This is the VERY SIMPLE essence of our work with ACIM to return to sanity. We simply need to identity and recognize, correctly, WHAT IS TRUE, AND WHAT IS FALSE.
This recognition comes about through the DISTINCTION between the two. Some things are simply inherently true - such as the creations of light. Some things are simple inherently false - such as the illusions of the dream world.
It is only because we have CONFUSED AND SWAPPED what is true and what is false, that we do not clearly recognize which is which. We have lost touch with reality and sanity. We simply need to learn to distinguish clearly between them, and recognize that ONLY that which is really true is true.
If your mind has confused or mixed or swapped truth and lies, it perceives accordingly. False perception is INVERTED perception, meaning what is true appears false and what is false appears true. This "total confusion" is the logical outcome of the ego thought system. It produces false perception in which NOTHING is recognized correctly.
To access true or accurate perception, that which actually is true must be "separated out" from that which is false. The false must be clearly and accurately recognized AS inherently false, and the true must be clearly accepted AS the only real truth. All real truth is of God. All real truth is THE KINGDOM and its contents. All real truth about YOU and your brothers is defined in the creation of souls.
When you have COMPLETELY distinguished correctly what really is true and what is not, BOTH the true and the false are recognized for what they are. The true - as in heaven or the real world, is seen as the only truth (vigilance for the Kingdom), while the false - the world of illusions - is regarded AS false and give no reality.
Jesus in fact tells us that if we give reality or truth TO that which is false, we will SEE IT, because we invest it with belief. This produces false perception and sees the world of bodies. When that which is true is the ONLY place where you allow there to be reality and truth, you will SEE ONLY the face of Christ.
This means that learning to SEE THE TRUTH (the Kingdom), allows you to OVERLOOK the false world (which is now the forgiven world, the veil, which disappears from sight). He wants us therefore to SEE ONLY REALITY.
Jesus makes reference to this many times over...
"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."
"Recognize this, for it is true, and truth MUST be recognized, if it is to be distinguished from illusion"
"You do not have them now, because your mind is totally undisciplined, and you cannot distinguish between joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, love and fear."
"Therefore, if you learn the tests by which you can distinguish everything from nothing, you will make the better choice."
"Only by learning what fear is can you finally learn to distinguish the possible from the impossible and the false from the true."
"Its sole concern is to distinguish between truth on the one hand, and error on the other."
"His Voice will teach you how to distinguish between pain and joy, and will lead you out of the confusion you have made."
"Thoughts are not big or little; powerful or weak. They are merely true or false."
"Thought-systems are but true or false, and all their ATTRIBUTES come simply from what they ARE. Only the Thoughts of God ARE true. And all that follows FROM them, COMES FROM what they are, and is as true as is the holy Source from which they come."
"But a hypothesis is tested as either true or false, to be accepted or rejected accordingly. If it is shown to be true it becomes a fact, after which no one attempts to evaluate it unless its status AS fact is questioned. ... EVERY idea which the ego has accorded the status of fact is questionable, because facts are in the realm of knowledge."
"For perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth AND illusion, you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."
"The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception."
"My role is to separate the true from the false in your own unconscious, so it can break through the barriers the ego has set up and shine into your minds."
"Jesus remains a Savior because he saw the false without accepting it as true."
"In his complete identification with the Christ, the perfect Son of God, His one creation and His happiness, forever like Himself and One with Him, Jesus became what all of you must be. He led the way for you to follow him. He leads you back to God because he saw the road before him, and he followed it. He made a clear distinction, still obscure to you, between the false and true."
"For reason sees the SOURCE of an idea as what will make it true or false."
"Innocent (or true) perception means that you NEVER misperceive, and ALWAYS see truly. More simply, this means that you never see what does not exist in reality."
"If nothing but the truth exists (and this is really redundant in statement, because what is not true CANNOT exist) Right-Minded seeing cannot see ANYTHING BUT perfection."
"The way to correct all such delusions is to withdraw your faith from them, and invest it ONLY in what is true. To whatever extent you side with false perception in yourself or others, you are validating a basic misperception. You CANNOT validate the invalid.""If you are willing to validate what is true in everything you perceive, you will make it true for you."
"The Spiritual eye perceives both the Creations of God AND the creations of man. Among the creations of man, it can also separate the true from the false by its ability to perceive totally rather than selectively. It thus becomes the proper instrument for reality testing, which always involves the necessary distinction between the true and the false."
"Christ's Second Coming gives the Son of God the gift to hear the Voice for God proclaim that what is false is false, and what is true has never changed. And this the judgement is in which perception ends."
"In sorting out the false from the true, the miracle proceeds much along the lines suggested very correctly by Bill, e.:
If perfect love casts out fear,
And if fear exists,
Then there is NOT perfect love.
But only perfect love really exists.
Therefore, if there is fear, it creates a state which does not existBelieve THIS and you WILL be free."
ACIM's simple teaching: "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?"
Do you believe this fully and deeply, that only God's truth is true? Maybe in theory, to an extent. But that's not what matters. What matters is if you REALLY believe it deep down.
We're simply being asked to ONLY believe God's truth, the truth of heaven and reality, and to disregard all lies and falsehoods. That's all. But we have to be CONVINCED and deeply fully believing that God' truth is true, AND that we want it.
The entire "process" of waking up entails just sorting out the true from the false. Reason being that we've mixed them together and are confused and lost. We have to clearly identify what the truth IS, and we have to in contrast recognize what things are false. And then we have to be willing to believe ONLY the true things.
This is likely to be met with ALL your resistance, because the fact is that EVERY single belief you have that is false has to be brought into question, and had to be recognised as NOT true, and you do NOT WANT to do that. You think the opposite is false and want nothing to do with it, unwilling to even entertain its possibility. You literally will have to give up everything you think you know and be very open to being extremely mistaken.
There really is nothing more to it than that. We identify what is REALLY true in God's terms, we contrast it against what is OPPOSITE, we recognize that they can't BOTH be true, we reject the FALSE in favour of what is TRUE, and accept the truth - which is atonement. The Holy Spirit helps us in this sorting out:
"The Spiritual eye is the mechanism of miracles, because what the Spiritual eye perceives IS truth. The Spiritual eye perceives both the Creations of God AND the creations of man. Among the creations of man, it can also separate the true from the false by its ability to perceive totally rather than selectively. It thus becomes the proper instrument for reality testing, which always involves the necessary distinction between the true and the false."
"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."
"You have need of contrast only here. Contrast and differences are necessary teaching aids, for by them you learn what to avoid, and what to seek."
"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 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."
"Truth must be all-inclusive if it be the truth at all. Accept no opposite and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely. Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true and nothing else is true. This you have heard before, but may not yet accept both parts of it. Without the first the second has no meaning, but without the second is the first no longer true. Truth cannot have an opposite. This can not be too often said and thought about. For if what is not true is true as well as what is true, then part of truth is false, and truth has lost its meaning. Nothing but the truth is true, and what is false is false."
"Let all these errors go by recognizing them for what they are. They are attempts to keep you unaware you are One Self, united with your Creator, at one with every aspect of creation, and limitless in power and in peace. This is the truth, and nothing else is true."
While enjoying the innocence and sinlessness of becoming aware that I did not "really" sin, a person began to verbally attack me.
It had absolutely no effect.
I found it interesting to see the complete distinction between who I was and what they were doing to themselves, as though it was completely clear that it couldn't have been about me - because I was not sinful.
The attack did not register, not even slightly, and I did not need to defend myself in order to be invulnerable. It was simply clear that this was not about me at all.
Who would put up defenses if they knew that they couldn't possibly be sinful or guilty, and that no claims against them could ever really be about them?
There was no ego that needed defending - my self was not identified with sin and guilt.
This is why all that we need to do is learn to see the truth and to clearly discern the difference between true and false. When you can clearly see the truth, it is simply obvious that the ego is false, and that it has nothing to do with who you really are. Therefore you are already completely invulnerable without even having to do anything.
This is why nothing real can be threatened.
Workbook Lesson 128 "The world I see holds nothing that I want." tells us all about the first world. It is the world of FALSE PERCEPTION. This is an hallucinated world added ON TOP OF the manifest world (world #2 below). These are personal, private worlds of ego isolation and insanity. You could say there are as many such worlds as there are egos. This is the same thing as "hell" in course terms. Perceived separation.
Workbook Lesson 129 "Beyond this world there is a world I want." tells us about the second world. It is the world of TRUE PERCEPTION, also known as the real world and the forgiven world. "Now is the last step certain; now you stand an instant's space away from timelessness." .... the "real world" is slightly removed from heaven and the lesson HINTS at there being a world beyond this 2nd world. This is also the world in which we can see a reflection of heaven IN SPITE OF the fact that this world is still an illusion. This is still a world of perception but it's a short distance from here to heaven.
Workbook Lesson 130 "It is impossible to see two worlds." does not yet introduce the 3rd world, but it lets us dwell on the distinction between the first 2 worlds - between false perception OF this world, and true perception OF this world. It has us practice distinguishing or discerning true vs false since this is large part of correcting perception. It also basically tells us that the world we see at this level is what we put there to see, ie we are dreaming this world.
Workbook Lesson 131 "No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth." Finally reveals to us there is a 3rd world, beyond even the "real world" or forgiven world. It is HEAVEN. It is the world that God created. It is your home. This lesson even takes you on a little experimental journey, to go past the world of perception (containing the first 2 worlds), and into the light, accompanied by angels, attempting to bridge the gap to Heaven itself.
3 Worlds. Only one of them is reality. Heaven is reality.
"Having been restored to your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself. 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 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. (Urtext version of T-1.III.1:5-6)"
Are you willing to be an active worker in Jesus's plan of atonement, working miracles for others and lifting your brother into awakening? Or are you only interested in undoing the error for yourself?
This is perhaps a major distinction in the course community. Those who listen to the Voice for God and undo error, versus those who did this but also then 'take it to the people' with expressions of love and miracles. Jesus says he wants us to be miracle workers for others and not just for ourselves.
"Having been restored to your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself. 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."
Does this not mean, that you must now actively help others to awaken? That you would naturally want to do this because you love your brother so much? That you would ACT upon this love and express and extend it to others, even intervening for them with miracles (miracles intervene for their holiness). If you truly are in a place of love, then you will become part of the atoning principle, the atoning 'plan' for salvation, of which Jesus is in charge, and then you will be a part of helping to awaken your brother. It's not a crusade like a conquest or war to 'attack' the ego, but rather to heal and help others to be restored to their natural condition (divine health, perfect mind) and to demonstrate and be an example of the truth, sharing it with everyone. It is a calling, to be a representative of God here, while the illusion persists.
The very first level confusion occurs when we as Sons of God attempt to "cause God".
Whenever an effect, or a lower level, attempts to cause effects in the very cause that caused it, ie a higher level, that is level confusion.
The first level confusion was the separation from God itself.
God is cause. God creates and produces effects. We are his creations/effects.
As effects, effects do not cause the thing that caused them.
Sons of God do not have the ability to cause God. If they did, and this is what the whole separation is about, this would mean that we can produce effects in God and therefore change God. If they were to do that, they would be capable of destroying the very causal power which maintains their own existence, which is impossible.
There is a cause-effect distinction between what is God and what is a Son of God. God is "first cause". Sons of God are His effect. His Sons have been given the ability to cause ie create in God's likeness and their own, but they do not have the ability to actually cause anything other than this.
When Sons of God attempt to cause something unlike God, or something which goes against the freedom of will granted by God to extend love, "fiction" happens. A dream of impossibilities. Make-believe worlds and pretend bodies. That all comes from wishful thinking. And it's all a level confusion.
The attempt by the Son of God to cause His Father, to produce effects in the father, is the idea of sin. To make God change and be attackable/hurtable/modifyable is the very idea of sin. It is also the same thing as the authority problem - believing we have power to will against God's will.
So the very moment we entertained this tiny mad idea of being separate from God, it was an idea of being able to cause effects in God and therefore usurp his will. This was the first act of level confusion.
Every single thing that takes place inside the egoic dream of impossibilities and death, is also level confused. Absolutely every part of the ego is level confused. It is all entirely an attempt to reverse cause and effect. It is all a belief in magic and victimhood. And it is all impossible.
There are two distinct aspects to creation. One is God's own Self which is complete, the other is God's creation or the exending/projecting outward of God. This extension is referred to as Christ or the Sonship or Kingdom.
Now, we're told that it is the Son who is dreaming, not God. We're also told that God does not believe in or acknowledge the dream, otherwise God would have become insane and there'd be no God to go back to. How is this possible?
Technically speaking, if everything is one and there is only God, then God is responsible for the dreaming of the cocacola delivery truck which just drove past my window. And he is responsible for babies seeming to die. And he's responsible for war. Can God conceive of war, even in a dream?
There's a bit of a problem there, because the course says "never was love in the world", ie, God did not "enter into" the dream. Jesus is also quite clear that while the dream never truly happened in terms of reality, the IDEA of it happening did happen. Can God have an idea of being separate? Is he even capable of that? What would happen if he were capable of that? Who is going to get God OUT of the dreaming state and wake Him up, if God Himself is asleep?
This is why God created the Holy Spirit to "do his dirty work" so to speak. To awaken His son from sleep, cooperatively.
What this all boils down to is this. If God is not part of the dream or dreaming, there ABSOLUTELY MUST be some kind of "distinction" or "separation" between what is God and what is the Son. The Son's mistaken use of will does not affect the father. The son can't cause the father. So that means the Son effectively has free will. COMPLETELY FREE will. It means if the Son chooses to try to will against God, although it in truth impossible, He can still imagine it happening, without God's "approval" so to speak.
Jesus describes mind (of souls) as having two potential functions. One is creation - which uses mind as a medium to Create along the same lines as God, AND He uses the term "co-create" several times. The other is the POTENTIAL of mind to PROJECT, which means it actually has the freedom to ELECT whether or not it will will with God or not. He even says that the fallen angels are "free to establish their kingdom wherever they choose". ie God isn't going to force them to comply with His will anytime soon.
This is ALSO why, the curriculum is mandatory and REQUIRED, BUT... you can elect WHEN to take it. You can postpone it, ignore it, choose away from it, and decide not to learn it right now. How is that possible, if God's will is somehow forcing you to act a certain way or make certain choices? And how is it possible that "love does not enter where it is not welcome", meaning that if YOU elect to do so, you are able to make love not welcome?
Basically, long story short, God does not WILL that there be death, God does not will suffering, God does not will war or conflict, God does not even will any kind of dream. In fact God wills that you WAKE UP from dreaming, and that's why He created the Holy Spirit to facilitate that. And this is why you also have to give your WILLINGNESS - your little willingness - in order to CO-OPERATE with God's Will for you.
There absolutely definitely IS a distinction between the freedom of God's will, and the freedom of your own will. Will does not coerce or force you. While you are an effect of God, you are not his slave. You are not created to "have to" do anything you do not choose to do.
The ONLY WAY that God cannot be the one who dreams, is by having given you ABSOLUTELY TOTALLY FREE WILL. As in... practically the same thing as saying you are SEPARATE. Absolute complete freedom. If you did not have absolute total autonomous freedom to decide for yourself, dreaming would be impossible and if dreaming were happening God would die.
This is why A Course in Miracles is not well represented by thinking of it as a teaching of conceptual "oneness" ie singularity, or as a teaching of "non-duality". Non-duality completely ignores the FREEDOM with which God creates, and the total freedom He GIVES to his creations. As the course says itself
"How wonderful it is to do your will! For that IS freedom. There is nothing else that ever should be called by freedom’s name. Unless you do your will, you are not free. And would God leave His Son without what he has chosen for himself? God but ensured that you would never lose your will, when He gave you His perfect Answer."
"The mind can be right or wrong, depending on the voice to which it listens. "
"Souls were given their own true authorship, and men preferred to remain anonymous when they chose to separate themselves FROM their Author."
"Peace is a natural heritage of the Soul. Everyone is free to refuse to accept his inheritance, but he is NOT free to establish what his inheritance IS."
"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it. That is why God Himself created you. Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and that is what creation MEANS."
"Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."
Intellect here is being basically equate with the ego thought system. Intellect is a device that separates and analyzes. It looks at things and separates them off and compares them. It judges them and evaluates them. This splitting apart is an emphasis on separation and increases the send of fragmentation of things. Things can become extremely complicated in the intellect.
As such, since the physical world is made from the idea of separation and the intellect similarly fosters perceptions of separation, the intellect can be said to be responsible for making the world. ie the ego mind of separation reinforces ideas of differences and contrasts and directly leads to physical matter showing up.
Jesus congrats this against real thinking, ie the thoughts you think with God, thoughts of love and creation, which are extensions of God's mind. Those create wholeness and spirit and eternal life because they are not based on separation. It's a way of thinking that doesn't dissect or analyse or judge or evaluate. It's a thought process that looks out from a loving whole state of mind and creates more of the same - the good, the beautiful and the holy. This extends the Kingdom of God (heaven).
"Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and the holy. Do not lose sight of this."
You might notice also that when you move away from love and the present moment, the mind creates a sense of separateness from "what is" and moves into a kind of more fictional, theoretical, conceptualizing state. This produce a sort of "shift upwards" in the mind, or what we might call moving thought up into the intellect. In the intellect everything becomes theoretical and non-practical, or is a lack of application because it's a lack of real engagement and sharing. It could be thought of as a way of shutting down and separating off by trying to hide from immediate reality, going into fantasies and sidetracks.
"Intellect may be a "displacement upward"
The intellect can be somewhat useful perhaps for assessing things in this world and sorting out what to do and so on, but only as a temporary tool. It's easy to become lost in it and to be so involved in intellectualizing that your whole experiences becomes one big theory and not a whole lot of relationship. Then you can be sort of living in a cloud of "course thought" masquerading as "doing the course" but only really being good at talking bout it, around it, and indirectly referring to it. The truth has to be lived, and that means eventually the intellect will be transcended and used no more.
"You are not sick and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do." - ACIM
Who we are is an immortal being. Period. That's all that we are. Immortal and safe and eternal and invulnerable and incapable of being sick or suffering or dying whatsoever.
But we CONFUSE ourselves with things that do seem to suffer and die. We confuse ourselves with a body, with an imaginary world, and with all kinds of fictional things.
Even if it seems the body is sick, you are not the body. But you are producing a sick body which indicates you don't quite believe you are not a body.
See, the body only shows up at all if your mind believes it is "made of" an illusion. It therefore expresses its idea of "self" and it shows up. If the mind believes it is a separate ego thing, a body appears. The more it believes this, the more the body that shows up appears to be sick. When it really binds its idea of self to "body", a dead body shows up.
But even a dead body cannot show up at all without a mind to make a dead body show up. Even if the body is lying there on the ground "dead", there MUST be a mind which is putting that body there, still.
This is the distinction that you are NOT the body and are not that which dies.
But this does not mean that it's therefore okay for the body to die. If the body dies it proves that you must believe in death, because you will ONLY create in like kind according to your beliefs.
Those who believe in immortality only create that which is immortal. Those who believe in death create bodies which appear to die.
And having believed death is real, we will make bodies which appear to be dead as though real, because that's what we believe is truth. Believe it and you will create it.
There are some who believe that in the atonement sick bodies and healthy bodies are all the same illusion - which is true - and that therefor (this is level confusion), when you are in the world it does not matter if your body is sick or not.
It does matter.
The body cannot be sick without the mind being sick.
The body cannot seem to die unless the mind believes in death and victimhood.
A sick/broken/dead body is PROOF the mind has NOT been healed.
A slight belief that you are a body, manifests a slightly sick body.
A stronger belief that you are a body manifests a suffering body.
A really extreme belief that you are a body, produces a dead body.
See how the ego always produces the exact opposite of what it says it is going to do. Believing you are a body should surely produce an everlasting body, right? Wrong. It does the opposite.
Believe you are a body and you will NOT succeed in being a body, you'll produce a dead one.
ie it is literally impossible to be a body, for real.
In A Course in Miracles, forgiveness is a movement away from believing that illusions are true and real, towards recognizing that they are in fact not true or real. This becomes clear when your awareness increases sufficiently to reveal a larger truth, which shows you the ways in which the "smaller truth", i.e. illusory lies, are in fact limited and untrue.
Forgiveness, as a process, is also a movement from unawareness, in which you don't see clearly or fully, to a state of expanded awareness where you see more of the whole picture and with greater accuracy. As you go through this, what seemed to be true of your illusions starts to be recognized as being not as true as the larger truth.
It's a matter of becoming clear about what REALLY is true, and what is actually false. Getting truth and illusions confused is the ENTIRE content of the ego, and the entire content of the separation from God - which is you trying to make illusions become reality.
As you become more aware of what the truth really is, and less convinced about what the truth is not, your discernment of true vs false becomes clearer. You learn to recognize the truth for what it is (not the illusion you thought it was), and recognize the illusion for what it is (not the reality you thought it was).
Through forgiveness you will eventually reach a truly, fully "forgiving" state of awareness, which recognizes ALL of the truth, which is that nothing has really happened, there is only innocence, and therefore there is nothing to forgive.
Now, there are a couple of pieces of the puzzles of performing miracles which I did not really get, but which certain Christian practitioners tried to describe. They would say that you have to a) believe in Jesus ("be a believer"), and b) have "faith". Since their belief in Jesus was heavily wrapped in Christian theology, I had trouble discerning exactly WHAT it was about Jesus that I was supposed to believe - such as that He died for our sins and such, which is not an ACIM teaching. I also have never really 'got' what faith means, because it was never explained in a clear context.
But I've become clearer on this now.
The only way that "believing in Jesus" and "having faith" become meaningful, is when you can discern that the ENTIRE WORLD IS AN ILLUSION. It is necessary to have a really strong clear distinction between what is TRUE, and what is FALSE. So as you go about your life believing in the world, (even if you're trying to learn not to believe in it you probably still do), while you're in this sort of in-between phase of "some of the truth is true, but some of it I don't get", you will also be similarly confused about what it means to believe in Jesus, and what faith is.
If parts of the world are real to you, in spite of what you might claim otherwise, this HAS to mean that you in part also believe that God is not entirely real. It also means that you have 'faith in' the ego, and faith in sickness and death.
Now, this isn't something that people want to admit but, the simple fact is, either you believe that God is real, fully, or in some way you don't believe it. And that displaced belief will be put into a conviction that the ego is real - that it is truth, and that everything it claims is true. That will go on to mean that when shit happens in the world and it seems real, part of you will be trying to look to God for a way out of it, but part of you will be attached to believing in it. And so you are now torn, or your faith is divided. And Jesus says faith cannot serve two masters.
So what needs to happen is, through proper forgiveness, we need to become REALLY CLEAR about the distinction between reality, and illusions. We can' have this mishmash of partial reality and partial illusion. It will confuse us and rob truth of meaning.
To be able to believe in Jesus, means that you believe Jesus is 100% reality, He is 100% love, He is 100% truth, 100% immortal, 100% innocent, 100% at peace etc. He shares this truth with God 100%.
IF that is true, if that's your definition of truth, then it HAS to mean, that anything not of God is not truth. So now you need to be very clear, WHAT is not of God? Because if you go on believing God created the world, and yet the world seems to be the place where things fuck up big time, then... well, now you are super confused. And of course you are confused because it makes no sense that God would create a world with sickness in it, because that means God creates sickness. So now if you were to follow that truth, and you were trying to find some healing or peace from experiencing sickness, how the heck would you have any kind of power to turn to if that power believes in sickness? You'd be hopeless.
So... to believe in Jesus means to believe in God, that God is the one and only truth, and only things which are completely in accord with unconditional love are of God. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else at all can be permitted to take up the label of "real" or "true".
So then you have to ask yourself, did God create the world? No. He did not. So that means the world is not real. And that's mind-blowing, if you really take in deeply. It completely undermines your entire view of reality - or rather, your mistaken view in which you think illusions are reality. Because all this time you've been thinking you're living in a 'real' world and now you find out, it's a tricking illusion pretending to be real!
But this is how you can then have faith. You can have faith because, now that you believe in God's truth, and you know that God's truth is the only truth, and that this world is NOT a part of God's truth, that means whenever any shit happens in the world, you can BYPASS it, OVERLOOK it (forgiveness), and HOLD STRONG to the truth as God would have it be. That means, NO MATTER WHAT is in front of your face, no matter what happens, no matter how serious it seems, no matter how final - even death, YOU DO NOT BELIEVE IN IT, because believing in it would have to mean - you really do not believe in God all the way.
But if you DO believe in God, then.... no matter what happens, no matter how serious, you do NOT pay it attention, you do NOT believe in it, and you instead express and extend GOD'S REALITY in place of it. You cancel it out. You overwrite it. You clarify that the problem is NOT real, is NOT the truth, and you replace it with love. This shows the nothingness of the illusion, puts everything in its correct order, and corrects all confusion. It also produces miracles.
So you have faith by believing that God's truth is true, and that this is shared by Jesus.... and you have faith by holding true to that fact regardless of how the world seems to be. The only question of your faith wavering is when you believe the illusion enough that your belief in God's power wavers, and that means you've temporarily forgotten that God's truth is true. You've believed in the ego again. So you lose faith when that happens.
This kind of faith in God is not blind faith or just 'hope'... it is CERTAINTY, it is KNOWING, it is TRUTH, and it is CORRECTION.
Holy Spirit interjected while writing that the word "trust" is really what faith means. Trusting God. Trusting the real truth. Trusting that BECAUSE of what the truth is, that "this problem" is not insurmountable or irreversible. It is that knowing of the truth, that trust in the truth, which powers miracles.
So forgiveness leads you to miracle mindedness, a clarity about what is true and what is false gives you miracle mindedness, and a certainty about the truth being true (and that therefore the world is not real) gives you the foundation for faith. Your trust/faith in God's Way gives you miracle-working capabilities.
To get there you're going to have to question the validity of every way that you're trying to find truth in the world, because it means that you're looking for truth in an illusion. It means you're not clear yet about what is true and what is false. The world is false - head's up!. Entirely false. It is entirely an illusion that doesn't really exist or mean anything at all. Every time you 'seek' for truth in it, you will not find it, because it is not there. You need to learn to stop trying to do that and instead believe in God.
The miracles will flow from there.