing they are really there, you are not with God. Or at least, you are partially blocked from awareness of God. But Jesus would be more total... that either you are fully aware of God, or you are not aware at all. All expressions of love are maximal. What is not love, is murder.

This is a murderous world. Or more precisely, it is the contents of a murderous THOUGHT SYSTEM. This world is a SYSTEM of thinking, in which sin is greatly emphasized as true. And you SEE SIN with your eyes, everywhere you look in it. Its a dream of death. Only upon awakening in which there is no world and the world has disappeared, can you finally KNOW GOD and his omnipresent nature, which is TOTALLY UNLIKE THIS WORLD AND OPPOSITE IN EVERY WAY.

The form that something takes is NOT its meaning. A form is like an instance, or example of something, or a certain variant of its possible range of states, or a specific configuration amongst many possible configurations. Something can take on a form, or take one form, or another form. There can be "forms of" things. Shapes, sizes, parts, configurations, structures, pieces, objects, bodies, states, conditions, etc it's all forms.

When you believe that something about the form is truth, now you are saying that the form IS CONTENT. That its inherent meaning or reality is tied to its form. So now if we say, well, my banana is looking old a rotten, we might now take this to mean the banana is dying and is not edible. Versus an underripe banana which is more firm and green, we might think this MEANS it is not yet edible. And thus we lock the form into certain judgmental definitions of what they are and what they can do.

When we mistake the form that something takes, for what it MEANS, and we derived meaning FROM it or based on it, we are deceived. This means we are listening to an illusory world asking it to tell us what is true. Form IS NOT meaning. Form is not content. Form does not have ANY truth. It is unsubstantial and meaningless and nothing. All forms are fiction and illusions. They are forms of error. They are mistakes, deceptions, lies, illusions, dreams and wishes.

To understand that everything in this world does not MEAN anything, we have to recognize that the form anything takes cannot tell us what it MEANS. One configuration of objects does NOT tell us anything. A certain arrangement of parts does not really mean anything. A bigger object or a smaller object, a certain kind of material, a piece of machinery, old versus new, none of it means anything different.

When we are in a thought system where we seem to ASK the world of form to TELL US what it means, looking to it as a source of truth and to inform us of what is THERE and what is happening, based on its particular aspects, we're literally asking a meaningless nothingness to derive meaning from itself. That a certain body in a certain state means one thing, and a body in another state means something else.

We start to then believe that there can be a DIAGNOSIS. Or a prognosis. Or a judgement or evaluation of what condition something is in, and the possible outcomes that may be consequences of that specific state. As if that means something or would lead to possible futures or potentials, while shutting off the path to other possibilities that aren't "appropriate" for this specific form. Possibilities that the FORM "claims" is not possible, BECAUSE OF the form.

So now a dead body rotting and decaying is believed to MEAN an irreversible process is taking place and the decomposition PROVES that life has ended. This is all completely bullshit and made-up. The body in this state is really absolutely no different to a body running a marathon. If we are DECEIVED by the appearance of form, then we are BLINDED. ALL appearances, all forms, all configurations, all shapes and sizes and colors are utterly meaningless and nothing true can be derived from them.

"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?"

Recognizing all objects as EQUALLY meaningless, their forms now become irrelevant. Who cares if something is taking on a certain shape? What does it matter that there SEEMS to be a certain specific sickness? Why should our response or reaction be profoundly different when the FORM is in a certain state versus another? To have different responses or to react in fear is really a sign that you BELIEVE that the form MEANS something different in a hierarchy of illusions. That a body in "this state" means "its terribly bad", while a body in "that state" is "not cause for concern." This is all bullshit, both the good and the bad evaluations.

All forms are deceptions. That's why the world is an illusion. It SEEMS to be something that it is not. It appears to be something it isn't. IT IS NOT TRUTH. It attempts to demonstrate PROOF OF SIN, that sins and events and happenings are taking place as, as if the world and the body have some kind of power, causation, will, mind, or ability to produce certain specific outcomes, chain reactions, or consequences. None of these pretend causations are real. All of these forms are equally just fake images being projected. They are empty pictures on a blank screen.

This is why ACIM even starts out the workbook having you look around the room and identifying that none of this means anything. To apply a single response (unconditionality) to ALL illusory forms, to all objects, in order to train your mind in the recognition that the form DOES NOT MATTER. That the form IS NOT MEANING. That the form of one object is no more or less important or relevant or significant than another. To deprogram you from the belief that certain kinds of objects in certain conditions MEAN one thing while others are more preferable.

The world is just a giant soup of jumbled up bits and pieces of nothingness, scrambled together into untold seeming numbers of configurations, designed to make it look as if there are a great MANY DIFFERENT things. As if there are contrasts and conflicts and ways that one thing IS NOT LIKE another. That this object is not that object. That this sick body is distinct from that healthy body. These are all DECEPTIONS. All illusions, trying to make it seem like ONE THING is many things. That the ONE DREAM is composed of many parts. That the illusion of separation isn't just an illusion of separateness, but a collective of untold numbers.

The ONLY way to recognize that all objects are equal, is to recognize they are all equally THE SAME. And the since they are all illusions of difference, their differences cannot be TRUE. Their FORMS cannot be true, when they conflict and differ. To be truth they have to be IDENTICAL. But their forms are NOT identical, so sameness reveals that their forms are NOT TRUTH. And different forms cannot be KEPT if there is to be equality. Their forms and their appearances of difference must not BE reality, because they're all contradictory. Therefore ALL FORM IS A LIE.

Not one object means anything more or less than another. Not one body means anything more or less than another in any state or seeming condition. Extreme torment and death and suffering is not any worse, bigger, stronger, harder, more difficult to undo, or more powerful and causative, than the slightest hint of a disturbance. Form cannot be taken to be meaning, it cannot be content, it cannot tell you WHAT SOMETHING IS, and all it can do is present a smokescreen.

The world is nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's not there. Without its forms there is no world. It is empty and nothingness. A void of meaninglessness. And not one thing in it means anything at all. And so there is no order, and no levels of difficulty, and no hierarchy, and no inherent meaning in any of it.

Therefore miracles respond to it with a single response, an unconditional response, which must be love, because only love can be unconditional. And so to recognize the world is all nothing is to love it, and light will shine away the darkness of forms and separations.

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

"There IS no meaning in the form, AND THERE WILL NEVER BE. "

"What is perceived takes many forms, but NONE has meaning."

"Realize that, whatever form they take, they have no meaning and no power."

"Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

"You have not found your happiness in foreign places, and in alien forms which have no meaning to you"

"Bodies may battle, but the clash of forms is meaningless."

"For here is nothingness, where neither birth nor death is real, nor any form in the misshapen mind that spawned it has any meaning in the Mind of God."

"Take not the form for content"

"Elusive happiness, or happiness in changing forms that shift with time and place, is an illusion that has no meaning."

"What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His. Therefore, it has no meaning."

"I do not choose to value what is totally insane and has no meaning."

"Would God have left the meaning of the world to YOUR interpretation? If He had, it HAS no meaning. For it cannot be that meaning changes constantly, and yet is true."

"The world you made is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless "laws," and without meaning of ANY kind."

Let's talk a bit about this notion that all you have to do is transcend "what's happening" in order to be at peace.

The major assumption here is that stuff is happening "on its own". The world is ticking over, events are occurring out of nowhere, no-one is necessarily responsible for making anything happen, attack thoughts pop into the mind seemingly out of nowhere, shit just happens, suffering happens, sickness happens, death happens. Seemingly all on its own with no input from you. So then you try to escape it.

This assumption is only possible if you perceive yourself as having NOTHING whatsoever to do with "causing" the world to be this way, causing sickness, causing suffering or death. The viewpoint is one of total powerlessness, in which the world seems to be the CAUSE OF YOU, the dream decides your fate, things happen to you against your will, and you are entirely at the effect of the world. It's a position of victimhood.

But this for everyone is usually the kind of mindset that you start out with, in the ego, identified with a limited body, perceiving the world as a huge objective reality that does stuff on its own. And then you come to the course and start trying to digest its teachings WITHIN that kind of viewpoint without questioning it. Without questioning the assumption that the world is running on autopilot, or that the body gets sick because of outside influences, or that death will "happen to you" when it decides to.

Finding yourself in a world that's attacking you (causing you, making you affected), you seek for SALVATION or ESCAPE, and you think that you will find it by some kind of AVOIDANCE of what's happening. That if you could crawl into a hole and hide and get away from the causes, you would find some kind of peace. This is entirely an ego strategy. It keeps the attacking world real, maintains external causes, and keeps you at the effect of everything, but then persuades you that if you will step back and sit on the fence just enough maybe you'll be beyond the reach of its influence. That it's totally normal for a hideous disease to be ripping the body apart so long as you're smiling, or that somehow it's natural to still get angry but "observe" the anger from a detached viewpoint. Split mind anyone?

This leads many people along the EGO path of seeking for salvation by some kind of "transcending" of what is happening. That is, firmly believing that what happens is entirely permanently outside your control, you have no power over it, it will STILL continue to do what it does, and there is nothing you can really to do STOP IT. And that therefore your only solution is to "change your mind about it" or try to "see it in a different way" so that, perhaps, you can WELCOME IT, or not interpret it as an attack, or position yourself beyond it somehow.

And so then the entire effort to progress spiritually becomes about a kind of withdrawal from the world, an attempt to transcend it, an attempt to bypass it, an attempt to KEEP THE WORLD functioning the way it does, keep the attacks, keep the wars, keep the sickness, keep the suffering, and keep the death, but find some way to "be at peace with it". Or to be happy "in spite of it".

The thing is, there is SOME truth to this, because the world is in fact not real, it's a dream, and taking it seriously makes you unhappier. Believing in its illusions and temptations produces stress. Reacting to it increases suffering. etc. So you reason that you will find more peace if you will sort of calm yourself down, become tranquil, try not to be upset by it and thus reach some kind of peaceful state. While the world keeps being murderous against your will. And then along comes death, and what can you do to stop it? Hold up a peace sign? Throw some vitamin water at it?

What happens here is that people find a kind of escape from suffering through avoidance and "re-framing". It's perfectly legitimate to reframe the world because the world is a dream and not to be taken seriously. But at the same time, while people will take "causality" away from the world as if to say, you are no longer "at the effect of" the world, they still won't go so far as to OWN THE CAUSALITY. They won't admit to having power over the world, nor admit to DREAMING IT. It's like becoming a passive dreamer who is still unconscious of the fact that the world is coming from their own mind.

They see no purpose or power or ability to actually INFLUENCE it in any way. And this is a result of the ASSUMPTION that the state of major limitation you find yourself in is "normal" and natural. In this state there has been no transcendence of the order of difficulty in miracles. The hierarchy of illusions has not been dismantled or flattened. The power of the mind has not been admitted to or owned or mastered. Miracles are not being performed. Healing is missing. In effect, every way in which you would be THE CAUSE OF WHAT HAPPENS, is completely ignored.

So what happens is, we still believe the world is the cause of everything, the world still spins on its own, events still happen outside your control, people still attack, the environment still causes your body to be sick, the death still decides when your time is up. But supposedly you are happy and at peace. And yet you are powerless. Passive. An "observer". A fence-sitter. Sitting there on a cloud doing basically nothing to engage with the world, heal sickness, cast out death or overcome the LAWS that you made up to govern you.

If you are under no laws but God's, why are you pinned down by gravity? Why are you restricted by space and time? Why do you depend on air and food? Why when "sickness happens" do you not realise you PUT IT THERE? Why when death seems to loom are you not seeing that you HAVE POWER OVER SICKNESS AND DEATH BECAUSE YOU MADE THEM UP AND CAN ABOLISH THEM BOTH?

Being "not at the effect of the world" does NOT mean "I don't let the world affect me". It means YOU STOP HURTING YOURSELF. It means YOU take responsibility for CAUSING everything, and you choose to stop attacking yourself. It means you stop believing there even IS an outside cause or power or will or mind that can affect you against your will. It means you stop believing that the body EVER "gets sick" through any process other than YOUR MIND ATTACKING IT. And it also requires the recognition that even death has NO POWER OVER YOU, and therefore you DO NOT MAKE IT HAPPEN, and there is NO cause anywhere to make it happen against your will. Jesus: "SWEAR NOT TO DIE!"

This is the part of ACIM that so many poeple do not want to see or admit to or own up to. That the world is not simply "not causing you" to be upset, but that YOU ARE CAUSING IT. SOMEONE is responsible for EVERYTHING that happens. Nothing happens without a MIND CAUSING IT. The planet does not even EXIST without a mind dreaming it. Sickness does not happen unless a MIND decides to make sickness. Death does not occur unless some MIND CHOOSES to make death appear to happen.

It is not anywhere near enough to simply seek out being "at peace" in a kind of escape from "a real world that does stuff to me on its own". That is not mastery. That is not transcendence, it's avoidance. There is no power in that. It's a state of passivity and really not much different than laying down and allowing death to happen "on its own". Being not "affected by" something does not mean it still HAPPENS and you are "okay with it". You have to look at WHY does it even HAPPEN AT ALL? It happens because YOU are responsible for making it happen. That's a whole different ballgame.

It's not merely about what the world does and how you respond to it, it's about YOU ARE THE DREAMER WHO IS MAKING IT ALL HAPPEN. And therefore you can choose to NOT making it happen, or to undo anything you have made. It is a position of POWER. It is a position of being able to HEAL whatever occurs. It is a position of miracle working and supernatural power. It's not a state of contemplating your navel and becoming mostly peaceful then having the body "become sick and die" in a total display of victimhood.

You are to not be affected by the world. That does not mean the world still does stuff "on its own" to you against your will. It means realizing the world DOES NOT do stuff on its own, YOU DO IT, and then deciding to STOP DOING IT. So that the world CANNOT DO ANYTHING without your consent. Because you do it all to yourself. This is the secret of salvation. This is why there is no power or cause in the world capable of bringing oppression, making you suffer, sick, sad or afraid. The world is the EFFECT OF YOU. Which means you, in your unlimited nature, should be able to CHANGE IT any way you see fit. Because you are the dreamer.

It's also not enough to meditate and "watch thoughts come and go". WHO MAKES THE THOUGHTS? You do. Stopping making the thoughts is correcting the problem at its CAUSE, rather than allowing the thought-generation to continue and to then try to BYPASS it. That is not peace. A healed mind should not be GENERATING attack thoughts. There should be no need to "observe" thought processes, given that those troublesome thought processes should not even be HAPPENING in the first place. It's not your job to let attack thoughts keep occurring by try to sidestep or ignore them (actually a form of disassociation). It's your job to uproot those motherfuckers at their source and stop making them.

The course says not to seek to change the world, but to change your mind about the world. A lot of people SOTP THERE. But it goes on to say, that if you change your mind about the world, THE WHOLE WORLD WILL CHANGE. Because your mind has the power to CHANGE THE DREAM. That is a VASTLY different standpoint than one of "only" changing your mind "about it". You never really change your mind ABOUT the dream anyway.... as you change your mind, the dream changes. There is no "about", unless you believe that the world is a SEPARATE THING FROM YOUR MIND.

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

"You made the world."

"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts."

If your focus is to try to LET STUFF STILL HAPPEN and "just observe it", you are turning yourself into a fence-sitting inert powerless action-less miracle-less passive recipient of death.

Jesus states that "members of my party are ACTIVE WORKERS."

There is miracle mindedness, that is one thing. It's a state of true perception and readiness to perform miracles. But then there is MIRACLE DOING, or working, which is an ACT of CAUSING illusions to change or disappear. Miracle DOING is the part that so many are afraid of and do not want anything to do with. Because that means having power over the world and not just seeking out an escape from it.

"Your function on earth is healing." "You share the Holy Spirit's function on earth."

If you want to be a miracle WORKER, not just "miracle minded" or "transcendent", it has to go WAY beyond passivity or trying to meditate or trying to let stuff keep happening without any ABILITY to do anything about it. Faith without works is dead. You must EXTEND LOVE, CAUSE HEALING, and REVERSE DEATH. This is not a spectator sport UNTIL the entire sonship is awakened.

There really are only two states. Wholeness, which means sharing everything, and separateness, which means being excluded from the rest in selfishness.

"Selfishness is of the ego but self-fullness is of the Soul because that is how He created it."

"Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships (sharing) that imply BEING."

The whole practice of ACIM is simply the transition between the state of separation and the state of being joined together.

In the separated state, people believe the are only a small part of what exists, limited and cut off from the rest. Particularly the body seems to prove this, in that anything outside the body seems to be nothing to do with you. And by "being" a body you identify yourself as exclusively imprisoned inside of it, kept apart from everyone else.

In the shared state, you are the whole of everything, sharing everything with everyone fully. Everyone has everything simultaneously. We are all one. Like a collective consciousness or hive mind. A unified holographic experience where anything that applies to you applies to the whole. Everyone is included, nothing is left out, and anything you do or give you also receive.

So when Jesus is talking about forming a better relationship with your brothers, in which if you do something to them you are affected, he's simply reiterating that what you give you receive. It's simply the idea that you need to remember your true identity as the whole, and realize the implication of this.

If you are the whole, then anything you do to any part you also do it to yourself. Anything you give you receive it as well. Anything you cause, you experience the effects. Other people are a part of the whole with you, so any way that you relate to them you also relate to yourself.

It also extends to the transition between false and true perception. False perception is a focusing on separateness and exclusion, making things out to be not joined and not part of a whole. True perception is nothing more than a state of recognizing that the whole is in all the parts and every part contains the whole. That every mind contains every mind. That each brother is all brothers.

This leads to a sense of identity that transitions from being a separated-off self, which typically identifies with and as a body as a "separation device", different and unique, to sharing a singular nature with everyone in a single shared identification as christ. Christ is just another name for the shared aspect of the sonship, the sense that we are all one and are each other.

"Christ is the link that keeps you one with God, and guarantees that separation is no more than an illusion of despair."

So all your practice really needs to be, to "do the course" and awaken, is to transition your sense of who and what you are from being exclusively "only you", to including everyone and everything in what you are. To think of yourself as the whole, and not just a part. That you are an individual soul, but your soul is shared with others. To reclaim the part of you that shares, so that you relinquish selfishness without a loss of self.

To exclaim, "I am the whole", and to remember you are the whole, puts your mind in a position where you properly acknowledge the golden rule. Anything you do, anything you say, anything you express, anything you think or feel, teaches all the universe. Anything at all that comes from you also comes toward you. Giving and receiving are one. You give to the whole, as the whole. You receive the whole as a result. You are included in everything.

This simple idea that you are included in everything, is the undoing of separation. Separation means exclusion. If you are included in everything, you will have shared interests. That means that anything you do to another you do to yourself, and therefore it's in your own interest to treat others with love so that you will treat yourself will love. If you don't treat others with love, you will treat yourself with a lack of love, and will make yourself suffer. You will have done it to yourself.

The simple "secret of salvation" then, and the whole key to being saved from all suffering, sickness and death, is in this simple recognition that you are the whole of the sonship. You are the whole Kingdom of God. It's not just some place you go to and hang out in as an individually created being, it's literally who and what you are. You are the entire environment. You are a part of and hosted within the being if God. He is your home, and you are one with the whole of him and with everything he created. The kingdom of heaven is you.

By being the whole, whatever you claim applies to another applies to you. Recognizing you are the whole, you will only want to give to another what you would want to receive for yourself. If you have given something sinful to another then you've made yourself sinful, because you are included in the recipients. Every psychological email you send out is carbon-copied to you. You must learn to share with everyone, love everyone, and know everyone as your self.

Your whole motivation shifts from selfish interests to the good of all. Your application of self becomes universal and unconditional instead of limited or conditional. Your loving becomes unconditional, your relationships become unlimited, your response becomes singular and consistent, your mind becomes unified, you no longer register orders of difficulty or hierarchies of illusion, and your whole approach to anyone and anything is to know and love it as yourself. Knowing your brother as yourself is the way to know God.

When Jesus tells you that if you do something to another to you will do it to yourself, or that you're doing it all to yourself, he isn't saying that you're doing it exclusively to yourself. He's saying that you, as the whole, are doing it to the whole, and you are included in the whole. The secret of salvation is that you are doing it to yourself - AS THE WHOLE, and because you are the whole.

Everything you do is done to everyone. Inclusion is the law of God. It also means that if you change, you are also changing other people, which is why you are able to affect the minds of your brothers towards sickness or health. Your miracles resurrect them and give them what they have denied themselves, simply because your mind IS their mind.

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

"Your gratitude to each OTHER is the only gift I want. I will bring it to God for you, knowing that to know your brother IS to know God."

"Giving and receiving are one."

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

"The Kingdom CANNOT be found alone, and you who ARE the Kingdom cannot find YOURSELVES alone."

"You ARE the Kingdom of Heaven" "The Kingdom of Heaven IS you."

"We are Creation; we the Sons of God."

"The sonship is your soul."

"Let me remember I am one with God,

At one with all my brothers and my Self,

In everlasting holiness and peace."

"All that I give is given to myself."

"As you give you will receive. There is no plan but this for the salvation of the Son of God."

"It will be GIVEN you to see your brother's worth, when all you WANT for him is peace. And what you want for HIM, you will receive."

"Asking for EVERYTHING, you will RECEIVE it."

"You had everything when you were created just as everyone did."

"You WILL receive the message you give, because it is the message you WANT."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

All that I do I do unto myself.

If I attack, I suffer. But if I

forgive, salvation will be given me."

"The full appreciation of its self-fullness makes selfishness impossible, and extension inevitable."

"I (myself) will be healed as I let him teach me to heal (others)."

"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts."

"I am alone in nothing. Everything I think or say or do touches all the universe. A Son of God cannot think or speak or act in vain. He cannot be alone in anything. It is therefore in my power to change every mind along with mine, for mine is the power of God."

"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?"

"A miracle is a Universal Blessing from God through Me to all My Brothers."

"When I am healed I am not healed alone."

"So is he healed, and in his healing is his pupil healed with him."

"And by his healing IS his brother healed. Let THIS be your agreement with each one; that you be one with him and NOT apart."

"Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health."

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real."

"There IS no end to God and His Son, for we ARE the universe."

"The power of one mind CAN shine into another, because all the lamps of God were lit by the same spark."

"The sick must heal THEMSELVES, for the truth is IN them. But, having OBSCURED it, the light in ANOTHER mind must shine into theirs, because that light IS theirs."

Lately I've been noticing that .... my state of mind, has something to do with what happens. I know that sounds a bit far fetched to many people. But we are after all told that this world is a dream, and that our minds are dreaming it.

I see how sometimes events and the appearance of certain people seem to correlate to certain attitudes or modes that I'm in. Sometimes a freer happier mode seems to produce the appearance of certain types of people, while unhappier or angrier modes seem to produce other types.

One of the ways that I've noticed this manifesting is with the idea that "what you resist persists". For example if you are driving a car and some slow person is in front of you, and you resist them being there, they seem to linger more than if you let them be there. When you let them go and don't make them an obstacle, they seem to leave sooner. In a sense, the showing up of a roadblock or "reason to slow down" shows up when you are "pushing too hard" or rushing. It influences what happens.

I've seen also times where, if I am doing a healing and saying things which are truthful, such as a few times in the hospital recently, following those times I noticed how other people seemed to lighten up a lot and laugh more. The whole sort of "atmosphere" of the place changed, the people changed and their moods changed and the events became more supportive.

For sure I also find that if I am upset or angry or frustrated, I start producing things going wrong. More and more things seem to fall on the floor, break, slip out of reach, get in the way, or generally just become "more reasons to be annoyed." I don't think that this is merely a matter of being annoyed and interpreting them as annoying. I think there is actually an increase in the number of things that happen, which don't appear to happen in such a condensed way at other times. Mind mind is literally influencing what happens.

Sometimes I get a sense that there is a kind of "psychic weather", in which, let's say.... it seems like maybe there are some minds that are contributing to external conditions - to dream content. Certain events seem to transpire as though "put there" by the minds of certain people. It seems at times as if there is a kind of psychological war playing out, literally orchestrating changes in events and what objects or people show up, in a subtle but noticeable way.

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

Overall, I sense and notice more often, that the world in fact does appear to be a malleable dream. Not just some fixed physics-driven state of objective reality, but really a much more malleable fluid sort of "mix" of contributions and influences. It even appears to be possible that stuff which seems like it would've taken a long time to "plan" or "make possible", becomes possible complete with backstory, just to "fit" into place. As if the whole world just "changed" to line up with expectations.

There are some days when I wake up and I feel like everything has changed, in a subtle but noticeable way. Almost like as if you had jumped to a different "dimension" or "version" of the world, in which everyone and everything is subtly different in the same way.

I wouldn't be the first to claim this either, because there is plenty of evidence and stories out there about buildings appearing out of nowhere, strange correlations, sudden appearances or disappearances of things which couldn't seem possible, etc. Again suggesting that this world is not a fixed predictable place but rather a "mind-driven" realtime mixture of effects coming from the minds of people.

I think that in some way, the more that I become responsible for causation, as per the secret of salvation, and less of a victim, and perhaps stronger spiritually, I'm seeing more "influence" happening. Perhaps in the early stages of this development, but it does seem that my mind and focus and mood often influences the environment around me. Not merely in a subtle way as suggested in the heisenberg principle of quantum physics, but at even a much more "macrocosmic" level.

I feel this also points to having to also be more responsible and vigilant for thought, for more carefully managing my projections and my ego activities. After all, Jesus in ACIM also says that we need a healthy respect for the power of the mind....

"All miracle-workers HAVE to be trained that way. I have to be able to count on them. This means that I cannot allow them to leave their mind unguarded, or they will not be able to help me. ***Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation.*** Otherwise, the miracle will be necessary to set the mind ITSELF straight, a circular process which would hardly foster the time-collapse for which the miracle was intended. Nor would it induce the ***healthy respect that every miracle-worker must have for true cause and effect.***"

Notice here that Jesus says that mind is very powerful and we need to be careful about mis-creating. If we are indeed powerful creators, and we have power of mind over matter, and mind is stronger than bodies, etc... and mind knows its dreaming, then obviously mind is going to start being able to "control" what dream content there is, what happens, and what does not happen.

"Yet this world is ONLY in the mind of its maker, along with his REAL salvation. Do not believe it is outside of yourself, for only by recognizing WHERE it is, ***will you gain control over it***. For you DO have control over your mind, for the mind is the mechanism of decision."

This suggests to me that in fact the workbook lesson "my self is ruler of the universe" where "what happens is what i desire" is not merely suggesting that we live in an objective world where we are "okay with" whatever happens, but that in fact LITERALLY we actually CAUSE EVENTS TO HAPPEN. That we begin to orchestrate the dream, consciously. Perhaps we can call it "lucid dreaming" in a sense. Indeed the mind certainly seems to have an INFLUENCE.

What this suggests then is this quite profound idea.... As you awaken more, your mind becomes more powerful. It becomes more causal, or more focused or "in control" of more DELIBERATELY CHOOSING. And this results in actual effects. It causes the dream to change. Your mind actually dreams of a different world. Not simply that you dream of the same world in a different way, or interpret the world differently, but that you PRODUCE a different world. The so-called "physical world" literally turns into a different configuration.

This would mean that the mind actually has the power to change the dream world directly, to manipulate events, to cause objects to show up and disappear, to have power OVER matter, to quite literally manipulate the world through direct effects. This would mean that, for example, for a person of enough power, they do not merely walk "the world", they walk whichever kind of world they want to emanate.

They literally can cause events, and prevent events. Nothing happens without their consent. They begin to have control over the dream world, over objects, over what transpires and what doesn't. And perhaps they can even literally force death and attack not to happen. They can cause events to steer away from destruction and death. Just as ACIM states that the Holy Spirit can clear a path for you so that you are free from obstacles...

"He will go before you, making straight your path, and leaving in your way no stones to trip on, and no obstacles to bar your way. NOTHING you need will be denied you. ***Not one seeming difficulty but will melt away BEFORE you reach it.*** You need take thought for nothing, careless of everything except the only purpose that you would fulfill. As THAT was given you, so will its fulfillment be. God's guarantee will hold against ALL obstacles, for it rests on certainty, and NOT contingency. IT RESTS ON YOU. And what can be more certain than the Son of God?"

That is quite a radical interpretation of the course because it suggests we don't just "re-perceive" the world in a better way, but that in fact the world literally is OUR DREAM, our mind is literally THE CAUSE of it, and we literally can dream of something else, CAUSING literal physical-seeming things to change. Why would this NOT be the case, when the mind has the power to actually cause bodies to heal, and the dead to resurrect, and mountains to move, and storms to calm? Such a mind can, let's say, ALTER REALITY. And that's quite exciting and interesting. And it means MIRACLES CAN MODIFY DREAM CONTENT DIRECTLY.

Obviously someone would need to become very vigilant about heir mind, very careful NOT to mis-create, very careful not to deliberately cause "bad situations", very careful not to CHOOSE events in which there is suffering etc, and to only induce dream environments which are conducive to healing etc. But this doesn't mean they can't choose anything they want. Imagine that Jesus could manifest any object he wanted out of thin air. Imagine that Jesus could make things multiply out of nowhere, he could turn bodies into other bodies, and could make things disappear. Why not, when he was "ruler of the universe"?

Not a mere passive traveler in a foreign land, but an ACTIVE DREAMER. Indeed, a "miracle worker", someone who can literally transform ANY APPEARANCE into any other, manipulating space and time and matter as if it's something to play with. In which the laws of reality as the world knows it are violated, any there is NOTHING your holiness cannot do.

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

"But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. "

"The idea for today is a beginning step in dispelling the belief that your thoughts have no effect. Everything you see is the result of your thoughts. There is no exception to this fact."

"There is no point in lamenting the world. There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause. The effects will change automatically."

"Neutral thoughts are impossible because all thoughts have power. They will either make a false world or lead me to the real one. But thoughts cannot be without effects. As the world I see arises from my thinking errors, so will the real world rise before my eyes as I let my errors be corrected."

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

"I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body AND the power of the mind, by uniting MY will with that of my Creator, which naturally remembered the Soul and its own real purpose."

"Very few people appreciate the real power of the mind. Nobody remains fully aware of it all the time. This is inevitable in this world, because the human being has many things he must do, and cannot engage in constant thought-watching. However, if he hopes to spare himself from fear, there are some things he must realize, and realize them fully, at least some of the time."

"The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will."

"It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains.

It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not the real reason why you don't believe it.

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

"My Self is ruler of the universe. ... It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do."

It may be easier to understand the differences in perception, when you consider inanimate objects. Objects which appear to just sit there and do nothing at all.

A good example is a rock. It just sits there. It has no will or mind and isn't particularly alive. At the subatomic level maybe it wiggles around but over time it generally does nothing but vegetate. It cannot move itself, it cannot articulate an attack, it cannot think, it cannot cause of its own will. It has no power and is just a lump of stuff, inert and unmoving.

If you a walking by and you stub your toe on the rock, you might yell at the rock for seeming to attack you. In pain your anger projects and you find the rock to be an enemy. This is your perception of the rock. In your mind, you are giving meaning to the rock. You now believe the rock is a sinful enemy, a guilty attacker. And as you look at it with hate you see it as real and threatening.

But the rock is just sitting there. And if you come to your senses you have to admit that really the rock didn't do anything at all. It was all you. Your own movement caused you to stub your toe. The rock just sat uninvolved and uncausing. So is it really the rock's fault? No. It's something you did to yourself.

So then you admit ok, I am only thinking the rock is an evil sinner because I am choosing to project guilt and sin onto it. I'm framing it as sinful and believing it is an attacker. That's happening in my own mind. I'm projecting stuff onto it and it's making me perceive it as hated and unwanted.

Then you have to realize that since the rock isn't really the cause of the upset, that you are the one who actually attacked the rock with your toe, it's really your own doing. And now you take back your accusation. The rock isn't a person, so there's no point yelling at it and calling it names. It can't hear your swear-words.

You shift "your perception" from false to true. You decide to believe that the rock is innocent and harmless, not an attacker or an evil sinner. You recognize the rock as incapable of hurting you against your will. You realize it has no will or mind or power to do anything on its own. So it cannot have wanted to hurt you. It must be innocent. So now you're willing to believe the rock is not sinful, or guilty, or an attacker. The inverse of which is a belief that it is innocent, loveable, beautiful even.

Your mind is able to decide what it sees in the rock, ie what meaning it projects onto it. When the mind is deciding to project from love, it sees the rock in a loving way, which makes it appear as though the rock is lovable rather than hatable. And so now you love the rock, because you are projecting love, in spite of the rock's own nature.

But the rock isn't changing. The rock isnt inherently sinful, nor is it sinless. It doesn't really have its own meaning. In a way it's kind of like a neutral mirror. You actually see yourself in it. Whatever you think is true you visualize in it. You see refleted back to you what you put there to see. So the rock is doing its own thing, and you are having varying types of beliefs about it, seemingly independent of it.

It's possible to project a mental state of hell onto the world of rocks, just as it is possible to project a mental state of heaven's reflection onto the rocks. True perception can be very close to heaven's nature. You reach within and find love and peace and joy and light and shine it outward and light up the world with it. What appeared to be a harmful rock is now a healing rock. What used to be an attacking rock is an innocent rock.

This is the translation, in your mind, of earth into heaven's reflection. A translation is an interpretative process which evaluates the meaning of something. It gives meaning to it, based on what you believe or WANT it to mean. This is in spite of any seemingly inherent properties that the thing has. Because it has none.

Earth, the world, the galaxies, space time, rocks and plants and animals, human bodies, cities and forests etc, is all essentially a neutral mirror. It's a veil of images which the mind is making and inventing. It holds pictures of forms and illusions of life and death. And yet it is a meaningless world. And so it only has the meaning that you GIVE to it. "The world is what you gave it, nothing more." "There is no world apart from what you wish." "Projection makes perception and makes the world you see."

So on the one hand, we made a world in an attack on God, which was made to be completely opposite to heaven, and which is therefore hell. Or at least, we came up with it in a state of false perception, ie misperception. In that state it appears to be hell because we see it in a hellish way. So we project hell and fragmentation and separation and attack and guilt onto it. And so it appears to be a hellish world. But this view of it (this projected world) only exists while you are having false perception (false projection).

What the course is saying is that you can change your vantage point. But the change in vantage point is huge. It's a 180-degree total opposition to false perception. It's a way of seeing totally alien to the world and to how the body functions. It flies in the face of every seeming law of physics and reality, and completely denies the apparently separated world. It's a lofty, heaven-based perception, which does not buy into anything the world appears to be.

It is in fact difficult for minds to comprehend how it's possible to see the world through loving eyes. The mind has trouble breaking through its own defenses against love. It can't sense or feel or experience what it is like to see from the vantage point of the Holy Spirit, without a whole lot of purificaiton and correction. And so most of the time, it seems impossible to love the world. Or indeed it seems as if the world is inherently sinful and wrong and bad.

The hell seen in false perception motivates a person to not want to love the world. Indeed the course says that such a world "cannot be the world God loves". Yet also that "God does love the world". He does not love the world seen in false perception, where rocks are separated and death seems real and attack seems commonplace. He does not love that world. No one can love such a thing and still behold it. No one can love death. "You cannot behold the world and know God."

But God does love the "real" world. The real world is a world seen in true perception, in which reality's love is projected onto it. And it does not show you separations of forms, or illusions of meaning. It is an accurate view of what the world IS, and the world is nothing but a flat image. It is a neutral inert meaningless lifeless powerless willless uncausal incapable valueluess veil of illusions. It has nothing of its own because it is nothing, and so at best it is symbolic. It can symbolize heaven or hell, but it cannot ever really be either.

If you look upon war you see war and you hate it. But if you see war as war, it is because you are giving war. If you give love and peace and extend and express these higher vantage points, then what you see comes from what you GIVE, not from what is THERE. You project the real world and see it as forgiven and holy because that's what you're projecting, and so it's all that you can see because you can ONLY see what you project.

You give love to the image of a world and the image reflects the love you are giving, and now you see the reflection of love in it. But this reflection also completely ignores anything the image itself possesses as its own properties. It overlooks forms, ignores shapes and sizes and distance or delay, and sees no orders of hierarchy anywhere. It doesn't distinguish individual bodies or places or times. And it sees no orders of difficulty.

If you extend love toward the world, it makes you blind to the world seen in false perception. It causes the dark twisted world to not be seen, and for this layer of interpretation to be lifted from what the world is. In a sense, the world of false perception is a world of specifics, and the world of true perception is abstract and transcendental. This doesn't necessarily mean the world stops having the form of attack. In fact it cannot ever have anything BUT forms. And it is this the body's eyes always and only see.

Even as the mind is healed and views love from love, the forms of the world remain much unchanged. The dogs still bark, the trees still lose their leaves, murderers still kill, and the graveyards are still populated. But they are translated, re-interpreted, overlooked, ignored, and do not stand out as different. All the differences are ignored, all properties of appearances are ignored, all ways that the objects could compete with one another for attention are ignored. The world becomes flattened and regarded as a singular unreal image. A veil of illusions, in which none of it is true.

As the veil is seen with love, in which its own nature is recognized as false, and yet which simultaneously acts like a mirror for your own meaning to be clearly projected, the veil is also losing its solidity. It becomes transparent before the light. And ultimately the reflection of God is seen. But to see God's reflection you cannot see bodies and spacetime, vying for attention. When "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind", God becomes ALL that you see, and you see nothing else. "A world forgiven cannot last." "Forgiveness sees it not."

And so the veil of a world lifts from sight, as all differences become ignored. And the face of Christ is revealed as heaven's reflection reaching across what still remains as a world of chaos. And all forms and differences are no longer seen. And to such an extent is the mind in the holy instant, fully present, that things of past and future such as bodies cannot be seen at all. The world is forgotten, and disappears. It is as though it has become so deflated and equalized and transcended that it does not exist at all. And all that remains is the face of Christ, which once seen leads to the immediate return to heaven. And "heaven is all that remains."

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

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

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

Ok. It's time to get honest and stop pretending to be dead!

You are an immortal being, created by God to live forever. You cannot change or be changed, and nothing can EVER happen to you. This is a FACT.

This means you cannot be hurt, damaged, attacked, broken, malfunctioning, decay, degrade, have a dis-ease, be sick, suffer, transform, change, be modified, grow old, or in any way be altered. You are PERMANENT AND ABSOLUTE This is a FACT.

Therefore you must still be exactly the same ORIGINAL SELF that God created, exactly as you were when he created you, and you must not have changed WHATSOEVER. You are STILL as God created you, immortal and unchanged and invulnerable. You have never turned into anything else. This is a FACT.

So what the fuck is this "sickness"? Anything which seems to be so-called "sick" CANNOT BE TRUE. It cannot even exist. How can it be true that you are immortal, and at the same time have it be true that you are a suffering dying self? How can they both be true of you? How can you die if you are immortal? How can you ever be sick? The sickness cannot be true and must be an illusion and a deception. This is a FACT.

"There can be no order of difficulty in healing merely because all sickness is illusion."

"So healing, never needed by the truth, must demonstrate that sickness is not real."

Jesus is stating in ACIM that you are an immortal eternal being with eternal life, endless and unassailable, PRETENDING THAT YOU CAN DIE. You are playing a game of pretending that you are mortal in a suffering body, to cover up who and what you are. To hide the TRUTH! YOU ARE FAKING YOUR DEATH. You are literally using the body as a DISGUISE to make it look like you are dying when you're not. All the while underneath you are totally powerful and perfect still.

"Did God create the mortal and corruptible? What use has God's beloved Son for what must die?"

You use the body as a decoy, to cover up who you are and hide your true nature as the Perfect Christ. You attack the body with your mind and make it show up as suffering, as a victim. And then you use this to accuse others and the world of causing you to suffer against your will, hiding the fact you put it there on purpose. You are literally trying to fake your own death and to make it look like someone else made it happen. So that it can seem that "you died" for reasons beyond your control.

"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the FEAR OF AWAKENING. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of TRYING NOT TO KNOW by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual."

"The sick remain accusers."

"A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed."

"For vengeance is not part of love, and fear, denying love and using pain to prove that God is dead, has shown that death is victor over life. The body is the Son of God, corruptible in death, as mortal as the Father he has slain."

So when you are sick, you are lying. When you are sick, you are deceiving yourself and others. It means you are insane and do not know who you are, so you're trying to be something you're not. When you are sick, you are pretending that you are fallible, weak, vulnerable, capable of suffering, diminished, threatenable, hurt, broken, having lost your peace, unfairly treated, victimized, abused and destroyed by anyone or anything EXCEPT yourself. It is a form of irresponsibility, in which you try to claim that death HAPPENS TO YOU AGAINST YOUR WILL.

YOU CHOOSE to make yourself and your body seem to be sick. So that you can DENY that you are NOT SICK. The sickness is a deception and a lie, and cannot be true. Therefore it MUST be an illusion - something appearing to be something it is not. It cannot BE a real sickness, it must be fake. Because you cannot really BE sick ever. The sickness is your attempt to DENY that you are immortal. Death is you being IN DENIAL that you STILL have eternal life. This is a FACT.

"Sickness is a defense against the truth."

"Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make"

"For sickness is an election; a decision. It is the choice of weakness"

"If sickness is but a faulty problem-solving approach, it is a decision. And if it is a decision, it is the mind and not the body that makes it."

"Sickness is idolatry, because it is the belief that POWER CAN BE TAKEN FROM YOU."

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent."

What are you doing? Why are you going into states of sickness and suffering? Why are you holding up the body as an attacked picture of crucifixion, trying to demonstrate first of all that you "are" the body, and that secondly you have been attacked? Why are you using the body as a picture held up to your brother to accuse THEM of causing it? Or to accuse the world of causing it? When all along YOUR OWN MIND puts the effects into the body and then shifts the blame to someone else?

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

You are FAKING BEING SICK. You are faking that you can even be CAPABLE of suffering. That you can even CHANGE or be changed. You are not even changeable. You are so permanent and endless and will live forever, such that you couldn't even really be sick if you wanted to. It cannot be "who you are" that is sick. Even if your mind becomes sick and takes it out on the body, pretending it is a body, and that the body is dying, your soul is STILL not sick.

"But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed!"

"If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body, so that IT will suffer pain."

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

YOU CAN NEVER BE SICK. YOU CAN NEVER DIE. YOU ARE NOT A BODY. YOU ARE IMMORTAL.

So what's with this fake game of "poor-me I'm dying"? Why are you playing this game and putting on this fake show? Who are you trying to convince? Why are you making yourself out to be a punished victim, weakened and tormented, disabled and disfigured, diseased and decayed, ripe for the picking and ready to die? Who are you trying to FOOL? Why are you so convinced not only that you ARE a body, but that you deserve to be sentenced to death?

You cannot be guilty because the fact is that you cannot even sin. Sin is the idea that something REAL can be attacked. But "nothing real can be threatened". Reality is NOT attackable. Reality is PERMANENT AND CHANGELESS. "Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all."

"Reality is changeless. It is this that MAKES it real, and KEEPS it separate from all appearances. It MUST transcend all form to be itself. It CANNOT change."

Nothing real can ever change. YOU are real and can never change. GOD is real and can never change. Your brothers are real and can never change. Nothing real EVER changes because it is ABSOLUTELY FIXED. So you cannot sin against or attack or destroy anything real. That means you cannot be sinned against, nor can you sin, or become sinful. You cannot stop being innocent because "my sinlessness is guaranteed by God." You are PERMANENTLY INNOCENT.

So the idea that you have become evil, have attacked God, are unworthy of love, have committed a crime, cannot be forgiven, deserve to be punished, should suffer, are guilty, should be destroyed etc, is completely unfounded. It's all based on a lie that you even CAN DO these things. You can't. You can never attack or hurt or damage anything real. And anything which SEEMS like it can be attacked or hurt or damaged CANNOT BE REAL.

Bodies show up with their seeming "proof of sin", with their images blasted in your face, with their testimony to your senses, showing you pictures of destruction and crucifixion, to try to tempt you to believe that this is a FACT. That sickness is TRUE. That it's HAPPENING NOW. But this cannot be true at the same time as you being immortal. You cannot be immortal and mortal at the same time. How can the sickness be real? How can the body even be real? How can a person ever actually BE anything less than perfect?

Either you are immortal and you cannot die, or you have NEVER been immortal and you are ALWAYS dead. You either have eternal life and are permanent and absolute, or you are merely some relative dream fiction temporary body story that begins and ends, which is not life and is a dream of death.

"Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible."

YOU CANNOT DIE. So why are you pretending that you ARE?

This is the whole issue of the separation from God. Immortal endless beings trying to force themselves to be mortal. Trying to DENY that they are STILL immortal. Pretending they have brought an end to the immortality and that life has been stopped. That you have CHANGED what God created to last forever, and have thus overthrown his will. That you are more powerful than God and have been able to destroy the indestructible.

Let's stop today playing this game of death, playing at dying, playing at suffering and being sick, playing at being guilty and unworthy, playing small and little and weak and helpless, playing at being victimized and paralyzed and struck down and attacked and helpless. We are POWERFUL BEINGS. We can NEVER DIE. When will the game of dying end? When will we bring an end to the illusion of death and proclaim that THERE IS ONLY ETERNAL LIFE?

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely."

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you."

"These are specifically first that the body is for attack, and also that you ARE a body. Without this, sickness is completely inconceivable. Sickness is a way of demonstrating that YOU CAN BE HURT. It is a witness to your frailty, your vulnerability, and your extreme need to depend on external guidance."

"This is the anti-Christ; the strange idea there is a power PAST omnipotence, a place BEYOND the infinite, a time transcending the eternal. Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

"Do not look to the god of sickness for healing, but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Him. When you acknowledge Him, you will KNOW that He has never ceased to acknowledge you, and that in His acknowledgment OF you lies your Being. You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

"These testimonies which the senses bring have but one purpose; to justify attack and thus keep unforgiveness unrecognized for what it is. Seen undisguised it is intolerable. Without protection it could not endure. Here is all sickness cherished, but without the recognition that this is so. For when an unforgiveness is not recognized, the form it takes seems to be something else. And now it is the "something else" that seems to terrify. But it is not the "something else" that can be healed. It is not sick, and needs no remedy. To concentrate your healing efforts here is but futility. Who can cure what cannot be sick and make it well?"

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

Am mortal, fallible, and full of sin,

And know I am the perfect Son of God."

"The body can be healed as an effect of true forgiveness. Only that can give remembrance of immortality, which is the gift of holiness and love. "

"You are God's Son. In immortality you live forever. Would you not return your mind to this?"

"Yet what is it except a game you play in which identity can be denied? You are as God created you. All else but this one thing is folly to believe. In this one thought is everything set free. In this one truth are all illusions gone. In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything; the central core of its existence and its guarantee of immortality."

"The body does not change. It represents the larger dream that change is POSSIBLE. To change is to attain a state unlike the one in which you found yourself before. There IS no change in immortality, and Heaven knows it not."

"The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live."

"In your brother is the light of God's eternal promise of YOUR immortality." "Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF. Yet God's Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM."

"The miracle of creation has never ceased, having the holy stamp of immortality upon it."

"Immortality is a constant state. It is as true now as it ever was or will be, because it implies NO CHANGE AT ALL."

Sometimes it *seems* as if something happens to us that we did not choose. Let's say, something physical in the world comes along and hurts your body. Maybe its a car crash. Maybe someone is having a bad day and spills hot coffee on your body. Whatever it is, the question arises, did *I* cause this to happen? Am I a victim?

If ever the answer is that I DID NOT choose it, what are the implications? It means that there must be something that has power over me, I must be a victim, I must have no hope for a cure, I must be vulnerable to external attack, and I must be capable of being made to suffer against my will. This whole belief is especially wrapped up in sickness and death, via perceived external or bodily causes.

There is also the fact that we are co-dreaming this world with others, and that means some other brother, not in his right mind, might elect of his own free will to attack your body. Is this also asked for? Did I CHOOSE to be attacked? Have I harmed myself or used my brother's body in some way, perhaps in agreement with him, a mutual attack? Surely if I did not participate in its choosing, HE is the sinner, and my victimhood and proof of attack in my body accuses him. "Sick bodies are accusers." "Brother at your hand I die."

Jesus says this.

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true."

So EVEN if there is a seemingly completely distinct attacker, some other person who of their own free will seems to be trying to attack your body, EVEN THAT is somehow chosen by you. And if you are pain or are suffering physically or emotionally, it is STILL true that you are causing it. In essence, there are NO EXCEPTIONS to the secret of salvation, and the instant that you believe there are, there is NO WAY TO FIND SALVATION, because now you've ruled out of the possibility of being FREE FROM "unwarranted external powers" or an "alien will."

Jesus goes on to say:

"For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

Here he seems to me to be saying, if you were sitting high up and were dreaming of a world down below you, which YOU populate with figures, and YOU animate, and you make "do things", like a child playing with dolls causing the dolls to pretend to interact or fight, then you'd realize that YOU are not identified with any of these figures and so these things are not happening to YOU. By being spirit-identified, you are not dream/body identified. So any activities in the world - in your dream - which you made do what it does, has no real effect on who and what YOU really are. But this does require a total clarity and atonement-level acceptance of the awareness of dreaming and the fact that you're making the world happen.

Jesus continues:

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

So now he's telling us that the form of the issue does not matter. Whether it be a violent person or a car crash or a disease or unhappiness. There is ONE truth about them all, and that truth is that YOU are doing them to yourself, by identifying with the body and dreaming a dream in which you CAUSE the bodies to hurt each other. For this to be true, you as a dreamer has to be a really high-level, powerful position. Can you comprehend the power entailed in dreaming a planet? Can you accept or own that this entire environment is in your mind?

"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts."

"Both heaven and earth are in your mind."

The issue with your body is a tiny speck of the dream that your mind is supposedly dreaming. Like in your dreams at night, where your mind invents an entire environment and then puts a little body in it, perhaps too it is true of this physical world. We dream up an entire ecosystem of events and activities and people and then make stuff happen and the only way we'd feel that we're vulnerable to any of it, is if we forget we're dreaming it and identify with some part of it, such as believing you are a body. Jesus is practically saying that what you are transcends ALL bodies. Is this too lofty of an interpretation? Too hard to relate to?

Jesus says to let them be as vicious as they may. And that seems to mean, even allowing the body to be attacked and damaged.

""In my defencelessness my safety lies." - You who feel threatened by this changing world, its twists of fortune and its bitter jests, its brief relationships and all the "gifts" it merely lends to take away again, attend this lesson well. The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus."

But somehow, if you were conscious enough of being the dreamer and not the dream, you would not be even slightly confused or believe that anything the body is experiencing is anything to do with what you are. That it is having NO EFFECT on you. It's not disturbing your peace of mind or happiness.

The problem with this is, "A guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body." So one moment Jesus is saying to let people be vicious, which presumably could mean your body is damagable, which is backed up by his statements about "only bodies can be attacked". And then the next he's saying that the mind should heal the body, and if it doesn't, the mind is not healed. "A damaged body is proof the mind has not been healed." Yet if another person did the damage, does that mean your mind is not healed? Is your mind not healed because YOU dreamed of the other person? Is your mind not healed because you made up another body to attack this body, in your dream, thus literally doing it to your body self?

Jesus seems in some ways to say, you can transcend all worldly happenings, all bodily situations, be fully spirit identified, recognizing you are mind not matter, and be free from every possible dream scenario no matter what happens in the world. BUT, he also seems to teach that a mind in such a position would therefore have the miracle-working power to UNDO or correct or heal, anything that arises. This seems to imply the body can be attacked and is vulnerable, BUT that the mind CAN heal it, and if the mind has not healed it the mind must not be healed simply because it's not sane to allow the damage to remain. "Forgiveness is not real unless it has brought a healing to your brother and yourself." "A miracle of healing proves separation (attack world) is without effect."

A question arises, is it possible to somehow supernaturally cause the body to be INCAPABLE of being attacked? Jesus speaks of a "protection" near the end of "sickness is a defense against the truth". He speaks of the body being unable to be sick, or to die. But if bodies can be attacked, would some other person come along in the dream and still attempt murder? And would it still produce a wound on the body? Does mind wield a power capable of essentially making the body literally immortal and undamagable?

Or would this be simply impossible, given the body is not real and only real things are free from threat? It would suggest the body can still be attacked, but that the mind could heal the attack. And that would seem to line up with Jesus's body being crucified in spite of his profound advanced mental state. If his mind has permanent projective power over the body, it would not have been crucifiable. The spear would not have been able to penetrate the hands and the nails could not be driven into his limbs.

It's true that, nevertheless, "the mind that made the body can make another". So in a sense, if the body is destroyed the mind, which is not the body, could manifest another illusory body, which also has inherent susceptibility. ie bodies fundamentally exist only as illusions, illusions can be attacked (illusions of attack) fundamentally, and so there is no way to render a body immortal or permanent. The mind CAN however heal the body, can project new bodies, and has the power to perhaps supernaturally manipulate events, utilize divine guidance and therefore find a "safe" path through the dream of attack.

One line says, "without the idea of death there is no world." Another says "to see a sinless body is impossible" and "the body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards." Which means, if the body seems to exist at all, it depends on death. It is made of death. And at best, it can symbolize eternal life but cannot BE it. Mind can maintain it and heal it. But there are limits - and short of a supernatural miracle, a body wouldn't survive a direct encounter with a supernova.

We know the body is just an image, an illusion, projected by the mind. It SHOULD, in the "movie projector analogy, mean it's possible possible for the DREAMER to NOT dream attack scenarios. In fact, "my self is ruler of the universe speaks to this."

"It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

How absolute does this sound? It seems to literally mean, as the ruler of the universe, nothing can happen without your consent. No events can occur, without you dreaming them. Wars cannot take place unless you make them happen. Not only does what you desire happen, what you DON'T want to happen does not occur either. ie, you have TOTAL CONTROL over the dream.

And if that is true, does it not mean you could organize that there will NOT BE an attack upon your body? Unless you CHOSE that there be one and made it happen, that perhaps Jesus orchestrated every aspect of his own crucifixion? But does not this also mean that he must've dreamed of the "rest of us" too? Why not just dream of everyone being fully awake and bring an end to the dream entirely? How are we co-dreamers? Through a shared will?

Jesus also speaks of the body disappearing upon awakening. This suggests, in a co-authored dream, when a dreamer wakes up, he stops making a body. The recognition of its NOTHINGNESS cancels its illusions, making it impossible for it to appear to exist at all. A light shines so brightly, the body vanishes. "And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar of the Son of God."

If mind has the power to make a world, it would seem mind could have the power to force the body not to age, be sick or die. That mind would take authority over any occurrences. Mind could supernaturally make it impossible for the body to be attacked. It could "sustain the body indefinitely, BUT within time, where all bodies exist. This would require an ongoing maintenance, a vigilance, in orer to maintain this projection. And this seems to be what is spoken of here:

"Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible.

Yet this ***protection*** ***needs to be preserved*** by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgement or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick. Give instant remedy, should this occur, by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer."

So Jesus is suggesting a potential for indefinite sustainability of the body's health and state, where mind is overriding any worldly causality. This feasibly could continue for thousands of years. And there are stories of certain masters who have accomplished this longevity. St Germain, Babaji, etc. These advanced teachers of God apparently have the power to reverse, heal, and resurrect the body. At least for as long as it is useful in the atonement plan. The purpose is the plan. And once fulfilled, bodies are no longer needed.

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. It merely became what it always was. And that is what 'rolling the stone away means.' The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body's worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand."

"Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there any time you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does. And then - and then - I cannot speak of that. A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death."

"This is the message of the crucifixion: there is no order of difficulty in miracles. This is the message of the resurrection. Illusion are illusions. Truth is true. Illusions vanish. Only truth remains."

So what's the conclusion?

Mind has power over everything. Mind is co-dreaming the world with others. All illusions are attackable IF the mind CONSENTS to it. Due to free will, other minds can use their bodies to try to attack your body. This possibly cannot happen at all if you do not consent to it. If it does happen, you have agreed to a mutual attack scenario, and now your brother seems able to attack your body. But now your mind has the power to miraculously heal it, and being sane it would do so. And this the body can be "protected" by the mind indefinitely while useful, eventually to be laid aside ie vanished when no longer useful. You can choose the body cannot be sick, age or die, by protecting it actively, or through miracles of healing. But the time of bodies will come to an end.

When something is logical, you start with a premise, and then as the nature of this premise "extends", it produces logical conclusions. The conclusions that will come from this premise are really established in the premise itself. The limitations or scope of the premise determines what can come from it, and what comes from it is completely in accord with its starting point.

"Every system of thought must have a starting point. It begins with either a making or a creating, a difference we have already discussed. Their resemblance lies in their power as foundations. Their difference lies in what rests upon them. Both are cornerstones for systems of belief by which one lives."

When you use logic, and you arrive at a logical conclusion, what you're looking for is consistency, or the lack of contradiction within the logical system. If what you end up with seems to correlate to what you started with, and there was no obvious "nonsense" creeping in, then you can conclude that your logical conclusions are valid. You won't see any sign of contradiction so you'll consider the conclusion to be "correct". It will seem that the logic "makes sense".

What's happening is you're finding an internal consistency within the system, set up by the premise you started with. And each step you took in your reasoning did not violate the rules of the logic system. So whatever conclusions you ended up with seemed to make sense, based on what you started with. And this gives you a notion of things making sense, being valid, even being correct.

The problem is that the premise itself has absolutely everything to do with what you end up with. The conclusions that come from it, if you follow the logical steps carefully and impeccably, are really "automatic". If you start at a given starting point, you WILL end up at an ending point which is in harmony with the starting point. And you won't be able to come to a "false conclusion" if you reason it through carefully.

But if you start off on the wrong foot, if you begin with an assumption, of your premise is entirely wrong to begin with, what will happen? You'll still make logical steps, you'll still seek out internal consistency, you'll still look for that sense of "it all seems to fit together", and you'll still draw conclusions which seem to be in accord with the premise you started with. And you'll conclude "it makes sense" even. But the conclusions you come to, if you start off on the wrong foot, will be actually false. Even though they'll seem correct.

So you can be logical, and be wrong. If you start out wrong, you will only get something wrong at the other end. If you begin with a lie, you will end up with a lie, but it will be a logical lie which makes sense within the context of the whole system.

Thought systems work the same way, whatever the system is based on determines what can come from it, and only that can come from it and nothing else, unless you want to be contradictory. Yet if you start out with a system based on a lie, you will end up with lies. The lies will seem to make sense and even will seem "true" in that they seem to "add up" without contradicting the starting point, but they will still be false in the big picture. But if you believe them, you will be trapped and stuck, while believing you are free. And that is false perception.

This is the problem with the ego thought system. In the really big picture, the ego's system is a "small picture", and it is out of context, and it does not start with the whole truth. It is not beginning with something that is actually really true. It is starting out on the wrong foot, such as the belief that separation is true, or sin is real, or the impossible is possible, or death is life, or something real can be threatened etc.

When you start out with something ultimately false like that, you will produce an ENTIRE logical "system", where your reasoning will progress completely "logically" from the start to the end. And you will end up with conclusions which seem consistent. The conclusions will even seem to make total sense, IF the premise is true. But in the big picture, if it is recognized that the premise was false to begin with, then even though the conclusions are logically consistent, they are still false conclusions.

So the ego starts off on the wrong foot, on an assumption which is wrong. It starts with the belief that separation is possible, or sin is real, and then begins a progression of seemingly natural logical conclusions. If separation is real, then it must be true (consistent) that bodies are real. Then if bodes are real, it must be true that anything bodies experience is real. And if their experiences are real, then death is real. etc. That's a natural logical progress and completely impeccable logic. But the conclusion is insane because the whole "system of thought", the system of logic, began with a false premise.

When you start with a true premise, such as that God is infinite and permanent and immortal, there are once again logical progressions which come from this. If you follow the steps and start to draw conclusions based on that, and if you are careful to be consistent and not contradictory, you will end up with natural conclusions. And these conclusions will make sense, and seem valid, and they ALSO WILL BE TRUE. If you start with truth, you will end up with truth. And so whether or not the result is true or false, depends on whether the premise is true or false. And what you get out of the system as a natural logical conclusion or outcome, is set up in its starting point.

When the starting point is God, the natural logical outcome of God is the creation of the Kingdom. It's not that God randomly decides to create immortal beings, it's that the whole system just functions that way, truth goes in at the start, progressions of logical consistency occur, and you automatically get creation out the other end. And because you started with immortality, you end up with immortality. "God is but love, and therefore so am I." Such conclusions therefore are not only making sense, they are also TRUE.

"The Kingdom is the result of premises, just as this world is. You may have carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is total confusion about everything."

"The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit, because your mind has the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects."

"From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos must follow. It is because it follows that it seems to be a logical conclusion; a valid step in ordered thought. The steps to chaos do follow neatly from their starting point. Each is a different form in the progression of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror and away from truth."

When you begin a thought process/system on a lie or illusion, you will end up with illusory lies which seem to make sense but are false. This means the total absence of REASON, which is the absence of sanity, because the whole system of thinking started out insane. When you start out the thought process/system with sanity and truth, you end up with a SANE conclusion. This is what ACIM refers to as REASON. The reasoning is LOGICAL, just as the ego's reasoning is logical, but it starts with sanity so ends with sane conclusions.

Just because something seems extremely logical, does not mean it is true. And this is a BIG problem for a lot of people studying ACIM. If for example you start out with a premise that e.g. God created the world, and you do not challenge this premise, the ENTIRE course will now be interpreted to try to "fit" it into that premise. And every conclusions drawn will not challenge that premise.

In order to uphold the premise that God created this world, a LOT of adjustments have to be made to the course's meanings, in order to produce consistency and a lack of contradiction. And this can lead to what seems like a consistent picture, but it is also completely wrong. Because it started out with a belief that is completely mistaken and unfounded, in light of God's nature.

A massive collection of CONSISTENT logical conclusions will be made based on it. And all of these conclusion together will form the appearance of what seems like a completely consistent internal coherence. It will STILL all seems to "fit together". A clear "picture" will form. There won't appear to be any contradictions. And any steps necessary to keep the premise valid will be made, regardless of the extent to which that means changing the meaning of the course.

Everything it says will be interpreted through that lens and filter. And the person will end up with a very elaborate, consistent, highly polished, internally supportive, self un-contradictory, and seemingly highly sensible set of conclusions. And it will all seem TRUE because it seems to make sense. And they will marvel at the seeming beauty of its logical harmony. BUT, the entire thing will be bullshit, because it all starts out with a false premise. And so the entire system of thought is completely mistaken. Yet it is regarded as truth because of its consistency.

You have to therefore be careful that your reasoning begins with something which is absolutely true. You need to understand God's nature first. And when you reason based on the truth, you will end up with truthful and valid and consistent answers, which are correct. You can't start with the world and try to reason backwards to find the truth. You have to start at the beginning of the system.

You have to have an awareness or grasp of what the absolute truth IS FIRST, before you can even proceed to think about anything. If you set off on the wrong foot, every conclusion you come to will be potentially false. But most of us will start out with false conclusions and assumptions and not question them, resulting in more false conclusions. Because we're starting out exploring all this with our egos, which has taken a whole bunch of assumptions as true, and this has not yet been questioned.

We have to find out first what the premise of our entire thinking is, whether we have started out on the wrong foot or not. And for that you have to ask yourself, what is the ultimate truth really like? What is God like? What is his nature? What IS the ultimate absolute premise? Where DID everything actually start, and what is the logical nature of that premise? Because from God, everything real proceeds as a logical system of thought, and it proceeds only according to His nature, and nothing can come from it which is unlike its starting point. So you have to be REALLY clear about God's nature before you can reason anything correctly.

When you can understand what God is like, you can start to draw truthful conclusions. And if you are careful, you can be GUARANTEED that these conclusions will be true. But if you do not understand God's premise, or you have difficulty being impeccable with your logic, then you will come to false conclusions because you'll be starting out with something false. And yet these conclusions will see true to you and make sense, even though they are mistakes or errors in reasoning. And you can end up with a whole lot of "it makes sense" even if you start out with lies.

This is happening A LOT in ACIM circles because many students are not yet in a position to grasp the nature of God's system, the premise of reality and the one truth. And so most of us are struggling to come to terms with what the conclusions are, yet alone being able to grasp where it all started or what it's all based on. And a lot of time is spent trying to uncover or learn about the premise.

If you return to the highest possible starting point, the pre-separation system, and you look at how God functions, and then you begin to reason out what CAME from that premise, and if you do so impeccably logically, you WILL come to true conclusions. But if you are mistaken about God, you will be mistaken in everything you conclude.

Those true conclusions will not only show you the things God COULD do, it will also show you what he COULD NOT do. What CAN come from Him, and what cannot. What He would will, and what he would not. And thus what you are, what your nature is, and what you are capable of in reality. When you do that, you'll see why the ego's system is entirely a FALSE premise, and EVERYTHING that comes from it will be false. And that includes the attempt to oppose God's premise, to overthrow the Kingdom, to make another world (including Earth), and why Earth CANNOT have come from God due to its nature being a complete contradiction of God's nature.

God does not make contradictions because He is logically consistent. For Him, heaven is the natural outcome of His premise. And Heaven is the ONLY outcome of His premise. Nothing else CAN come from it because it is rooted in truth. And because of His nature, Heaven HAD to be created. It's in God's nature to extend His logical premise to produce The Kingdom. Which is why it has always existed.

Earth, which is OPPOSITE to heaven in *EVERY* way, CANNOT COME FROM GOD. Its nature is opposite to His premise. It does not function like Him. It does not begin with the premise He begins with. And it cannot be a natural outcome of His thought system. If He were to create it, in addition to creating Heaven, that would mean two entirely different and opposing outcomes can result from a single premise. This is logically IMPOSSIBLE regardless of what the premise is. Each premise produces ONE conclusion in accord with it, not two different ones.

God could only create one or the other, and which one is set up in his beginning nature. Since Earth is opposite to Heaven, God could NOT have created it, otherwise He would have to have STARTED OUT with a split mind and be opposing himself. He would have to be fundamentally contradictory, as a premise, in order to PRODUCE two contradictory outputs. He could only Create ONE or the other, not both, and they cannot both exist or "be one" because of their contradictory natures. If Earth is real, heaven does not exist at all.

God is NOT contradictory, so He can ONLY produce ONE outcome. That outcome is HEAVEN, and Earth is therefore NOT OF GOD, and is not based on truth or reality. And since God is real, Earth therefore, logically, cannot be real. And since only what God creates CAN exist, Earth does not exist at all. And if God is permanent, Earth cannot be permanent. And if God exists, having Created ONLY heaven, Earth cannot exist at all. This is why "there is no world" and God did not create it.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates MUST be eternal AS HIMSELF" is a logical statement. Since Earth is NOT eternal, it must have come from a NON-ETERNAL premise, and since God is eternal, it cannot have come from HIS premise. And because HIS premise is true, it must have come from a FALSE premise. And therefore Earth is an illusion, and never will it be His one outcome.

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"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."

The idea of separation is madness, because what it implies is impossible. It is not possible to be separate from God. But the mad idea was the idea that you CAN be separate from God, even though it is impossible.

To insist it is possible, must be madness, because to believe it you have to deny reality and truth and blind yourself to sanity and sense. This belief makes the mind insane, because it now believes impossible things are possible. This is why the separation from God was an entry into a state of mental illness, ie insanity.

"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."

"The instant that the mad idea of making your relationship with God unholy seemed to be possible, ALL relationships were made meaningless. In that unholy instant time was born, and bodies made to house the mad idea, and give it the ILLUSION of reality."

The mad idea gave rise to a mad world, based on insane notions and crazy laws, devoid of meaning and empty of truth. And into this insane world we projected our insane beliefs, producing a mad and false world to reflect our inner madness. And all who participate in it are mentally ill.

"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."

What we've ended up with then is a fictional world which insane people believe exists. And it is populated with people who have insane beliefs about who and what they are. They do not know themselves, are out of touch with their own reality, and think they are something they're not. This especially is entwined with the belief that they are physical bodies, which their immortal souls could never be. And they see themselves as limited and lacking.

"Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where truth should be, and where it really is. Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

Realize then that the world as we know it is populated by beings who originally were, and in truth still are, wholly immortal, perfect, innocent, loving, healthy, happy and completely invulnerable. Beings who God created to live forever in divine perfection, who lacked nothing and were capable of anything.

In the separation, these beings gave belief to impossible nonsense and thus moved their minds into insane states. This produced the anti-christ or otherwise known as the ego, which is an idea of what you THINK you are, as a kind of wishful thinking or denial of your true nature. Thus each person developed a SECOND self for themselves, which they identified with and as, and thought to be the whole of who they are.

"This is the anti-Christ; ... 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."

"The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE."

So now you have a world seemingly populated by individual beings who strongly believe they are NOT as God created them. They've added an entire layer of lies on top of themselves, to cover themselves up. They've invented a second self to suit their preferences.

They have profound denial which means they actively resist admitting to the truth about themselves and each other, and instead participate in lies and fantasies about what they are. They want to be a body and they want to suffer and they want to die, and they think this is normal because they think the hell they created is heaven.

"He has come to save me from the evil self I made."

"They DO believe that Heaven is hell, and ARE afraid of love. "

"For your definition of Heaven IS hell and oblivion, and the REAL Heaven is the greatest threat you think you COULD experience."

This has thrown these individuals into states of mind that are distorted and unnatural. They are mentally ill. They believe they are something or someone they are not. They have associated with being a physical object. They think they came into existence with the body. They believe they are limited and lacking and insufficient and defective and broken and sinful and guilty and in need of fear. And they relate to others through specialness and selfishness and mistrust and victimhood.

"the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt."

On the level of the world then it always seems that you're interacting with a whole person, who is egoic, and who has major selfishness issues, and who relates in special ways, and strikes bargains, and wants to get, and sees themselves as limited and lacking and defective. And it seems this is ALL THERE IS to the person. As if they ACTUALLY ARE a limited dysfunctional individual.

You see this appearance as the whole truth about the person, and people seem to really be in states of "becoming", of "growing", of transformation, learning, progression, acquisition and so on. As if they have started out with nothing and are lacking and little and weak and frail. And so the whole world seems to be populated with egoic individuals who are all far less than magnificent and most of whom find themselves to be unworthy of love or life. Which drives them all to self-punishment and suicide.

"...the sense of loneliness and abandonment which all the separated ones experience. Depression is an inevitable consequence of separation. So are anxiety, worry, a deep sense of helplessness, misery, suffering, and intense fear of loss."

"the delusions of the Separated ones."

"All the separated ones have a basic fear of retaliation and abandonment. This is because they BELIEVE in attack and rejection, so this is what they perceive and teach and LEARN. "

It seems then that we're living in a world where people represent varying degrees of ability, accomplishment, skill, confidence, and a very wide range of personalities and potentials. And in all cases no-one is perfect and everyone is lacking in some way. And everyone is trying to improve themselves because they all think they were created broken. And now there is competition and everyone fights to be better than all the other defective ones, while the defective ones lick their wounds and want to die.

If you take this at face value, if you think this is normal and natural, then you'll think that the EGOS that you interact with ARE people. That their egotism is NOT a mental illness, but is in fact just some normal psychological structure. A personality trait perhaps. And that it's completely normal for people to hate themselves, to attack others, to be angry, to worship idols, to take from others, and to seek for exclusive relationships. As if this is what completely natural mentally-sane people do. So normal because it's so common.

What we have to realize is that this is NOT sanity. And these ego people, the way they present themselves, is NOT really their self. It's not their real identity. They in fact are pretending to be something they're not. They present themselves as fictional characters, with traits and behaviors that aren't even natural. With beliefs about themselves that are unfounded and false. In denial of their own self and repressive of their own freedom.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES. If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick."

They don't even know who they really are. They don't know where they came from or how they got here. And they certainly don't even suspect that they even have a real self. And even think that maybe they don't exist at all, have no real creator, invented themselves, and maybe aren't even real.

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

What we're looking at, when we look at the world, is in fact a place where a very large number of mentally ill people are gathered together. And all of their mental illnesses are regarded as largely normal and natural, ie not an illness at all. We don't even recognize insanity when we see it. We think it's normal that people relate the way they do, think of themselves in such unnatural ways, and are completely lost and out of touch with their own reality. On a planet filled with suffering, how can you remember what it's like not to suffer?

If we don't suspect that there is a higher, larger truth about people, then it's going to make it seem like their ego self is REAL, that it is the WHOLE truth of them, and there is nothing more to it. And in that view you will relate to their EGO in terms of special relationship, and with no sense of forgiveness. Anything they do in insanity will be a sin, and you will justify holding it against them. Because you don't recognize they are mentally ill. And all their twisted behaviors are in fact part of their illness.

If you had only ever known someone in an ill condition, and had never known them when they were healthy, you would have great difficulty seeing past their illness. If you had only met them after they became dysfunctional, you'd have a hard time having any notion of what they are REALLY like when they're not sick. And if the whole planet is sick, how can you know what society is supposed to be like, when no-one can even remember a time when there was no suffering at all?

If we have no sense of the actual REALITY of each person, then this is what we're going to do. We're going to BUY INTO their illusions of who and what they are, fall for the same temptations, go into false empathy, join them in suffering, and compound their ego. This keeps them imprisoned and does not offer any kind of healing. And they need healing because they are not sane. Falling for this means YOU are insane, because you've failed to recognize that the illusion of sanity is not sanity, and so think that you are sane when you're not.

Everyone, when sane, is a loving, powerful, supernatural, immortal, eternal being of light, filled with joy and laughter and miracles. Such a person is invulnerable, cannot be sick, cannot die, cannot be upset, has no grievances, doesn't judge or blame anyone, is perfectly innocent and holy, knows God intimately, depends on God for everything, and has no authority problem. This is what EVERY person in the world was like when they were created. This is the kind of self they ARE behind their mental illness. And if their mental illness was cured, this is how they would be. A world of christs!

To not RECOGNIZE that people's egos are not their real self, is to fail to forgive. To forgive requires having in mind an awareness BEYOND THE LIES, of what the person's souls is really like, as created by God. The original self. The real self. The holy self. The higher self. That is their true self. And that self has no limitations or lacks or failures or malfunctions or depressions or sicknesses or lies about themselves or others.

So then we have to realize that we join with the Holy Spirit as therapists in the world, as healers, come to offer SANITY to those who are insane, and to lift them up and resurrect them to truth and light, so that they are restored to their true function and true abilities. To their real identity. To remember who they are, to know themselves and to live out from the love that God put in them.

"Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God."

"your function in this world is healing"

"As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares HIS with you on earth."

The only way you can forgive someone is to know the real truth about them on a higher level. The bigger picture. Their true nature as established by God. And this truth has to STILL be true, even if it is covered up by their own mind, and obscure and hard to see. Even if they themselves don't know it's there, and even if they themselves deny that it's true of them. Because people are in fact out of touch with their own souls and don't even remember what their real identity is. It is our task to REMEMBER FOR THEM, so that they might remember also and wake up to their true nature.

"Remember for everyone your Father's power, that He has given them"

"He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP. Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN. To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember."

"Do not allow your brother to be sick, for if he is, have YOU abandoned him to his own dream, by SHARING it with him."

Since the ego is really a smokescreen of lies, it is not true of a person. Even if they are holding it up strongly in front of your face as an obstacle to peace. To forgive is to OVERLOOK it, and see BEYOND it, beyond their body, and beyond their false sense of identity. To recognize who they are in spirit, and to acknowledge the PERMANENT TRUTH about them. To hold them in the light and acknowledge that they ARE in the light.

This means in fact bypassing their illusory ego beliefs, their ego self, and realizing that on a higher level their mind is SANE. Only a small portion of their mind is insane and their soul is still perfect. By tapping into the higher self and truth of the person, you JOIN with them in love. This bypasses the ego and increases the wholeness within the mind, which in turn undoes the false ego identification - the sickness - the mental illness. Because "all sickness is mental illness." This is how miracles are performed.

Don't be deceived. People are not who they say they are. Everyone has an imposter in them. The Holy Spirit knows who we really are, and will awaken this truth in us if we will let him.

"Seek not to make the Son of God ADJUST to his insanity. There IS a stranger in him, who wandered carelessly into the home of Truth, and who will wander off. He came WITHOUT a purpose. But he will not remain before the shining light the Holy Spirit offered, and you accepted. For there the STRANGER is made homeless, and YOU are welcome. Ask not this transient stranger, "who am I?" He is the only thing in all the universe that does not know."

If we describe the Holy Spirit as having the power of God, of knowing everything, of having a healing solution for every problem, of being able to guide us specifically and tell us what to do, to make all decisions for us, and be an authority, then this should clearly position us in a receptive frame of mind to listen, learn, and do.

If we are unclear as to the absolute and total strength of the Holy Spirit, we will think that there are some things he cannot do, is not equipped to do, and cannot be trusted to do. And then we will doubt him, and we will start to trust our own egos. And then we will usurp his functions and take over control, unwilling to listen to or follow instructions. This means we basically are not giving him enough credit or acknowledging fully what his function is.

Part of the problem is that our egos are inflated and we want to be gatekeepers, in control of everything, making all decisions, knowing what everything is, being special and important, and all the rest of it. All of this clouds our dependence on the Holy Spirit and makes us be in competition with him. We do not want his help and we won't seek it out, listen to it, accept it or welcome it. We think we know better and don't need him.

We need to very fully and clearly spell out precisely what the Holy Spirit's function is and what he is capable of, so that we are in no way mistaken about what his duties and functions are. Only if we can be clear about exactly what he's supposed to be doing, can we be clear about what we are supposed to be doing. What is his role, and what is our role. Otherwise we will have a blurred boundary and the ego will step in.

If I acknowledge that the Holy Spirit has all of the power of God, this power is unlimited, it can heal every sickness, it can solve every problem, he knows absolutely everything that is going on with everyone all the time, he knows exactly what every problem is and how to solve it, has access to all information and facts and variables in the past present and future, and is squarely in a position to KNOW, then this tells me clearly that I can depend on him knowing. He knows how, he is fully equipped, he cannot fail, and he can be depended upon. That means I do not NEED to know everything because I can LET HIM do his part.

This then tells me that I can depend upon him and work with him as a team member, utilizing him for his function and turning to him TO help in all the ways that he is equipped and assigned to do so. Then I will not look to MYSELF to try to fulfill those functions, recognizing that I am not in a POSITION to do so. This tells me that it isn't my function here to know everything, to decide everything, to heal anything, to correct anything, or to pretend that I have all the information. I should be turning to him for that and letting him advise and help.

This also opens up the door for easier trust, because if you are now clear about what He is supposed to be doing and are acknowledging that he CAN do it, you will have more FAITH in him. Part of this entails recognizing that he has the power of God, he is absolutely unlimited in his power, and there is nothing he cannot do. To admit and acknowledge that might, to your ego, strike you as frightening. So you're going to have to work on that and get past it. If you can acknowledge and be comfortable with the Holy Spirit being immensely powerful, and on your side, then you can go forth with greater confidence knowing He is backing you up.

Since he shares God's power, he more or less can be thought of as an extension of God. And that means you should be having faith and trust in him to the same extent and in the same way that you would with God. The Holy Spirit has been appointed by God to help us, on purpose, AS the answer to the separation, TO guarantee our return home to heaven. He knows how we got into this mess, he knows how to get us out of it. We have to learn to let him do that. He also knows how to solve all problems, heal all sickness, and reverse death. We have to learn to let him do that.

Now that you know just how helpful and powerful the Holy Spirit is, you can make room for him and work alongside him as a partner rather than work against him vying for attention. You can let him help you, heal you, resurrect you, and enlighten you. He can solve all your problems and undo all your suffering.

"I will step back and let Him lead the way."

"I do NOT feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo ALL

the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM.

I WILL to let Him by allowing Him to decide for God for me."

"You know not where you go, but One Who knows goes with you. Let Him lead you with the rest."

"I will step back and let Him lead the way,

For I would walk along the road to Him."

"Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him Judge what the response should be."

"Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function. Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven."

"I rest in God today, and let Him work

In me and through me, while I rest in Him

In quiet and in perfect certainty."

"And so I give all judgment to the One You gave to me to judge for me. He sees what I behold, and yet He knows the truth. He looks on pain, and yet He understands it is not real, and in His understanding it is healed. He gives the miracles my dreams would hide from my awareness. Let Him judge today."

"That is because I do not yet realize that God has placed the answer together with the problem, so that they cannot be separated by time. The Holy Spirit will teach me this, if I will let Him. And I will understand it is impossible that I could have a problem which has not been solved already."

"Let Him be Judge of what you are, for He has certainty in which there is no doubt because it rests on Certainty so great that doubt is meaningless before Its Face"

"Let Him be Judge as well of everything that seems to happen to you in this world."

"Let Him evaluate each thought that comes to mind, remove the elements of dreams, and give them back to you as clean ideas which do not contradict the Will of God."

"Follow His light and see the world as He beholds it. Hear His Voice alone in all that speaks to you. And let Him give you peace and certainty, which you have thrown away, but Heaven has preserved for you in Him."

"The CAPACITY to empathize is VERY useful to the Holy Spirit, provided you let Him use it in His way."

"The Holy Spirit asks only this little help of you. Whenever your thoughts wander to a special relationship which still ATTRACTS you, enter with Him into a holy instant, and there, LET HIM RELEASE YOU."

"God's Voice alone can tell you how to heal. Listen, and you will never fail to bring His kindly remedy to those He sends to you, to let Him heal them, and to bless all those who serve with Him in healing's name."

"And now I place you in His hands, to be His faithful followers, with Him as Guide through every difficulty and all pain that you may think is real. Nor will He give you pleasures that will pass away, for He gives only the eternal and the good. Let Him prepare you further. He has earned your trust by speaking daily to you of your Father and your brother and your Self. He will continue; now you walk with Him as certain as is He of where you go; as sure as He of how you should proceed, as confident as He is of the goal, and of your safe arrival in the end."

"I place you in His charge, and let Him teach you what to do and say and think each time you turn to Him. He will not fail to be available to you each time you call to Him to help you."

"Let Him uncover the hidden spark of beauty in your relationships, and SHOW it to you."

"Then turn to Him who shares your function with you, and let Him teach you what you need to learn to lay all fear aside, and know your Self as Love Which has no opposite in you."

"He is the strong protector of your innocence, which sets you free. And it is HIS decision to undo EVERYTHING that would obscure your innocence from your unclouded mind. Let Him, therefore, be the only guide that you would follow to Salvation. He knows the way, and leads you gladly on it. WITH Him, you will not fail to learn what God wills FOR you IS your will."

"Then let Him teach you quietly how to perceive your guiltlessness, which is ALREADY there."

"The Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist. He makes healing PERFECTLY clear in ANY situation in which He is the guide. The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION. He needs no help for this. He WILL tell you EXACTLY what to do, to help ANYONE He sends to you FOR help, and will speak to him through you, IF YOU DO NOT INTERFERE. Remember that you ARE choosing a guide for helping, and the wrong choice will NOT help. But remember also that THE RIGHT ONE WILL. Trust Him, for help is His function, and He is of God."

"The Holy Spirit knows NO-ONE IS SPECIAL. But He also perceives that you have MADE special relationships, which He would purify, and NOT let YOU destroy. However UNholy the reason why you made them may be, He can TRANSLATE them into holiness, by removing AS MUCH FEAR AS YOU WILL LET HIM. You can place ANY relationship under His care, and be sure that it will NOT result in pain, if you offer Him your willingness TO HAVE IT SERVE NO NEED BUT HIS."

"And yet he is NOT crucified. For here is both his pain AND his healing, for the Holy Spirit's vision is merciful, and His remedy is quick. Do not HIDE suffering from His sight, but bring it gladly TO Him. Lay before His eternal sanity ALL your hurt, and LET Him heal you. Do not leave any spot of pain hidden from His Light, and search your minds carefully for any thoughts which you may fear to uncover. For He will heal every little thought that you have kept to hurt you, and cleanse it of its littleness, restoring it to the magnitude of God."

"Thank God that He is there, and works through you. And all His works are yours. He offers YOU a miracle, with every one you LET Him do through you."

"Do not make the mistake of believing that YOU understand what YOU perceive, for its meaning IS lost to you. But the Holy Spirit has saved its meaning FOR you, and if you will LET Him interpret it FOR you, He will restore what you have thrown away. As long as you THINK YOU KNOW its meaning, you will see no need to ask it OF Him. You do not know the meaning of ANYTHING you perceive. NOT ONE THOUGHT YOU HOLD IS WHOLLY TRUE."

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

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

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

""My Self is ruler of the universe."

It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

(Urtext W253L to W253L1)

"There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. "

(Urtext W190L5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

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

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

(urtext T28C11)

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

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

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

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

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

(urtext W281L)

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

(urtext W26L)

"It can be but myself I crucify."

(urtext W196L)

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details"

(urtext W152L1)

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness."

(urtext W190L5)

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

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

"I am not weak, but strong."

"I am not helpless, but all powerful."

(urtext W91L8)

Jesus said this:

"The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind."

Here we’re told that God created "man’ (souls) and gave man (souls) the ability to create, when in his right mind (as God intended). All of this is taking place within God’s realm, the Kingdom of Heaven. Heaven also IS God’s Creation and everything in it including the souls.

The souls together comprise "the sonship" and since they share oneness with all of Creation, they are all "the One Son" ie the one/united creation. At this point it has absolutely nothing to do with physicality or planet Earth or separation.

"The latter (man’s ability to create in his right mind) required the endowment of man by God with free will because all loving creation is freely given."

So we know that it is natural to have free will, for each "individual soul", who is part of oneness, and who is also christ. Each individual soul is therefore "free" to independently dream or not.

At this point, pre-separation, in my opinion all of this is encompassed within God’s Kingdom, Heaven, which IS the sonship and IS creation and INCLUDES all souls. All as one Sonship, one creation, on being, on sense of identity yet still many parts. (I know I know, suspend disbelief).

All of this content, is what the Course originally refers to as WORLD. This was God’s world, God’s creation. What really exists. (Not the "real world"). This is the same thing as "the universe" of God.

God gave a world to His Son, spoken of here:

"The statement ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life’ needs only slight correction to be meaningful in this context; ‘He gave it to His only begotten Son.’"

I believe, the world referred to is simply the Kingdom of God, heaven. It is the only place where there is everlasting life. This is true in both versions - that "God gave His Son" = world (God’s created universe, not earth, God expressed/gave the Sonship), and that "God gave the world to His Son" = God’s creation, heaven, given "to" his Son to SHARE and be a part of as God’s Kingdom/expression. This has nothing to do with the physical universe, a world made by separation, or planet Earth in any way.

At this Level, Heaven, Creation, God, Sonship, The Son, The Sonship, Souls, Reality, Universe, World, Eternity, Oneness, Christ, Children of God, and Christ’s Creations, and the creations from Souls, are essentially all part of a single experiential realm or state of mind/being in which there is perfect sharing, multiple minds, yet all sharing and reflections of God’s mind as well.

"God has but one Son, knowing them all as one."

"It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts."

ie, "the son" IS the sonship, which contains multiple sons of God, all equal, and perhaps there is no single "first begotten son" kind of identity. Just the multitude souls? Yet every soul is fully one with the whole sonship, sort of implying two levels or aspects to identity? "Soul-self" and "shared-self’? And that when the "sharing" is severed, what’s left is the soul estranged as a separated son, still having its own identity but seemingly disconnected from the whole.

Then there was the separation...

"All fear is ultimately reducible to the basic misperception that man has the ability to usurp the power of God."

Or to put it another way, each soul can choose to sleep (or they all slept at once?), and "dreaming" (authority problem, separation, sin, level confusion, fear) is the mis-creation of each soul’s free will. Each soul tried to "withdraw" from the unity of the whole sonship, going into a state of isolation with artificial walls around it (later to become bodies), seeming to no longer be part of oneness, no longer sharing, no longer connected.

Jesus says this:

"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, possible of both accomplishment and real effects."

Notice it says "the son of God". Given all souls form the sonship and together they are collectively "the son of God", along with whatever else God created (angels etc?), does this not mean that all (or some of?) God’s "Creation" collectively had the tiny mad idea? Ie we’re not just talking about a single son, but many sons "falling" together?

We’re also told this:

"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….God's extending outward, though not His completeness, is blocked when the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one. So He thought, "My children sleep and must be awakened."

So we’re told there that when some parts of the sonship (souls) are blocking, the entire sonship is affected and so God then knows he needs to create the Holy Spirit.

Here is the version from the urtext, which is more clarifying:

"It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness does transcend the sum of its parts. However, it loses this special state as long as any of its parts are missing. This is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all of the individual parts of the Sonship have returned. Only then, in the true sense, can the meaning of wholeness be understood."

When the sonship, or even one part of it, still believes in separation, is dreaming, unaware of the whole, or rejecting the sonship, the sonship is incomplete. In this state, what the sonship experiences now is the "fall" into, and the dreaming OF, collectively, the "second world".... the world of death and separation.

This second world comprises everything that is "inside" the tiny mad idea, all thoughts of sin and death, the entire physical universe which was made a "place" (actually a state of mind) in which God seems not to exist. This second "world" is the world in which we experience perception (of all kinds). This "world" is the entire physical universe. It may additionally comprise further fake universes in higher dimensions because the separation from God progressed through various stages.

So then there are two worlds. God’s universe/creation/heaven, and the illusory universe/what we made/physical universe which is artificial ("Earth is opposite to heaven in every way"). We typically think of world as the planet, but it means the entire realm in which we seem to exist. All of the "universe" we think is the universe, all planets and stars, all galaxies and nebula and civilizations. And all of the massive expanses of space and time. All of this is "the world" - the world WE MADE, which God DID NOT CREATE. A world of separation. And within this world, this realm, planet Earth is just one of many illusory locations.

There is a series of workbook lessons, I posted about this recently, which tell us 1) we’re experiencing a hell of false perception laid on top of the world we made, 2) true perception is then introduced as an alternative way to view "this world" (this fake universe), 3) we’re guided to experiment with discerning true from false, 4) we’re then told about how HEAVEN is ANOTHER world (a 3rd experience, beyond false and true perception) reachable when "this world" is left behind (the world/realm/universe we made).

The lesson "No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth" specifically describes us leaving this "world" and returning to Heaven, to the realm of Creation, to God’s universe. Which is not the Earth or even the physical universe.

This also means that, the collective "Son of God" dreamed the fictional "world" which houses the fictional planet earth (there is no world). This also means then that if true perception shows you the "accurate perception" of the world YOU MADE (physical universe), to see accurately/truly the world you made is to see what THE SON projected. Since this "world", the physical universe, is the "One Son’s dream" or, the collective dream of the Sonship, which we all made together, and since the course says "The world IS perception", seeing this world with true perception is us perceiving PERCEPTION. Perception twice removed!

As individual souls we’re looking upon what the One Son projected as a fake universe. Within this context alone, we EACH have a false perception OF the One Son’s perception. A false perception of "the world" (and you can include Earth in that world). False perception ADDS a "personal layer" on top of the world we made, true perception removes that layer and reveals what is "there" without distortion. Yet this world we’ll see, the "real world", is STILL within perception. It is STILL the 2nd world, the one WE MADE, not the one God created.

We will disappear this 2nd world. This 2nd world is one we made up, invented, it is a DREAM. An illusory universe. It doesn’t really even exist at all. IT is the opposite to the nature of heaven in EVERY WAY. It is not a part of heaven now, and it will never be. Being an illusion, it must disappear entirely. Being literally NOTHING, it never was, does not exist NOW, and never will. It simply will vanish when recognized in the light of truth. The light will shine it away. It will be no more because it never was. We don’t need it.

God has created a "world" - Heaven - a "place" (as much as any, though different to the physical experience), "fit for a King" ... a realm of permanent joy and love and eternal life. It is EVERTHING, where the "world" we made is nothing. The world we made is not real. "There is no world" is a direct statement speaking to this - this world we made, which includes planet Earth and more, does not exist. "The world holds nothing that I want" ... not just the world of false perception, OR the world of true perception. The world we made, to replace God’s world, holds nothing that I want. The "real world" is an illusion, not a reality. God’s reality is the REAL, real world.

These are, to me, essentially the two worlds. And within the world we made, because perception is selective and has degrees, there is a really screwed up state of false perception (hell), and a much more preferable and closer-to-reality state of "true" perception. As clear a state of perception as we can possibly have while still being OUTSIDE of heaven. And "there is no life outside of heaven", because the world we made is not life.

I guess I’m just putting this out there. FInding my way to a clarity about this which makes sense to me. Take what you like leave the rest.

FED-UP WITH SUFFERING? PUTTING UP WITH WHAT HAS HAPPENED? TOLERATING PAIN? WANT SOME RELIEF?!!

The ego’s thought system is specifically geared to make you suffer for as long as possible.

Every time something "happens" in this world, it is symbolic of sin. Sin seems like an irreversible event which, once it has happened, produces inevitable consequences. The consequences are believed to be irreversible, and so we resign ourselves to tolerating them, accepting them, allowing them putting up with them, and SUFFERING, for a long long time.

Sin, or events, as soon as they happen, move into the past. This was our ego device for using time to keep the "cause" of all problems locked in the past, beyond access to the present, so that it could not be changed. The past ITSELF is the idea of "something happened which cannot be changed." And pretty much everyone believes, you cannot undo the past.

Then, the consequences of sin proceed according to ego laws, extending indefinitely into the future, featuring lots and lots of suffering. We believe we cannot do ANYTHING to change what has happened, so we just put up with it. Our mind, believing this ego arrangement, starts to become CONDITIONED to think and perceive and be USED TO living this way. Stuff happens, we accept it as real, we do not undo it, we think we have to LIVE WITH IT.

This mental conditioning, kind of a habit of thought, which runs completely OPPOSITE to the thought system of the Holy Spirit, is a thought system of maintaining suffering. Ie, maintaining the consequences of sin indefinitely. We become used to it. We think it’s NORMAL! We then tolerate the suffering for as long as possible, until it adds up and destroys us. Living this way, is unforgiving. We have condemned ourselves to death.

Since this conditioning has been built up over a very long period of time, it seems almost impossible to even question it or do anything about it. Surely we cannot undo sin? Surely we cannot REVERSE the consequences of our wrong decisions, or events which seemed to "happen"? But we can.

Holy Spirit had news for me, because I believed and acted this way. I did not believe stuff could be undone. I didn’t even know there was ANY OTHER WAY to live. I was so USED TO accepting that whatever happens, it’s a done deal. As soon as I become sick, I accepted I must suffer it and use magic and try to get over it the "normal" way. This always means, a long drawn out period of suffering. Lots of time spent feeling like shit. I did not even IMAGINE that it might be possible NOT TO HAVE TO SUFFER this way.

Holy Sprit started teaching me that "you need not suffer". One day I burned my hand on hot water. It became sore fast. I started believing, I was going to have a sore hand for a week, would have to suffer with it, this was really really annoying, and I was mad about it. I saw no way to avoid that suffering, other than trying to use magic. It hurt, and I was pissed. But Holy Spirit had news for me! He said, "you need not suffer". My hand started to shake. A miracle was happening, but I did not want to LOOK at it. I was a bit frightened, because miracles blow the ego expectations out of the water.

Something was happening completely contrary to how things normally happen, against y ego, and against my resistance. After a few moments, I looked. All of the soreness was completely healed, all the redness gone. And at that moment, just for a moment, something happened in my mind... a sudden glimpse of some kind of miraculous state of being, a mind which knew that anything of the body can be flipped on or off like a light switch, to which it was completely immune. It was a moment of LIGHT. A state of mind I had never experienced, caused by my EGO ILLUSIONS being proven before my eyes, that they were NOT TRUE. Miracles are teaching devices!

At times I also have emotional releases of old pain. These used to require that I cry at great length. I have cried so many times over the past years doing the course it’s probably in the 1000’s. But lately, Holy Spirit has been teaching me, "you need not suffer". As I go to cry, showing a willingness to release, Holy Spirit immediately steps in. I can’t even get a tear out. He does his healing thing, producing various temporary effects and shaking and so on, and then the upset is GONE. Just disappeared. No need to cry at all. In fact, laughing at the end of it. I thought I had to suffer, feel upset, let it out the painful way. Not any more! Now, every single time I go to release emotions, Holy Spirit does it for me! You could say, I never need to cry ever again. Isn’t that something to be thankful for?! It’s a miracle every time.

Now, this applies to all of us, because this is what happens when a MIRACLE happens. Miracles REVERSE what seems to have happened (sin), proving it was NOT irreversible. They can reach BACKWARDS in time and beyond all "causes" that we think were in the past out of reach, and UNDO them, restoring us to how we were BEFORE stuff happened. Restoring our innocence and immortality! Miracles reverse time! This is completely the OPPOSITE of what we usually experience as "linear time". Linear time seems to only move forwards, shoving sin into the past and guilt and suffering into the future. Not so, say miracles! Miracles GO THE OTHER WAY! They rewind, they undo, they collapse, they correct, they reverse, they heal, they restore, and demonstrate that YOU DO NOT NEED TO SUFFER EVEN A LITTLE BIT FOR ANY TIME AT ALL!

This is mind-bending for us who are accustomed to thinking with the ego, assuming that linear time (shit happens and it gets worse) is "normal", and just taking the way this world SEEMS to function at face value. My mind is so used to moving "forwards" with the consequences of sin, that to get myself to even THINK about moving the opposite direction is a real challenge. My mind doesn’t seem to want to go that way! It’s like a whole different direction of perception. It takes baby steps. It takes practice. And each time I am a little bit willing to entertain this idea...."maybe I DON‘T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS", and the sooner the better, and imagine that it MIGHT be possible to NOT have to go through the whole train of suffering in the future, I open up to the Holy Spirit, who CAN OFFER HEALING NOW, and prevent having to suffer a long drawn-out PUNISHMENT.

Holy Spirit is capable of REVERSING absolutely anything the ego has made, of undoing absolutely ALL SIN, proving and demonstrating that NOTHING stands in the way of God’s healing power, and that SIN is absolutely NOT PERMANENT and HAS NO REAL CONSEQUENCES. "Holy Spirit will undo the ALL the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him", literally means, MIRACLES WILL OVERRIDE ALL CAUSES AND EFFECTS and will UNDO every form of suffering you ever thought you "had to experience" based on "what happened" or "what you did". We do not "have to" go along with the whole "something bad just happened, let’s immediately accept it has happened and PUT UP WITH IT" bullshit. THAT IS THE EGO! We must STOP TOLERATING THE EGO, because the only place it leads to is suffering and death.

It can be hard to do, especially at first. I have experienced this myself, and I still feel like a baby at this. Each time something "goes wrong", or some sickness pops up, or whatever temptation there is that "there’s nothing I can do about this", the challenge is to catch myself and stop myself and be like.... wait..... I don’t have to accept this crap! This is not God’s will. I don’t have to SUFFER! MAYBE there is another option. "I can see peace instead of this", or rather, "I can choose a miracle and UNDO THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW! I don’t have to just go into a future-predicting VICTIM mode and the whole story of how this is going to ruin my life forever. THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY.

There is! Question that time must go forwards. Question that you are stuck with what happens to you. Question the temptation to believe there is NOTHING that can be done to undo this. And you will be going up against YOUR OWN BELIE that there is nothing anyone can do, and it’s a strong one! You’re going to have to really stretch your mind to consider and be open, that EVEN THIS.... even this "thing" thats happening, big or small, EVEN THIS you don’t have to accept, it doesn’t have to stay, MAYBE it can be undone, MAYBE there is a way to heal this with God. And gradually you will develop TRUST in the Holy Spirit and be willing to BELIEVE His Power to heal anything, and thus become OPEN TO RECEIVE THE HEALING. Holy Spirit has an unlimited supply of healing waiting for you!!!!!! There is nothing your holiness cannot do. There is nothing his holiness cannot do.

But it will take practice, because your mind has been TRAINED to "go along with the consequences of sin", at great length. So much that you think it’s totally NORMAL - everyone seems to suffer the asame way, bad stuff happens and there’s nothing we can do. That’s the battle-cry of SIN! The ego LOVES TO SUFFER! Our mind may even have DIFFICULTY even beginning to entertain this idea that events can MOVE IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION. Like someone hitting REWIND on the VCR! We do not have to live in a world of "doing" (to us). We can live in a world of UNDOING. Simply because we do not see hardly anyone demonstrating this, we have ASSUMED that we must suffer and whatever caused stuff to happen, we’re stuck with it. It’s bullshit!

We have not seen someone coming BACK to life after being dead. We have not seen a car accident being reversed and no consequences coming from it. We have not seen someone with terminal cancer suddenly have cancer no more. We have not seen a dead baby being resurrected. We have not seen a leg which was broken 5 minutes ago be completely healed. We have not seen broken objects be repaired, or lack be filled out of nowhere, or people being CURED of what the world says "cannot be cured". Ego/sin says nothing can be cured! It is CERTAIN of your death. We must choose the OPPOSITE DIRECTION! That’s what miracles are. Every miracle demonstrates the mind is more powerful than the body and more powerful than SIN.

Miracles are reinforced by forgiveness which recognizes sin has no consequences, and it UNDOES THEM! We simply ASSUME that everything proceeds forwards, starting with sin, ending in DEATH. It does not have to!

Let’s practice being the ones to DEMONSTRATE that sometimes, and it should be ALL THE TIME, things can go backwards. Stuff can get healed. There can be total reversal of death. "Causes" can be nullified and cancelled out, and all effects which came from them UNDONE. We need to work with the Holy Spirit in our OWN EXPERIENCE, learning that we don’t have to put up with the things that "happen to us" in life. Let him show you that you need not suffer.

Let him show you that you DON’T have to tolerate that cold for 2 weeks, that you DON’T have to just accept that you will never get your paralyzed limb back, that you DON’T have to just lay down and die just because SIN claims that you do.

This is learning to trust the supernatural healing power of miracles, which UNDO everythig the ego tries to DO. It is nothing short of the complete reversal of all death and destruction and chaos, and the undoing of the separation, and the guaranteed RESURRECTION of God’s Sons. Miracles REVERSE what the ego has "done". That is how they UNDO. Miracles don’t really do anything at all, because all they do is undo? Is that a sorry excuse for a watered down non-miracle? MIRACLES UNDO EVERYTHING THE EGO HAS PUT IN PLACE!

Guess also why Jesus says the MIRACLE is the only tool available to you to control time? Because miracles MOVE TIME BACKWARDS in order to revert and undo the consequences of sin! They RETURN YOU to innocence, health, wholeness and happiness from which you came, which is symbolically in the distant past. With miracles, you need not AGE, you need not DIE, you need not SUFFER, and you need not be SICK ever again! Nothing needs to go wrong and stay wrong! There is NOTHING YOUR HOLINESS CANNOT DO. This takes learning, patience, practice and trust, in the HOLY SPIRIT, that HE has the power and ability to HEAL ANYTHING FOR YOU if you will allow it and just be open to this one simple idea ..... maybe there is a better way, than having to suffer the consequences of sin.

In the separation from God, we introduced an idea of "separateness" into wholeness. We believed it was possible for there to be a lack of wholeness. This produced the idea of "over here" and "over there", each distinct and different and seeming to lack the some part of the whole, setting them apart.

This laid the foundation for both space and time - notions that what is here is not there, or what is there lacks what is here. And so each seeming part of it seems to have a different form, a partial collection of attributes which sets them apart from each other. And neither has everything.

"You who believe that God is fear made but ONE substitution. It has taken many forms, because it was the substitution of fragmentation for wholeness." And then we continued to subdivide and split the mind. We tried to assign certain collections of properties, aspects, characteristics, to some parts, and others to the rest. To break wholeness into seeming isolated chunks of form.

Each part took on a different form and meaning. Various forms or examples or versions of the same one error of separateness. This caused a multitude of differences to seem to appear, each held apart from the rest and separated out as if many things.

This inevitably produced an entire universe of many "forms of error", where each object or body is different to the rest. Each lacks what the others have, rooted in sacrifice and limitation. Not one is whole, and every one is partial.

And so each form appears to comprise different materials, shapes, structures, behaviors, colors, textures and appearances. From these scattered fragments of illusion, entire worlds seemed to arise, each unlike the others and unique in its appearance. Including every human body and every atom.

An illusion is the appearance that something is other than what it actually is - seeming to be something it is not. The single idea of separation, the one problem, shows up as multiple things and multiple problems. It is really one thing, but separateness leads to many forms. And every form is an illusion that the one error is many errors.

Each form says, "look at the ways I am not the same as the rest". And so as one form pulls itself away from sameness, another form does the same. And the two forms try to disguise the fact they are one thing.

And now each form seems to vie for attention. Every form is different, and therefore in conflict and competition. Some are larger, smaller, more or less important, more or less valuable, more or less serious, more or less difficult to deal with.

And now we have an entire hierarchy of illusions, from the gigantic to the tiny, and everything in between. The form that each form takes deceives by distracting you with its claim that it is not like the rest. My car is not a house. My boat is not an airplane. My trousers are not shoes. My ice cream is not a burger.

Every form is designed to assert a deception, a temptation, an illusion, that if its form is real and true, then it IS NOT the other things. This was founded in the simple premise that this world is NOT reality, or the negation of God, and so everything appears to be NOT the rest.

If you believe it, you are deceived. Because every form is a form of deception, an illusion that a singular idea of separation is many things.

One part says, I am not like the other part. Look at how I am different. Look at my different shape, color, size and makeup. Look at what sets me apart. Look at what I have which the other lacks. Look at our differences. Look how we are separate and not the same at all.

And to believe this is to be completely blinded to the the truth. Because if you fall for this and take sides, if you come to prefer one form over another, or think they are truthfully unique and valuable, then you have fallen for the ONE temptation of the world.

Every form is a lie. Every physical object and every body is a lie. Every planet and every star and galaxy is a lie. They are all designed to hide and disguise the one single illusion of separation.

So long as you are caught up in a life where the worshipping of DIFFERENCES prevails, where you prefer some forms over others, where you think that two things are not THE SAME, you are deceived and blinded. There is nothing so blinding as to fixate your vision on the perception of FORM, making the separation real.

The body's eyes look only upon the forms of error. Only the body makes the world seem real. Its fixation on differences, changes, inequalities and comparisons, blinds you to seeing any kind of singular truth. It sees a world of a billion truths, none making any sense or meaning anything at all. The whole message of ACIM is that we need to transition AWAY from a world of differences, towards wholeness. To repair the sense of fragmentation in the mind and restore singular oneness.

This requires seeing THROUGH the deception of form, and not believing it. Not believing that a car and a house are real differences. Not believing that a living body and a dead body are real differences. Not believing that some objects are more important or valuable than others. Realizing that we gave the world of forms ALL the meanings that they have.

To flatten the hierarchy of illusions is to recognize that ALL illusions are one illusion. A single error presents itself to you in every conceivable form of deception. If you buy into it, you think there is an order of difficulty, where some things are harder to deal with or change than others.

To recognize there IS no hierarchy, is to recognize that all forms are the SAME. That every form of suffering is the SAME. That every form of sickness and death and life is the SAME. That there is ONE thing here, not many. That the manyness and the differences are entirely untrue. That one thing is sneakily showing up as a massive multitude to HIDE its true nature of being just one thing.

This is why there is really only one lesson the Holy Spirit teaches, that ALL FORMS of suffering have a SINGLE cause. This is why the workbook lessons have us NOT be selective in which forms we apply things to, so that we will learn that forms are meaningless decoys. This is why we are to recognize there is ONE problem not many. And this is why there is ONE truth and ONE law and ONE atonement.

Every form that the world takes is a lie. Every time it says you should want this form or that form, it is trying to get you to take sides. Every time you take sides there is war. Every difference of form IS conflict. Everything you see with the body IS conflicted, with objects vying for attention, some nearer some further, some louder some quieter, some more "appealing" than others.

All of this is ONE thing, one effort, one scheme, to TEMPT you to believe in the differences so that you will not recognize they are ALL THE SAME. That this whole world is entirely unreal. That not one form is more real or important or valuable than another. That there aren't billions of choices, there is only one choice.

ALL illusory forms are like two characters who act and speak and present themselves differently to try to create the illusion that they are not ONE actor. The mind is ONE actor, taking on the role of multiple simultaneous parts, pitted against each other. So long as you do not recognize that ONE mind is playing ALL the roles, of both victim and victimizer, you will be deceived by form.

In a world of forms, all the forms are untrue. Not one of them IS reality. And none of them show you what is true. To see only physical form is to see nothing but error and sin. True vision will show you that their many appearances are lies, and that there is a singular truth behind them. We are addicted to a world of forms, believing in specialness and made-up values. Made-up worth. Made-up importance. Goals and toys and special jobs and relationships and things you want and things you don't want.

All designed to keep you locked into a hell of form and separation. To keep you tempted that the next big thing will save you. That the next form the illusion takes will be the one you've always wanted. So that you never realize NONE of them are true, NONE of them are real, and NONE of them are what you really want.

That without deception, lies, falsehood and temptation, there is NO WORLD HERE AT ALL. Without form, there is no planet and no body. And behind all forms is the one lie that started it all, which the world of forms was made to hide - that separation is even possibe.

"A problem can appear in MANY forms, and it will do so while the problem lasts."

"It is not a thought which judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. It merely focuses on what it is, and knows that no illusion can be real."

"For how can one illusion differ from another but in attributes which have no substance, no reality, no core, and nothing that is truly different?"

"Today's idea is another giant stride in the perception of the same as the same, and the different as different. On one side stand all illusions. All truth stands on the other."

"Illusions battle ONLY with themselves. Being fragmented, they fragment."

"Illusions CAN conflict, because their forms ARE different. And they do battle ONLY to establish which FORM is true."

"The meeting of illusions leads to war."

"EVERY illusion is an assault on truth."

"Bodies may battle, but the clash of forms is meaningless."

"The gap is carefully concealed in fog, and misty pictures rise to cover it with vague, uncertain forms and changing shapes, forever unsubstantial and unsure. Yet in the gap is NOTHING."

"The thought of sacrifice gives rise to all the forms that suffering appears to take."

"Sickness takes many forms, and so does unforgiveness. The forms of one but reproduce the forms of the other, for they are the same illusion."

"For time and space are ONE illusion, which takes different forms."

"The dream is but illusion in the mind."

"The forms the broken pieces seem to take mean nothing."

"Your sleeping and waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. THEIR CONTENT IS THE SAME. They are your protest AGAINST reality, and your fixed and insane wish to CHANGE it."

"You are so used to choosing between dreams, you do not see that you have made, at last, the choice between the truth and ALL ILLUSIONS."

"This course attempts to teach no more than that the power of decision cannot lie in choosing different forms of what is still the SAME illusion and the SAME mistake."

"Death is a thought which takes on many forms, often unrecognized."

"Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion."

"Those who are special MUST defend illusions against the truth."

"Guilt ASKS FOR punishment, and its request is granted. NOT in truth, but in the world of shadows and illusions BUILT on sin."

"What is perceived takes many forms, but NONE has meaning. Brought to truth, its senselessness is quite apparent."

"Yet has God given Answer to the world of sickness, Which applies to ALL its forms."

"NO illusion has ANY truth in it. Yet it appears some are MORE true than others, although this clearly makes no sense at all. All that a hierarchy of illusions can show is PREFERENCE, NOT reality."

"What relevance has preference to the truth? Illusions are illusions, and are false."

"Illusions HAVE no witnesses, and no effects. Who looks on them is but deceived."

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate, and has a different set of thoughts which SETS HIM OFF from others. This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are MORE valuable, and THEREFORE true."

"For this establishes degrees of TRUTH among illusions, making it appear that some are HARDER to be overcome than others."

"Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

"The laws of chaos govern ALL illusions. Their forms conflict, making it SEEM quite possible to value some above the others."

"This illusion can take many forms."

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth.""

"The strength of pardon is its honesty, which is so uncorrupted that it sees illusions as illusions, not as truth."

"The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to PROVE it is autonomous and real."

"Though the dream itself takes many forms, and SEEMS to show a great variety of places and events wherein its "hero" finds itself, the dream has but ONE purpose, taught in many ways."

"Bring, then, all forms of suffering to Him Who knows that every one is like the rest. He sees NO differences where none exist, and He will teach you how each one is CAUSED. None has a DIFFERENT cause from all the rest, and ALL of them are easily undone by but a SINGLE lesson truly learned."

"Not once do the advanced teachers of God consider the forms of sickness in which their brother believes."

"The gap that is not there is filled with toys in countless forms."

"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see BEYOND what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and NOT see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see ONLY illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside FORM of nothing. To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

"Only MISTAKES have different forms, and so they CAN deceive. You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is NOT reality, it MUST be an illusion. And is Not THERE to see. And, IF you see it, you MUST be mistaken, for you are seeing what can NOT be real, as if it WERE. What cannot see BEYOND what is not there, MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions AS THE TRUTH. Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth?"

"You are advancing to love's MEANING, and away from ALL illusions in which you have surrounded it."

"You who believe that God is fear made but ONE substitution. It has taken many forms, because it was the substitution of fragmentation for wholeness. It has become splintered and subdivided and divided again, over and over, that it is now almost impossible to perceive it once was one, and still IS what it was. That ONE error, which brought truth to illusion, infinity to time, and life to death, was all you ever made. Your whole world rests upon it. Everything you see reflects it. And every special relationship you ever made is PART of it."

"Temptation has ONE lesson it would teach, in ALL its forms, WHEREVER it occurs."

"Elusive happiness, or happiness in changing forms that shift with time and place, is an illusion that has no meaning."

"Never foster this illusion in yourself, or encourage it in others. An "object" is incapable of release, because it is a concept which is deprived of creative power."

"What is seen as "reality" is simply what the mind prefers. Its hierarchy of values is projected outward, and it sends the body's eyes to find it."

"All that a hierarchy of illusions can show is PREFERENCE, NOT reality."

"Fear is the emotion of the world. It has but one. Its forms are many - call them what you will - but it is one in content."

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning. ... Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form MEANS understanding HAS BEEN obscured."

"Before a holy relationship, there IS no sin. The FORM of error is no longer seen."

I went back and slowly re-read the entire "miracle principles" from a very early urtext version, plus some other sections.

The impression I have of miracles now is different and more cohesive. Whatever our understanding of them is, they must incorporate every single thing Jesus says about them, including the ability to literally move mountains, to heal the sick and raise the dead, and also to correct perception. Here are some key points and new clarity on the subject.

1) Miracles are best understood in a vertical direction. They come down from above and lift upwards, or restore life and reality. "Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from heaven." "performed by those who have more (above) for those who have less (below)". They extend or radiate down into the world from God. They also go out sideways between brothers because brothers are ultimately IN heaven.

2) Every aspect of the "descent" into egotism, separation, degrading reality, becoming insane, unwillingness, unconsciousness, etc which is all an attempt to introduce separation between brother's minds (to split the sonship or divide the Kingdom), to interfere with mind-to-mind communication, is the exact opposite of miracles. Projection is opposite to miracles. Magic is opposite to miracles. Miracles inherently correct level confusion, heal projections, undo magic (which includes sickness), and restores awareness of the truth.

3) Every movement towards restoring communication, reintegrating reality, bringing wholeness to your mind AND your brother's mind, uniting you with your brother, healing relationships, removing separations, all effects resulting from separation and sin (including sickness, illness, suffering, death), and cancelling out the "consequences" of sin, are accomplished by miracles. "Miracles unite you directly with your brother". "The purpose of miracles is to restore reality". "Miracles make brothers one in God" etc. The ultimate aim of miracles is to induce revelation and direct communion with God. This however does not exclude miracles that manipulate forms or move mountains, because mountains are actually also thought-forms in the MIND and are actually BELIEFS which mind can manipulate. "The world IS perception" (in the mind).

4) Miracles originate in the mind of Christ. They require the absence of fear, and an awareness of Christ's presence. Jesus inspires them. While they come FROM the Christ mind, you can be in varying degrees of "miracle mindedness" depending on whether your mind is functioning and responding in an ego-driven way or a love-based way. "Miracles are seen in light" "Miracles reflect an inner awareness of Christ." They are therefore typically requiring quite an advanced state of mind, BUT they also can be performed even by "beginners" who are able to temporarily put fear aside and shift into VERTICAL perception away from the horizontal belief system, which allows them to bring forth a miracle which helps develop "conviction in the ability" by seeing physical appearances change. The ability to make this shift isn't necessarily an act of your own purification but a USE OF the parts of your mind that have already been purified.

5) There are two aspects - miracle-mindedness/readiness, and miracle-working. To be miracle-minded is based on the STATE of your mind. But a mind based on love is not unexpressive or static. It is a mind that extends, gives in order to have, shares, increases, creates. Being miracle-minded/ready emphasizes that you are "ready, willing, and able" to "perform" or "do" miracles. The "action" aspect of miracles should be under Christ control (Jesus) due to the atonement plan and should be "involuntary". You are not supposed to consciously control that part of it yourself, but you ARE responsible for becoming "ready, willing and able".

6) "Miracles are thought-creations". Our mind goes through varying degrees of power to CREATE or project, depending on how much ego there is. We become more able to express creatively as we wake up. The mind can shine INTO and BLESS other minds due to having both been created by the "same spark" of God - being of like kind. Miracles not only unite you with your brother, they also increase your own strength by giving love, and also strengthen your brother. They in a sense "repair" the sense of separation between both of you, increase the level of communication, and therefore UNDO the manifestations of the separation idea (forms of sickness etc). Miracles are tightly associated with CREATION, and therefore are capable of creating. They combine "thought-creation" with belief, in order to produce results, which includes changes to *appearances* - meaning all forms, in a law-defying way (including moving mountains).

7) Miracles are not shifts in perception as such. However they can produce a shift in the perception OF OTHERS. Miracles are inter-personal ACTS. They are something you DO to EXPRESS the state of love that you are. They are an "application" of your holiness, and thus create in the same way that God applies himself to create. Because they can "correct" misperceptions in yourself AND others, they can heal your brother and yourself. They bestow grace and blessing on others. Miracles can correct perception and shift it, but when you yourself "correct thinking" and "change perception" that act itself is not necessarily a miracle. Miracles express from above downwards, changes of mind express from below upwards. You stepping "up" to the miraculous mind can require many steps before you are "high" enough to express "downward" with miracles. In a way though, any movement towards God/truth/love is a step in the right direction. The shifting itself isn't the miracle, the miracle is the love that expresses AFTER the blocks to awareness are removed. Although having said that, when you express a miracle it strengthens you also, increasing your sanity, so....

8) The miracle-mind thought system is totally different to the ego thought system in that it has an omnipresent and holographic nature. This means that the miracle is everywhere. It also means the miracle can express in "a part" of the dream and seem to produce a wide variety of specific results. However all miracles are inherently united and consistent and devoid of any recognition of levels of difficulty or heirarchy or size or any other ego construct. "To God all things are possible." I visualize God as like this ocean of liquid where all aspects are fluidly flowing all over the place and completely defies the entire ego thought system and all of its very rigid, compartmentalizing laws. The miracle-minded are literally miraculous in that they can create anything, can do anything, can heal anything, can produce any changes to any appearance, and there is nothing they cannot do.

9) Miracles collapse time because they introduce sort of a separate "moment" of time in which all of the horizontal laws are defied and a "new state" is directly implemented, instantly, which is almost like taking a tiny clip from "the future" and inserting it into the current timeline "out of the temporal order". Another analogy is a vynil record, as if you suddenly bump the arm and it skips some tracks and resumes playing further along in the song. The interval in-between of the "thousands of years" that were skipped, essentially has collapsed or deleted an entire portion of the timeline. Their purpose IS to collapse time and bring about the end of the need for time. Ultimately they lead to revelation and total wholeness, and then are no longer needed. This is all to do with mind. But this DOES NOT exclude apparent changes to forms, bodies, sickness or death, because all of those things are actually mental states, thought-forms, ideas, images in the mind, which are just as much within the scope of mind-power as anything you would normally consider "inside your mind". You have to realize the entire universe is WITHIN our shared minds, and therefore even physical forms have to be ultimately disappeared and "healed" and "shone away" by our light, in order for the the entire sonship to totally be free from dreaming.

10) Miracles are a maximal service you can render a brother. All expressions of love are maximal. That means they express FROM "total" love, not partial. However, you can be in varying degrees of miracle mindedness depending on how you express or "relate". If in a given situation, you have one possible response which is egotism where you make the problem real and use it for attack etc, and another possible response is that you remain "in love" and affirm the truth of both of you and see your brother as sinless and calling out for love and you "empower" both of you, this is a miracle. You chose to love instead of hate, you chose to express a truthful healing charitable gracious blessing rather than attack.

11) Miracles are also "energizing" in that they give LIFE to others ("all around the signs of life spring up"). They supply a lack. They are given by those who have more to those who have less. Lack is just "lack of love", so by supplying love you bless and remove a curse and energize and shine light onto the "area of separation" which causes it to reintegrate and become whole again. "The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness" because you have to be in a mindset of wholeness (miracle readiness) in order to see your brother's holiness and innocence, which strengthens this in both of you and thus energizes and gives life to both of you. When you heal, therefore, BOTH of you receive healing. Separation isn't a "private idea", it's something that "comes between" like a double-sided sword, and removing this sword restores communication in BOTH directions.

12) Miracles can move mountains and raise the dead. Since both of them are illusions and all forms are illusions, and all illusions are based on separation, the miracle-minded have total power OVER these things, either by bringing life to them and healing them, or by demonstrating this power OVER them by changing appearances. A body returning from death and decay to life, or a mounting moving from left to right, are both "changes to appearance". Miracles change appearances to PROVE and demonstrate that the forms themselves ARE illusions BECAUSE they could be changed, and therefore cannot be real because they are so easily manipulated by the mind. The illusion of objects being physical, heavy, large, or that death is too difficult to undo etc, all these illusions crumble to nothing when they are shown to be changeable.

13) Miracles require faith and trust. Having faith in your brother's innocence even when they show up as guilty/sinful/sick, overcomes/overlooks/forgives their illusions and can shine them away. Your mind CAN enter the mind of another and enlighten it. Also certainty (fearlessness) is required (even if temporarily suspended), because miracles occur as thought-acts which are decisive and committal. You don't have to merely have "strong belief" "of your own", you need to also RELY ON or depend on God, trusting HIS power and strength, and knowing what HE is capable of, so that you have TRUST in the certainty of the outcome and KNOWING that it must occur. This goes beyond your "self" as an individual or separate miracle worker. You can do nothing on your own, but you can work WITH God to co-create. Faith/trust also correlates to belief.

14) Miracles also correlate to acceptance/receiving of atonement. They are expressed through PRAYER, which brings about the active "doing" of miracles, because in the prayer you combine thought and belief and faith (key ingredients that are MUST have's), and ask with the heart (not necessary to use words). This "asking" is almost the same thing as "expressing" or "stating" and "seeing" what change you want to occur, as though it has already happened and has been received. "Believe you have received and you shall have it." Miracles EXPRESS FROM the atonement. You have to accept some atonement to accept some "miracle juice", so that you can give it. That means that in some small way, in some part of you, on some issue, you accepted the truth about you as innocent and loved, rather than condemn yourself with sin. This part of you now has received a miracle or has been restored to a more miracle-oriented way of being, and this now can express to others. In a healed part of you, when confronted with another situation like what happened before, you might now "bless" instead of "see sin", and this IS capable of healing others.

15) Overall it seems miracles are essentially HOW the entire illusion of separation is reversed. In all its way, all its appearances, all its consequences. Every form of suffering, all sickness, death, and also demonstrations of the falseness of the ego's laws. Moving a mountain may well demonstrate and violate laws of physics and weight and size and so on, proving that these are not TRUE, that illusory limitations are not true, and this can bring healing to the mind. Miracles can be teaching devices. They remind you and your brother of what is true about you. The entire "lifting up" of all brothers and the "lifting away" of all forms of separation and the "disappearing" of all suffering and forms and illusions and eventually the universe itself, is "the miracle", which is kind of everywhere and omnipresent and comes from God.

16) You are a miracle. This means that God creates miraculously because God is also miraculous. It's natural to be miraculous. You are miraculous in the sense that anything is possible to the holy, and God who is alive has miraculously created the sonship. To the ego, it should not be possible, but it is. A miracle as a "creative expression of thought" is your natural way of creating in heaven. It's how you express love. It's an extension of yourself and increases joy and overcomes lack and restores BOTH you and the thing you create. When you express miracles or miraculously in the world it similarly follows the same laws of GOD and creates wholeness, healing, health, happiness, freedom, love, perfection, holiness, joy, peace, life.

17) Miracles are super-natural. This means they are totally above the ego's "nature", and fly in the face of everything we think of as "the nature" of this universe. This includes all ego laws and physics and time and space. They express from above the battlefield, from heaven, falling like drops of healing rain on the desert (absence of love) below and supply a lack and bring the dead back to life, raising it up towards resurrection. Miracle workers are like angels or holy beings who step inside a dream of death and start expressing themselves, demonstrating all over the place that nothing here is fixed or limiting or has any power over you at all. As beings of light and immortality and creativity, when we express as this kind of identity (christ-aligned) we totally defy every law of the world and therefore literally produce "miraculous" effects. To the ego, miracles are considered un-natural, but to God they are considered completely natural. There is nothing they cannot do and there is nothing your holiness cannot do. You are UNLIMITED, and the sheer degree of limitation of this ego world is shown to be extremely false by every miracle expression.

18) Being miraculous is your natural inheritance and does not require anyone else to choose to be miraculous. It doesn't "require" a holy relationship. BUT, it can IMPLEMENT a holy relationship due to the fact that it heals the separation between brothers. Jesus as the one who woke up can perform them for anyone, and he inspires all miracles which intercede for your holiness, but in so doing, he also unites you with Himself and the two of your minds join and share love, if you are willing. You still have free will and no-one can force anyone to wake up or be healed if they do not want it or if it would frighten them.

19) If you can grasp how God's mind is omnipresent and this means that all of him is in every location FULLY at the same time, which TOTALLY defies the entire ego world and all its forms of matter and space and time, you can get a better sense of how anything is possible in God. And how, in contrast to that, this world and its laws are set up to be extremely limiting, to suggest no two things share anything, forms are things in their own right, nothing is coming from the mind, mind has no power over anything ("the mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this"), and everything is separated off and compartmentalized into boxes and finite objects. This is SO TOTALLY OPPOSITE to God's nature and the nature of anyone who has access the miracle-working mind or the "attitude of love". Love isn't just a finite thing in a box. It is miraculous, life-giving, spacetime defying, and completely ignores all illusory differences. When the world is PROVEN to be NOT separated out, and NOT disconnected from the mind, and NOT a thing in its own right and can easily be changed by the power of the mind, the true nature of God's UNLIMITEDNESS is revealed.

20) Miracles are what happens when an ego-defying, omnipresent, spatially-defying, time-defying, massively potential, unlimited, whole miraculous mind, comes into contact with the ego illusion of limitation and separateness. You can express them and bestow them everywhere, they are unlimited in number, and all support each other forming a "web" of atonement. You have to realize that all physical objects are part of the MIND, and are thoughts, and are perceptions, and are ideas in the mind. Therefore when mind changes and there are actions of expression of miracle-mindedness, this CAN and DOES also change and manipulate the appearance of physical objects. Separating mind from body is an error in this sense. Mind has power OVER the body. "That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind proves the mind must be stronger than the body." Whenever you elect to "be a bit more miraculous" or "be a bit more loving" or "express and stay strong in the truth" or "utilize your creative power" or "bless another" or "repair separation" or "reveal the unreality of an illusion" or "demonstrate that you are not limited" or "join minds with your brother" in any way, you are being miraculous.

I will explain now in one sentence, why there is no world, the entire foundation for miracle-working, and the meaning of cause and effect....

*** This universe (world) is once removed from reality. ***

Did you catch that? Read it again if it’s too short. Here’s the breakdown.

This world, including Earth, is not a thing in its own right. It is not direct reality. It is the EFFECT of a cause which is unseen and unmanifest. It is a projection, from a mind which seems invisible.

Being an effect of that mind, this universe itself has no identity of its own, no mind, no will, no causality, no truth, no reality, no purpose, no love, and basically does not exist.

If this world were a direct experience of reality, it would be different. Then it would make sense to believe its illusion that it exists on its own and is a real thing. But it’s not. This world is a by-product of dreaming, and whatever the dreamer decides to dream, shows up as this world.

This world has no will. It cannot decide to make something happen. It has no mind. It cannot think for itself. It has no purpose. It is not alive. It does not even move unless the hidden dreamer decides to move it. Nothing here breathes or seems to live unless a hidden mind somewhere else is causing every single moment of motion. It is absolutely nothing more than a "movie" being projected. It is nothing more than an IDEA that someone, somewhere, is HAVING.

A movie is a lifeless, inert, neutral, illusory nothingness. A movie does not cause anything to happen in reality. A movie is the EFFECT put in place by a mind entirely separate from the movie, who is choosing to make the movie appear one way or another.

Everything in this world, this world itself, this planet, all objects and bodies, all of it is SECOND HAND. It is showing up like a REFLECTION. It’s not really there. And since it has absolutely no life of its own, it can DO nothing without the hidden mind saying so.

The dreamer of this dream is the Son(s) of God. They are invisible to this world. This world is being PROJECTED from their mind. It seems to be outside of them. But this world is not first-hand reality. It is second-hand. Just an effect and nothing else.

Nothing within the world can change the world. Nothing within the world causes the world. Nothing within the world made the world appear. Nothing within the world is alive. Nothing within the world has a mind, or a will, nor does it think for itself. Nothing within the world is the cause of life or death. Nothing within the world makes events happen. There is nothing within the world, because the world is nothing. It does not DO anything. IT does not EXIST.

This correlates to miracles and to cause and effect. The mind which is causing this universe is the mind of the Son(s) of God. Everything that is showing up, the Sonship is putting there. Everything that moves, all chemical processes, all physical interaction, all events, the entire history of the universe, is all being WRITTEN from ANOTHER PLACE that you are not seeing with your eyes.

Cause is not IN THE WORLD. Cause is OUTSIDE THE WORLD. Cause is DREAMING THE WORLD. The cause of this universe is unseen, a mind so vast and powerful that it is able to make anything seem to happen.

Cause is the mind, the world is the EFFECT of its dreaming. Cause, from a holy mind, would normally CREATE. But we’re a little bit confused. Cause from a confused mind MIS-CREATES and MAKES a universe.

This does not mean that the mind literally creates a world that exists on its own with its own will and causality and life! The world NEVER is more than an EFFECT and it can do NOTHING on its own. This world/universe is the result of mis-creation, or dreaming, COMING FROM a LEVEL OF REALITY beyond this entire universe. Mind is cause, this world is effect.

Because of this, recognize that a miracle is what happens when it is REVEALED, that a mind BEYOND this world has the power to CAUSE this world. It only appears that there IS no such separate cause, ONLY beause the dream has not featured miracles very much. For the most part, the dream seems to just tick over, and its FAKE LAWS seem to just keep on applying with very little evidence that there is ANOTHER CAUSE outside of it. So we think this is normal, and believe those fake laws, and take the world to be real.

From within the world, within its illusion, we take it at face value for how it appears. "Nothing so blinding as sight of form". This leads us to believe (in ego) that this world is a thing in its own right, living and breathing and existing. This is NOT TRUE. It is not DOING ANYTHING. It’s like an image being projected onto a wall. It can’t change itself!

Everything happening in this world, and this world itself, is just an effect FROM a hidden, higher level of reality. Mind is causing it. Which means, in order for ANYTHING to seem to show up in this world, indeed for ANYTHING to happen in the world AT ALL, the mind has to put it there. It has to dream it. In order for objects to even MOVE, the MIND has to move them. In order for a river to flow down a hill, the MIND has to move every single particle. NOTHING HAPPENS without the consent of the one who is dreaming it. Not even death. If mind were not dreaming it, there would be nothing here!

This means that the mind which is BEYOND this world, causing it, would have to PRETEND that things WITHIIN it are causing each other. There is, factually, absolutely NOTHIING within this world that causes anything else to happen. Laws of physics are an illusion. Time is an Illusion. Death is an illusion. Something happening to someone against their will is an illusion. There CANNOT BE causes within the world itself, because it is ALL coming from the mind.

Mind MAKES ILLUSIONS that SEEM to appear as though one thing causes another within the world, and all the while the mind is secretly pulling all the strings. Nothing in the world "makes something happen". Nothing in the world "affects something". Nothing can BE affected "by" the world UNLESS the mind CHOOSES to PUT THE EFFECTS THERE. This is why the proper loving use of the body, temporarily, makes it IMPOSSIBLE for it to be sick or die! If mind does not will it, NOTHING happens to it.

So absolutely every so-called "cause" in the world is not real. And the "effects" which those so-called causes produce ARE NOT the result of those causes. That’s linear fiction. Believing that is FAILNG TO RECOGNIZE THE ILLUSION. Believing that something WITHIN this level causes effects WITHIN this lever, is "horizontal" or linear cause-and-effect. There IS no such thing! It’s not real. It’s a totally made-up fictional explanation by SLEEPING IDENTITIES who think this word is first-hand reality. ONLY THE MIND causes anything to seem to happen here. ONLY THE HIDDEN LEVEL of causality produces CHANGES in this world.

The mind is ALREADY CHANGING THE WORLD. The mind is MAKING THE WORLD TURN. The mind is animating the oceans. The mind is dreaming of life and death, things being born and growing and dying. None of this happens without the mind making it happen.

If there seems to be a flower growing, the MIND is growing the flower. If there seems to be a person walking, the MIND is walking the person. If there seems to be a drop of rain falling totally unbeknownst to any human in the middle of nowherer, it is ONLY falling because SOMEWHERE, MIND is making it move.

If there was a pause button to this projection, you would be able to stop and look at objects suspended in mid-air, wondering at how they can even be there, and demonstrating that they do not move by their own will. They are just EFFECTS, and being in touch with CAUSALITY ("this is a course in cause and not effect") gives you MIRACLE WORKING FREEDOM to IGNORE the laws of this world (which cause nothing), demonstrating the TRUTH that mind is the cause of this world.

Miracles occur as EXPRESSIONS from the mind of Love, the hidden mind, which is a DIRECT REALITY. That level of reality expresses and DEMONSTRATES that *this* level of reality, EFFECT, is TOTALLY UNDER ITS CONTROL. The "miraculous" mind has no limits to what it can do nor does it care what is in othe world, nor how big or small it seems to be, or the illusion of how "difficult" it might be to perform a particular miracle. It knows that MIND IS POWERFUL and MIND IS DREAMING THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE!

Any illusion of a fictional linear cause or effect has absolutely NO POWER to prevent the mind from manipulating the dream in any way it chooses. If the mind decides to throw pebbles in the air and turn them into butterflies, THAT WILL HAPPEN. If the mind chooses to freeze-frame a waterfall and to hold a lump of mid-flow water in the hand in suspended animation, that WILL happen. If the mind decides to LITERALLY MOVE A MOUNTAIN from one location to another, completely defying "gravity", SO BE IT!

This is all possible, and more. Nothing happens here AT ALL without the mind’s consent! No-one dies without their consent! No-one is attacked against their will! No-one can be sick unless they attack themselves. Nothing affects the body. Time does not even PASS unless the mind MAKES IT PASS. The cells in your body do not even move or eat or divide or anything unless the dreaming mind MAKES THEM APPEAR TO DO IT. Absolutely NOTHING HAPPENS HERE other than what the mind projects. That’s because there is no world, and this universe DOES NOT EXIST unless we keep dreaming of it.

Realize also that because even those cells in the body are nothing but a projection, even the shift from one "state" to another is ONLY happening because mind is making it happen. Mind is projecting, projecting, projecting, projecting, and over time, that makes it seem like "the object" being projected exist IN ITS OWN RIGHT. It does not. It is NOT ALIVE. It is just a constantly shifting IMAGE that the MIND IS DREAMING. It’s not there. It is NOT a life form.

So when you look at the world, realize this. You’re NOT looking directly at reality. You’re looking at a ONCE-REMOVED side-effect or projection from SOMEWHERE ELSE. All of the DECISION MAKING, all of the CONTROL, all of the choices as to what will show up, is happening somewhere else entirely, out of sight. You’re seeing an EFFECT. A big giant effect, like a huge movie that’s being broadcast from SOMEWHERE ELSE, to create the illusion that there is no projector. The projector is the MIND, not the world. Earth is a fairytale.

This is why "there is nothing my holiness cannot do". The mind of the Son of God who is DREAMING this world, can choose to do whatever he likes with it. HE ALREADY IS. The year 2017 is being projected by Him NOW. If He weren’t projecting this, there would be NOTHING HERE. No planet, no world. He is ALREADY CHANGING THE WORLD, every second of time, every moment, is only seeming to happen beacuse HIS MIND is making it change! Right now!

To be fully in touch with this TRUTH, and to therefore RECOGNIZE that everything in this entire universe is an ILLUSION, with NO real cause-and-effect happening within it, and having NO INHERENT EXISTENCE of its own, and with cause being SOLELY the mind that is dreaming it, will grant you ACCESS to "make changes". Free will.

The ability to make these changes was eloquently demonstrated by Jesus. Walking on water proved gravity is bullshit. HE MADE GRAVITY. Healing the sick proved there was no such thing as sickness and it had no power to resist him. And he also demonstrated that death can be overcome. "You made sickness and death and can therefore abolish both." They’re just DREAMS! WE make them up ourselves and pretend they’re happening against our will.

Everything about the Course makes sense in this simple framework. Cause is in the mind. Mind is projecting the world. The world is nothing but an effect of your mind and doesn’t really exist. You can do anything you want to change it beacuse you already are the one putting it there.

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles" because YOUR MIND is CAUSING EVERYTHING HERE. "Here", this world, this universe, this planet, isn’t doing anything on its own. It has no life, mind, will, or intentions. It causes nothing. All of its causes are ILLUSIONS. All cause is BEYOND this world. There is no world!!!!!!!

If you believe planet earth is real, or created by God, or causing stuff to happen, or has truth in it, or is alive in any way, YOU HAVE FALLEN FOR THE ILLUSION. It means you believe the PROJECTION from the mind IS the mind.

It means you believe Earth is alive and has a will of its own, which will automatically make you a victim of magical causes, suffer and die. It is LEVEL CONFUSION on a grand scale. Higher level mind CAUSES everything! The world causes nothing.

That which cannot cause anything cannot create, and so it cannot extend life, and therefore it is DEAD. This is a dream of death. "There is no life outside of heaven." There is no world here. It does not exist apart from our dreaming it, and no part of it has its "own existence".

There is no world because it is just an effect. Our effect. We are the cause.

The physical world is a world of forms, and forms are blinding and deceptive. All objects appear to be set apart by their differences, and claim they exclude the rest. Exclusion is separation, and all objects are at war.

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

An apple is not an orange. A banana does not agree with a grape. A pear is at war with a peach. But these differences of form is an illusion, disguising the fact that all of these objects are the same illusion of separation.

All physical objects are in a state of transition, transiting between what they were and what they are becoming. They are never permanently anything, lacking any real identity of reality. They are avoidances of the present, and are all forms of the idea of separation, showing up in different appearances and temptations.

If we then move into ego, we divide up the physical world based on these appearances. We categorise and label and we start to put similar things into boxes. Some things go into the life box, and some go into the death box. We think that the form something takes tells us what it means, and how we should respond to it, which is not true.

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

Things which we think symbolise life, such as freshness, newness, youth, cleanliness, order, vitality etc, we put into a life box. The things we think symbolise death, such as decay, damage, sickness, suffering, aging, withering, etc we put into the death box. But these are entirely made-up categories.

"I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me."

It is us who gives these things these meanings, based on how the forms appear. Things which seem to show more symbols of death, we call death, and things which seem to show more symbols of life we call life. And thus we decide to believe that seemingly living bodies are separated from the dead ones, that living bodies are more alive, and dead bodies are more dead, and we try to keep the two separate.

We end up with a "hierarchy of illusions", an entire collection of boxes and labels, having categorised all forms into one group and not another. But this means we have fallen into the ego's trap and are now perceiving separation everywhere, dividing up a single illusory world into fragmented pieces.

If we believe that the forms of death are different to the forms of life, we will attach all manner of evil, wrongness, badness, guilt, failure etc to death, and try to remove these things from the things we call life. And so we polarise our view of the world and are believing in separation, wearing rose-tinted glasses of denial.

Having failed to recognise that dead bodies are no more dead than living bodies, and that living bodies are no more alive than dead ones, we will start to form a prejudice against death in favour of what we think is life. We will fear the symbols of death, the forms of death, the sickness, and will try to populate our lives with the symbols of life. And when the symbols of death begin to appear, we will go into judgement, fear, resistance, attack and war.

If something we regard as "was once alive" turns into what appears to be "is now dead", such as the seeming death of a living body person, and coupled with a belief that the life and death of illusory forms are separate, we'll go into a grief mode. The grief will testify that something awful has happened, something that was truly alive has died, and death has taken over where life left off.

"The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you awaken and decide to dream no more."

But this of course means that we are in denial of the fact that life was already dead, and death is just another part of the illusion of life. Neither living bodies nor dead bodies are really alive, or dead, or anything. They are in fact nothing at all, being illusions of persons in a dream. The bodies were already dead before they died.

If we are separating out the things of spacetime and calling them death, while separating out other things and calling them life, we are deceiving ourselves. A person's body was not really alive when it seemed to live, anymore than any real difference has taken place now that it appears in a dead form. Death has not increased. The illusion has just shifted its appearance, and this does not mean anything at all.

The deception is that if you believe that physical life and physical death are opposites, you are caught in the belief in separation. The illusion is that they do appear to be different, but the truth is that they are not different at all. Bodies do not live or die. They are not holy or unholy. They are not better off being alive or dead. They are nothing at all because they don't really exist.

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

"To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"To see a SINLESS body is impossible. For holiness is POSITIVE, and the body is merely neutral. It is NOT sinful, but neither is it sinless. As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego. EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth."

The body is a symbol. It symbolises the state of mind. When the mind is healthy the body will show up as the symbolic forms of what we call life, freshness, newness, vitality, innocence, harmlessness, purity, etc. It will seem to be alive. When the mind is in a state of separation, including perceiving death as separate from life in this world, the body becomes attacked and takes on the symbolic form of death. But physical death is no more death than physical life, in the big picture.

Therefore in this world there are indeed symbols of life and death. It is true that we should aim for the body to show up as healed, in order to teach forgiveness, and to demonstrate resurrection. But at the same time as this "avoidance" of the symbols of death, we have to also recognise that even the healthy body is just as much the same illusion as the dead body.

"Not once do the advanced teachers of God consider the forms of sickness in which their brother believes. To do this is to forget that all of them have the same purpose and therefore are not really different."

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

All bodies are illusions. "The body is a dream." But healthy bodies can symbolise eternal life, while dead bodies symbolise death. But we must remember this is also a "dream of death", and "without the idea of death there is no world." This means that even a healthy body still contains an idea of death in a dream of death. These are just difference contexts. And just because all bodies are "the same" does not mean we have no reason to move the body towards the symbols of life.

It's possible also that if your perception is separating out the world into opposites of life and death, not recognising death in the life and vice versa (as in yin and yang), you will become averse to the symbols of death, ie dead bodies. That means a fear of death's symbol, which frames the physical symbols of death as something to be afraid of and avoided at all costs. The mind then tries to separate out death and life as a defence, which increase separation, and induces sickness.

It's also then possible to believe that, to be a miracle worker, you must steer the body towards the symbols of life. But not from the perspective that life and death symbols are the same, but as a compulsion based on the fear of death. An attempt to save someone from a fate that you believe in.

To deny death while still making it real. To wage war against the symbols of death, believing that avoiding them is a movement toward resurrection, all the while falling for the deception that all of the death lies in the symbols of death only. Death is hiding in the symbols of life as well.

We have to move beyond the belief that the symbols of death means death, and that the symbols of life means life. They are still just symbols, and all symbols are still illusions. And all illusions are a rejection of reality. Even the symbols of life, on a physical level, have death in them. Even the newest born life forms have death in them. All "life forms" are really "death forms."

"Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death."

"Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

All the things of spacetime have death in them because they are rooted in an idea of opposition to eternal life, and have limitation imposed on them (a lack of immortality). And within that illusion there is a spectrum of symbols, some looking more like life, and others like death. But both are just as equally untrue. Bodies do not really live or die and their states are all telling the same lie.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven (spacetime), life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. "

The world is nothing and does not really exist. Bodies are nothing and do not really exist. If you believe that some forms of objects are more alive or dead than others, you believe in a hierarchy of illusions. And that means you believe in separation. To not believe in separation the entire hierarchy has to be equalised and flattened. All sense of differences has to be erased. All differences have to become meaningless and form has to be completely overlooked (forgiven).

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK. Look, then, BEYOND error, and do not let your perception rest UPON it, for you will believe what your perception HOLDS."

"What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy. But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be."

When the forms mean nothing, when physical death means nothing more than physical life, when nothing physical defines what anything means, and when there is a singular whole response to all things equally, you have developed an unconditional mind and a state of miracle mindedness. In this view everything is recognised as one thing, one problem, one error, one separation idea. And in that view, there is no order of difficulty in miracles and no hierarchy of illusions.

Do not be deceived by appearances. Life is death and death is life an all of it is not real in this world. The flowers are filled with death before they bloom. The bodies are born from an idea of separation. All the planets are destined to be destroyed. Nothing here will last because it is all a symbol of God's absence.

"It might be worth a little time to think once more about the value of this world. Perhaps you will concede there is no loss in letting go all thought of value here. The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

"Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

Lesson 1: "Nothing I see means anything. The reason this is so is that I see nothing, and nothing has no meaning. It is necessary that I recognize this that I may learn to see. What I think I see now is taking the place of vision. I must let it go by realizing that it has no meaning, so that vision may take its place."

THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD (and why many sons)

Understand omnipresence and you will understand how God created many sons.

The course appears here to contradict itself, saying there is only one son, and yet that there are many sons, in the same paragraph. But it is not contradictory...

"It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts."

Here it is further clarified that God has one son AND many sons (souls) all of whom make up the sonship....

"It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. "

-----------------

The question is, how it is possible for God to have one son AND many sons and for both facts to be true at the same time, without contradicting?

God is omnipresent. What does that mean? It means God is fully present everywhere. But let's draw some analogies to what the ego thinks that means, to show why it is not what the ego thinks it means.

A cloud .... may seem to be the same everywhere. Today here the sky is overcast and gray, as if one cloud. But there are particles of cloud "over there" which are not "over here". All of the particles are separated out and cut off from each other. It is an illusion of oneness, simply a gathering of many separate parts huddled together. This is not what omnipresence means.

A human body - may seem to be "one body", joined together with its arms and legs. But the arms are not the legs. The hands and feet are separate. A hand is not a foot or vice versa. All of the parts are separated out. They seem to share to some degree but there are clear separations between parts. What is in the hand is not in the foot. What is in the eye is not in the knee. This is an illusion of a "blob", or semi-oneness. A collection of parts again huddled together to make an illusion of a whole or sharing, but where there is no sharing at all. All of the body's cells and particles are separate. It is a collections of separate parts. This is ego.

Omnipresence is not like this. Omnipresence defies every single property of matter. It transcends space time. The laws of omnipresence totally ignore every single law of physicality and physical limitation.

In omnipresence, it is possible, for the entirety of God, to be entirely present in one location. This sounds reasonable to the ego so far. But what does not sound reasonable is this additional fact: While God is being fully and completely present in one location, showing up with all of his being and all of his attention in that location, He is ALSO SIMULTANEOUSLY fully showing up and fully present in another location. ALL of His presence and attention and being are in that other location AT THE SAME TIME.

To the ego, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It can only think in terms of finite amounts or volumes. To it, if God is fully present over here, there is nothing left to be present over there. Or rather, this is the idea of conditional love, in that there is only so much "amount" of love to go around, so if all the love is showing up in one place or given to one person, it must be exclusive, and there is no love left for anyone else. This is not what God is like.

God loves unconditionally. A part of unconditionality means that God can FULLY LOVE every single PART of existence. Without reservation. This does not mean He is spread thin, either. He has no limitation. It does not mean He has a really great big huge amount of love, like a 10 gallon container of water, and happens to be so much "bigger' than a row of glasses that he can fill all of them and have some left over. That's more ego logic. What really happens is, God puts ALL of Himself into every glass, to the point where there should to the ego be nothing left to put in another. And yet, there's God, fully present in the other glass. And all the rest equally. ALL OF HIM, IN ALL LOCATIONS, SIMULTANEOUSLY. This concept is completely alien to the ego.

If you can get a sense of this in your mind, it will help you to understand the metaphysics of God's creation, and will allow you to make sense of HOW it is possible that God has MANY SONS, and how all of them are also simultaneously one.

If God shares ALL of Himself, in order to create "the first son", the ego will then say, well, God just used up all of what he has, and now there is nothing left to share with any other son or to create again. But this is not true. God has not reduced whatsoever by sharing Himself. He has in fact increased. "Creation is increased only by sharing". AND, his omnipresent nature means He is perfectly capable of putting ALL of Himself into A BILLION SONS, without diminishing in any way, and without lacking anything, and without "running out" of Himself. Every single one of them has ALL of Him.

And here is the crucial point, as to why God creates MANY Sons and not just one...

When God shares all of Himself to create the first son, this in no way - due to his omnipresent nature - confines him or limits Him. He is able to be FULLY PRESENT and to create wholeness, EVERYWHERE, simultaneously. The creation of one son is merely the radiation of God in "one location", and... there are a lot of other locations! Other locations can simultaneously express all of God, to create a Son, in EVERY location. Simultaneously.

Here is an analogy.

A single point of light may seem to create a single photon. That photon is one created son. However, if the light source spans a large volume of space, such as a fluorescent tube, or an array of LED's, then it is capable of producing, simultaneously, an extraordinary number of photons i.e. creations. This is completely NATURAL to the nature of God, to simultaneously create MANY instances/wholes, because God is actually INFINITE in His ability to be present fully in every location. It is totally natural to God to create INFINITE SONS and to create each of them unlimited.

It is not natural for God, to claim that He can only therefore "create one son" and, be confined to that. That's as if to say, He uses all His creative juice, because the fullness of him is a limited "amount" (ego logic) and therefore if He puts all of Himself into ONE son, there is nothing left. BUT THERE IS. Not only is there something left, EVERYTHING IS LEFT. God has not reduced AT ALL. And as such, God goes on CREATING MULTIPLE SONS... perhaps INFINITE SONS.

That is his Omnipresent nature. To create many children, not just one. If there will be creation at all, given the massive expanse of God, and given that God will create in ALL locations simultaneously, and that He will give ALL of Himself in EVERY location, he will create WHOLE SONS in every single location.

Each son is a WHOLE, because ALL of the Father is shared with Him. Not just some parts. Not just a little bit of God. ALL of God is shared with every created soul. And every single soul has EVERYTHING, lacking nothing, because it does not lack ANY of God. The fullness of God is in every part of His Sonship. His entire creation thus contains many, many, many sons, each one of them is experiencing ALL OF GOD, simultaneously, and yet each one is therefore a WHOLE in and of itself. It must be, because God is a whole and can only create more wholes. Again, this makes NO SENSE to the ego's way of thinking, but it makes perfect sense holographically. The all is in every part and every part is a whole.

There is no "unnatural division" in this (ego separation). There is only "natural division".

The so-called "one son", aka Christ, is simply the entire "sum total" of all the individual free-willed Sons that God created. Yet it is more than just a sum of its parts. Again this is to do with holographic creation. Since ALL of God is in EVERY Son, adding up the number of Sons does not tell you what is there. The sum total of all Sons is not the totality. Since every sons SHARES ALL OF GOD, there is MORE to each Son than just "himself". He is SHARING GOD. So the Sonship, is more than the sum of its parts, because they are all sharing and extending a wholeness which is far bigger than any of them - the One Father.

To God, since he is IN all of the sons fully, shared with them, one with them, yet they are distinct, his experience of "all the sons" is simultaneous. As such he experiences the total as "one son" or "one unified experience". Another word for this one son is Christ. It is a sense of, every son sharing one parent. Of every son having ALL of God in them. That unity, that, connectedness, is "christ". But the christ is not just "one son", it is the immediate shared experience of the fact that ALL of God is in every son. Every son experiences and shares the whole of creation.

So it then is true to say, that each individual son, is in fact

1) A distinct son, a whole, containing the whole of God or made from the whole of God

and

2) Also intimately connected to and sharing God with every other son, as christ.

Therefore every son is christ. He is both "the whole sonship" AND "one son" simultaneously. The all, and the part, simultaneously.

Every creation of God also inherits God's omnipresent nature. Every single son, every being of light, every angel, every son of a son of a son, is OMNIPRESENT as well. It can be everywhere. And it can manifest multiple occurrences of images of an identity simultaneously, at any point in time or space, if needed. For example, angels are capable of being with MANY people simultaneously. This is only possible because they are omnipresent, otherwise they'd be jumping all over the place trying to keep up. This is true of them and it is also true of every Son.

Jesus is able to appear to MANY people individually, simultaneously, because he is EVERYWHERE, and is OMNIPRESENT, and is not limited in these finite ego-logical ways. Jesus can be FULLY present here with me right now, and be FULLY present with you right now wherever you are. This is NATURAL for all creations of God. This is part of our divine nature.

It is only this world of FORM and matter and time and objects and bodies, that APPEARS totally the opposite of this. In form, it is suggested that what is in one location IS NOT in any other location AT ALL. Matter also suggests that there *IS* no "all" in ANY of the parts. That all parts are separate, all parts are NOT JOINED, none of the parts are SHARING at all, and there is NO ONENESS. That was the POINT of making this universe of illusion, to be the TOTAL OPPOSITE of the nature of Heaven, God, and the Sonship.

Every single object in this world testifies that there is no God and that every son is separated. Every single body demonstrates this. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards". The planet itself, Earth, is a physical expression of the idea of separation, in which it is "OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN IN EVERY WAY", because it does not demonstrate ANY omnipresence whatsoever. It does not appear to be a hologram (though it is), it does not show that the all is in any of the parts, no two parts share anything, there is no true joining, nothing overlaps, and basically every single physical particle of matter says "God is not here".

This is why this world is a bullshit lie, and no matter HOW you look at it or perceive it, its FORM is fundamentally in opposition to the nature of Heaven and God and the Sonship. It is NOT divine. It opposes divinity in every way. Every single particle of matter or energy is an expression of the idea of separation. Every subatomic particle. Every wave. Every quantum. However you deep you want to go, this universes is the OPPOSITE of omnipresence. And that was on purpose. The ego MADE THIS on purpose to try to create a picture of SHUTTING OUT GOD.

This is also the meaning of "this world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son". In every way, the separateness of matter is an attempt to claim that the son is CUT OFF from his father, because he no longer shares anything with the whole and no part contains ANY of God. That is an idea of the DEATH of God's Son, portrayed as physical particles which make up a demonstration of the Son being so completely devoid of God's presence that he must not be alive at all.

This is why we are not to make this world SPECIAL, or to worship it, or to want to keep it, or to try to have it somehow turn into heaven, or to put it on a pedestal, or to suggest God created it, or that it will be a permanent part of Creation. It CANNOT BE, because ALL that it is made of is this suggested idea of being UNLIKE HEAVEN. So there is no way that it can BECOME like heaven and still exist. Its entire NATURE is to be OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN. It exists AS "what God is not like". ... so it can't be IN what God is like and still exist. It cannot enter heaven or be part of it. This is why ... "THERE IS NO WORLD."

God's creation is one of holographic omnipresence. Every one of his MANY sons is a holographic omnipresent creation. Every single part of God's creation is the same everywhere and fully present in all parts. This is utterly IMPOSSIBLE to be expressed in form or matter, although any of God's children DOES have the ability to materialize illusory forms in any and MANY simultaneous locations if they choose to do so.

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

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

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

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

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

"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the FEAR OF AWAKENING. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of TRYING NOT TO KNOW by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There are no accidents in salvation."

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

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

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

"My Self is ruler of the universe." It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

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

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

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

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

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you."

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

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

I'm posting these quotes which focus on the ways that this world - Earth - is not created by God, is unlike God, and is the world WE made.

I'm posting these not in order to "be negative" or to attack the world or to make the world out to be something it's not. Nor am I trying to correct perception with these quotes - the true-perception view of this world is an entirely different topic.

I'm just offering a willingness to LOOK AT and recognize that ACIM is teaching that God DID NOT create this world, and that this is clearly stated. If God HAD created this world, the world itself would be perfect and would NOT be something requiring forgiveness, or needing salvation, and there would be no function for the Holy Spirit. The world HAS to be opposite to God's will in order for there to be any point to forgiveness at all.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

"The world stands like a block before Christ’s face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place?"

"For where God’s memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust even as you made it."

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world."

"Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made, and do not want. The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make, is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

"To give this sad world over, and exchange your errors for the peace of God, is but YOUR will."

"He MUST deny the world of pain, the instant he perceives the arms of love around him. "

"Your Father knoweth that you have need of nothing. In Heaven this is so. For what could you need in eternity? In YOUR world you DO need things, because it is a world of scarcity, in which you find yourself BECAUSE you are lacking."

"God’s Son is not a traveler through OUTER worlds. However holy his perception may become, no world OUTSIDE himself holds his inheritance."

"Salvation FROM the world lies ONLY here. My peace I GIVE you. TAKE it of me, in glad exchange for all the world has offered but to TAKE AWAY."

"The world is false perception. It is born of error, and it has not left its source. It will remain no longer than the thought which gave it birth is cherished. When the thought of separation has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be seen in quite another light; and one which leads to truth, where all the world must disappear and all its errors vanish. Now its source has gone, and its effects are gone as well."

"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love’s absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely."

"We must save the world. For we who made it must behold it through the eyes of Christ"

"The world you see cannot be the world God loves"

"It is not the world that makes peace seem impossible. It is the world you see that is impossible."

"I am come as a light into the world which DOES deny itself everything. It does this simply by dissociating itself from everything. It is therefore an illusion of isolation, MAINTAINED by fear of the same loneliness which is its illusion."

"My purpose, then, IS to overcome the world. I do not attack it, but my light must dispel it because of WHAT IT IS. Light does not ATTACK darkness, but it does shine it away."

"The world MUST despise and reject me, because the world IS the belief that love is impossible. YOUR reactions to me ARE the reactions of the world to God."

"My Kingdom is not of this world because it is in you. And you are of your Father. Your Kingdom is not of this world because it was given you from beyond this world."

"If you will accept the fact that I am with you, you are denying the world and accepting God."

"The world can add nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it."

"You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true."

"The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist."

"This world is not where you belong. You are a stranger here."

"Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world has to offer."

"Except for God’s teachers there would be little hope of salvation, for the world of sin would seem forever real. The self-deceiving must deceive, for they must teach deception. And what else is hell?"

"The world will end in an illusion, as it began. "

"The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment."

"When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be."

"The world will end when its thought system has been completely reversed."

"The final lesson, which brings the ending of the world, cannot be grasped by those not yet prepared to leave the world and go beyond its tiny reach."

"The world will end in joy, because it is a place of sorrow. When joy has come, the purpose of the world has gone. The world will end in peace, because it is a place of war. When peace has come, what is the purpose of the world? The world will end in laughter, because it is a place of tears. Where there is laughter, who can longer weep?"

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish. Perception will be meaningless, when it has been perfected. For everything that has been used for learning, will have no function."

""What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own Soul?""

"The world is very tired, because it IS the IDEA of weariness. "

"Memory rises in your mind, peace must still surmount a final obstacle, AFTER which is salvation completed, and the Son of God ENTIRELY restored to sanity. For here your world DOES end."

"It seems to you the world will utterly abandon you, if you but raise your eyes. Yet all that WILL occur is YOU will leave the world forever. This is the re-establishment of YOUR will."

"The world is nothing in itself. "

"Perhaps you think you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came. There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly."

"There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again."

"Today’s idea is true because the world does not exist."

"Others find it in experience that is not of this world, which shows them that the world does not exist because what they behold must be the truth, and yet it clearly contradicts the world."

"There is no place where you can suffer, and no time that can bring change to your eternal state. How can a world of time and place exist if you remain as God created you?"

"There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real? Can it be anywhere? Deny illusions, but accept the truth. Deny you are a shadow briefly laid upon a dying world."

"On this side of the bridge, you see the world of separate bodies, seeking to join each other in SEPARATE UNIONS, and to become one BY LOSING. "

"Never forget the world the sightless "see" must be imagined. "

"This they do not believe. And so they keep the world they learned to "see" in their imagination, believing that their choice is that, or nothing. They hate the world they learned through pain. And everything they think is in it serves to remind them that they are incomplete and bitterly deprived. Thus they DEFINE their life and where they live it, adjusting to it as they think they must, afraid to lose the little that they have. And so it is with all who see the body as all they have, and all their brothers have. They try to reach each other, and they fail. And fail again. And they adjust to loneliness, believing that to keep the body is to save the little that they have."

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation, and be loving. LOVE DOES NOT KILL TO SAVE. For if it did, attack WOULD be salvation, and this is the ego's interpretation, not God's. Only the world of guilt could demand this, for only the guilty could CONCEIVE of it. 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."

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son. And until you realize that God's Son cannot be crucified, this is the world you will see. But you will not realize this, until you accept the eternal fact that God's Son is NOT GUILTY."

"In this strange world which you have made, the Son of God HAS sinned. How could you see him then? By making him invisible, the world of retribution rose in the black cloud of guilt which you accepted, and you hold it dear. For the blamelessness of Christ is the proof that the ego never was, and can never be. Without guilt the ego HAS no life, and God's Son IS without guilt."

"Deny YOUR world, and judge him not."

"Let me accept the strength God offers me And see no value in this world, that I May find my freedom and deliverance."

"Illusions will not last. Their death is sure and this alone is certain in their world. It is the ego’s world because of this. "

"In a world of form the ego cannot be denied for it alone seems real. Yet could God’s Son as He created him abide in form or in a world of form? "

"Judgment, like other devices by which the world of illusions is maintained, is totally misunderstood by the world. It is actually confused with wisdom, and substitutes for truth. As the world uses the term, an individual is capable of "good" and "bad" judgment, and his education aims at strengthening the former and minimizing the latter."

"The world goes against your nature, because it is out of accord with God’s laws. The world perceives orders of difficulty in EVERYTHING. This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable."

"The unreal world IS a thing of despair, for it can never be. And you who share God’s Being with Him, could never be content WITHOUT reality. What God did not give you has no power over you, and the attraction of love for love remains irresistible."

"The real world was given you by God, in loving exchange for the world YOU made, and which you SEE."

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you really understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who seem to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are wholly unreal? Could you have faith in what you see, if you ACCEPTED this? And would you SEE it? Hallucinations disappear when they are recognized for what they are. This is the healing and the remedy. Believe them not, and they are gone. And all you need to do is recognize YOU did this. Once you accept this simple fact, and take unto yourself the power you GAVE them, YOU are released from them."

"Hallucinations serve to meet the goal of madness. They are the means by which the outside world, projected from within, adjusts to sin, and seems to witness to its reality. It still is true that nothing is without. Yet, upon nothing, are ALL projections made. For it is the PROJECTION which gives the "nothing" all the meaning that it holds."

"And all the figures in the dream in which the world began go with it. Bodies now are useless, and will therefore fade away, because the Son of God is limitless."

"But in this world there ARE no simple facts, because what is the same and what is different remain unclear."

"There is no basis FOR a choice in this complex and over-complicated world. For no-one understands what is the same, and seems to choose where no choice really is. "

"Only the Oneness of Knowledge is conflictless. Your Kingdom is not of this world because it was given you from BEYOND this world. Only IN this world is the idea of an authority problem meaningful. The world is not left by death but by truth, and truth CAN be known by all those for whom the Kingdom was created, and for whom it waits."

"God's laws do not obtain directly to a world perception rules, for such a world could not have been created by the Mind to which perception has no meaning."

"Give welcome to the Power beyond forgiveness, and beyond the world of symbols and of limitations."

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other’s sorry outcome which is Heaven’s opposite in every way."

"Jesus is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, Whom he called down upon the earth after he ascended into Heaven, or became completely identified with the Christ".

""Heaven and Earth shall pass away" means that they will not always exist as separate states."

Personal note: For me it is perfectly clear that God did not create the Earth or this world. We made it as an attack on God and a defense against the nature of Heaven. As such it is a dream illusion, which does not really exist. Our task is to learn to see it in a different light (that's a whole other post), so that we can learn to recognize its unreality and go home to Heaven.

There is one reference to "vertical perception" in ACIM, as part of miracle principle 41. Jesus says:

"41. The miracle is a learning device which lessens the need for time. The sudden shifts from horizontal to vertical perception which the miracle entails introduces an interval from which the doer and the receiver both emerge much farther along in time than they would otherwise have been."

So he introduces this idea that there is a horizontally oriented way of perceiving, and a vertical way. The horizontal way is what you don't want, and the vertical way is what you should be trying to shift towards. But what are these two ways of perceiving?

Let's start by saying the world doesn't exist yet. You are designing a new world inside a computer. You're using some 3D software to model forms and objects and are placing them in a scene. Your intention is to create a 3D holographic movie of various CGI scenes, in which anything goes.

As far as you are concerned, as the director and editor, it's a level playing field. There are no inherent rules or laws as to what is possible or what can happen. There are no laws of physics set up. There are no limitations. Your imagination can run wild.

So you start designing this environment, composed of what seem to be models of objects - cars, buildings, bodies etc. But simply by putting them in the scene, nothing happens. They just sit there. Nothing causes anything. There are no consequences. There are no laws. There are no forces of repulsion or gravity or collisions between things. Objects can exist in the same space overlapping even. There are no chemical reactions. No biological processes.

From this perspective, which we'll call "vertical" or "above the battlefield", you are in a position of vertical causality. The level you are on is ABOVE the level of the world you're making below. Whatever you decide, happens. So if you decide to move one of the models of a car, the car moves. It can't move on its own. But moving it doesn't do anything. There are no effects or limits. You can even move one car to overlap another car, without anything happening. But let's say you want to make it SEEM as if there is a car crash. What do you do?

Well, you're first going to have to CAUSE there to be a scene with two cars in it. You're going to have to cause the two cars to SEEM to move. They will not be moving as a result of having an engine, that's just a pretend engine "for show". Your mind is going to determine where the cars are. You can even pick up the cars and plonk them down somewhere else, or make them float in the air, with no regard for any laws of physics. So you deliberately move both cars in what appears to be a direction towards each other, on a fake road, pretending they are "driving" and making "broom boom" sounds like children at play.

When the cars approach and seem like they should "crash", nothing's going to happen. They'll pass through each other. So you have make up some fictional "laws of physics". You make up some rules which suggest, when this car touches the other car, it will SEEM as if they push into each other, "causing" a crash. One car might be thought of as SEEMING to "cause the crash". But this is entirely illusory. It's on purpose. The car does nothing. The mind that causes EVERYTHING about the car, causes what seems to be the crash.

The director - the true causer - is deciding that car A will crash into car B. And the director also has to deliberately model the way car B will deform to make it LOOK AS IF car A's impact caused bodily damage. So when you now "play the scene", it's going to SEEM as if it's an animation in which the two cars move towards each other on a road - under their seeming own power - not seeing the hidden hand of the director - and collide. Car B seems to become damaged, and it looks like car A was the cause. But it's just an illusion. Everything that happens is orchestrated from above. Did you fall for it?

You know better. You know that NEITHER of the cars has any causal power. You know from this vertical position, looking down on the whole scene from above, as the director, who can pull all the strings and change anything at will, even changing or breaking the laws of physics, that it's NOT TRUE OR REAL that car A crashes into car B. But based on appearances, viewed through a camera (the body's eyes), it SEEMS as if car A causes damage to car B. The camera frames the scene just right to make it seem believable.

This is because when you look at the scene through the camera, which ONLY looks at the **end result** of the director's work, the body's eyes do NOT see that the entire scene is fabricated, they do NOT see that if the director so chooses the car will not be damaged, they do NOT see that there are strings being pulled to create the ILLUSION of laws of physics, and they do NOT see that the movement of both cars is being orchestrated by the ACTUAL CAUSE, the mind. All the laws of physics are EFFECTS, not causes.

Even the damage to car B cannot occur without the higher level mind causing it. It is NOT caused by car A. The illusion that car A has causal power is AN ILLUSION! It's "causality" is ONCE REMOVED from what the REAL cause is. And taken at face value, the body is "blinded by perception of form" and appearances, not looking past them and not seeing the trickery and lies that are producing this illusion. And so it is tempted and deceived by what it sees.

So at the level of the world, which is the scene containing the objects, viewed through the body as the camera, looking at the props and taking them to be not only real but the FIRST ORIGIN OF CAUSALITY, your body assumes there is no other cause that CAME BEFORE, no prior or higher cause, no bigger picture, no author, no orchestration of the world, no secret agenda, no plot to deceive, and just takes it at face value. It thinks then that the car ITSELF had causal power. And now there's reason to blame the car for "causing it".

Seeing the scene this way, is what we call FALSE PERCEPTION. The entire physical world IS FALSE. All the objects are false. ALL the laws of physics are false. ALL of it is a lie. It's a movie set. Every apparent "horizontal causality", where it seems something on this level in the world CAUSES something, or is the true origin or chooser of something, creates the illusion that the world has real consequences, causal power, makes things happen on its own, and isn't being run by a deeper, hidden author.

The DREAMER - the director of all things that happen - goes unnoticed and hidden behind the scenes. He is the cause of the "causes" in the world. He is the one deciding that all objects move. He is the one making up the laws. HE is the one deciding what SEEMS to affect what. HE makes both the causes and the effects that we see as being on the same level. He orchestrates all events and has power OVER everything.

He can also BREAK all the laws and consistencies and illusions of the world through his seemingly "miraculous" freedom and transcending of all illusions. He can rewrite the world. He can make mountains move in an instant. He can reverse death. He can make a pretend body seem to walk on pretend water, as if gravity were total nonsense. He MADE UP gravity, and is not bound by it. He MADE what we call sickness and death, and can ABOLISH both. He is the director. He has the power to dominate all things in the world. There is NOTHING his holiness cannot do. His mind has the power to make WORLDS appear!

To those on the horizontally perceiving level, who are living within the context of ASSUMING the world is real and causal, when the awakened dreamer - a miracle worker - decides to CHANGE the dream in a way that BREAKS the normal order and laws, having shifted into vertical perception, and EXPRESSING a vertical causality, SEEMS to be doing things which are "impossible".

He seems to be breaking the laws of physics. He's walking on water, he's multiplying objects, he's cancelling death, he's curing all sickness, he's moving mountains with his mind, and seems completely unlimited by anything in the world. To those asleep, he appears miraculous. Yet he is just being natural. He is in touch with the power to cause and choose, under NO LAWS but God's. Those fixated on the body's world see him as OUTSIDE what's possible. He breaks their reality. And they do not understand how he can do this.

When you are believing everything the body sees, which is an illusion, the illusory world of form, you are having "horizontal perception". It's the same thing as false perception. And everything in the world, all objects, all laws, are what you see when you are only looking through the camera which was designed on purpose to NOT SEE the secret behind-the-scenes activities. The body fixates only on the story, the appearance, and the illusion. The end result or effect. The dream. "Only the body makes the world seem real."

To horizontal perception, ie false perception, everything in the world seems to be lined up side by side. Like in a crowd of people. All horizontally spaced out. And so if one of the bodies is sick, and dies, the appearance is that not only is the sickness and death "reality", there is also a strong BELIEF IN (being deceived by) these appearances. The divisions between things make the body's appearances seem very tangible and pronounced. Differences are emphasized, so as to blind you to the deeper truth.

Someone operating on the level of false perception believes that sickness is real, death really happens, the world is dangerous, people sin in bodies, stuff is attackable, there are causes to be afraid of, we are victimized by the world, and are at the effect of the world. To them, the FORM of differences are very strongly deceptive, bodies all seem different, problems seem different, and the world is highly fragmented. What the body sees is believed. And then all kinds of coping strategies arise from that perception of horrors.

To move into "vertical perception" ie true perception, you're not merely going upwards above the battlefield and still perceiving in a horozontal way, you're moving OUTSIDE of horizontal causality and seeing from an entirely different perspective. Outside of the laws of space and time and physics. You're lifting up out of the illusory world, the story, the fictional movie. You're taking your perception OUT of the role of "character in a dream", and becoming aware that YOU ARE THE DREAMER. You are that one who MADE the world, made the bodies, made the planets, and invented all the laws. And you recognize you have been "doing it to yourself" - which is the secret of salvation.

You made up bodies, made up a world, made up laws, made up scenarios, forgot who you were, believed YOUR MOVIE was orchestrating YOUR life, that your scene had causal power over you, that you were now a character IN the movie, a body - the hero of the dream, and thought the dream was happening to "you". You lost touch with your vertical causality, the fact you are directing the whole thing from above, and that you are under NO LAWS BUT GOD's!

Your "miraculous" freedom FROM all causality and laws on the horizontal level, allows you to perform "miracles" - or rather, expressions of vertical causality, which BREAK AND DEFY these "second hand" "once removed" causes. Illusions of causes and illusions of laws are nothing to a miracle worker, who recognizes there is no order of difficulty because ALL of the lower orders are at YOUR effect, including what seem to be causes. You are free from all limitations. The hierarchy of illusion is FLAT to you. ALL illusions are the same. Raising the dead is no harder than healing a headache.

From the higher vantage point of vertical perception, looking down on the WHOLE scene from above, the distracting ILLUSION of appearances is SEEN THROUGH. The spiritual eye, Christ vision, looks PAST the movie set. It sees all the props and cameramen and sound crew. It reads between the lines. It sees the glue holding the scene together. It sees the light of the room in which the movie is being edited.

It does not BELIEVE FOR A MOMENT anything that the appearance of the movie would say is true. It doesn't even buy that physical objects are even really there. It pays no attention to appearances of form, shapes, colors, sizes, distances, weights, laws, or supposed differences of any kind. It has the VISION to SEE the WHOLE scene, including all hidden parts and mechanisms and trickery. It recognizes it is all an illusion. It is not DECEIVED by anything at the level of the world. Vertical perception is inclusive, horizontal perception is exclusive.

Mind is cause. World is effect/dream. Mind being causal is vertically positioned above the world. Everything below, in the world, is an illusion of horizontal causality. Nothing about the world is TRUE. Believing it is false perception. When you are in true perception you do not REGISTER the illusions of differences between things. Bodies are not separate. Objects are not real. There is a subtle connectedness that you didn't see before. A light which sparkles between things. A glue which you become aware of. A sparkling unity and sameness that seems to be behind everything.

A vertically perceived world is a forgiven world. Being aware of ALL the information about the scene is awareness of the real world. You cease to project sin and guilt and fear and death onto the scene. These arise only from false perceptions. You don't see it from a horizontal vantage point. You ignore the eyes of the body. You know that nothing in the world is real, so nothing is sick, and nothing is dying, and everything is one thing.

You see death as not an end, at the end of a horizontal linear sequence, but as a dipping DOWN from a higher level to a lower level perception. As an immersion into falseness. And from above, you know death is TOTAL FICTION. Just some arrangement of fake particles that you DECIDED you would call death. Which can easily be rearranged and reanimated if you so choose. It's totally fake. Actors in a movie do not die when their character dies.

Here, above the battlefield, you know you cannot die. You are the author of the world. You are not a body. You are not the story. You make the rules. You can break them. And nothing in the world has any bearing on anything real. Death is now vertically no longer seen as an interruption, but as merely another form of objects on par with all others. Just an effect you have power over. You can choose not to make it happen.

Dead bodies, living bodies, they are all illusions. They have NO inherent meaning. The world has no inherent meaning. You give it all the meaning it has when you design it, projecting made-up stories onto it. The world is nothing but fiction. You are not bound or limited by any of it. You are free. The director of a movie is not bound by ANYTHING that seems to happen. And edits can be made at any time. You have power over the world, because you are its cause.

"W-pI.190.5. It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. 2 Nothing external to your mind (horizontal) can hurt or injure you in anyway. 3 There is no cause (at the horizontal level) beyond yourself (who are above it) that can reach down and bring oppression. 4 No one but yourself affects you. (from above) 5 There is nothing in the world (below) that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. 6 But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see (as director, author, dreamer, law-maker) by merely recognizing what you are (from a position vertically aligned above the world)."

"Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. They are thus twice removed from reality." ALL words in ACIM are symbols TWICE removed from the truth.

The word "apple" is twice removed from reality. The thing it represents, the actual apple itself sitting in your fruit bowl, is once removed from reality. Notice that words are symbols OF SYMBOLS. Therefore the apple itself is a symbol, and is NOT reality. Everything in this world is symbolic, just as all dreams are made of symbols.

"The body is the symbol of what you THINK you are."

"The body DOES appear to be the symbol of sin"

"The body is the symbol of the ego"

"As nothingness cannot BE pictured, so there IS no symbol for totality."

"Give welcome to the Power beyond forgiveness, and beyond the world of symbols and of limitations."

"The body can become a **sign** of life ... and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that ***it represents***." (symbolizes)

Symbols are not an end in themselves. They don't have their own identity. They represent something else. They serve as a reflection or representative for something they point to. The body for example is not a THING in its own right, it is not an end. It SYMBOLIZES something else, and therefore is an effect of something else.

"Regarding the body as an end, it has no real use for it at all, because it is not an end. "

The metaphysics of ACIM does not really exist at the level of words twice removed. The metaphysics is once removed from reality. The words themselves, SYMBOLIZE, the metaphysics. They are expressions FROM or structured BY the metaphysics. Behind the words, deeper than the words, there is a core metaphysical structure which the course's expressed statements are BASED ON or coming from.

Or to put it more accurately, the ACTUAL metaphysics takes place as STATES OF MIND, as REALITIES, as WORLDS, playing out in the mind as SYSTEMS of logical thought. A THOUGHT of separation produces an ENTIRE WORLD representing that LOGICAL STATE. So what is this "deeper" metaphysics? There is a perfectly pure LOGICAL SYSTEM, underlying both reality and illusions. But the system is not a concept. It actually takes places as STATES of mind. As experiences of "realities". Conclusions have effects because PREMISES ARE CAUSES!

Both God's thought system and the ego's thought system are based on a LOGICAL premise. God's premise is Himself. His nature establishes the laws of what is TRUE. As He expresses/creates, His thought SYSTEM functions, and follows the laws established in his nature. The OUTCOME or "logical conclusion" of His system of thinking, MUST be in accord with his nature and be THE ONLY possible outcome that could come from such a starting point.

Because God is eternal, the outcome of His thinking must be eternal. Because God is alive, His thoughts must be alive. Because God is love, His thoughts must be made of love. Because God is happy, His thoughts must be happy and lead to happiness. Because God is a creator, the living beings He creates must be creators also (co-creators).

Everything that comes FROM Him is in accord with His Will and nature, and is in his perfect LIKENESS. It HAS to be in His likeness because in a logical system, everything that comes from the ORIGIN of the system stays WITHIIN the confines of the system and thus is governed by the same laws.

These FACTS, have nothing to do with interpretations, ideals, made-up spirituality, theory or theology, or any other kind of conceptual make-believe. These are ACTUAL FACTS of reality. And "metaphysics" is based on irrefutable FACTS. It is a fact that God is a creator, and therefore it MUST be a fact that God's creation is also a creator. Regardless of whether ACIM ever mentioned that in its words at all, that HAS to be true.

ACIM happens to say "A co-creator with the Father must have a Son." But you can DEDUCE this, LOGICALLY, by following God's system of thought. Simply, God is a creative father. He passes on Himself to whatever He creates. Therefore, logically, if God Himself has a nature which results in a Son, then the Son MUST have a nature which results in a Son of a Son. YOU, as a Son, MUST therefore have creations. This isn't true just because ACIM says so in its words. It's true LOGICALLY. And that is the deeper metaphysics. Jesus has BASED those quoted statements ON that logic.

Let's look at another example, the separation from God. Without even considering anything ACIM says about separation, let's assess it with purely impeccable logic and see what we get.

Ok so God wills eternal life because God IS eternal life. God wills happiness. God wills a total lack of limits because He is unlimited. God gives freedom, because God IS freedom. The co-creative living entities that God MUST create, therefore must have His freedom. But this also means, they are free FROM any kind of limitation or restraint. The only truth is that they must function WITHIN the system of God. They cannot leave God. BUT, they can exercise their co-creative ability to freely choose to try to DENY or oppose God's will and nature, thus opposing their own. What would HAVE to happen if you did that?

Look at it purely logically. Reality is ..... light, life, happiness, peace, love, unlimited, constant, unchanging, equal/harmonious, permanent, truthful, open, immortal, etc. BECAUSE, this is what God is. So everything IN God's system must be this too. What would an OPPOSITE to this be? What would you get, if you DENIED this system and tried to bring about an OPPOSITE system?

Well, an opposite system would have to be based on the "belief" that all of the nature of God is NOT true or real. It has to be a PREMISE, that OPPOSES God's premise. So the premise is, ... darkness, death, unhappiness, conflict, hatred/fear, limitation, change, inequality/difference, impermanence, everything is false, closed, mortality, etc. Because these are the LOGICAL opposites to God's nature. And if this collection of "unpleasant" CONDITIONS is the PREMISE of the entire ego SYSTEM, everything WITHIN this "line of thinking" MUST RESULT IN, all of these things. DEATH, is the logical outcome of the ego thought system.

So the question is, does this logical conclusion LINE UP with what A Course in Miracles says. And the answer is YES. It does. In fact Jesus even says so.

"From the belief in sin (the premise), the faith in chaos MUST follow. It is because it follows that it seems to be a ***logical conclusion***; a valid step in ordered thought. The steps to chaos ***DO follow neatly from their starting-point***. Each is a different form in the **progression** (logical thought process) of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror, and away from truth."

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death."

"The logic of the world MUST therefore lead to nothing, for its GOAL is nothing."

So what you find is, if you can get a grasp of the PURE LOGICAL BASIS of God's system, and if you can then grasp the idea that the "separation" is simply the idea of AN OPPOSITE TO REALITY, you can LOGICALLY come to conclusions. And the fact is, that these conclusions EXACTLY MATCH what Jesus has described in A Course in Miracles. WITHOUT ERROR. They totally correlate to the separation, the result of separating, the OUTCOME of starting on a basis of sin.

"The wages of sin is death - ie, if you start with sin (which is the idea "an opposite to God is possible", you must end with death". Death is the suppression and denial and NEGATING OF, God's reality. It is the "end of life" because it OPPOSES GOD'S WILL which supports life.

Therefore, and this is a metaphysical FACT.... a belief in separation MUST LEAD TO a seeming "world" or "logical state of mind", wherein everything is based on an idea of sin and death. e.g. "Without the idea of death there is no world." "The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son" - ie its the idea of God's LIVING son, pictured in a condition OPPOSITE to living. Similarly "the world was made as an attack on God" is based on the LOGIC that by trying to OPPOSE THE TRUTH, you "attacked" the premise of the truthful thought system (God), by trying to establish another SYSTEM that was totally opposite.

For example, Jesus says "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way". Why is Earth OPPOSITE to Heaven? Because it is part of a "world" or STATE of OPPOSITION to THE TRUTH. The world is thus a logical outcome of the ego thought system. It is MADE OF DEATH. It is made of denial. It is made of sin. This isn't something I need to say based on ACIM saying it. I can make this "claim", IMPERSONALLY, WITHOUT OPINION, because the METAPHYSICS accurately indicates that this MUST be the case.

Now, here is the interesting thing about metaphysics. The underlying core logic describes VERY accurately, PERFECTLY, not only the nature of God's "system" or world, and the nature of any world that tries to oppose it. Through LOGICAL REASONING, which must be "impeccable", you can actually make "statements"- symbolic word expressions once removed from the metaphysics, that were never written IN the Course itself, but which are TOTALLY in line with it. This is not an opinion or a matter of making something up. The LOGIC tells you, BY ITSELF, WHAT MUST BE TRUE.

For example we could say, anything that is opposite to God who is eternal life must be incapable of living forever. It doesn't necessarily explicitly SAY that in the course, but it MUST be true. It does however say basically the same thing in other words, e.g. "there is no life outside of heaven."

We could also say, "everything in this world opposes reality". It doesn't necessarily say that in the course. But it MUST be true. The metaphysical LOGIC, the impeccable reasoning, TELLS YOU, that it MUST be true because it is perfectly sound logic. And this world IS A LOGICAL SYSTEM BASED ON AN ENTIRELY LOGICAL PREMISE.

The really interesting thing is, the metaphysical LOGICAL SYSTEM completely removes the need for OPINIONS. Of any kind. If God is truth, anything not of God is not true. That is purely logical. It's not an opinion. In fact the LOGIC is such a COMPLETE system, with no strange fuzzy exceptions or loopholes or things unaccounted for, totally black and white in its perfect clarity and precision, that it leaves NO ROOM for ANY INTERPRETATION. NONE.

And this is why the multitude of "interpretations" of the course, ALL of which are NOT really based on pure logic, are faulty and OF THE EGO. And this inevitably results in conflict and arguments because it inherently leads to CONTRADICTIONS. The ego cannot even reason correctly. Our normal ego thought processes don't even typically function "LIKE GOD THINKS", and therefore comes to FALSE conclusions about His system of logic. Frequently. And you can see by all the debate and WAR in this forum the sheer extent of this CONFUSION, which has resulted from NOT SEEING THE METAPHYSICAL FACTS CLEARLY, errors in logical reasoning, and false conclusions that EGOs have arrived at. There is ONLY ONE TRUTH.

All we can do is look at the logical system and let IT TELL US, what the truth MUST be. If we don't, and we start trying to MAKE UP TRUTH, or DECIDE what the truth is, we are now delusional and are not following the logic and are not having REASON. We then will not MAKE SENSE and this leads to all confusion. That means, the logical conclusions being drawn here, or by anyone who can reason impeccably, COMPLETELY TRANSCENDS opinion. It REFLECTS the truth. It is FACT. That means it is not MY opinion, or yours, or anyone's. It is how things actually are.

Therefore, if you can grasp this and SEE the sense in it, you can USE the metaphysical logical BASIS of everything the course says as a TOOL. You can USE it, practically, to inform you of what the course MUST BE MEANING. You can actually hold up a quote, and COMPARE IT, to the metaphysical structure, and provided your grasp of the structure is accurate, it will TELL YOU the context in which the quote is placed, the meaning of the references, what it is referring TO, and thus what it MUST MEAN.

If you get used to doing this, you will find gradually that everything Jesus says in the course is BASED ENTIRELY ON logical reasoning. Jesus is an absolute MASTER of this. And you will then realize that all of the WORDS in the course are in fact expressions OF the metaphysics. The number of ways and forms of expression OF those FACTS, is largely unlimited. Jesus wrote a huge book expression FROM the facts. He could've written more. If you "get the facts straight", and are not in denial or making logical errors, you can evaluate everything the course's WORDS say, and CORRECTLY RECOGNIZE what they MUST MEAN, in light of what the logical truth says MUST be true.

This however is one area that we are all struggling with, because most of us do NOT think logically or impeccably enough. We make a lot of errors. And the main reason for that is simply NOT SEEING the core logical BASIS behind the ENTIRE metaphysics of the course. And so instead, we'll try to "put together the pieces" from the bottom up, starting with loose ends, trying to assemble a cohesive picture, and making a lot of errors along the way. We then depend too heavily on the WORDS. The wordings. The phrasing. What it SEEMS like it says. And we will find that sometimes the CHOICE of words can seem misleading, when you compare it to the metaphysical meaning.

What the logic can do for you though, is it can provide you with a powerful tool for discernment, it can guide you, it can tell you what Jesus's words mean, it can clarify what the words CANNOT mean, and it can help you to get past all the nit-picking arguments and disagreements that come from MULTIPLE OPINIONS, all of which result from a LACK OF true facts and too much faulty reasoning or "blindness" to the LOGICAL METAPHYSICS. All of the discussions about "is it this or that" come from this "difficulty" with seeing the logic behind it.

Does A Course in Miracles line up with a PURELY LOGICAL set of conclusions, a logical system of black and white conclusions? YES. It totally does. Was this world made as a result of a LOGICAL conclusions? YES. Does death occur because of the conclusion that MUST come "inevitably" from a premise of real sin? YES. Would we make BODIES as a logical CONCLUSION in a thought system? YES, because they are the "natural outcome" of WALLS THAT BLOCK TRUTH, as "separation devices". Bodies ARE the idea of the rejection of wholeness. They ARE limitation, as an experiential idea or state of mind.

The atonement is logical too. It is nothing but the recognition that only the truth is true. There is no real sin. An opposite to what is all encompassing does not exist. It is the TRUTH. It represents God's PREMISE and therefore results in the resuming of the extension of creation. IT HAS TO. That's part of its logical basis. This is also why by "denying the denial of truth", you LOGICALLY cancel out the denial. Because you took what is FALSE, and you tried to make it TRUE, in order to deny that the truth is true. So if you REVERSE that by DENYING that the false is true, you deny the denial of the truth, restoring the truth as the only truth. This is entirely logically based.

To restore you to reality, you must UN-OPPOSE God. You must stop "negating" the truth". You must stop believing in sin, which is the idea of God's system having been destroyed and opposed. You must surmount death, which means resurrection is nothing but an assertion of TRUTH, which is life. Everything to do with God's creation, everything to do with the separation, everything to do with the descent into the ego and death, and everything to do with healing and awakening to reality, is all ENTIRELY the interplay of PURELY LOGICAL SYSTEMS or states.

Awakening is even logical and inevitable because you, being an effect of God, must FOREVER be an effect of God, since God never changes, and therefore CANNOT ever stop being God's son. Your reality is SECURED as a result of the logic of the system. The ending of death is just as inevitable, because when you get yourself into a logical STATE of ONLY TRUTH, there cannot be a state of an opposite to life, and death is therefore "snuffed out" as Jesus puts it.

Jesus's choice of words is masterful, but sometimes potentially misleading. There is a lot of material to digest. There seems to be a lot of stuff to figure out. Sometimes things seem contradictory which are not. And our egos make a TON of logical errors. Error, ie sin, is nothing but a logical mistake. You cannot oppose God's will, so it is "error", logically, to CONCLUDE you can. Healing is therefore the undoing of error, by re-establishing the facts of reality and accepting God's premise as the only true one.

This is all the metaphysics. It's behind the words. When you GET it, you can express FROM it, and be coming from the truth. You can express 100,000 books BASED ON this and every single one will be in line with ACIM. We're inside a logical system of thought, albeit based on a FALSE starting point, resulting in FALSE experiences, and FALSE outcomes. A false outcome is SUFFERING. Suffering is inevitable when the entire SYSTEM is founded on opposition to health and life. Suffering means you are "suffering from" being mistaken about the facts of reality.

If you want eternal life and happiness, you must open up to accept the REASONING of the Holy Spirit, which is the SAME as God's SYSTEM or WAY of thinking. Thought BASED ON TRUTH will set you free.

ALL of the conflict in the ACIM community is based on NOT SEEING and NOT ACCEPTING the purely LOGICAL CORE TRUTH in A Course in Miracles. All of the disagreement about what it says, what it means, what it implies, is all based on NOT being logically sound. ALL OPINIONS ARE MUTE! Your opinion has no value, and nor does mine. We are supposed to get away from having opinions. We are supposed to recognize the FACTS OF REALITY, instead of trying to MAKE UP interpretations. Interpretations are entirely ego. The course HAS NO INTERPRETATIONS. The course is based on FACTS. It is based on TRUTH.

And truth is not an intepretation. It is an expression FROM THE PURE LOGIC SYSTEM OF GOD'S THINKING. When everyone finally recognizes this and accepts the ONE CORRECT metaphysics, there will be no more NEED for conflict, no more BASIS for confusion, no more REASON to fight about it, and no more DEBATE about what it means. Behind all the seemingly varied WORDS in the course, behind all the many EXPRESSIONS, behind the choice of phrases and the language and the way Jesus speaks, there is a PURE METAPHYSICAL CLARITY.

Do not be DECEIVED by the ILLUSION OF DIFFERENT FORMS in the course. Do not be deceived by taking the WORDS too literally. The WORDS ARE NOT THE METAPHYSICS. They are only based on it. And if you base your entire understanding on THE WORDS, you will very likely come to false inconsistent conclusions. When you get bogged down in isolated quotes, inconsistent reasoning, things taken out of context, and all the rest of it, you are missing the CLARITY of the course's truth.

Go deeper. Get behind the words. SEE the logical structures. Recognize the metaphysics. It's beyond words. It's beyond those symbols. The course is PURE TRUTHFUL FACT and it is totally consistent without contradiction. If you are confused, wondering about meanings, uncertain about structures, or any other reaction to what's said, you are not using logical reasoning and so are using blind ego interpretation. If you see contradictions, you made a logical error.

If something doesn't fit, you haven't seen the logic behind it clearly enough. And if you conclude things OUT OF ACCORD with what the LOGIC says, you are mistaken, regardless of what the words seem to say. Jesus is 100% perfectly ACCURATE in every single thing he has expressed FROM a PERFECT GRASP of the PERFECTLY CLEAR metaphysical basis of truth. HE has not made any errors. His expressions in words are not erroneous. He is PERFECTLY CORRECT. Our only challenge is coming to SEE, RECOGNIZE and ACCEPT, the CORE TRUTH behind the entire course. REASON will allow you to literally SEE SENSE.

"The introduction of reason into the ego's thought system is the beginning of its undoing. For reason and the ego are contradictory. Nor is it possible for them to co-exist in your awareness. And reason's goal is to make plain, and therefore obvious. You can SEE reason. This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally. If it is not the body's sight, it MUST be understood. For it is PLAIN, and what is obvious is not ambiguous. It CAN be understood. And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their different ways."

Here, you can read the THE ONLY PARAGRAPH in the entire Course where a "shift in perception" is mentioned in connection with "miracles". There are NO other references to this and there is not even a single reference to any kind of "shifting" OR changing of perception in relation to "miracles" mentioned within the same context or section of text, anywhere.

I am going to explain what it really means and what a MIRACLE is, below.

"The miracle minimizes the need for time. In the longitudinal or horizontal plane the recognition of the equality of the members of the Sonship appears to involve almost endless time. However, the miracle entails a sudden SHIFT from horizontal to vertical perception. This introduces an interval from which the giver and receiver both emerge farther along in time than they would otherwise have been. The miracle thus has the unique property of abolishing time to the extent that it renders the interval of time it spans unnecessary."

So, for a start, the "shift" referred to is in the context of the collapsing of time, and not so much talking about the so-called "shifts in perception" that you undergo when you are correcting/purifying the mind. But it does mention perception.

The KEY sentence is this: "The miracle entails a sudden SHIFT from horizontal to vertical perception."

Now, we need to understand what the Course means by a "horizontal perception" and a "vertical perception" and how they are different and what exactly is "entailed" by "shifting" from one to the other.

"Horizontal perception" is ego perception. It means that you believe in and are perceiving causes on this level, which are producing effects on this SAME level. Therefore it seems that cause and effect are operating sideways. So for example, if it SEEMS as if a person throws a ball at another person and it hits them on the head, person A is the cause and person B is affected. This illusion sets up a scenario of victimhood, if the people are thinking with the ego.

On the surface it appears there was an independent, separate cause on this level, which produced independent, separate effects in some other part of this level. This way of perceiving relies on separation and fragmentation of the level, ie multiple separate individual causes and effects. And also in horizontal perception, it is believed that a cause "escapes" from the effects it produces, so is not at the effect of itself and can get away with murder.

Horizontal perception is a murderous thought system of attack and the attempt to deny effects ie to deny oneness, to have separate rules for separate individuals, to perceive inequality and to seem capable of attacking without being attacked. This is all "standard" within horizontal perception. It's ego perception.

"Vertical perception" is very different to this. Instead of looking sideways for causality on this level, or thinking that this level causes effects in a higher level, perception instead places you IN GOD, ie in truth/heaven, looking DOWNWARDS upon the lower level (this world).

From that higher perspective, it is seen that the ENTIRE world is one dream, it is all coming FROM the higher level, the higher level is the cause of it, all of the things happening in the world are EFFECTS ONLY, there ARE no causes in the world on the horizontal level, and therefore there also are no victims, no possibility of one part of the world attacking another, and no separated opposing wills working against each other. It is the perspective of God, or the perspective of the dreamer of the dream.

In vertical perception, you literally RECOGNIZE that everything in this world/lower level is expressing FROM the higher level, thus mind is the cause of everything that's showing up, and there are no other causes of anything. That means there is no horizontal cause of sickness or death. There is nothing that is happening or showing up in the world which "explains" or "justifies" or "causes" anything else on the same level. So someone does not die from a car crash, someone is not sick because of bad food, someone is not suffering with PTSD from a war, someone is not lacking money because someone stole it, etc. No horizontal causes whatsoever.

Instead, vertical perception sees that there can be no victimhood, there are NO causes on the level of form, the entire universe is an effect, mind is the cause, mind has all the power, mind has projected this entire world and it can CHANGE ANYTHING if it so chooses. When it changes something, it basically goes behind the back of any fictional "horizontal laws", which includes all of the laws of physics, biology, chemistry, etc, and pulls the plug on them.

That means, while it is physically impossible for a physical object to suddenly disappear from one location and show up in another, based on the horizontal laws of causality, "vertically" this is absolutely effortless. The vertical mind can choose, from above, to simply undo the projection of the object and to project another object somewhere else. To the observer on the physical level it will seem like A MIRACLE! A demonstration of what appears to be horizontally impossible. A law-breaking, physics-defying demonstration that the horizontal laws ARE NOT TRUE, and that the laws of God ARE TRUE.

This is also the true meaning of "there is no order of difficulty in miracles". They are all the same because all that happens is a vertically-perceiving person who does not buy into any of the horizontal illusions/laws whatsoever, decides to rearrange the illusion in a way which completely defies all of the laws and which horizontal-believing people find to be impossible. If at first a person appeared dead, and if the horizontal laws say that once death occurs there is no going back, and the vertically perceiving person decides to remove the dead body and put life back into it and manifest a living body in its place, THAT IS A MIRACLE.

A miracle is an expression, rooted in love, aligned with the Atonement (vertical truth), which CAUSES FROM ABOVE, and produces effects BELOW (e.g. in the physical level). And since all such acts are basically the SAME ACT of causality from above to below, it does not matter whatsoever what the below rules say should be possible, or what seems more difficult or easy, or the magnitude of the effects, or how long lasting they have been, or how many times a person was caused, or how long sickness has been present, or how long someone is dead for. None of it matters vertically because love expresses maximally from above, will full power and effect below, and everything is essentially the SAME ACTION. One problem, one solution.

Now, we need to therefore recognize that when someone is in the ego mindset, if they are trying to apply the course and are trying to shift perception or have a healing or receive a correction, the only "actual" healing possible is to move in the direction of the vertical.

However, if we are being honest here, a person who is just starting out with this and who has a "little" willingness and accepts a small correction, can barely be called a miracle worker. They may "shift" from 99% horizontal perception, to 98.5% horizontal perception. A very slight shift away from horizontal toward vertical truth. And that person WILL NOT be able to move mountains. They will not be able to reverse death nor will they be able to heal the blind etc.

Each little shift in perception gradually, slowly, over a long period of time, moves the person from the horizontal upward toward God. And it takes a LOT of purification work to do this. A huge amount of investment in horizontal ego perception must be let go in order to move upwards. And there is NOT a "sudden shift" here. You do not suddenly go from heavy ego investment to "no ego" in the blink of an eye (at least almost never). We're not talking about going from horizontal to "slightly more vertical" perception. A miracle entails a shift ALL THE WAY to vertical perception.

Notice also it says "entails", which doesn't necessarily mean "is". It's not saying a miracle IS a shift to vertical perception. It ENTAILS getting into vertical perception first. You need to get your mind up there into the perspective of God, first, before you will be able to perform a miracle. And for most people that is going to take YEARS of dedicated undoing and correction, which the course calls PURIFICATION. It's not even the same thing as forgiveness.

Now, there are parts in the Course where Jesus makes a distinction between being "miracle ready" and the actual "action" of performing a miracle. Miracle readiness means being in vertical perception at all times. Actually PERFORMING a miracle, which expresses FROM love, in a vertical direction, producing changes in EFFECTS on the level of this world (almost always observable), is a separate part of being miraculous. You don't just sit there "being miraculous". It is not a spectator sport. Members of Jesus's party are ACTIVE WORKERS. There is an activity involved. A USE of the POWER of causality. An EXPRESSION of it to where love was LACKING, providing what was lacking, so that LIFE is restored and death is reversed. (Miracles fulfill a lack).

So the "shifting of perception" from fear to love, or from ego to truth, or from darkness to light, or from death to life, is not ITSELF a miracle. Miracles flow DOWNWARD FROM HEAVEN. "Miracles fall like drop of healing rain from heaven on a dry a dusty world where starved and thirsty creatures come to die." They come DOWN from ABOVE, not up from below, and they are not your movement upwards. Nor do they flow sideways. A sideways shift in perception is not a miracle. A slight shift towards vertical perception is not a miracle. A person is not performing miracles by MOVING UPWARD, they perform miracles by expressing FROM a high place, downward, which then LIFTS upward. The shifting of perception towards God is an EFFECT of a miracle, not a cause.

It is in fact the EGO which likes to believe that IT is a miracle worker. It does this through level confusion, which is the belief that a lower level causes a higher level. In this belief, the ego says, well, if I shift my perception toward truth, then I am being causal and am triggering a miracle. Or as if, the shifting itself is a cause, and it produces vertical effects. This is A LIE. This is classic ego thinking. God is cause, not the ego. Cause comes DOWN from above, not up from below.

Miracles ENTAIL a shift into a vertical perceiving mode, FIRST, in order to SEE with God's eyes, to recognize suffering for the illusion it is so that you do not make it real, and then LOVE EXPRESSES. The expression of love is downwards from God. Causality flows vertically, from God, to us. Getting your perception INTO a state of perceiving vertically IS NOT a miracle, it is PREPARATION for a miracle.

Recognize that miracles are rooted in forgiveness and forgiveness is a HIGH STATE of mind, in which there is nothing LEFT to forgive. It is the atonement. Forgiveness, atonement, salvation, are all the same thing. They are end goals after a great deal of purification work and much correction of perception. Correction of perception is not a miracle, but miracles DO have a corrective function.

They are extensions of, expressions of, the atonement principle, once it has ALREADY been accepted. Atonement has to be RECEIVED, BEFORE miracles can be GIVEN. You can only give the miracles you have received, and miracles are something you SHARE and GIVE, not something that you "only receive". You cannot express a miracle UNTIL you accept atonement, and you cannot accept atonement UNTIL you have "shifted perception". So the shifts in perception have to happen FIRST, over a long period of time, gradually, to get your mind to where you are WILLING to ACCEPT the atonement, and THEN you will be willing to RECEIVE, and THEN you will be ABLE to extend and perform a miracle. You cannot give miracles you have not received and that means you cannot express atonement if you have not accepted it yet!

You can't sit there and think, well, I just shifted "my perception" and so "I" have now received a "miracle" in isolation, which only I have benefited from, and it has no causal effects on anyone else. Giving and receiving are one, and once you accept atonement you GO OUT and you extend the atonement to others and HELP OTHERS. Miracles are services to others FROM a state of love, not little stepping stones in your own awakening.

Miracles can rearrange time because they operate from above and outside of time and therefore can DEFY linear/horizontal causality/time. Does shifting your perception rearrange time? Does it have effects which are POTENTIALLY SPECTACLES, which you then have to be careful not to use AS spectacles (ie for that sake alone)? Could you describe your own correction of your own perception, something that could have the "risk" of being considered SPECTACULAR in the eyes of other people, with effects so extraordinary (like Jesus appearing out of thin air after having "died")? Not likely.

Jesus walking on water to prove that gravity means nothing and He is not under the laws of the horizontal, THAT is a miracle. Jesus completely defying all laws by MULTIPLYING a few loaves of bread and fishes enough to feed 5000 people, that is a MIRACLE. Jesus raising someone from "certain death" and reversing death and restoring him to a living state, that is IMPOSSIBLE on the horizontal level of laws (death is irreversible), but He proved that it is NOT irreversible, because he has his hand on the "controls" of this entire world "there is nothing my holiness cannot do."

If it is not supernatural, it is NOT a miracle. It there is not some kind of causality coming from above and expressing below and BREAKING the ego's laws, it is NOT a demonstration of God's truth and is not a miracle. If it is merely someone having a personal healing in the privacy of their home and perceiving slightly more truthfully afterwards, that is NOT a miracle. It is merely a stepping stone TOWARDS being able to let miracles flow. If all expressions of love (FULL love) are a miracle, then love has to be able to flow fully and freely through you before you can be miraculous, and that is NOT even remotely going to happen while you still have a ton of correction and purification to do. "Miracles are everyone's right, but PURIFICATION IS NECESSARY FIRST." Purification is a process of gradual shifting of perception towards truth and a LOT of it is needed FIRST BEFORE you gain access to the right to perform miracles.

MIRACLES ARE NOT SHIFTS IN PERCEPTION!!!!!!!!!

Miracles are expressions from love. To be able to express from love, you have to have willingness to allow love to be in you. You have to be aware of love, and you have to be free of blocks to love. That's a HIGH STATE of mind. That's advanced. You try to get someone who has just picked up ACIM and accepted a little bit of correction, to express God's love through them.

They will not be willing OR able, because there are too many blocks in the way. Miracle working DOES NOT come to the beginner. It takes a lot of undoing and correction of the mind - a lot of "shifts", which add up overall to a much bigger shift, which eventually put you closer to God and more in alignment with vertical perception, which THEN starts to reveal miracle working abilities. The ability to cause from above. To cause from above (super) the natural (ego horizontal nature).

If it does not PROVE and DEMONSTRATE that the ego's laws are not natural and do not APPLY at all, it is not a miracle.

And note that Jesus walking on water COULD have been considered a spectacle. However, the Course actually says, do not use miracles as a spectacle as an attempt to INDUCE BELIEF. This is often cut short. The end part is vital. If you use a miracle ONLY to try to "force" someone to "believe" or to become a follower or to go along with your teaching or whatever, to coerce, to manipulate them, THEN you are producing a (potentially spectacular) miracle for the sake of achieving an ego purpose. And this IS a mistaken understanding of their purpose.

But if you are not doing that, and you're not going around putting on a show just to shock and awe people, without using them to actually TEACH or HEAL or UNDO or RAISE THE DEAD so that people become MORE RESURRECTED, THAT is the only way that they are used incorrectly as spectacles. It's got NOTHING to do with whether the miracle is spectacular or not. And this idea of "not doing anything spectacular" has led people to hide in a hole and be afraid of miracles and to play them down and shove them in a box to suggest not doing ANYTHING that could be considered a spectacle. It's a gross misunderstanding.

So anyway. Stepping off my soapbox for now. Miracles are miraculous. This is a Course in SUPERNATURAL MIRACLES, ego-law breaking miracles, what appears "impossible" to the horizontal ego thought system, and expressions of real love which has the power to LITERALLY move mountains.

Come on people. This is a course in MIRACLES. MIRACLES!!!!! Not a course in fixing yourself up and sitting on a fence.

I asked Jesus last night fairly bluntly about death, whether a person's body can die without any problems in the mind, and whether a person can be fully awake/enlightened and still go through the death process.

His answer was short and sweet and cut to the chase:

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"Demonstrate death and you must believe in death."

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Just to make sure you grasp what this means, recognize the ACIM ideas that "to teach is to learn" and also "all teaching is demonstration" and "you will demonstrate what you believe is true" and "you are always demonstrating even while you sleep".

So that means, whatever you are expressing, whatever you are showing up "as", whatever state your body is in, whatever is coming through you, however you are using the body, whatever you are trying to communicate to others on all levels including the physical, whatever "message" you are giving through the state of your body which reflects the state of your mind, that is your DEMONSTRATION. Which means, it correlates exactly to what you BELIEVE IS TRUE.

This is proven out in this quote, which tells us that whatever you use the body to DEMONSTRATE, it will BECOME THAT, so if you use the body to demonstrate sickness or death, it becomes sick and dead, because you BELIEVE IN DEATH. The mind makes ALL DECISIONS about the body's condition, including whether it lives or dies:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body’s condition. "

So when you are believing in true health, you will demonstrate true health. When you believe in attack you will demonstrate attack. When you believe in sickness you will demonstrate a sickness. When you believe in death, you will demonstrate death!

What Jesus is saying is, in order to demonstrate death - "to die" as we like to refer to it, where the body goes through a death process, that is ONLY POSSIBLE when you BELIEVE that DEATH IS TRUE AND REAL. And it is because you believe in death being true, that you demonstrate that this is your truth.

It also means therefore, that if you DO NOT BELIEVE in death, YOUR BODY CANNOT DIE. Literally ****CANNOT****. Impossible for it to die, no matter what. If that is your 100% perfect belief in absolutely no attack, the body MUST become a symbol of immortality, to remain in perfect AGELESS HEALTH, as long as it is needed. Not even affected by weather or food or time.

Long story short..... DEATH CAN ONLY HAPPEN IF YOU BELIEVE IN IT!

And that also means... TO COMPLETE THE CURRICULUM AND FULLY WAKE UP, YOU MUST NOT BELIEVE IN DEATH, AND YOU MUST DEMONSTRATE IMMORTALITY.

So everyone is constantly demonstrating, teaching, communicating, what it is they believe the truth is, putting on a "show" which exhibits for everyone to see, exactly what it is you believe in.

Jesus also teaches simply that if you REALLY believe that something is true, you WILL be ABLE to demonstrate its truth. Not just a sort of powerless wishful thinking, but that if it is your actual experience that something is true, you will wholeheartedly be willing to demonstrate it to PROVE that you believe it. Nothing will hold you back from demonstrating it. Being fully convinced of its truth, it becomes REAL for you, and that gives you the POWER to demonstrate it.

"Miracles demonstrate that learning has occurred under the right guidance, for learning is invisible and what has been learned can be recognized ONLY BY ITS RESULTS. Its generalisation is DEMONSTRATED as you use it in more and more situations. You will recognize that you have learned there is no order of difficulty in miracles when you apply them to all situations. There is NO SITUATION (including sickness and death) to which miracles do not apply, and by applying them to ALL situations you will gain the real world."

So what this boils down to is this simple fact.

If your body becomes sick, or if you die, YOU MUST HAVE CHOSEN IT, BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE IN DEATH.

There is no exception to this. If you "demonstrate death" for all to see, you are PROVING that death is something you believe in, and that is why you are TEACHING DEATH to everyone through your EXAMPLE. You're saying, look everyone, look at how death is real, look at how death is happening, look at how death is my truth, and LOOK AT HOW YOU DID THIS TO ME!

When you look at all the passages in the course which talk about "demonstration" this is clearly revealed, that when you demonstrate something it "applies" your belief to others. And therefore when you make your body sick, you are attacking others because you are demonstrating your belief that you have been "made sick" by someone other than yourself. And when you are attacking others, YOUR BODY will be attacked, and will become sick, to DEMONSTRATE that you are believing in attack. And this is nothing other than the attempt to PROVE that your brother must be a sinner because EFFECTS are showing up in you which he MUST have caused.

And even further, when you CEASE believing in death and sickness, you EXONERATE your brother, because you are no longer believing that he is the cause of your state of being, or the world. Jesus used His own resurrection - the re-materialization of a body which was NOT DEAD, proving He had NOT been killed by crucifixion, to DEMONSTRATE that death is not real. Here:

"We said before that the purpose of the Resurrection was to "demonstrate that no amount of misperception has any influence at all on a Son of God." This demonstration EXONERATES those who misperceive, by establishing beyond doubt that they have NOT hurt anyone."

He refers to misperception because in a prior paragraph he spoke of how the misperception of others was the justification for their attempted attack on his life. He resurrected to PROVE that they were EXONERATED, through physical demonstration, because of his BELIEF that there is no death, and therefore showed that they were no longer ACCUSED of having caused the death. Simply, by showing up as "not dead", it immediately cancelled and proved false any belief that anyone had killed him, thus rendering all onlookers INNOCENT. He thus TAUGHT THEIR INNOCENCE through this miracle demonstration, because miracles are teaching devices.

The demonstration of what you believe is important. It is all over the course. When we are making ourselves sick, we are accusing our brother of sin. And yes THIS DOES MEAN AT THE PHYSICAL LEVEL. It is only at the physical level that you can see the RESULTS of miracles and the results of the mind's belief system. And this physical level is used as a COMMUNICATION device to make statements about WHAT IS TRUE OF BOTH YOU AND YOUR BROTHER. Your sickness attacks BOTH of you. Your death attacks BOTH of you. With death you are saying, "you killed me, and I killed you, and both of us are dead". This is spelled out in black and white, that "your sickness" is an attack on others and an attempt to accuse your brother of sin. Your body *MUST* be part of your awakening process and part of your view of yourself and part of what it is you believe in.

"The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price if they can say, "Behold me, brother; at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors must be sins."

Here Jesus is not talking figuratively or metaphorically about death. He's talking plainly about a person's body dying as an attempt to accuse your brother of sin. Anyone who is sick, anyone who dies, is accusing the whole sonship, and the world, and God, of "causing it", and therefore claiming that we are all sinners. Sickness and death OF THE PHYSICAL BODY are WEAPONS OF ATTACK. The body is an IMAGE you are showing your brother to say hey, this is what I think of you, and this is what is true of us both. This is why the body is an integral part of your MIND and an integral part of your entire process of spiritual enlightenment. IT MUST SHOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE.

You can't it be that the body just sits there like a separate "thing" having absolutely no input from your mind and not reflecting your inner condition whatsoever, with you blissing out in some corner of your mind pretending to be awake while the body is still showing everyone that you believe death is real. You can't just be like, oh I'm not a body I am free, I'll just sit here and not be a body, while my body is sick and dies, and I don't care if its sick or dead cus it's an illusion. THAT'S DENIAL. THAT'S A LIE. THAT'S DISHONEST. THAT'S BULLSHIT!!!!!!!

I know that many people cannot accept this and many deny it. But Jesus in A Course in Miracles, and supported by everything He has said in his own words, is telling us to STOP BEING SICK and STOP DYING. That sickness and death are the total OPPOSITE of God's Will, and that we are to DEMONSTRATE AN UNWILLINGNESS TO DIE, in order to PROVE that we really truly believe that death is not real.

It is not enough to sit on a fence and say, ok, I don't believe in death. And to then die. That is a lie. It is dishonest to say you do not believe in sickness and to then demonstrate being sick. Or to claim you are not dying and to then die. Or to say it's not my mind that's dying, it's just my body, which is not me. That's an intellectualization because THE BODY CAN ONLY DIE IF YOU ATTACK IT. It is a lie. The mind IS believing in death and is making the body sick. A SANE MIND heals the body!

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

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, the mind HEALS THE BODY (making sickness and death IMPOSSIBLE) because it has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness because it cannot conceive of attacking anyone or anything."

If your mind is sane, YOUR BODY CANNOT DIE. If your body dies, YOUR MIND IS NOT SANE.

Whatever you demonstrate, whatever you express, whatever you show, it is coming from your inner condition as an outward picture. It is a demonstration of your thought system and what you REALLY believe. If you go through death, YOU DO BELIEVE IN DEATH. No exceptions. If you do NOT believe in death, YOU WILL NOT DEMONSTRATE IT.

You do not get to wake up from being a body in the dream and then go through death. You do not get to wake up from being a body and believe intellectually that you're not the body and to then have the body be sick and die. Where is the correlation of proof that your mind makes your body? Where is the consistent honesty? This is deception. You can't be demonstrating one thing and believing another.

Jesus is literally teaching us to OVERCOME DEATH. "You made sickness and death and can abolish both". This is not an OPTIONAL course teaching. This is not just some side-thread which you can elect whether to participate in. This is a CENTRAL TEACHING. It is inherent to healing. It is inherent to being right minded. It is inherent to miracles. It is inherent in all of the Course's metaphysics, and it is GOD's WILL that you not demonstrate death. Death is an attempt to kill God's Son, no matter what anyone claims about their supposed state of mind. Death is humanity's belief in hatred made manifest. Period.

Anyone who shows that they die in this world, is demonstrating and proving that they believe in death. That's all there is to it. It doesn't matter how much of a guru you are, how enlightened you seem to be, how many miracles you performed, how many yogic skills you have, how many followers you accumulated, how many people adore you, nothing. The proof is in the pudding. If you die, you did not overcome death.

"A dream of death is not left by death but by truth."

It's plain and simple. All the arguments about "oh this is just a dream and death isn't real so it doesn't matter if you die"... it's a logical ERROR, it's level confusion. All the arguments about "well I don't have the power to stop my own death", is also bullshit. It is UNWILLINGNESS TO LIVE. All the arguments about "death is natural" - absolutely false. All the arguments about death is inevitable - absolutely false. All the arguments about "everything dies" or "everyone dies"... how SORRY IS THAT?

That 99.99% of the human race is FAILING TO BELIEVE IN LIFE. That 99.99% of the human race is suicidal. "A dry and dusty world where starved and thirsty creatures come to die." And world where we come "to hate a while, whither and die".

This is not God's will.

It is God's will that you believe in life, you demonstrate that you believe in life, you ABOLISH DEATH, you undo ALL sickness, and you SHOW and PROVE that you cannot be killed, nothing can affect you in any way, and that the body can be overcome. You leave the dream through TRUTH, not through death. And truth brings light to illusions and disappears them.

This is the new frontier of A Course in Miracles. This is the true message Jesus is teaching. That you DO NOT NEED TO DIE and YOU SHOULD NOT DIE if you are to believe in everlasting life.

Again "demonstrate death and you must believe in death".

Death is what you are teaching. Death is what you believe in. If you are overpowered by disease and forces in the ego world, which you made, you have not undone your own self-attack. If your body is wracked with sickness, which are defenses you yourself put in place, and you have not removed those defenses, then you are still blocking God's Will.

No-one dies without their own consent. All death is suicide. Death is the opposite of God's Will.

"Sickness and death seemed to enter the mind of God's Son against His Will. 2 The "attack on God" made His Son think he was Fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god of depression."

"4 Many are afraid of blasphemy, but they do not understand what it means. 5 They do not realize that to deny God is to deny their own Identity, and in this sense the wages of sin is death. 6 The sense is very literal; denial of life perceives its opposite, as all forms of denial replace what is with what is not. 7 No one can really do this, but that you can think you can and believe you have is beyond dispute."

"T-10.V.2. Do not forget, however, that to deny God will inevitably result in projection, and you will believe that others and not yourself have done this to you."

"From the ego came sin and guilt and death, in opposition to life and innocence and to the Will of God Himself. Where can such opposition lie but in the sick minds of the insane, dedicated to madness and set against the peace of Heaven. One thing is sure—God, Who created neither sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. He knows of neither sin nor its results. The shrouded figures in the funeral procession march not in honor of their Creator, Whose Will it is they live. They are not following it; they are opposing it.

81 And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body which they dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, offered to sin to feed upon and keep itself alive—a thing condemned, damned by its maker, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself. You who believe you have condemned the Son of God to this are arrogant."

If you REALLY believe in God's Will and that God is eternal life, you WILL DEMONSTRATE IT IN THIS WORLD by proving you cannot be affected by the world IN ANY WAY, not even death can happen to you, and you are IMMORTAL. If you are not doing that, it is because you do not believe it, it means you do not fully want to do God's Will, and MUST still have mental illness. If you die, you are NOT awake. Death is a symbol of sleep within sleep. It is the total opposite of progress, the total opposite of awakening, and the total opposite of truth.

"There is no death, the Son of God is free" is true ONLY IF you can PROVE IT, by being INCAPABLE of dying, not merely as a mind, but in any way that you show up. If you are in a body, you MUST SHOW IT by showing you CANNOT DIE PHYSICALLY EITHER.

Do you really think if Jesus showed up in the world, projecting a body from His mind, that anything in the world could make that body dead? That you could hurt it in any way or make it sick against Jesus's will? THAT would be arrogant, and that is the arrogance of the ego. "There is no death, the Son of God is free" WHEN HE FULLY BELIEVES IN THE END OF DEATH and has the balls to show it to the world.

I'd like to try to explain from my point of view what a miracle is. However, I have to acknowledge that there are still some aspects of miracles I do not understand. So this is a work in progress. Take what you like and leave the rest.

Firstly, there are two levels. A higher level and a lower level. Think of each level as a realm of existence. The higher level is where God hangs out. In-between them is the idea of separation, and then below is where the ego hangs out. You could equate these to heaven and earth.

In truth, the higher level is the only causal power. In this higher level sits the Son of God who is dreaming, and in His dreaming he makes the lower level. He sort of projects it downwards from above. Mind, as cause, produces the picture of the world, an effect.

This picture of the world contains *everything* in the world, and he simultaneously puts in place everything that moves or seems to have affects on other things, plus the effects that those causes seem to have.

There are no causes inside the dream, only effects. So he is actually like a puppeteer pulling the strings to make BOTH the "causes and effects" or "victims and victimizers" do everything that they seem to do, and the "story" of how one causes the other is FICTIONAL.

In this perspective, cause and effect are VERTICAL. What is above, causes what is below. So this means everything in the world below is only an effect of the dreamer above.

Within the world below, however, there are illusions of separation, and many of these illusions make it SEEM as if there are independent causes within the dream. An example would be that the wind blows and makes the leaves on the tree move. Or a person kicks a ball.

The wind DOES NOT blow the tree - the wind AND the tree moving are BOTH dreamed SIMULTANEOUSLY by the higher level mind. The person does NOT kick the ball, the person kicking and the ball moving are BOTH dreamed simultaneously by a single mind, to create an ILLUSION of cause and effect when viewed in "linear time".

In this perspective, cause and effect are HORIZONTAL. Or in other words, there is an ILLUSION that something in the dream is able to "cause" something else in the dream to be an effect. In essence, this turns the "effect" of dreaming into a cause in its own right. So then we believe that this world contains "causes" which produce "effects". In the horizontal, causes are VICTIMIZERS, and effects are VICTIMS. And it is possible for victimizers to be affected as causes transform into effects and back again, because they are all the same ILLUSION.

Someone kicks you in the leg and you develop a bruise. If you are a body, this puts you AT THE EFFECT of the world, making you an instant VICTIM. Being born "by" the world into a body is an ILLUSION which makes you an instant victim, but in truth you are NOT at the effect of the world, and you are NOT "created by" your parent's bodies.

This horizontal perception of cause and effect is ENTIRELY illusory, because even the things which seem to "cause" other things, and the "effects" of those causes, are actually BOTH EFFECTS of the higher level mind which is the only cause of them. The higher level mind, in its vertical causality, manifests both the person kicking the leg, and the bruise on the leg, simultaneously, making it SEEM as though there was a horizontal cause of the bruise.

In the horizontal perception, we come to believe there are thus illusory "laws" which SEEM to describe what we are seeing happen from within this level, without being awakened to the true nature of cause and effect. It SEEMS to us that every action (cause) has an equal and opposite reaction (effect). The laws of physics are based on this. Science has gone to great lengths to describe the APPARENT way in which stuff happens at the level of being inside the dream, unaware of the higher level.

All of these ego laws, horiziontal laws, are SHOWN to be completely false and illusory, when the higher level decides to DEMONSTRATE that IT is the cause of everything. It is therefore possible for the higher level to decide to project a different image or dream, below, which is unlike the condition it was in previously, WITHOUT OBEYING any of the lower level illusory laws. Because the higher level "overrides" the lower level, any illusions of how things are supposed to happen, or what is supposed to be possible, are completely ignored.

The higher level is the level of love. But it is not just love as we think of love "separate from" other qualities. It is also joy, peace, life etc. In particular, it is ALIVE. God's love is a LIVING PRESENCE, which contains within it life-giving, eternal-life giving qualities. It is able to extend life forever. It is able to express SO MUCH "livingness", that it is permanently in a state of incorruptible "health", it is absolutely impossible for it to become sick or die, and it is therefore a state of immortality.

The life-giving quality of God's love, naturally EXPRESSES at all times. God is therefore ALWAYS giving life and continuing life. God's love is so life-giving and restorative and absolutely refuses to include any form of death or problem, that if any kind of illusion of sickness or death were "exposed" to it, it would be so INFUSED with life, that all signs of decay or sickness or death will be completely reversed. Health (light) will totally obliterate suffering (darkness), shining it away permanently.

This life-giving quality of God, is what we refer to as MIRACULOUS. It literally is 100% unlimited in what it can do, and there is absolutely nothing that can deter it or prevent it from healing, ie being in a permanent state of perfection. God is PERMANENTLY MIRACULOUS. Permanently life-giving. And so is His Son. It is completely NATURAL for God and His Son to be permanently miraculous. If they were to seem to be not miraculous, something must have gone wrong! Miraculousness does not ever stop. It is an eternal aspect of God's creative power.

With this in mind, when we "descend" into the darkness, going down to the lower "level", into the ego world, hell, we are attempting to put distance between ourselves and God. The further we become distant from God, as though descending further downwards towards death (eventually to be buried in the ground), the more we will be blocked from the life-giving properties of God's loving expression. This will result in a mind which believes sickness and death are reality, and it will project a body which is sick and later dead.

Death, in the ego's world, is the final statement that God's life has ended, or that we are so distant from God's Will to Live, that "our" will to live is no longer a will to live, but a will to cease living, ie to die. This means we believe we are becoming *completely* separate from God. Death of the body and mind is the ego's final attempt to completely escape the realm where God's light shines. Only complete "non-existence" can seem to fulfill the ego's wish to be separate from where God is.

In the dark, our mind is believing in separation, and is therefore sick. We have blocks to awareness, so do not see the light very well. This causes us to attack ourselves and our body will show this. Forms of sickness will appear, and eventually the body will die because we have attacked it. In order to UNDO this and reverse it, even to reverse what shows up as physical death, we need a miracle. We need some of the miraculous life-giving radiance of God's love.

Exposure to such radiance will RESURRECT us back to life, first a restoration of health and life in the mind and body, and then later the completion of the resurrection in which the body disappears, because the mind has become SO pure that it can no longer be bound by a body image. There are degrees of darkness and because the body is an outward picture of an inner condition at all times, if the mind resurrects, the body will also. Any "symptoms" (fake effects) from the illusion of horizontal causality, will be UNDONE by the shift to vertical perception (true causality - mind over matter).

A "miracle" as we tend to think of it, seems to be a step towards God. Or as some people call it, a "shift in perception" from death to life. However, we need to be clear that God is permanently miraculous and so is His Son. The miraculous life-giving property of God never stops. The ability to do absolutely anything never comes to an end. The creative power of the mind never ceases. And God is ALWAYS being loving. Anything that comes from love as an expression of love, IS MIRACULOUS. This means that God is ALWAYS MIRACULOUS.

A miracle then, CANNOT BE defined as the shift from death to life itself. The miracle is the LOVE which EXPRESSES in order to PRODUCE a shift from death to life. The shift is an EFFECT. The shift takes place entirely in the realm of the ego's world, the lower level, the level of EFFECT, because a miracle is an expression from the higher level of love, shining down onto what is below, and lifting it upwards towards God.

A helpful analogy, is when Jesus says beautifully:

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."

What this is saying is, miraculous healing love shines "down from above" onto the illusory world below where stuff seemed dead, giving it life, pulling it closer to itself, and "life" erupts to show SIGNS (symbols) of the immortality that has been extended from love. Love expresses, the dead come back to life, even forms and bodies and objects come back towards life. As far as forms of life can, being limited as symbols in a dream.

Corresponding to this then, realize that miracles come down from heaven, from the higher level, FROM LOVE, as an expression of Love, and BLESS what is below (the dusty dead world), bestowing upon it the MIRACULOUS radiance of love's life-giving properties, and therefore "bringing life" to what is there, RESTORING to being "more alive".

Jesus says in his analogy that the signs of life now spring up. Simply, what once was seemingly dead or even partly dead, has had some measure of its "dead-ness" lifted away, that thing has been RAISED upwards, vertically, towards God, and therefore is now in closer proximity to the life-giving power of God's love, and therefore COMES BACK TO LIFE. This even means that ROADKILL can be brought back to life, all "effects" of war can be undone, and all death reversed. The body can even be made immortal, incapable of sickness and death, because it is SO infused with the life-giving power of love. A miracle indeed.

Miracles are also referred to as a shift in perception - FROM HORIZONTAL TO VERTICAL PERCEPTION. As I described, when the mind changes how it sees things, and no longer sees things entirely in a "horizontal" way in terms of cause and effect, is no longer believing that one thing in the dream caused another thing, it shifts its VIEWPOINT by moving awareness VERTICALLY up towards God.

Vertical perception is the awareness that the higher level (love) is the ONLY CAUSE, and everything "below" that seems to be in the world - bodies and such, is ONLY EFFECT. This so-called shift into alignment with how God operates, is a shift into the recognition that cause is inside you not outside you, or to put it another way, cause is above, and all effects are below.

The "shifting" itself IS NOT the miracle as such. The shifting itself, the transition from darkness to light, is not really what causes healing. What causes healing is God's LOVE expressing FROM above, shining down onto what is below, causing what is below to be partly dissolved, such that the mind seems to shift upward.

This has to be true, because if the miracle itself - the miraculousness of love - were ONLY the shifting from horizontal to vertical, then once the "shifting" itself had been completed, the miracle would be ENDED, and that means, love would stop being miraculous. Love is PERMANENTLY MIRACULOUS. It cannot stop being miraculous.

What happens is, once a shift to vertical has taken place and healing has been RECEIVED FROM ABOVE, and the level of communication has been raised (oneness increased, separation decreased), there are simply LESS BLOCKS to the extension of love. More love is allowed to SHINE from above, through the mind, and to extend outward.

It extends outward completely naturally because that is what love does all the time. So when you remove your block to awareness, whether you call it a shift or not, you REVEAL the presence of love in the mind, you open up to the higher level and allow it to shine through you, and therefore love can now EXTEND THROUGH YOU.

Removing blocks to love, is an act of removing blocks to the AWARENESS of love's presence, because love is ALREADY FULLY PRESENT, being miraculous all the time. Correction, shifting, purification, or removal of blocks, simply UNCOVERS the love which was trying to express, allowing it to express more.

Shifting perception DOES NOT CAUSE A MIRACLE and DOES NOT CAUSE LOVE TO EXIST. Love, miraculousness, already exists. That is the *ego's version of miracles*, which it thinks IT causes, because IT thinks that IT has power over love to make healing happen! The shift is seen by the ego as a cause, but it is an EFFECT from a higher level. A gift. A sign that the mind is WILLING TO RECEIVE LOVE, not an ability to 'make love happen'.

The shift merely puts us closer TO it and allows us to EXTEND it, thus RECEIVING healing FROM love. "We" do not cause healing by shifting perception, LOVE DOES ALL THE WORK. And this also means, that being open to RECEIVING LOVE from God is important in healing, not just doing stuff with your mind on your own. You do not have to do everything yourself, God WANTS TO HEAL YOU FOR YOU.

The INCREASE in the expressability of that love through you is what HEALS YOU. The shift does not heal, the unblocking does not heal, LOVE IS THE ONLY HEALER. Love is the miracle.

After a while, when you have removed enough blocks to love that you are starting to RADIATE LOVE on a more constant basis, or at least something approaching towards love, YOUR MIND is now being restored as a conduit or medium through which love can naturally extend.

This means you will now be willing and able to extend love outward. And since you're still in the body at the moment, that means you will be able to DO GOD'S WILL ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN, ie you will be able to express the LOVE OF GOD, here, which means expressing God's LIFE-GIVING POWER, here, to HEAL and undo absolutely any sign of "non-life" you encounter.

In other words, you do not simply perform a miracle in order to shift your mind towards love. You shift your mind towards love SO THAT you can be miraculous. Otherwise it would mean that someone who is heavily steeped in ego lies, upon making their first little shift, is suddenly a full-blown miracle worker. That is pretty much impossible.

"Miracles are everyone's right, but PURIFICATION IS NECESSARY FIRST". This means that your purification efforts will have to happen first, possibly over a prolonged period of time, BEFORE you will GAIN ACCESS TO the right to perform miracles. This is because you need to remove quite a lot of blocks to love BEFORE love can flow through you fully enough to show up as miracles in your life or on behalf of others. If you have a lot of blocks to love, you are GETTING IN THE WAY of the extension of love and therefore are blocking miracles.

You are not miraculous just because you start studying the course or doing the workbook, or "shifting your perception". Miracles come LATER, after much purification work ie correction of your mind, letting go of ego, applying forgiveness etc. Shifts in perception are not miracles, but eventually they LEAD TO miracles. If you could suddenly shift your perception very much to a highly vertical perception, you could conceivably perform a miracle right now. But it is uncommon. Usually we have to "prepare" to be able to do that.

You will OPEN UP TO miracles over time, the more you release blocks to love, because you will be placing yourself closer to God and therefore regaining access to love, a willingness to extend it, and therefore miracles can work through you from God. You can then perform God's WILL, but you are not going to be able to perform God's will after a few perceptual adjustments.

However, at some point, you WILL get to the point where you are spending much more of your time IN vertical perception, not believing in the horizontal ILLUSION of causality, and will become much more miraculous. When miracles are not happening ALL THE TIME, something has gone wrong. This means that miracles are a PERMANENT PART of the NATURE of the Son of God. And of God. It is a natural part of love and life. When we are not being constantly miraculous, constantly loving, we are not performing miracles all the time, so something is wrong.

When we do become more consistently aligned with God's Will, the Power of God will now extend through us. We will now be ABLE to EXPRESS LOVE. And since we're still in this world, this means, we are able to render the MAXIMAL SERVICE to our brothers, which is what every miracle does. At this point, "miracle working" does NOT simply entail shifting someone's perception towards truth. It entails utilizing the vertical perception of the higher level (God/Love/Life) to OVERRIDE any and every illusory "effect", or "cause" in this world.

This means your holiness is very powerful and there is literally nothing that it cannot do in the world. Miracles expressing from the higher level, love, do not see orders of difficulty because they do not believe the lower-level illusion of cause and effect. They overthrow ALL physical laws because all laws on the horizontal level are FICTION. What appears to be a cause in the world is NOT A CAUSE. Any state or condition or sickness or form of suffering or even physical death, CAN BE REVERSED.

Why would you do this? Well, you're going be expressing a LOT OF LOVE. And it is NATURAL for love to be miraculous. It is NATURAL for love to want to HEAL, to reverse suffering, to undo ego pain, to heal the SEPARATION, and so if separation is showing up as physical sickness or broken bodies, LOVE WANTS TO HEAL IT. It is not God's will that ANYONE suffer or die. It is God's Will that EVERYONE experience perfect health and resurrection and permanent happiness.

Why express miracles in a world which isn't real? First of all, that's level confusion. Second of all, it's because this is what LOVE WANTS TO DO. Love wants to HEAL THE WORLD to resurrect everything to a reflection of perfect health and incorruptability, and to then bring everyone home across the tiny gap between that "real world" and heaven. The world NEEDS miracles of healing from love. And third of all, it is our FUNCTION in this world to HEAL, a function which we share with the holy spirit, and while we are here, it is our natural RIGHT and PURPOSE to heal at all times.

This means PERFORMING MIRACLES EVERY SINGLE DAY. God wants us to BE MIRACLE WORKERS, in the world, helping our brother, healing our brother SUPERNATURALLY through the Holy Spirit, DEMONSTRATING that vertical perception is the truth, demonstrating that ego laws DO NOT APPLY, and teaching everyone by EXAMPLE what the TRUTH OF LOVE IS. We ARE supposed to be going out and healing the sick and raising the dead and teaching everyone that God is Love and all limitations are fictional. Miracles are the MAXIMAL SERVICE you can render your brother, and that means, extending God's love TO EVERYONE, which WILL HEAL THEM.

And what will the nature of these miracles be, will it be that we help someone to see differently? Perhaps. ANY expression of love is miraculous. But love is also capable of healing the sick, raising the dead, reversing death, undoing all suffering, curing all incurable diseases, even transforming bodies into different bodies. Love has so much power that it also is capable of DEFYING ALL PHYSICAL LAWS, including laws of gravity and space and time and size and mass and properties of matter and anything else which is an ILLUSION on this level.

This means, if necessary, you will have the ability to DO ANYTHING if it is helpful and loving. If it demonstrates that the egos' horizontal laws are COMPLETELY UNTRUE, and easily proven to be false, you will be willing to do it. If that means, lifting up a car with your mind to show that gravity means nothing, so be it. If it means, moving an entire physical mountain in order to show that the mind has power over the world, so be it. If it means manifesting food out of thin air to feed 5000 people, so be it. If it means making your body walk on water to prove that the laws of physics are bullshit, so be it.

You will walk this earth PROVING that cause and effect are VERTICAL, proving that love has the power to GIVE LIFE to the dead, curing what everyone says cannot be undone, proving that resurrection is God's Guarantee, and there will be literally NOTHING that your holiness cannot do. You will heal sick people, you will raise the dead, you will move mountains, and you will SAVE THE WORLD.

Saving the world does not so much mean that you save it FROM some attacker, but rather, that you save it from itself, because it is an ILLUSION. The ultimate healing of all the world will be the restoration of "immortal bodies" temporarily, the total undoing of all sickness across the entire planet, the recognition of the real world by the entire sonship, and then the complete DISAPPEARANCE of the universe, revealing that ONLY HEAVEN IS REAL.

Miracles are the MEANS of the atonement - how YOU get there, but because they are expressions from a higher level of love, you will also BECOME PART OF THE ATONEMENT by continuing to express love even as you are about to accept the atonement, still in a body, walking the earth. You become part of the atonement by becoming part of LOVE, part of God's Will, and DOING WHAT GOD WANTS YOU TO DO, which is to extend love and healing to everyone who needs it!

This is why you will join the "great crusade" and be part of the plan of atonement long-term, because it is YOUR NATURAL FUNCTION when you have received healing and naturally desire to alleviate the suffering of others. You will not have any willingness to support or keep sickness in yourself OR in others. You will be miraculous ALL THE TIME, EVERY DAY. Being miraculous is a PERMANENT QUALITY of the Son of God and all of God's creations. Being constantly miraculous in this world is NORMAL. Being un-miraculous is ABNORMAL. You will also have no desire to "opt out" of this crusade. Jesus needs active miracle workers to bring about the resurrection!

Miracles raise everyone towards God's eternal life. We are to use them WHILE it seems there is a "need". But miracles really acknowledge that "there is nothing to heal" just as forgiveness recognizes "there is nothing to forgive" and God's power recognizes "there is nothing to have power over". So long as illusions persist however, miracles HEAL the illusion, forgiveness UNDOES the ego, and God's power DEMONSTRATES what is true.

Miracles mean life. Resurrection of "what is dead" and brought back to life is the goal of the atonement. Miracles lead to revelation and atonement as the ultimate healing. We are in a state of semi-death right now, in this dream world, separate from God. We NEED miracles. The whole world NEEDS miracles from God. This world NEEDS LOVE.

And love will restore life, to turn the world into a SYMBOL of life, and then the symbol will give way to REAL LIFE. The lower level will disappear (since it was never real) and all that will be LEFT will be the higher level of God/heaven/truth. This is a course in CAUSE, not effect, a cause in how to express the miracle of love from that higher level, not to suffer as a victim of fake effects of death in an ego illusion!

Then we will simply extend God's love forever, which has been happening all along, continuing the miracle of eternal life.

Salvation is SO simple, that it can seem difficult to grasp, especially when we are so used to being deceived that there are many separate, different, isolated problems. When the form of the problem deceives you, which is believing that illusions are real and true, you do not recognize the problem. And when it seems there are an endless string of different problems, escape from suffering seems hopeless.

You think the problem is about what the form says the problem is about. But the form is a disguise. The form is made to deceive you to believe the problem is specific and confined to one thing. And when you seem to solve that one thing you do not really solve the real problem.

The problem we need to recognize is the single problem, the only problem, which is believing that the world is true and real. Not recognizing it is a failure to recognize that this is only a dream, not a reality. That there is no world. When we do not recognize this problem, this one belief, we become lost and confused in the many forms of the world, we buy into the hierarchy of illusions, different situations seem separate, and the form they take starts to dictate the solution.

If you were to recognize the true problem, the separation idea, which is the belief that the world is true and real, or that an opposite to God exists, this recognition alone would solve the problem. The problem really, then, is the LACK OF RECOGNITION of what the situation IS, causing your mind to become tangled up in and lost in a world of a seemingly endless string of disconnected pieces and specific problems.

If the only problem really is that you have swapped what is true and what is false, what is real and what is unreal, then it is easier to solve. If the only problem is that you have assigned EVERY attribute of God and reality TO that which is not God and is unreal, and you have assigned every aspect of what is not God and is unreal TO God, then the simple solution is to reverse this reversal of the recognition of what is really true. That only the truth is true and only the false is false.

Salvation is in fact then incredibly super simple. All you have to do is un-swap the true and the false, the real and unreal. To correctly distinguish between the true and the false, so that the truth is recognized AS true - God's truth - and the false is recognized AS false - the illusory dream world which doesn't really exist.

"For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM. The ego sees SOME good, but never ONLY good. That is WHY its perceptions are so variable. It does not reject goodness entirely, for this you could not accept, but it always ADDS something that is NOT real TO the real, thus CONFUSING ILLUSION AND REALITY. For perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth AND illusion, you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

"But HIS (Holy Spirit's) function is to distinguish only between the false and the true, replacing the false WITH the true."

This is all that is needed to be set free from ALL FORMS of suffering, no matter the form they take. This ONE LESSON is all that need be learned, and applies to all situations no matter the form they take. The lesson is the re-framing of the WHOLE world, the entire picture, the changing of the PREMISE of everything that seems to be happening, so that you recognize again that IF this entire world is ONLY a dream, not a reality, this completely invalidates ALL forms of suffering and problems.

You can go through life tackling individual problems till the cows come home to die. You can get lost and deceived in the many ways that EACH problem seems different. You can fear the onset of the next big problem, which you fear will be different to yet just as threatening as the last, or moreso. And how will it be solved differently than the one before? Problems can take on the form of a person who has a broken leg, which seems to be different to, the tap is leaking, which seems different to, the car needs fixing, which is different to, someone just threatened me with their contagion.

And an endless string of individual SPECIFIC FORMS are presented by the ego, IN the world, AS the world, which is a horizontal experience of the world, with never-ending supply. Like taking a road littered with constant obstacles, where each one throws you off in a different direction or hurls you off-center right after getting done dealign with putting out another fire of a different form. When will it end? How many DECEPTIONS of specific problems, all of which are unreal, do you need to experience before you realize THEY ARE ALL DECEIVING YOU into believing there are MANY problems, and NOT ONE OF THEM IS TRUE?

It ends when you start to not be deceived by the FORM the problems are taking, and instead start to question the validity of ALL problems, by changing your mind ABOUT THE WORLD. This is the shift from false to true perception. If you can rise up above ALL problems, have no reaction to ANY problems, then there is nothing to fear and you cannot suffer. If ALL the problems are ONE problem, once recognized as false, then EVERY problem is simultaneously solved through ONE change. And this one change is the recognition - enlightenment - that NO PROBLEMS EXIST because there is no "world of problems".

Forgiveness, then, to redefine it in clearer terms, is merely the recognition that there is no world, there are no real problems, none of the forms are true, there are no differences between forms, every problem is the same problem, the whole world is unreal and untrue, there is no reality to sin, sin does not exist, and there is no suffering at all. It's the recognition that this IS ONLY A DREAM. And therefore, every single thing that seems to happen has its MEANING entirely changed, because of the change in the premise of the whole thing.

If the world WERE real and true, and a war were happening, this would be a nightmare. But the instant that you recognize that the world IS NOT real or true, and is just a dream, this utterly changes the meaning of the entire event. Not only is the event not happening, it is having no real consequences, there is no real suffering, there IS NO WAR, and nothing is happening. Upon THIS recognition, you cannot react, and you cannot be afraid. Because you WOULD NOT REACT AT ALL to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. And now the ENTIRE war and every part of it IS INVALIDATED.

You can only be afraid if you believe that the dream world, which is an illusion of a world, has reality. The instant you believe it has reality, truth, cause, power, will, mind, existence, life, presence, happening, effects, etc... you have become confused, are insane, will now be lost in illusions, taking forms to be real, and will be deceived. And now you MUST be in fear because something which does NOT exist appears to exist. Something NOT OF GOD seems to be happening, which is terrifying. And now the form of every problem will stand out as DIFFERENT to the others and will deceive you into an endless road of suffering.

"Deny anything not of God any power to affect you."

Everything in the course points towards the SIMPLICITY of salvation. It is the transcendence of form. Moving beyond appearances. Recognizing that THIS IS ALL A DREAM. Recognizing that the entire world is based on a FALSE PREMISE. It is NOT real, and God DID NOT create it, and IT DOES NOT exist. Which changes the meaning of everything that seems to be happening. To such an extent, that you cannot possibly have grounds for reacting to anything, or being upset by anything, or hurt by anything, because there is NOTHING THERE. And when "nothing unreal exists", you HAVE to be happy, safe and at peace.

The world, essentially, is nothing more than an hallucination. It is a dream you are having IN YOUR MIND. It isn't a world of existence and it is not part of existence. It is entirely contained in your imagination, in thought. "You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts." "There is no world apart form what you wish." "The world is false perception". You project a world and perceive WITHIN your mind. "The world IS perception." There is no world here at all, really. We are just dreaming of a world, in our mind, in a state of sleep. And if you believe this illusion of a world HAS ANY REALITY, you are lost in the dream and WILL suffer.

All salvation therefore, the escape from suffering, the escape from sleeping, the escape from insanity, the escape from sin and death, entails nothing more than recognizing IT IS NOT GOD. It is not real or true. It is not really there. You must take AWAY from it all the power you gave to it. You must take away from it all the sense of truth, reality, power, causality, presence, life, will, mind, spirit, union, consequence, existence, that you GAVE to it, when you confused illusions with the truth.

"Nothiing in the world has the power to bring oppression ... to make you ill or sad or weak or frail" ... "but it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see".

When you took what is true and what is false, and swapped them, which is ALL THAT HAPPENED in the separation from God, which is responsible for EVERYTHING that seemed to arise from the separation, you CONFUSED the true with the false, you stopped distinguishing between them, and you believed true things were false and false things were true. And so you MIXED truth into the false and tried to GIVE the false reality. This has to be undone. It is simply undone by reversal of the denial of God, and the acceptance that ONLY THE TRUTH IS TRUE, and nothing else is true. That is the atonement.

Your challenge now is to learn to NOT be deceived by the FORM of multiple separate illusions, separate events, separate problems, separate bodies, and instead to see that THE WHOLE WORLD and your belief in it is the problem. You suffer because you believe in the PREMISE of this world. You suffer because you think this stuff is ALL HAPPENING. You suffer because you HAVE TO react to the world in fear and stress IF you believe it is real. And you suffer ONLY because you think there is TRUTH to appearances.

Salvation is simple. Salvation is singular. Salvation is abstract. Salvation is ONE solution to ONE problem. The belief that a world opposite to God is real, is the one problem. This produces EVERY form of suffering, because form is made real. The recognition that the world IS NOT A REAL OPPOSITE to God (who is all encompassing and has no opposite), sets you free from ALL suffering NO MATTER what form it takes in the dream. Awareness of dreaming recognizing this IS just a dream, and sighs with relief that nothing unreal exists.

"The real world is all that the Holy Spirit has saved for you, out of what you have made, and to perceive only this is salvation, because it is the recognition that reality is ONLY WHAT IS TRUE." ... This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel that a course which, in the end, teaches nothing more than that only reality is true is necessary. BUT DO YOU BELIEVE IT?"

"How simple is salvation! All it says is what was never true is not true now, and never will be. The impossible has not occurred, and can have no effects. And that is all. Can this be hard to learn by anyone who WANTS it to be true? ONLY unwillingness to learn it could make such an easy lesson difficult. How hard is it to see that what is false can not be true, and what is true can not be false? You can no longer say that you perceive no differences in false and true. You have been told exactly how to tell one from the other, and just what to do if you become confused. Why, then, do you persist in learning not such simple things?"

"How simple, then, is God's plan for salvation. There is but one response to reality, for reality evokes no conflict at all. There is but one Teacher of Reality, Who understands what it is. He does NOT change His mind about reality, because REALITY does not change. Although YOUR interpretations of reality are meaningless in your divided state, His remain consistently true. He GIVES them to you because they are FOR you."

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

"Salvation lies in the simple fact that illusions are NOT fearful, BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT TRUE. And they but SEEM to be fearful to the extent to which you fail to recognize them FOR WHAT THEY ARE. And you WILL fail to do this, to the extent to which you WANT them to be true. And, to the same extent, you are DENYING truth, and so are making YOURSELF unable to make the simple choice between truth and illusion, fantasy and God."

"We have repeated how little is asked of you to learn this course. It is the same small willingness you need to have your whole relationship transformed to joy. The little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit for which He gives you everything. The very little, on which salvation rests. The tiny change of mind by which the crucifixion is changed to Resurrection. And, being true, it is so simple that it cannot fail to be completely understood."

"Have faith in nothing, and you will FIND the treasure that you sought. Yet you will add another burden to your mind, ALREADY burdened, or you would NOT have sought another. You will believe that NOTHING IS OF VALUE, and will VALUE it. A little piece of glass, a speck of dust, a body, or a war, are one to you. For if you value ONE thing made of nothing, you HAVE believed that nothing CAN be precious, and that you CAN learn how to make the UNtrue true. The Holy Spirit, SEEING where you are, but KNOWING you are elsewhere, begins His lesson in simplicity with the fundamental teaching that TRUTH IS TRUE. This is the hardest lesson you will ever learn, and in the end the ONLY one."

"Simplicity is very difficult for twisted minds. Consider all the distortions you have made of nothing; all the strange forms and feelings, and actions and reactions, that you have woven out of it. Nothing is so alien to you as the simple truth, and nothing are you LESS inclined to listen to. The contrast between what is true, and what is not, is PERFECTLY apparent, yet you do NOT see it. The simple and the obvious are NOT apparent to those who would make palaces and royal robes of nothing, believing they are kings with golden crowns BECAUSE of them. All this the Holy Spirit sees, and teaches, simply, that ALL THIS IS NOT TRUE."

"The quietness of its simplicity is so compelling, that you will realize IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DENY THE SIMPLE TRUTH. For there IS nothing else. God is everywhere, and His Son is IN Him WITH everything. Can he sing the dirge of sorrow, when THIS is true?"

"Today I would remember the simplicity of salvation by reinforcing the lesson that there is one problem and one solution. ... The problem is a grievance; the solution is a miracle. And I invite the solution to come to me through my forgiveness of the grievance, and my welcome of the miracle which takes its place."

"A problem cannot be solved if you do not know what it is. Even if it is really solved already, you will still have the problem because you cannot recognize that it has been solved. This is the situation of the world. The problem of separation, which is really the only problem, has already been solved. But the solution is not recognized because the problem is not recognized.

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. Who can see that a problem has been solved if he thinks the problem is something else? Even if he is given the answer, he cannot see its relevance."

"We will try to free our minds of all the many different kinds of problems that we think we have. We will try to realize that we have only one problem, which we have failed to recognize. We will ask what it is, and wait for the answer. We will be told. Then we will ask for the solution to it. And we will be told."

"Be not deceived by the form of problems today. Whenever any difficulty seems to rise, tell yourself quickly:

"Let me recognize this problem so it can be solved.""

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences. 2 But the mind that has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. 3 There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. 4 But the healed mind will put them all in one category; they are unreal. 5 This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. 6 And of these two, but one is real. 7 Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place—for differences cannot exist within it—so too are illusions without distinctions. 8 The one answer to sickness of any kind is healing. 9 The one answer to all illusions is truth."

----TL;DR: Changing your perception OF a sick body, isn't enough to change what you are projecting. You are projecting your body and the symptoms.----

"Projection makes perception. The world that you see is what you have put there to see; nothing more and nothing less and so it is important to you. The world that you perceive is the witness to your state of mind, the outward picture of your inward condition. As you think so do you perceive."

Recognize that projection COMES FIRST, then perception happens SECOND.

"The world you see" (perceive) "is what you have put there to see" (what you projected first).

"The world you perceive" (second) "is witness to your state of mind" - your perception "witnesses", perceives, and reflects back to you, your state of mind, because your state of mind PROJECTED what it is that you are now PERCEIVING.

These are two different processes. The act of having a certain state of mind, which you then project FROM, puts stuff "out there", which you THEN perceive as a secondary process.

Even the body itself is a projection. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards". The body then PERCEIVES, AFTER having been projected.

Jesus talks about how this is a circular logic for us, a trap, whereby we believe what we want to see, we project it because we believe in it, we "make it appear" (manifest it), then we "perceive" ie let the body tell us what it is we projected.

Perception then, is distinct from projection. It is a secondary act. Without projecting, there would be nothing TO perceive.

So here's what you need to realize about perceptions of sickness.

The mind, in whatever state it is in, has beliefs in it, thoughts, which then project. These projections MANIFEST the body and many other forms and objects. The mind for example projects the body ITSELF.

If the mind has a belief in separation, it will project a body which shows up with signs and symptoms of sickness, because it is a PICTURE of your inward condition, and your inward condition is one of "I am under attack". So the body SHOWS it. it is a WITNESS ie corresponds to your state of mind. This is why "a broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." The body literally only shows up as the mind's manifestational projection. It's an image being projected by the mind.

Jesus speaks to this in his "special notes to helen"....

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. It merely became what it always was. ... The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness.

I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body's worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood.

I came to tell them that death is an illusion, and THE MIND THAT MADE THE BODY CAN MAKE ANOTHER SINCE FORM ITSELF IS AN ILLUSION. They did not understand."

So here we can see, the MIND, MAKES the body. Your mind is projecting your body, and everything about it, right now. However it is showing up, witnesses to your mental content and your belief system. If it is showing up as sick, it is therefore directly correlated, it is PROOF, that your mind is not healed.

This also means, that when the mind IS healed, or close to, and it is still projecting a body, it MUST project a body which appears without signs or symptoms of sickness. This is because the body COMES FROM the mind, mind is its source, and a healthy mind WILL ONLY project a healthy-appearing body image.

Now. There is a problem here in how many people are interpreting the correction of perception.

Remember perception happens to look upon WHAT YOU PROJECTED, after you projected it. The body's eyes receive little photons of light to tell it, oh look, there's a body there. That's part of perception. The illusion that the very thing YOU PROJECTED, is now telling you what IT IS, completely forgetting that you put it there in the first place.

So now perception, is ONCE REMOVED from the direct expression or projection of the mind. Perception therefore is a secondary experience.

So now, let's say that you have projected a body with a broken leg. The broken leg was not caused by anything in the world. It was ONLY projected from the mind. The mind did not project a broken leg ONTO the body. The mind directly projected ONLY an image of a body with a broken leg. The body does not EXIST as a separate object, or a "thing", or something as an end in itself. If you do not project it, nothing shows up! If you do not project it, there is no body!

So now, that you projected an image of a body with a broken leg, you now will perceive. Perception can be in a state of correctness/clarity or in a state of false perception/distortion. Since your MIND has a belief in sickness in it, and has made a sick-appearing body image materialize, it also now believes sickness is real. Perception is now going to take place, and that same mind which PROJECTED the "sick body", is also going to see that same belief in sickness IN the body that was projected.

This means perception is now going to show you a hallucination of "sickness is real", "something is wrong", "sin and guilt" etc, as though it is *IN* the body. It is not in the body, it's in the mind. Thus the idea of sickness, which made the body to begin with, is now SECONDARILY projected ON TOP OF the body that you projected.

Then you will have various ego reactions to what you are misperceiving, and will start to seek a resolution. But your planned strategy here isn't typically anything to do with fixing your PROJECTION, it's always to do with fixing your PERCEPTION. And that means, something very obvious is about to happen.

If all you do, is fix your perception OF what you projected, you might be able to seem to "be at peace" with what is showing up. You might seem to become less upset or resistant or less fighting with, your broken leg. You'll tell yourself, if your perception OF the body is healed, you will be TOTALLY DONE. But this leaves you with a problem, and a state of denial.

Fact is, even if your so-called "perception" is perceiving your broken leg as "lovely and wonderful", oh how lovely that death looks.... your leg is STILL BROKEN. And that's a problem. Because now you are demonstrating that you can be hurt, you are attacking the entire world by claiming that something OTHER THAN YOU put the break there, you are holding this broken leg up for everyone to see to make them guilty and accuse them of sin, and you are attempting to demonstrate that God's Son can be killed.

It also means that since ALL sickness manifests as a DEFENSE against the truth, in the mind, which then projects a "defending body", which shows up as attacked, you CANNOT accept full and total peace while still maintaining that defense. It is impossible. The defense has to go, which means the belief in separation has to go, which MUST produce a projected body which shows up as HEALED.

Nothing happens to the body that was sick that you projected previously. It does not exist. You just RE-PROJECT A NEW ONE, every moment. Sickness in the body can only show up if the mind is defending against truth, and sickness can only show up in the body if the mind has GUILT. "Sickness is but another form of guilt". Therefore, if the mind does not have guilt and defenses, the body WILL ONLY show up as healed, as PROOF, that the mind is healed. The mind will PROJECT a healed-appearing body to testify to ITS inner condition.

So while that broken leg persists, you are in denial. You may be owning up to the fact that you have some control over your PERCEPTION. But you are not admitting that you have the power to PROJECT what you are even looking at.

This is a fundamental difference and there is a pretty big divide in the ACIM community based around this one distinction. Many people believe all they need to do is fix their perception OF the world, or what's showing up, and then they are done. In this belief system, it becomes justified that you can still have sickness show up and have a "healthy mind", that you can still DIE and be innocent, you can welcome death, you can keep your sickness and be totally happy, etc.

Yes, to a degree, as a preparatory step, you can come to be "relatively peaceful" about these things through changing your perception. What you are INDIRECTLY doing there, is that it's not actually your perception that you're fixing, is the content of your mind that PROJECTS the body in the first place. Attempting to change your perception is a second-hand roundabout way of trying to address the content in your mind, which is "showing you" a belief in sin and sickness "in" the broken leg. But at some point.... you're going to hit a wall.

The wall will simply be, that in order for you to really thoroughly change your perception so that you do not believe in sickness, and have no sickness in your mind, you're going to have to also ADMIT, that your mind is projecting the FORM OF SICKNESS *AS* the body, in the first place, regardless of your perception OF it.

So many people are onto this "change my mind about the world" kick, which changes perception OF the world. But they do not realize, at some point, if you are not going to perceive sickness, your mind has to be emptied of all belief in sickness, AND THIS MUST result in the PROJECTION changing. It has to. The mind can't retain some small amount of belief in separation and have *perception* be a state of peace.

If that broken leg is still showing up, but you are relatively "ok with it", you are IN DENIAL. That broken leg is NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SHOWING UP AT ALL. A sick body is PROOF the mind HAS NOT been healed.

There is this second camp of ACIM folk then who see this, and acknowledge, that the mind projects the body. Jesus Himself said it in that quote above. The mind that projects the body can make another. And if the mind can project the ENTIRE BODY, then IT is 100% responsible for making the body show up with ANY sign of sickness or death. This is how no-one can die without his own consent! If your mind does not put it there, it cannot be.

So if you just stop at.... I'm going to just be okay with this sickness, I'm going to perceive this sickness differently, I'm going to perceive this BODY differently, I'm going to look at this body in a more loving way etc.... that's a step TOWARDS healing the mind's content. But if that body is still showing up as BROKEN, you are NOT DONE.

This is where there comes to be a lot of denial, because not only is it often difficult to see that you projected the sickness AS the body (it can happen really fast and then go unconscious), there is also a lot of FEAR about this idea that your mind is THAT POWERFUL, that it can not only make sickness and death happen to you BY your will, but that the mind can also reverse that. Yet Jesus teaches:

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both." ABOLISH means, to TOTALLY REMOVE. That means, the reversal of ALL forms and signs and symptoms of sickness in the body AND mind, and EVEN DEATH. It Literally means, the ability to reverse death, to raise the dead, and to completely restore life. It is the ability to REWIND SIN and UNDO ALL OF THE CONSEQUENCES (effects) of your wrong decision.

Your mind is cause. Your body is your effect. The body is NOT CAUSED by the world in any way whatsoever. Ever. Your sickness is NOT PUT THERE by any cause outside of your mind, EVER. You are responsible for what you have chosen. And because you are, you can CHANGE YOUR MIND and it MUST CHANGE THE PROJECTION.

So yes it's one thing to work on changing your perception, but your perception has arisen from what you have projected. And that means, if you are GENUINELY undoing the sinful content in your mind, are taking full ownership of your power, are NOT believing that anything in the world has the power to affect you or your body, and are NOT attempting to demonstrate that the Son of God can be hurt and killed THROUGH the symbol of the body (the body can become a sign of immortality), then YOU WILL STOP PROJECTING SICKNESS AND DEATH.

You do not project it ONTO the body. You project it AS the body. No-one else put the body there. Your parents did not put the body there. Biology did not put the body there. Chemical reactions and physical interactions did not put the body there. The world, the dream, other people, did not put the body there. ONLY YOU DID.

So that means, if you're to go all the way with this.... this is where you get into MIRACLE WORKING. Because it means, you are willing to DEMONSTRATE, to live by example, that it is possible to reverse all sickness and death in yourself, AND IN OTHERS.

You first reverse it in yourself by accepting atonement. This allows you to receive miracles. Then you are able to express those miracles to and for others. If they are willing to accept it.

We are not supposed to be walking around with limbs hanging off and body parts failing and organs malfunctioning and eyesight going bad and developing a limp and a having cancers and diseases and various other forms of SIN.

Death is an attempt to demonstrate that the Son of God can be killed. Pain is an attempt to bind the son to the body to fixate him on and identify with being a real body. Sickness is an attempt to prove the Son can be hurt. Sickness is an attack on your brother. Sickness is the result of seeking outside of yourself, and demonstrates level confusion. None of this is God's will. It is a demonstration of the OPPOSITE OF GOD'S WILL for you.

No-one is supposed to be dying. Bodies are not supposed to be decaying and dying. There is NOT supposed to be 7 billion people planning their own death, who will very likely die in the next 100 years, putting 7 billion corpses in the ground, just because they did not want God's healing and love. That's their choice. It does not have to be yours.

If we are to demonstrate that we are immortal and invulnerable, we ARE supposed to demonstrate here, in the flesh, that the body cannot be hurt, BECAUSE, the body is ONLY coming from the mind, and therefore if you project a healthy body it will STAY HEALTHY at all times. And nothing can attack it. It is IMPOSSIBLE for it to be sick. NOR CAN IT DIE.

"Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as IT MAKES ALL DECISIONS THAT ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BODY'S CONDITION."

Later, when it's done being useful, it is simply DISAPPEARED. Just as Jesus did:

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. It merely became what it always was. And that is what 'rolling the stone away means.' The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. "

It was not a matter of it disappearing from his perception OF it. The body ITSELF disappeared because HE STOPPED PROJECTING IT.

THIS is our natural inheritance, this ability to work miracles, to reverse all sickness and death, to not only correct perception but to CORRECT PROJECTION. To UNDO everything we have PROJECTED. AND that ultimately includes your body, everyone else's body, all sickness, all death, all forms of separation, all objects, all planets, and this entire ILLUSORY UNIVERSE which is a PROJECTION coming from the mind.

So don't stop at "I will just change how I see the world." "Seek not to change the world, seek to change your mind about the world. Perception is a RESULT (effect of projecting) and not a cause (the body that shows up is not alive!). "And that is why order of difficulty in miracles is meaningless." ie... change your MIND, your body and the world MUST CHANGE to reflect the content of your mind. Without exception.

There are people who wake up in this world. There are people who are awake in the dream. There are people who have purified perception to such an extent that they seem to be seeing the real world or something close to it. They recognize that they were contributing sin to what is here, projecting it "onto" the body and world. But what they usually do not realize is, THEY are projecting the body and the world. And therefore, typically, they age, and they die. And then they reincarnate and make another body. Why? Because they did not get to the level where they woke up FROM dreaming, and FROM perceiving.

To wake up FROM the dream, you have to get in touch with the fact that you are the DREAMER of it, the one who is PROJECTING IT, and you are the one who is PUTTING ALL OF ITS OBJECTS OUT THERE. This puts you in touch with miracle working because now you are able to enact VERTICAL PERCEPTION, cause and effect are now vertical not linear, and you recognize the power of YOUR MIND to manifest absolutely anything in this dream, or change it, at will. Because you will realize, you have been DOING THAT all along. Your body was coming from YOUR MIND, and your mind only.

To wake up from the dream requires the undoing of dreaming, which overrides ALL perception, deals with separation at ITS CAUSE, and therefore DISAPPEARS THE DREAM UNIVERSE. That means, the disappearance of the physical universe, including precious "planet earth", which was never anything but a mental projection. All that is then left, is God's creation, which is Heaven.

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."

(this will be a fairly long post, so please bare with me)

The ego thought system is based on separation. Separation resulted in space and time. In space, spatial relations are HOW the ego thinks. The physical universe IS its thought system.

This includes physical objects, which are separated out, where an object is EITHER HERE OR THERE, (but not in both places). This is a "natural" ego thought process. One thing seems to exist in one location only and not all locations. One thing is NOT something else, and all things are DIFFERENT, separate, and kept apart.

The entire physical universe is arranged according to this WAY that the ego thinks. It regards the entire thing as structured by SEPARATIONS. One object versus another. One location versus another. And then it draws comparisons, and has reasoning, and finds conclusions, based WITHIN the framework of separation.

So you, in your ego thought processes, then start to THINK this way. You think in terms of EITHER THIS OR THAT. And this seems to make SENSE to you because it maps directly to how the world is arranged. It then becomes "second nature" to think of anything in the world in SEPARATE terms.

For example, I parked my car in the first spot, not the second. I ordered the fries instead of the onion rings. My car is red, not blue. This is my body, not your body. Earth is not Mars. etc.

Our whole WAY of thinking runs according to these rules, based on SEPARATING things out, sectioning them off, isolating them, keeping them APART, emphasizing their differences, and locking them up in little prison boxes. And we think this is a natural way to think, to relate, to communicate, to reason.

Then we go about USING this way of thinking, to think about EVERYTHING. Not just to think about things which ARE based on a thought system of separation, but even to think about things which are completely BEYOND the ego thought system.

"It is the part that believes your existence means you are SEPARATE. Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships (sharing) that imply BEING."

This may not seem to present any problems when you use SEPARATION-BASED reasoning to discuss the things of space and time, but it COMPLETELY misses the mark when you think this way about heaven, God, creation, sonships, sons, souls, etc.

The Kingdom of God is a thought system, and God similarly has a WAY of thinking. His WAY of thinking is NOT based in the idea of separation. It is NOT based on the limitations of space or time or spatial relations. It does NOT separate things off, make them different, put them in SEPARATE BOXES, or keep them apart.

God's thought system/reality also does not demand that something HAS to be separate from something else. It does not require something to be EXCLUSIVE to one box and not another. Nor does it assert that everything that exists MUST be partitioned off into EITHER one state OR another. God simply does not THINK in terms of "either this or that".

God's mind, his creation, his way of THINKING, is actually based on a totally different kind of reasoning. This reasoning is INCLUSIVE, rather than exclusive. It also completely embraces the idea of SHARING. The ego's thought system completely blots out ALL suggestions of sharing, overlap, simultaneity, unity or oneness.

In God's system, it is NATURAL for there to be one thing, which SHARES all of itself with another. It is natural for one thing to GIVE all of itself and STILL RETAIN all of itself without loss. It is natural for TWO things to BE one thing. It is natural for one thing to be in ALL locations simultaneously. It is natural for one thing to be in one box, AND in another box, at the same time. It is natural for something to SPAN and TRANSCEND separations.

The Golden Rule, the law of God and of equality, simply states that what is true of one thing is true of another. Whatever is true of God is true of His Sons. Whatever is true or me is true of you. This is equality. God treats all his creations the same way. The Golden Rule reflects this, because it is a rule based on INCLUSION. We are both included in the same truth. The ego however is COMPLETELY AGAINST sharing and inclusion. And so is this world.

In reality, God THINKS in a holographic way. In a hologram, the whole is in every part, and every part is a whole in its own right, and every part shares the entirety of the whole with the whole. ACIM confirms that this is the way by which God thinks, and NOT through a process of separation:

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you."

This means for example that GOD IS WHOLE, being infinite. And God as a creator therefore extends and creates ANOTHER WHOLE. His Son, is a WHOLE SON. A full creation. As described here:

"The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created. There is no lack in it."

"There can BE no disinherited parts of the Sonship, for God is whole, and all his extensions are like Him."

"EVERY mind that God created is equally worthy of being healed because GOD CREATED IT WHOLE."

However, for God to BE whole, and to CREATE wholly, and thus to create another WHOLE.... becomes TOTAL NONSENSE to the way that the EGO thinks. And if you think in the same separation-based way that the ego thinks, this FACT registers to you as total nonsense. You will reason, "how can it be possible that there are TWO wholes, that makes no sense!". It makes no sense to a thought system of separation, yes. But God's reality is NOT based on that kind of system. God is not limited by separation or spacetime.

In order to recognize AND accept, that God's mind and creation DO NOT follow the ego's rules, and that God does not THINK or create like the ego would, and God's Kingdom is NOT spatially separated out like the physical world is, you will have to become willing to think massively outside the box. You CANNOT use separation-based logical reasoning to evaluate the truths or falseties of reality.

Let's look at what happens when you try to shove God into a box-based thought system. God for example gives ALL of Himself when he creates. His Son inherits EVERYTHING. But... if you are thinking with the ego, you SHOULD conclude that by God giving all of Himself AWAY, there SHOULD be nothing left. Thus God should snuff out of existence and only His Son should remain. This is LOGICAL to the ego because the ego believes in SACRIFICE AND LOSS, which is inherent to a box-based world. But it is complete nonsense.

Similarly, you could suggest that if God gives EVERYTHING to ONE SON, there is NOTHING LEFT to give to another Son. This is how the ego would think in finite terms. However, God has ALL of Himself left to give again to ANOTHER son, and another, and another, without any reduction at all in Himself. And this is how the Kingdom INCREASES. And by giving ALL of himself away, reality is increased. As stated here:

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

"To have all, give all to all."

You can see that if you think in exclusive, separating terms, you WILL come to FALSE conclusions about what's happening in reality. You'll conclude that if I have everything, you have nothing. But in reality, as Jesus describes in ACIM, me having everything DOES NOT prevent you from having everything also. How is it possible that we BOTH simultaneously have everything? Because we SHARE IT. And this sharing does NOT mean compromise or that we each only get half.

Sharing is the way by which God's Kingdom INCREASES. Because if it weren't for the ability to share, there would be no logical way for God to ever create anything more than just God, because he is already unlimited and everywhere. As this states:

"Nothing real can be increased, except by sharing."

If SHARING, INCLUSION, BOTH/AND is the natural thought SYSTEM of Heaven's reality, and it follows that thought PROCESS when it reasons anything, then SELFISHNESS, EXCLUSION, EITHER/OR, SEPARATION is the natural thought system of spacetime. And they are TOTALLY opposite. They are opposite because "this not that" is a direct reflection of the separation idea of "ego not God" or "death not life" or "non-existence not existence." The ego thought system is the NEGATION of reality.

If God creates two sons, who are brothers, and both are whole beings who have and share everything, co-creating with God, and then we look at this fact WITH THE EGO, we will see false conclusions. For example we'll say that there can't BE two sons. Or that if there are two sons, that's "duality", because now the two sons are KEPT APART in separate boxes meaning duality.

But this is not how it works at all. The fact that there are two, WHO SHARE, violates the boundaries of those boxes. One son is IN the other son and vice versa because they share everything. So there are two sons, who are ALSO each other.

"One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds. Such is the truth."This also extends to the relationship you have with God. Those who think LIKE the ego, will reason that EITHER.... God is all there is, OR there is a separation. Or similarly, EITHER God and I are one thing, OR we are two things. Or that, if you get rid of all separations, you will end up with oneness.

There is a major flaw in that reasoning. The ego first establishes that you MUST think in a separating way, in which there is duality, and all things are kept apart. THEN it has you DESTROY all of the other parts except for one of them, by getting rid of the idea of separations between the parts. But it will not have you get rid of the ego thought process. Then it concludes falsely, that when you remove the separations, you end up with ONE THING. And this one thing is thought to mean "oneness", or to represent God.

This however is a false conclusion, because now "separate boxes" have been mapped onto God, and God has been shoved into a separate box, all by himself, and there is no creation and no sonship and NO SHARING. And the ego rejoices that it has imprisoned God this way, in the name of freedom.

When you look at what ACIM says, Jesus DOES NOT say that God is alone, or that he is separated off from creation, or that he has no creations. Instead it tells you in fact that God has a huge family and is simultaneously one with them. And that His oneness DOES NOT ERASE their manyness.

"Heaven is the sum of all God's thoughts, in number infinite."

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

"The Kingdom of God includes all His Children and their creations."

This does not mean the Kingdom is duality or that it contains separate boxes. It means it contains overlapping shared beings who ALL have everything and ARE everything, seemingly as OPEN boxes who are not in any way confined, yet are still many things. HOW that's possible, is due to heaven's miraculous nature.

Ego thought processes do not allow this to be true. Nor does ego thinking allow it to be possible that when you are "one with God", you still have an individual self. EGOS then become AVERSE to any notion of individuality, which is self destructive, which the ego loves. You being one with God, DOES NOT ERASE your individuality.

"This appears to contradict another statement: "I and my Father are one." It doesn't. There are still separate parts in the statement, in recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER. Actually, the original statement was "are of one KIND."

There ARE STILL "separate parts" in the statement, AND in some ways God is NOT totally like His sons, in terms of function or role. Meaning, YOU still exist as a distinct entity, AND God exists as a distinct entity. And what you SHARE between you, is your oneness with each other, AS TWO BEINGS. That is what ACIM teaches. And its definition of oneness is not "one thing being alone", it is EQUALITY. Being of THE SAME KIND. And an equality which is more than just two separate boxes next to each other - an equality where you SPAN the boxes.

Similarly, the ego will falsely conclude that if God and His Son are TWO things, this is duality. It is not, because we're again jumping the gun and projecting separate boxes onto heaven. Just because they are TWO, does NOT mean they do not share, and does NOT mean there is no unity. The Father and the Son are one, but there is still a Father and a Son. Just as WE will ALWAYS be brothers even in heaven.

In fact, the way by which God is everything, AND YET, His children are also FULLY created beings, who are also everything, is the course's definition of MIRACULOUSNESS. This miraculousness is completely alien to the ego thought system and all separation-based reasoning. The ego has NO CLUE, how it is possible, that God could have even created ANYTHING, yet alone multiple beings who somehow have been added-on to an already infinite reality. Nevertheless:

"MIRACULOUS CREATION was his own Source, and also his own real function.""Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human (ego) thinking"

"Miraculousness", is the nature of God's reality. UN-miraculousness is the nature of spacetime. Everything in God's MIND and reality is permanently miraculous. It is miraculous because it makes possible what the ego says is IMPOSSIBLE. Just as the ego is the idea of impossibility.

For one soul to be a whole being, that shares everything with another whole being, as brothers, and with God, without a loss of self or individuality, and without ceasing to be "separate", and without being CONFINED to separate boxes, is miraculous.

This miraculousness is also reflected in THE MIRACLE. And in true perception. And in learning to THINK LIKE GOD, which the course asks you to do. In order to think like God, you have to TRANSCEND the "separating off and putting in boxes" nature of the ego and its thoughts. And that includes thinking of souls as separate bodies.

This entails overlooking separations and seeing unity beyond it. It requires you to not be blinded by perception of form, because form is anchored in separation. Your whole perception has to become similar to heaven's reality, which breaks all the ego laws. And this is also why miracles break all the laws of space and time AND of ego reasoning.

Becoming able to THINK LIKE GOD, requires you to align with the truth of the Golden Rule, in holy relationship, where what is true of you is true of all others. Where differences are completely ignored. Where no-one is IMPRISONED in a box. And where your whole way of REASONING is LIKE God's.... that is, based on "paralogical reasoning" - or AND/BOTH reasoning, rather than either/or.

We could say, THE ENTIRE COURSE is geared towards developing this BOTH/AND kind of perception, thought and experience, for all students. We are supposed to stop thinking with the ego, OR LIKE the ego. And we are supposed to learn that we are undo no laws but God's, and HIS laws are NOT laws of separation, exclusion, spatial relations, or limitations.

In order to fully grasp ANYTHING that ACIM says about the pre-separation state, God, the Kingdom, oneness, sonship, sons, souls, creation, extension, holy spirit, etc..... any of that non-ego stuff, you CANNOT USE the ego-based reasoning method. If you do, you will fail. Guaranteed. And you will see truth that is false, and what is really true will appear false to you. That's how BACKWARDS the ego thought system is.

Any conclusions you come to about God or oneness etc, if it's rooted in "either this or that", IS WRONG. Guaranteed 100%. Only when you start to think in terms of BOTH.... me AND you.... WE.... only then do you start to approach the NATURAL way of thinking like God, which is a miraculous state of mind. And ONLY by thinking that way will you understand and grasp the metaphysical facts of God's nature.

Non-duality for example is complete bullshit. It is bullshit because it is the result of an EGO thought process. The ego reasons, well, I believe all things are separate, so if we attack all the parts and end up with one victor, this ONE THING that's leftover, which is practically nothing, but is a single thing, symbolizes God. Because to the ego "less separation" is equated with spirituality or simplicity. So it will then map this "one thing" idea of oneness onto God and claim God is one thing - that there is NOTHING ELSE other than God. That God is SEPARATED OFF. That is NOT what ACIM teaches at all!

God is not only a creator and a father, God has a HUGE family of whole beings, all of whom are co-creators with each other. You and your brother co-create your creations. You and God and your brother co-create together. Even the holy spirit is a co-creator. And we all have this HUGE family of created beings in heaven. This is utterly incompatible with both the traditional idea of "oneness" and the idea of "non-duality".

And ALL of those beings are of ONE KIND, and SHARE EVERYTHING, and yet ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY MANY. Because that is HOW GOD THINKS. A holographic thought system in which the whole has created many parts and each part shares the whole with the whole of the rest. That is what ACIM says! And in order to INCLUDE all of what ACIM says, WITHOUT EXCLUDING any material or any factual statements, you will ONLY be able to accept ALL of what it says if you think in a non-separating way.

As soon as you get the simple idea that heaven's reality is based on BOTH/AND, rather than either/or, it will all fit into place and become clear. Because everything real is based on a both/and system of reason and thought processes. Creation ITSELF is based on sharing between two. God SHARES HIMSELF, in order to create, and He does not will to be alone. The natural logical outcome of that is that WE, as many permanent brothers, in the sonship which God DIRECTLY created, are all "one" (equal/sharing) because we share everything.

If this does not make sense to you, it is because you are thinking with the ego. If it seems like nonsense, it is because the ego is projecting its separation ideals onto it. If you cannot follow it, either I explained it poorly or you can't get past your ego thinking. But either way, God's entire reality is NOT LIKE EARTH, and you have to learn to RADICALLY think WAAAAAAY outside the realm of boxes if you want to recognize its true nature. Heaven is not spacetime!

"Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

This is more than just another way to think or use the intellect. This ties into how you should PERCEIVE, how you experience the real world, how you tune into the miraculous state of mind, the nature of the miracle and the atonement, all holy relationships, living by the golden rule, holy spirit's thought system etc.. It's all based on heaven's nature which is NOT based on a world of separate boxes.

"The separation IS the notion of rejection. As long as you teach this, YOU still believe it. This is NOT as God thinks, and you must think as He thinks if you are to know Him again. Any split in will MUST involve a rejection of part of it, and this IS the belief in separation."

"Exclusion and separation are synonymous."

"Can you who see yourselves WITHIN a body, know yourself AS AN IDEA? Everything you recognize you identify by EXTERNALS, something OUTSIDE itself. You cannot even think of GOD without a body, or some form you think you recognize."

"To you the miracle cannot seem natural, because what you have done to hurt your mind has made it so unnatural that it does not remember what is natural to it. 2 And when you are told what is natural, you cannot understand it. 3 The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you. 4 Wholly natural perception would show you instantly that order of difficulty in miracles is quite impossible, for it involves a contradiction of what miracles mean. 5 And if you could understand their meaning, their attributes could hardly cause you perplexity."

"God's miracles are as total as His Thought, because they ARE His thoughts. God shines in them all with perfect light. If they recognize this light anywhere, they know it universally. "

"For you cannot understand Wholeness unless YOU are whole, and no part of the Son can be excluded,"

"the whole Kingdom as literally PART OF YOU."

"For in your part lies ALL of it, without which is no part complete, nor is the whole"

"One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds. Such is the truth.""If they are deprived, their perception becomes distorted. When this occurs, the whole family of God, or the Sonship, is impaired in its relationships.""Though every aspect IS the whole, you cannot KNOW this, until you SEE that every aspect IS THE SAME, perceived in the SAME light, and THEREFORE one. "

OK.

This is going to have to be pretty long because this is a very difficult subject to explain, so bear with me. Some of you may be willing to accept what I'm going to say, some will not.

Oneness. What does it seem to mean? God is whole. God is complete. God is "all there is". God is everywhere, omnipresent, lacking nothing. God is the same everywhere. So... if this is true in terms of ego logic, it means the following:

God has no son. God is dreaming this world. God is a murderer. God created death. God makes people suffer. The separation happened inside God. God is mistaken. God is afraid. God is all people. God is experiencing "himself" through and as all people in the world. There is nothing other than God. We are God. Separation is real. God created this world. etc.

Absolutely none of that is true. That is the purest most logically accurate definition of what non-duality means to the ego. It is the most precise conclusion you can draw from how the EGO understands oneness or what it means to be "one". If oneness truly means "there is only one", the God is responsible for hell. And it is grossly mistaken.

If God is one, then God cannot even create anything because there is nowhere for the creation to occur and nothing to add which wasn't already there and so, literally, "there is only God". This is the conclusion many many Course folk have come to. It seems to in some ways make sense TO EGO THINKERS and those who use linear logic who think that such linear logic is capable of encompassing and understanding the nature of God.

God is not like this. And oneness does not mean "there is only God". And non-duality, as the opposite of duality, does not properly describe the holographic creative nature of God or reality. Non-duality is CLOSE to being correct, and is more correct than duality, but it is still a concept and it falls way short, as you will see. If there is non-duality there should be just "one thing". In that, there can be no Son of God at all, no creation, no love, no extension, no sharing, no sonship, and no holy relationship.

In fact, what's happened widespread in ACIM folk is various false conclusions which have established themselves as if written in stone "what the course says". And yet the consequences of these errors are quite horrific. To believe God is all there is is to equate God with ego and death. To claim that God is all there is also denies and murders every Son of God.

OK.

Now, let's talk about how God actually exists and thinks and creates and the nature of His creation. If the strictest definition of oneness or non duality is true, then God cannot even create anything. And in a sense, PARTS of the Course speak to this. E.g. "God is". And also, "nothing real can be increased except by sharing". So anything real, like God, is permanent, fixed, unchanging, does not increase or decrease, and therefore there can be no creation whatsoever. Which means no son. UNLESS, this thing called "sharing" happens.

Recognize that God is love, and because of what love is, it automatically goes out and shares and extends. It shares because it has no reason to hold anything back. It is fundamentally a state of sharing, including, giving, and this radiation of love is another way of describing the act of creation.

God in and of Himself is whole, complete, lacking nothing, needing nothing, and is already permanent. Like a solid rock. Unchanging. That does not really sound like something that can create, does it? It seems very fixed. Like absolutely nothing is happening or possible. That's strictly what most definitions of "oneness" imply also. That nothing else is possible besides God existing. That's false.

God loves, and in that love, God radiates, extends, shares, creates, miraculously. Ego logic will NEVER account for "the miraculous", and God's creative ability is truly miraculous, which is why YOU ARE A MIRACLE. To the ego, God CANNOT create, and the act of His creating defies ALL EGO LOGIC and demonstrates that God is a miracle worker. Something happens in God which defies explanation and seems impossible yet happens. God SHARES AND CREATES something "other" than Himself, out of nowhere.

If you think of God like a light bulb, God is the fixed light bulb which does not move or change really, but the bulb radiates and SHINES light. The light goes outward and illuminates. That "shining", that light radiating, that is creation. The light radiating is not necessarily the same thing as God Himself. God is complete and whole already, but God SHARES Himself by shining light and radiating and extending, and that which extends outward is creation.

It is in this way that God created the world of Heaven. Here is how the Course describes it is a NATURAL division:

"The world was made as "a natural grand division," or a projecting outward of God. That is why everything that He created is like Him. Projection, as undertaken by God, is very similar to the kind of inner radiance which the Children of the Father inherit from Him. It is important to note that the term "project outward" necessarily implies that the real source of projection is internal. This is as true of the Son as of the Father."

So God in and of Himself is complete and whole, but He "projects outward" (extends) and that which is projected forms a "world" (heaven). This world is, in a sense, "divided from" God in a natural way, in that it comes FROM God and is God SHARING, but God as its SOURCE still remains in a sense, beyond it.

This is because God is the "first cause" and what God radiates is the "effect" of God. His Thought/Shining is the effect of Him as the "thinker". The effect of God is not capable of turning around and "causing God" in reverse, or of making God its effect. The creation (the Son/sonship) is being constantly sustained by, projected by God, forever, is coming FROM God, and therefore the Son is ONLY "as God created Him" and cannot change what He is. The Son has no real say in what He is at all, He merely gives thanks for having been created perfect.

God is cause, not effect. God cannot be affected. This causal extension or "creating of effect" in a way puts up a kind of "wall" or division you could say, just on a causality level, which in a sense, separates the creation from God's own Self, but only in the sense that the created Son cannot cause God back. But the Son CAN share love with Him.

This is not the same thing as the "separation" that we are accustomed to thinking of as what the ego does or relating to the "separation from God" which was a different matter. The "separation from God" happened when the Son, who is only effect and not capable of causing God, attempted to cause God. That means the Son tried to will against God's will or to undo what God has created, trying to replace it with something else. That was an act of impossible denial, which brought about the separation and the "fall of man".

That's an entirely different thing to the "natural division" between God and His Son. The division between God and Son is NATURAL in that this is How God intended it, that the Son is imbued with the SAME WILL TO CREATE, the same love, the same completeness, the same wholeness, AND SHARING the WHOLE OF GOD within itself, as well as sharing THE WHOLE OF CREATION within itself. All of God is in the Son, shared with the Son, and yet the Son is in some way also "divided" from God as a creation of God or thought of God.

In nonduality and oneness concepts there is no accounting for God thinking anything at all, yet alone creating a son. It completely glosses over the fact that God is LOVE, and love radiates and extends and creates. When people tell you what the definition of oneness is they become very clinical and ego-specific in describing God as a kind of "single blob". There is no love in that concept, nor does it appreciate the NATURE of Oneness, which is to share, extend everywhere, create, increase, and to experience JOY. Do you equate oneness with joy, or power, or love, or creativity, or miracles? As a logical device, no. But God is joyful and creative and all powerful and miraculous.

Now, it is possible for God to create AT LEAST One Son, and the Course references the "one son of God" in various places. And due to misunderstandings, many people have come to believe God only has one Son. So now there are two camps - a set of people believing that God is one therefore has no son or "I am God", and a camp of people accepting there is One Son (somehow) but not more. It relates to how much of the nature of God is grasped.

OK. So holograms. Did you know God thinks holographically? Do you know what a hologram is or why this is totally different to how the ego thinks? If you are thinking about God's creation or oneness without thinking about holograms, then you WILL come to false conclusions, such as that there are no divisions in heaven or God has only one Son or no son, because non-holographic logic CAN ONLY arrive at these conclusions. Ego logic is FAULTY and limited.

The essential idea of a hologram is that the whole is able to express in many "parts" and yet each part contains ALL of the whole. This makes NO SENSE to the ego, because it thinks in terms of separated space, where it is impossible for all of God to be in one part AND all of God to be in another part simultaneously. The ego will wager, "there is not enough God for God to be elsewhere, if God is fully here". And that's why the ego is BLIND to the nature of heaven. It does not account for SHARING.

Here's what the Course says about the holographic nature of God and the Sonship - note how ILLOGICAL and CONTRADICTORY these all sound, at first:

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you."

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

"It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness does transcend the sum of its parts."

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite."

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought, and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. All His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other."

So Jesus is saying two things, which seem to clash. 1) God created One Son. 2) God created many sons. The conclusion here, to THE EGO, is either, a) God only created one Son, or b) The "many" or "multitude" nature of the sonship tells us that it is OF THE EGO and is therefore not real. Are either of these conclusions true? NO! They are both mistakes, and reveal the limitations of the ego's thought system when it tires to understand the EGO DEFYING nature of God.

In a hologram, the whole is present in EVERY part. Now, if you think in terms you are familiar with in this world, like physical objects and space, you think ok, if I take 1 gallon of water and I pour it into a 1 gallon container, there is no water left to fill another container. Yes? This is ego thinking. And ego thinking gave rise to this ENTIRE universe, including all physical forms, and all laws of physics, to paint a picture that attempts to PROVE that God's NATURE is NOT the way things are. And we have used physical form as a way to understand the nature of existence. This is a major error. We are BLINDED by sight of form, because forms express the EGO IDEA of separation, limitation, "measuring" how much of something there is in a finite way, and then concluding that there is lack and limitation.

When ALL of God is poured into one creation, how much God is there left to pour into another? ALL OF HIM! He does not run out. He INCREASES BY SHARING. The ego cannot believe this. The multiplying of fish and bread to feed 5000 people is a good example of this principle. Giving ALL to something does not diminish it AT ALL, it merely increases by being given away.

God puts ALL of the whole of his nature into His creation, in EACH thought. And what He creates is FULL, complete, and whole, AND shares ALL of itself with God, and includes all of God, and all of any other creation God creates. So then God has another thought, creates another WHOLE, and then another WHOLE, and another. You should get the idea then, spatially, even in ego terms, that adding more wholes INCREASES the sum total - and this is How the Kingdom expands.

To the ego, it is impossible that God be fully in one location and yet fully in another. This is completely impossible in terms of a physical object. However, bi-location is a miracle because it demonstrates that we are not bound by space or by instances or amounts. The Course says that God has many thoughts, INFINITE IN NUMBER. That amounts to an INFINITE number of Sons of God. And each Son of God is WHOLE and complete and perfect in itself, has free will just like God, extends and creates just like God (you have your own creations in Heaven), and radiates love just like God. This means each son is not just some "partial person" or limited or unlike the rest, it means EVEY son is FULL, whole, complete, absolutely unlimited, and shares EVERYTHING with God in perfection. And so do all the rest.

That God does not diminish when sharing himself fully to create a WHOLE SON, means automatically that God can create MANY sons without any diminishing of Himself at all. And all of God is in every Son. AND every Son is within every Son. And the ENTIRE SONSHIP is within every Son. This is entirely NATURAL AND NORMAL in Heaven. Heaven therefore contains INFINITE "naturally divided" (causally divided) INDIVIDUAL WHOLES - which are souls or Sons of God - each one holy and perfect.

Ok.

So now we need to talk about why some people are confused in constantly saying that God has One Son or there is "only oneness" or the Sonship is an part of separation etc. It's because people are getting PART of the picture and not the whole picture, because EGO LOGIC is telling them to EXCLUDE some parts of the holographic nature of God. They can "see" that God's oneness makes sense, but this seems to imply there is no son or at least not more than one. They can't see HOW God can have created many sons OR how a "division" is natural. And so they just can't get their heads around the nature of God or how it's possible for there to be a sonship at all.

And if you will go looking, ACIM contains specific quotes which SEEM to support the ego's interpretations by focusing on only one PART of the holographic picture, using that as justification for why "the course said this". For example, "God has but one Son", or countless references to "God's Son". Well, this leads God people to conclude that the Course is saying God doesn't have more sons. It's a mistake. With no grasp of God's NATURE - which is holographic, it makes sense people will be in error. And then they will say well, since God has only one Son, the sonship is a lie, or I do not exist, or I am God, or I do not have a self, or there is no-one here, or whatever else.

These are NON-DUALITY concepts which FAIL to appreciate God's nature. And you can see how, if it is true that God has many sons, these kind of "beliefs" are HARMFUL. They basically DESTROY the sonship, DENY the Self, and render God impotent.

When I finally understood how God thinks holographically and realized that non-duality is bullshit and a limited EGO concept of God, I felt great RELIEF about the simple recognition that "GOD CREATED ME". Me, as an INDIVIDUAL. Not me as an EGO, that's different, but that I have a HOLY SELF, which is sharing with other holy selves, and all of us are PERMANENT and INTENDED by God to have free will. When I saw this, I cried tears of joy, and also release of sadness, which had built up from the non-duality teachers, who have MISLED countless students and spread LIES ABOUT HEAVEN, resulting in the belief that "I do not exist", which can only lead to despair and depression because it DENIES GOD'S CREATION.

A course in miracles is NOT non-duality at all. The principle of Oneness is NOT that there is "only one and nothing else". Oneness truly means, sharing, creation, unlimited extension, INFINITE wholes, and a heaven filled with SOULS that live forever in a state of perfection and wholeness, sharing everything they are with ALL OTHERS including God. Why do you think Jesus refers to you as a brother? It's not just a temporary thing. You will ALWAYS be equal to and a brother of Jesus, AND at the same time, one with Him, and literally sharing everything WITH Him, AND still having your own soul, and still having your own free will which happens to be the same in focus as God's.

So now we have a very different picture of Heaven, and it has NOTHING to do with Earth or this universe. "Heaven and Earth are opposite in EVERY way." Heaven is a PLACE in the sense that it EXISTS as God's creation and you can experience it and BE there in it/with it. There are many references in the course where Jesus says "in Heaven" and also referring to Heaven as a "world" and as something God created. And given that THIS world - earth, physical universe, DOES NOT EXIST BECAUSE THERE IS NO WORLD - where IS there to BE or live or exist other than Heaven? In that sense, it IS a place, far more a REAL place than planet earth. Earth is not a place at all.

Heaven is within the mind of God. "The kingdom of God is you" is another reference to you being The Son of God and one of may sons of God. You are part of and all of heaven. Something you can be INSIDE OF and BE, and where there are infinite souls and angels, plus the Holy Spirit, plus an entire sonship of equal souls, all equal with Jesus, all individually a Son of God, AND also every one of those souls is THE Son of God as well. And each soul continues to CREATE MORE. There is nothing unnatural about this at all. All PARTS of heaven are of ONE ORDER.

Per Jesus: "The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will because all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in these statements implies any sort of level involvement or in fact anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects are of the same order." (Here "man" is the same thing as soul or son of God, not humans.)

One final word then. Each Son of God, being a hologram of God, is whole and complete in and of itself, lacking nothing. And AT THE SAME TIME, is so OPEN and so SHARING, that it is wired into the ENTIRE CREATION of God. Picture it as your mind is so expanded that you are "one with" ie sharing in, the entire sonship. God therefore experiences ALL of his many thoughts, as ONE, while simultaneously allowing them to be many.

This is why there are many references to God having only one son. When it's speaking of this, it refers to how God experiences all Sons as though they are all the same and one, experienced simultaneously and so sharing that they do not seem "separate". Yet they are still divided. And then when the course speaks 250+ times about the many sons of God, this is not contradictory because God DOES have many sons AND one son.

God thinks holographically. All of God is in every son and all of every son is in every son. The whole sonship is in every son and every son in the sonship. You are the ONE SON of God, AND you are one of many. This is heavenly logic, not ego logic. When every individual PART of the sonship has returned to its true nature, all of the sonship as a whole communicates with God again.

The only other point to make I think is the difference between division and ego separation. In heaven you are divided from others and from God. But only in the sense that you are a loving family who shares everything together. Loving families are still individuals yet joined. The individuality does not go away. When walls are erected between family members, ie artificial separations are introduced, there is denial of the sharing, denial of the oneness, and denial of wholeness. This UNNATURAL DIVISION is the ego. This is what the course refers to as separation.

You have to get your head around the idea that you can be individual AND joined and that this is normal, natural and real. It is not your individual soul nature that makes you an ego. It is not that you are PART of a huge family of souls (sonship) that makes you an ego. What makes you an ego is that you withdraw your connection from God, withdraw your connection from the sonship, and become ISOLATED behind artificial imaginary walls of denial. It's got nothing to do with whether you are an individual or not.

Perhaps the most misunderstood thing about ACIM is the belief that ego means separate self, and therefore means individuality, and therefore having an individuality is ego. THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!! Individuality is not the problem. Cutting your individuality off from sharing with the whole is the problem. Trying to be a "part" of the hologram that does NOT contain the whole. Trying to not be an effect of God. Trying to cause God and change Him and affect Him. Cutting yourself off from the sonship. Believing you are not equal to all brothers. Being special. THAT is the problem and that is what the ego is made of, not your individuality.

Individuality does not mean you are separate from God, it means you are one of God's Son's. YOU DO EXIST. Just not as an illusion of an isolated self who has no connection to others. What is death but the end of all connection and the bringing about of total separation from Life? Joining with Life does not make you disappear! It's not about "you're not really out there". It's more like, "you are MORE than you APPEAR to be." You are God's Son and one of many sons. You are one with God and with all others and you SHARE with them all, one in sharing, not in number.

ACIM is not non-duality. And ACIM is not about the ego's idea of what oneness means. ACIM is not teaching that God only has a single son "separate from" the many sons. Heaven is a cascade of creation and miracles and light and souls and beauty and sharing and union and freedom. This is why YOU are responsible for everything YOU CHOOSE. Choose again.

This is a MAJOR axis in the course, transitioning from false perception to true perception. Learning to overlook the world of bodies and see beyond it to the light of the real world, so that you are ready to move on to Heaven. It is VERY CLEAR that the physical world of bodies is ONLY SEEN through the body's eyes, and learning to OVERLOOK it and not believe any of it is forgiveness.

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant."

"Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. No-one who looks on it without the help of reason, would try to pass it. The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. Yet reason sees through it easily, BECAUSE it is an error. The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from reason's eyes."

"ONLY the form of error attracts the ego. Meaning it does not recognize, and does not know if it is there or not. Everything that the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole, without the meaning that the whole would give. And yet mistakes, regardless of their form, can be corrected. Sin is but error in a special form the ego venerates. It would preserve all errors, and make them sins. For here is its own stability, its heavy anchor in the shifting world it made; the rock on which its church is built, and where its worshippers are bound to bodies, and believe the body's freedom is their own."

"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?"

"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."

"It is not Will for Life, but wish for death, that is the motivation for this world. Its ONLY purpose is TO PROVE GUILT REAL."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not. And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."

"The body's eyes will NEVER look on it. Yet they will SEE what it dictates. The body will remain guilt's messenger, and will act as it directs, as long as YOU believe that guilt is real. For the REALITY of guilt is the illusion which seems to make it heavy and opaque, impenetrable, and a REAL foundation for the ego's thought system. Its thinness and transparency are not apparent, until you see the light BEHIND it. And then you see it as a fragile veil, before the light."

"This world you see (with the body's eyes) MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision (christ vision). YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER."

"You do not really want the world you see (with the body), for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust even as you made it."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

"The purpose of these exercises (workbook intro) is to train the mind to a different perception of everything in the world. The workbook is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the undoing of what you see now, and the second with the restoration of sight."

"Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

"Corrective learning always begins with awakening the spiritual eye, and turning away from belief in physical sight. The reason this entails fear is because man is afraid of what his spiritual eye will see, which was why he closed it in the first place. We said before that the spiritual eye cannot see error, and is capable only of looking beyond it to the defense of Atonement. There is no doubt that the spiritual eye does produce extreme discomfort by what it sees. The thing that man forgets is that the discomfort is not the final outcome of its perception. When the spiritual eye is permitted to look upon the defilement of the altar, it also looks immediately toward Atonement. Nothing which the spiritual eye perceives can induce fear. Everything that results from accurate spiritual awareness merely is channelized toward correction. Discomfort is aroused only to bring the need to correct forcibly into awareness.

What the physical eye sees is not corrective, nor can it be corrected by any device which can be physically seen. As long as a man believes in what his physical sight tells him, all his corrective behavior will be misdirected. The reason why the real vision is obscured is because man cannot endure to see his own defiled altar. But since the altar has BEEN defiled, this fact becomes doubly dangerous unless it IS perceived. This perception is totally not-threatening because of the Atonement. The fear of healing arises in the end from an unwillingness to accept the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary. The fear arises because of the necessary willingness to look at what man has done to himself."

"Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two types or levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict for a long time, and can become very acute."

"But the outcome is as certain as God. The spiritual eye literally CANNOT SEE error, and merely looks for Atonement. All the solutions which the physical eyes seek, dissolve in its sight. The spiritual eye, which looks within, recognizes immediately that the altar has been defiled, and needs to be repaired and protected."

"The REAL beauty of the Temple cannot be seen with the physical eye. The spiritual eye, on the other hand, cannot see the building at all, but it perceives the altar within with perfect clarity. This is because the spiritual eye has perfect vision."

"Vision adapts to wish, for sight is always secondary to desire. And if you see the body, you have chosen judgment, and not vision. For vision, like relationships, has no order. You either SEE, or not."

"By focusing upon the "good" in him, the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight, and will at length be seen as little more than just a shadow circling round the "good".

"The concept of the self stands like a shield, a silent barricade before the truth, and hides it from your sight. All things you see are images because you look on them as through a barrier which dims your sight and warps your vision, so that you behold nothing with clarity. The light is kept from everything you see. At most, you glimpse a shadow of what lies beyond. At least you merely look on darkness, and perceive the terrified imaginings that come from guilty thoughts and concepts born of fear. And what you see is hell, for fear IS hell. All that is given you is for release; the sight, the vision and the inner Guide all lead you out of hell with those you love beside you, and the universe with them."

"And this he learns when first he looks upon ONE brother as he looks upon himself, and sees the mirror of himself in him. Thus is the concept of himself laid by, for nothing stands between his sight and what he looks upon, to judge what he beholds. And in this single vision does he see the Face of Christ, and understands he looks on everyone as he beholds this One. For there is light where darkness was before, and now the veil is lifted from his sight.

The veil across the Face of Christ, the fear of God and of salvation, and the love of guilt and death, - they all are different names for just one error; that there is a space between you and your brother, kept apart by an illusion of yourself which holds him off from you, and you away from him. The sword of judgment is the weapon which you give to the illusion of yourself, that it may fight to keep the space that holds your brother off unoccupied by love. Yet while you hold this sword, you must perceive the body as yourself, for you are bound to separation from the sight of him who holds the mirror to another view of what he is, and thus what YOU must be."

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used only as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function. For minds need not the body to communicate. The sight that sees the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship. And while you look upon each other thus, the means and end have not been brought in line."

"If you send forth ONLY the messengers the Holy Spirit gave you, WANTING no messages but theirs, you will see fear no more. The world will be transformed before your sight, cleansed of all guilt, and softly brushed with beauty. The world contains no fear that you laid not upon it. And none you cannot ask love's messengers to REMOVE from it, and see it still. The Holy Spirit has given you HIS messengers, to send each other, and return to each with what love sees. They have been given to REPLACE the hungry dogs of fear you sent instead. And they go forth to signify the END of fear."

"My holy vision sees all things as pure" - "And while we still remain outside the gate of Heaven, let us look on all we see through holy vision and the eyes of Christ. Let all appearances seem pure to us, that we may pass them by in innocence, and walk together to our Father's house as brothers and the holy Sons of God."

"Be willing, then, to see your brother sinless, that Christ may rise before your vision and give you joy. And place no value on your brother's body, which held him to illusions of what he is."

"Vision is freely given to those who ask to see. Your brother's sinlessness is given you in shining light, to look on with the Holy Spirit's vision, and to rejoice in, along with Him."

"There is no problem, no event or situation, no perplexity, that vision will not solve. All is redeemed, when looked upon with vision. For this is not YOUR sight, and brings with it the laws beloved of Him Whose sight it IS. Everything looked upon with vision falls gently into place, according to the laws brought to it by His calm and certain sight. The end, for everything He looks upon, is always sure. For it will meet His purpose, seen in unadjusted form, and suited perfectly to meet it. Destructiveness becomes benign, and sin is turned to blessing under His gentle gaze.

What can the body's eyes perceive, with power to CORRECT? Its eyes ADJUST to sin, unable to overlook it in any form, and seeing it everywhere, in everything. Look through its eyes, and everything will stand condemned before you. All that could save you, you will never see. Your holy relationship, the source of your salvation, will be deprived of meaning, and its most holy purpose bereft of means for its accomplishment. Judgment is but a toy, a whim, the senseless means to play the idle game of death in your imagination. But vision sets all things right, bringing them gently within the kindly sway of Heaven's laws."

"The barren sands, the darkness, and the lifelessness are seen only through the body's eyes. ITS vision IS distorted, and the messages IT transmits to you, who MADE it to limit your awareness, ARE little and limited, so fragmented that they are meaningless. From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it. And these messages bear witness to this world, pronouncing it as true. For YOU sent forth these messengers, to bring this BACK to you."

"Anger but screeches, "Guilt is real!" Reality is blotted out as this insane belief is taken as replacement for God's Word. The body's eyes now "see"; its ears alone can "hear." Its little space and tiny breath become the measure of reality. And truth becomes diminutive and meaningless."

"Reason would tell you that the world you see through eyes that are not yours, MUST make no sense to you. To whom would vision such as this send back its messages? Surely not you, whose sight is wholly independent of the eyes which look upon the world. If this is not your vision, what can it show to you? The brain can not interpret what YOUR vision sees. This you would understand. The brain interprets to the body, of which it is a part. But what it says, YOU cannot understand.

Yet you have listened to it. And long and hard you tried to understand its messages. You did not realize it is impossible to understand what fails entirely to reach you. You have received no messages at all you understood. For you have listened to what can never communicate at all. Think, then, what happened. Denying what you are, and firm in faith that you are something else, this something else, which you have made to be yourself, BECAME your sight. Yet it must be the SOMETHING ELSE which sees, and, as NOT you, explains its sight to you.

YOUR vision would, of course, render this quite unnecessary. But, if your eyes are closed, and you have called upon this thing to lead you, asking it to explain to you the world it sees, you have no reason not to listen, nor to suspect that what it tells you is not true. Reason would tell you that it can't be true, BECAUSE you do not understand it. God has no secrets. He does not lead you through a world of misery, waiting to tell you, at the journey's end, why He did this to you. What could be secret from His Will? Yet you believe that YOU have secrets. What could your secrets be except ANOTHER will, that is your own, APART from His? "

"Your sight was given you, along with everything that you can understand. You will perceive no difficulty in understanding what this vision tells you. For everyone sees only what he thinks he IS. And what your sight will show you, you will understand BECAUSE it is the truth. Only your vision can convey to you what YOU can see. It reaches you directly, without a need to be interpreted to you. What needs interpretation MUST be alien. Nor will it ever be made understandable, by an interpreter you cannot understand. Of all the messages you have received and failed to understand, this course alone is OPEN to your understanding, and CAN be understood."

"Reason will tell you that they must have seen each other through a vision not of the body, and communicated in a language the body does not speak"

"My condemnation keeps my vision dark, and through my sightless eyes I cannot see the vision of my glory."

"The love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another. That is because the real vision is still so dim."

"Miracles are seen in light" "It is important to remember that miracles and vision necessarily go together. This needs repeating and frequent repeating. It is a central idea in your new thought system and the perception which it produces. The miracle is always there. Its presence is not caused by your vision; its absence is not the result of your failure to see. It is only your awareness of miracles that is affected. You will see it in the light; you will not see it in the dark."

"Only be quiet. You will need no rule but this to let your practicing today lift you above the thinking of the world, and free your vision from the body's eyes."

"To the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive a world in which attack is justified. To the extent to which you recognize that guilt is meaningless, to that extent you will perceive attack cannot BE justified. This is in strict accord with vision's FUNDAMENTAL law: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you WANT it there. Perception HAS no other law than this."

"But on His Vision sin can NOT encroach, for sin HAS BEEN corrected by His sight."

"What is the resurrection?" "Here the curriculum ends. From here on, no directions are needed. Vision is wholly corrected and all mistakes undone."

"Now there are no distinctions. Differences have disappeared and Love looks on Itself. What further sight is needed? What remains that vision could accomplish? We have seen the face of Christ, His sinlessness, His Love behind all forms, beyond all purposes."

"These things await us all, but we are not prepared as yet to welcome them with joy. As long as any mind remains possessed of evil dreams, the thought of hell is real. God's teachers have the goal of wakening the minds of those asleep, and seeing there the vision of Christ's face to take the place of what they dream. The thought of murder is replaced with blessing."

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"These are among the many magical beliefs that come from the conviction you are a body, and the body's eyes can see. 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." " Yet this is no more foolish than to believe the body's eyes can see; the brain can know."

"It is your weakness that sees through the body's eyes, peering about in darkness to behold the likeness of itself; the small, the weak, the sickly and the dying, those in need, the helpless and afraid, the sad, the poor, the starving and the joyless. These are seen through eyes which cannot see and cannot bless. Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances. It keeps its steady gaze upon the light that lies beyond them. It unites with light, of which it is a part. It sees itself. It brings the light in which your Self appears. In darkness you perceive a self that is not there."

"The body's eyes are closed, and as you think of him who grieved you, let your mind be shown the light in him beyond your grievances."

"You can SEE reason. This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally. If it is not the body's sight, it MUST be understood. For it is PLAIN, and what is obvious is not ambiguous. It CAN be understood. And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their different ways."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see. For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. What was its maker's GOAL, but not to see? For this the body's eyes are perfect means. But not for seeing. See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and cannot go beyond. Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning."

"Let not the FORM of his mistakes keep you from him whose holiness is yours. Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body's eyes can see. Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins, and of his body. What is there in him that you would attack, except what you associate with his body, which YOU believe can sin? Beyond his errors is his holiness, and YOUR salvation. You gave him not his holiness, but tried to see your sins in him, to save yourself. And yet his holiness IS your forgiveness. Can YOU be saved by making sinful the one whose holiness is your salvation?"

"There has been some controversy (in human terms) as to whether seeing is an attribute of the eyes, or an expression of the integrative powers of the brain. Correctly understood, the issue revolves around the question of whether the body or the mind can see (or understand). This is not really open to question at all." " The body is not capable of understanding. Only the mind KNOWS anything." "Only the mind sees".

"Your world is seen through eyes of fear, and brings the witnesses of terror to your mind. The real world cannot be perceived except through eyes forgiveness"

"I would bless the world by looking on it through the eyes of Christ."

"You keep an ancient memory before your eyes. And he who lives in memories alone is unaware of where he IS."

"The real world is attained simply by the COMPLETE forgiveness of the old; the world you see WITHOUT forgiveness. The Great Transformer of perception will undertake WITH you the careful searching of the mind that MADE this world, and uncover TO YOU the SEEMING reasons for your making it. In the light of the REAL reason that He brings, as you follow Him, He will SHOW you that there is NO reason here at all. Each spot HIS reason touches, grows alive with beauty. And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release.

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

"Forgiveness is the home of miracles. The eyes of Christ deliver them to all they look upon in mercy and in love. Perception stands corrected in His sight, and what was meant to curse has come to bless. Each lily of forgiveness offers all the world the silent miracle of love. And each is laid before the Word of God upon the universal altar to Creator and creation, in the Light of perfect purity and endless joy."

"Seen through understanding eyes the holiness of the world is all I see, for I can picture only the thoughts I hold about myself."

"Vision is the means by which the Holy Spirit translates your nightmares into happy dreams; your wild hallucinations, that show you all fearful outcomes of imagined sin, into the calm and reassuring sights with which He would replace them. These gentle sights and sounds are looked on happily, and heard with joy. They are His substitutes for all the terrifying sights and screaming sounds the ego's purpose brought to your horrified awareness. They step away from sin, reminding you that it is not reality that frightens you, and that the errors which you made CAN be corrected.

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

"This is your purpose now, and the vision that makes it yours is ready to be given. You have the vision that enables you to see the body not. And as you look upon each other, you will see an altar to your Father, holy as Heaven, glowing with radiant purity, and sparkling with the shining lilies you laid upon it."

And this will be your concept of YOURSELF, when you have reached the world beyond the sight your eyes alone can offer you to see. For you will not interpret what you see without the Aid that God has given you. And in His sight there IS another world. You live in that world just as much as this, for both are concepts of yourself, which can be interchanged, but never jointly held. The contrast is far greater than you think, for you will love this concept of yourself, because it was not made for you alone. Born as a gift for someone not perceived to be yourself, it has been given YOU. For your forgiveness, offered unto him, has been accepted now for BOTH of you."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals."

"Accept the one illusion which proclaims there is no condemnation in God's Son, and Heaven is remembered instantly; the world forgotten, all its weird beliefs forgotten with it, as the Face of Christ appears unveiled at last in this one dream. This is the gift the Holy Spirit holds for you from God your Father."

"Now is there silence all around the world. Now is there stillness where before there was a frantic rush of thoughts that made no sense. Now is there tranquil light across the face of earth, made quiet in a dreamless sleep. And now the Word of God alone remains upon it. Only That can be perceived an instant longer. Then are symbols done, and everything you ever thought you made completely vanished from the mind which God forever knows to be His only Son."

"And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"The stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All things that come and go, the tides, the seasons, and the lives of men; all things that change with time and bloom and fade, will not return."

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish. Perception will be meaningless, when it has been perfected. For everything that has been used for learning, will have no function. Nothing will ever change; no shifts nor shadings, no differences, no variations that made perception possible, will occur. The perception of the real world will be so short, that you will barely have time to thank God for it. For God will take the last step swiftly, when you have reached the real world, and have been made ready for Him."