"The body appears to be largely self-motivated and independent, yet it actually responds only to the intentions of the mind. If the mind wants to use it for attack in any form, it becomes prey to sickness, AGE AND DECAY. If the mind accepts the Holy Spirit's purpose for it instead, it becomes a useful way of communicating with others, invulnerable as long as it is needed, and to be gently laid by when its use is over. Of itself it is neutral, as is everything in the world of perception. Whether it is used for the goals of the ego or the Holy Spirit depends entirely on what the mind wants."

"How can I know who I am when I see myself as under constant attack? 3 Pain, illness, loss, AGE and death seem to threaten me."

"The mind that thinks it is a sin has but one purpose; that the body be the source of sin, to keep it in the prison house it chose and guards and holds itself at bay, a sleeping prisoner to the snarling dogs of hate and evil, sickness and attack; of pain and AGE, of grief and suffering."

" Is it not madness to think of life as being born, AGING, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"

"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. 4 You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible."

"And yet a neutral thing does not see death, for thoughts of fear are not invested there, nor is a mockery of love bestowed upon it. 6 Its neutrality protects it while it has a use. 7 And afterwards, without a purpose, it is laid aside. 8 It is not sick NOR OLD nor hurt. 9 It is but functionless, unneeded and cast off."

"***Now is the body healed*** because the source of sickness has been opened to relief."

"***The body CAN be healed*** by its EFFECTS, which are as limitless as is itself."

"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 healed*** BECAUSE YOU CAME WITHOUT IT and joined the Mind in which all healing rests."

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. ***Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed.*** The sane mind cannot conceive of illness, because it cannot conceive of attacking anything or anyone. "

"***A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed.*** A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect. "

""Holy indeed is he who makes these words his own; (I am as God created me) arising with them in his mind, recalling them throughout the day, at night bringing them with him as he goes to sleep. His dreams are happy and his rest secure; his safety certain ******and his body healed*******, because he sleeps and wakens with the truth before him always. ""

"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. Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself:

"I have forgotten what I really am, For I mistook my body for myself. Sickness is a defence against the truth, But I am not a body. And my mind Cannot attack. So I can not be sick."

Notice that it is very clear here, that Jesus is saying when you are SANE, your body can and must also be HEALED. That there is a direct parallel between a healed mind and a healed body. Sanity of mind produces bodily health. As you wake to happy dreams your body should not have sickness. The body's health is fully guaranteed, sickness is impossible, and your body becomes a symbol of eternal life and harmlessness. This is a radical teaching particularly for anyone who thinks that it's okay for the body to remain in states of sickness while the mind is allegedly "separately" healed. When the mind is sane, it WILL heal the body. And the body will then testify to your brother's innocence. "Brother, at your hand I LIVE".

"If I defend myself I am attacked."

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

"Defense do what they would defend."

"In my defenselessness lies my safety."

It's interesting but, when we try to defend ourselves, under the belief that we are making ourselves more protected, more safe, more secure, we ACTUALLY are undermining ourselves and attacking ourselves. So now self attack masquerades as self defense.

The ego splits off the illusion of attack and defense because it splits cause and effect. It tries to make out that attacks are not defenses, and defense are not attacks. That you can cause in order to not be caused. Or you can defend in order to not be caused. But both attack and defend are forms of the same ego plot to weaken you.

A defense automatically presumes that you need defending, because there is something weakened, vulnerable and wrong with you. That you are frail and fragile and attackable. Without this belief in being attackable, you cannot have defenses, and there would be no point defending something that isn't attackable in the first place.

Therefore the defenses undermine your integrity and require you to believe that you need them, due to being attacked already, and therefore your defenses attack you. It's the same as with e.g. virus protection software. It is designed to save you, but the belief in viruses causes the eruption of enemies.

And so defenses are attempts at saving yourself from attack, but in fact are themselves attacks. So they cannot work. And all they do is paint an illusion that you are safer without in any way undoing the belief that you are weak or vulnerable. You then think you are safer because of the illusion of protection, but you have not really increased your belief in invulnerability whatsoever.

To be truly defenseless requires you to be convinced that you cannot be attacked, which requires you to recognize that you are immortal.

"You are immortal and you cannot die."

"There is no death. The Son of God is free."

When you defend yourself, you make yourself sick. Defenses are self-attack. You think you need to be defended and this attacks the body, making it sick. Sickness is a defense against the truth, or in other words, sickness is a self attack masquerading as being attacked by something else in an attempt to defend yourself. Attempting to defend yourself weakens you and makes you sick.

If you defend yourself, you undermine your immortality.

"The body is hardly worth the least defense."

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

"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.**** Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself:

"I have forgotten what I really am, For I mistook my body for myself. Sickness is a defence against the truth, But I am not a body. And my mind Cannot attack. So I can not be sick.""

---

"The "self" that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and ***hardly worth the least defense***, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?

Defend the body and you have attacked your mind. For you have seen in it the faults, the weaknesses, the limits and the lacks from which you think the body must be saved. You will not see the mind as separate from bodily conditions. And you will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from the conception of the mind as limited and fragile, and apart from other minds and separate from its Source."

"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, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more."

"How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth. You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you made one with it. Thus is your "true" identity preserved, and the strange, haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust silenced and stilled. For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be."

"Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live, but cannot overcome your choice to die. And so the body is more powerful than everlasting life, Heaven more frail than hell, and God's design for the salvation of His Son opposed by a decision stronger than His Will. His Son is dust, the Father incomplete, and chaos sits in triumph on His throne."

"Such is your planning for your own defense. And you believe that Heaven quails before such mad attacks as these, with God made blind by your illusions, truth turned into lies, and all the universe made slave to laws which your defenses would impose on it. Yet who believes illusions but the one who made them up? Who else can see them and react to them as if they were the truth?"

...AND ITS REVERSAL...

"God knows not of your plans to change His Will. The universe remains unheeding of the laws by which you thought to govern it. And Heaven has not bowed to hell, nor life to death. You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable cannot change. And what is wholly sinless cannot sin."

"Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. There will be no dark corners sickness can conceal, and keep defended from the light of truth. There will be no dim figures from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey."

"Now is the body healed, because the source of sickness has been opened to relief. And you will recognize you practiced well by this: The body should not feel at all. If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. No response at all is in the mind to what the body does. Its usefulness remains and nothing more."

"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."

ACIM

My note: Note that Jesus specifically refers here to healing the physical BODY, and to his intention that we PRACTICE this in order to then evaluate how well we did based on how meaningless the body is afterwards, as well as making the body invulnerable to and not dependent upon the world.

Here are FIVE passages from ACIM telling us about a body which is not sick, cannot suffer, cannot die, and symbolizes immortality.

"****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."

-----

"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 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 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."

-----

"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. Yet the teacher of God does not make this decision alone. To do that would be to give the body another purpose from the one that keeps it holy.God's Voice will tell him when he has fulfilled his role, just as It tells him what his function is. ****He does not suffer either in going or remaining. Sickness is now impossible to him.****"

-----

"****Now is the body healed**** because the source of sickness has been opened to relief."

"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."

-----

"Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death. It is a reawakening or a rebirth; a change of mind about the meaning of the world. It is the acceptance of the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the world's purpose; the acceptance of the Atonement for oneself. It is the end of dreams of misery, and the glad awareness of the Holy Spirit's final dream. It is the recognition of the gifts of God. It is the dream ****in which the body functions perfectly****, having no function except communication."

God is permanence. What God creates is also permanent. How can it be, that if God has created you as permanent, that you can malfunction? The whole idea that you can even have anything wrong with you is completely incompatible with you being permanent.

How can your total complete perfection, immortality, innocence, holiness, sinlessness, purity, guiltlessness, immacuate cleanness, ever turn into some kind of MALFUNCTION? How can heaven just BREAK someday? How can immortals suddenly become sick out of nowhere? How can what is permanently perfect, ever degrade or corrupt or decay or be destroyed?

The idea of death and the idea of eternal life are UTTERLY INCOMPATIBLE. You can't BE malfunctioning. God does not create things that don't work. His brand even comes with a guarantee.

"My sinlessness is guaranteed by God."

"God's promises make no exceptions. And He guarantees that only joy can be the final outcome found for everything."

"The Guarantee of Heaven"

"We thank you, Father, for Your guarantee of only happy outcomes in the end."

"He Who ensured your sinlessness must be the guarantee of strength and light as well."

"God's guarantee will hold against ALL obstacles, for it rests on certainty, and NOT contingency."

"In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything; the central core of its existence and its guarantee of immortality."

"It is His laws which GUARANTEE your safety."

"And thus His Will provides the means to guarantee that it is done."

"Leave, then, the transfer of your learning to the One Who REALLY understands its laws, and Who will GUARANTEE that they remain unviolated and unlimited."

"It needs but two to understand that they can not decide alone, to GUARANTEE the joy they asked for will be wholly shared."

"Yet, to the dedication to the truth as GOD established it, NO sacrifice is asked, NO strain called forth, and all the power of Heaven and the might of truth itself is given to provide the means, and GUARANTEE the goal's accomplishment."

"But the guarantee of your continuity is God's, not the ego's."

"The Atonement is the GUARANTEE of the safety of the Kingdom."

"The removal of blocks, then, is the ONLY way to guarantee help and healing."

"The world WAS a way of healing the Separation, and the Atonement is the GUARANTEE that the device will ultimately do so."

"Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God."

"My sinlessness is guaranteed by God."

"Its oneness is forever guaranteed inviolate; forever held within His holy Will, beyond all possibility of harm, of separation, imperfection and of any spot upon its sinlessness."

"In me is His creation sanctified and guaranteed eternal life."

"It is in this that the simplicity of salvation lies. It is because of this that it is guaranteed to work."

"God's treasure house can never be empty. And if one gift were missing it would not be full. Yet is its fullness guaranteed by God."

"Your claim to miracles does not lie in your illusions about yourself. It does not depend on any magical powers you have ascribed to yourself, nor on any of the rituals you have devised. It is inherent in the truth of what you are. It is implicit in what God your Father is. It was ensured in your creation, and guaranteed by the laws of God."

"The end IS sure and guaranteed by God."

"Our home is safe, protection guaranteed in all we do, power and strength available to us in all our undertakings."

"We will attempt today to find this Thought, Whose presence in your mind is guaranteed by Him Who speaks to you from your One Self."

"And God Himself has GUARANTEED the strength of miracles for what they witness TO."

"Where two have joined for healing, God is there. And He has guaranteed that He will hear and answer them in truth."

"Morning and evening do we gladly give a quarter of an hour to the search in which the end of hell is guaranteed."

"The "right to live" is something no-one need fight for. It is promised him, and guaranteed by God."

"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."

"Who could be surer that his happiness is fully guaranteed?"

"What is the Will of God? He wills His Son have everything. And this He guaranteed when He created him AS everything."

"Our success in transcending the ego is guaranteed by God, and I can share my perfect confidence IN His Promise because I know He gave me this confidence for both of us and ALL of us."

"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." - Lesson 152

This is an extremely black and white level of responsibility. If you give your CONSENT, then sickness and death will occur. If you do NOT give your consent, then sickness and death of the body become IMPOSSIBLE.

Paraphrase: What you use the body for it becomes to you. If you use it to attack it becomes weak and sick and dies. If you use it for love it is healed and sickness is reversed and death becomes *IMPOSSIBLE*. "A sane mind heals the body."

This as Jesus says is a CENTRAL TEACHING of ACIM - that sickness and death of the body are OPTIONS THAT YOU CHOOSE (or not).

The body is not supposed to die or go through the death process. The body is not supposed to get sick. Death is nothing but another more extreme form of sickness, and sickness is just an earlier form of death. It's all the same thing. The ego mind attacks and kills the body as a result of a belief that sin and death are real, in an ARROGANT attempt to symbolically kill the Son of God. If you do not have that belief, you will not attack the body, it will not become sick, and it cannot die.

"Use it (the body) to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. 5 Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. 6 When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. 7 The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body's condition."

The mind makes ALL decisions about the body's condition, including whether it is sick, and whether it dies. It CANNOT DIE if the mind does not CONSENT and CHOOSE to kill it. "From the ego came sin and guilt and death" .... "The glitter of guilt you laid upon the body would kill it. For what the ego loves, it kills for its obedience".

The body then becomes a "symbol of immortality" in the dream, as a DEMONSTRATION that your mind truly believes in God's laws over the egos. It is useful purely as a communication device.

"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."

You will then retain the body, which is really nothing, but in this state effectively is invulnerable and cannot be destroyed. This produces a supernatural protection because "a broken body is proof the mind has not been healed" and therefore if the mind IS healed it WILL heal the body. It must.

"Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. 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."

When you have ceased attacking the body, "a sane mind heals the body", the body will be restored miraculously to "perfect health" and become "holy", in the dream. It is used to bring God to those who need help, to perform miracles and raise the dead. And then when its usefulness is done, the body is DISAPPEARED, not laid down on the ground to rot and die. The dream of death is not left by death, but by truth.

Anyone whose body dies does so because THEY BELIEVE IN DEATH AND HAVE CONSENTED TO DIE. Death is a choice against God's Will. Death is NEVER a doorway out of dreaming. Death is DENIAL OF GOD.

Jesus describes how he finished dreaming not through death but through the recognition that the body was nothing/illusion and thus made it literally disappear:

"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."

Death of the body is optional and is a FAILURE to live according to the Will of God. Whatever you believe you demonstrate. If you demonstrate death, you MUST believe in death. If you do not believe in death, you CANNOT demonstrate death. We are to demonstrate "immortality" of the body, in the dream, before we can stop dreaming. "There is no death, the Son of God is free" applies ONLY AFTER PROVING IT by making the body free of death, as demonstration of your actual acceptance that you are under no laws but God's.

The truth is, while you value something and believe there is truth in it, you will not want to let it go. You're convinced other stuff is less true and is not what you want, and that you should protect what you have faith in. That's a reasonable attitude. Although what you believe might ultimately be false, Holy Spirit is not here to tell you "you can't have that" or that "you shouldn't do that".

What is asked of us is simply to be a little bit willing to return to the Light of Truth. We don't have to have to be willing, ever, to have stuff ripped away before we are ready. Nor do we need to feel guilty when we are not ready or when we want to keep stuff. The truth is you WILL NOT let go of stuff when you are not ready because you can't let go without being genuinely willing and ready. Holy Spirit knows that and that it would be a complete waste of time to 'force' you.

At some point, if we are to wake up to truth, we need to be willing to entertain the possibility that what we think is true might not be - and that something we denied or thought wasn't true might well be the truth. We've denied God and we need to reverse that. But to reverse it we have to question where we've put our sense of value, and we've put it into many things that aren't really the truth.

So maybe we value music. Most people do. Or nice sunsets. Or videos of puppies and kittens. If you go do those things, in light of what the Course says, the ego will say "if you do this you're not doing the Course, so you are guilty". The ego positions itself as Holy Spirit's right-hand man as if bestowing the punishment that allegedly would come from Holy Spirit for your failure to comply. Holy Spirit did not appoint the ego to do this, and you're not guilty. Being mistaken doesn't mean you're guilty or deserving punishment.

At some point though you might be willing to get closer to God, and that will mean opening up to a greater truth. And once you expose yourself to the greater truth, you're not going to be ABLE to go backwards. It will also show you, in light, that what you thought was true or valuable, is really actually not AS valuable as the real truth. It's not as meaningful. ONLY when you are able to see through what you thought was important and recognize it for what it really is - an illusion, nothing of value, a decoy, or a ridiculous ego scenario, you will then be ready and willing to let go of it. Stepping into the truth IS letting go of it.

There is no force involved. There is no coercion. There is no pressure. There is no guilt for not being ready. WHEN you are truly ready, there won't be anyone standing there telling its about goddam time you sacrificed already. You will, and can, only let go of stuff, when you AGREE that the stuff you're letting go of is NOT of value to you, and that what you've chosen instead IS of value (God's truth). When you can see clearly in LIGHT, it is obvious what is true and what is false - what is valuable and what is valueless. Then there is no struggle and no fight. Nobody's ripping stuff from you, and you're not having to just go cold-turkey on stuff you still feel attached to before you're ready.

So yes you can keep all your stuff and your behaviors and your beliefs and all of it as long as you want. Guilt free. AND, even when you realize that this stuff is not truly worthy of the Son of God, that doesn't mean anyone's going to say "see told you so" or try to make you stop doing those things. You can still watch TV if you want, or walk the dog, or eat food. But the important difference then is that you do not NEED to and you don't believe it is reality.

At some point, when you are ready, you WILL look at every stone and turn it over and realize the gifts the ego was offering versus the gifts God is offering, and you will gladly choose God's gifts, and you will gladly and effortlessly let go of the ego's gifts. This includes all of the ego's laws. It includes all of the things you think you NEED and WANT, other than GOD alone, in order to survive and exist and be happy. That includes needing to eat food, drink liquid, sleep, breathe air, or be a body at all. You might still do these things for a while, but a MASTER does not need any dependence on anything besides God.

To summarize, there is no guilt or punishment coming for your 'sinful' behavior of enjoying chocolate cake or watching movies. But your dependence on these things as your source of truth might be keeping you away from something far more magnificent, and eventually you might decide to change your mind about what you want. And when you're ready to do that, Holy Spirit is right there ready to take the opportunity to gently guide you forwards to see for yourself what it is you've been denying.

Ultimately because you are denying God you are denying yourself/depriving yourself of everything God offers, which is an absolutely huge blessing that you've rejected. Why deny yourself such magnificence and joy? Jesus might at this point prod us - "ask yourself, do you want your little trinkets the ego has to offer, or do you want the love of God?" And since is it GOD that you stand to GAIN when you let go of things of lesser meaning, YOU CAN'T LOSE.

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.

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom. The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist."

In ACIM, Jesus teaches in many ways that the body, the ego and the world are nothing. Even that they don't really exist at all in reality. But another major part of the teaching is that we've invested these things with meanings, laws, rules, values, powers, which they do not have.

"It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body. What is alien to the mind does not exist, because it has no source."

As a further step, Jesus goes on to say that if you give the body power or meanings or roles that it is not supposed to have, being nothing at all, this is what makes it sick. The body becomes sick because your mind is trying to distort it from being nothing into being something else. It is putting pressure onto the body, trying to manipulate it into serving made-up causes.

"You might ask how the voice of something which does not exist can be so insistent. Have you ever seriously considered the distorting power of something you WANT, even if it is not true?"

As Jesus says, if you believe that the body has an ability to create, meaning an ability to cause something, your mind will be sick and it will manifest this sickness upon/as/in the body. Since the body is nothing, it does not have an ability to cause anything. If you believe the body can or is causing something, your mind is sick, and this will make the body sick.

"The body cannot create, and the belief that it CAN, a fundamental error responsible for most of the fallacies already referred to, produces all physical symptoms."

The same applies to the world. It's easy to say we're not at the effect of the world, but we need to also realize we've invested the world will all kinds of powers, casual abilities, creative powers, trying to make it be something, with false values and credit where it's not due etc. And these things distort the world and effectively results in a sick mind, a sick body, and a sick projected world. The world has to be recognized as absolutely nothing, rather than believed to be something of importance.

"As "something", is the body asked to be God's enemy, replacing what He is with littleness and limit and despair. It is HIS loss you celebrate when you behold the body as a thing you love, or look upon it as a thing you hate. For if He be the sum of everything, then what is NOT in Him does not exist. And His completion IS its nothingness."

It may seem odd at first, but Jesus wants us to recognize that all bodies are nothing. They are not something. They are much closer to being emptiness and lack, being the idea of sin. We need to stop giving power to them, stop giving value to them, stop making them out to be something they're not, and stop trying to give them worth.

"The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?"

Jesus even says that they are so worthless as to be not even worth defending, and that if you defend the body you will make it sick. By this worthlessness he does not mean that the body is judged as evil or that we project guilt onto it or make it out to be a victim or a perpetrator. It doesn't mean we value it as low and hated and so on. He simply means that because it is neutral it is nothing, and its neutrality means that you cannot give it any attributes at all, either positive or negative.

"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."

The body is essentially not there. It is not real. It does not exist. It's an hallucination, empty, void, pretending to show up as something but isn't even a real creation.

"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but NEVER experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely. For sin is never present."

Jesus goes on to suggest that if you can recognize the body as nothing at all, withdrawing all artificial beliefs, uses, roles, laws, meanings and so on from it, the body will actually become a picture of health. The reason is that the mind is becoming "clear" and empty of illusions, and therefore the picture of the body begins to fade and disappear, at first infused with light and healing and love, but eventually eradicated by it.

From the state of a healthy mind and body, the body will go on to disappear entirely into the light, consumed by it and erased by it. Recognizing your brother's body as nothing is the way for your body to be free from sickness and death. Regarding a person as a body is a form of separation-belief, and so is an attempt to be split off from life. Your brother's body, your spouse's body, your children's bodies, your neighbor's bodies, they are all absolutely nothing and worth nothing all. Mistaking these people for their bodies is an attack upon who they really are.

"His body's nothingness releases yours from sickness and from death. For what is yours cannot be more NOR less than what is his."

"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."

Finally, Jesus suggests that if you take this all the way, if you deprogram your mind from belief that the body and the world and the ego are ANYTHING, and recognize them as nothing at all, they will disappear. What is recognized as nothing cannot really be there, and this causes it to not be there. In truth, there is no body, there is no ego, and there is no world.

"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."

We are tasked with nothing short of erasing the world, ending space and time, and returning to the complete recognition that they are not there, they never were there, and only God's Kingdom really exists.

"What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

Here's a fact. NOTHING ABOUT YOUR BODY HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH YOU. The body is not your self. Its form, shape, color, size, activities, say NOTHING about you. Your face isn't even your face. Its gender and sexual persuasion is not yours. You have been a hundred bodies in a hundred lifetimes. Not even ONE of them defines you or is TRUE of you. If you believe otherwise, you are confused about who you are, and have a body-identification issue. To be spirit-identified you must stop confusing yourself with the body. To awaken, you MUST recognize yourself as ONLY SPIRIT. And ALL spirit is identical.

"I am not a body I am free, for I am as God created me."

You are not a man or a woman.

You are not straight or gay or bi or trans or anything else.

You are not beautiful or ugly based on the body's looks.

You are not fat or thin or chunky or rotund or lanky.

You are not oversized or overweight or underweight.

You do not have a face.

You do not have arms and legs.

You do not have genitalia of any description.

Your musculature says nothing about your strength.

Your wimpyness says nothing about your strength.

The size of your private parts says nothing about you.

The way your brain functions is unrelated to what you are.

Your amount of seeming intellectual ability is meaningless.

You are not tall or short or anything in between.

You are not hairy or bald or naked or dressed.

Your clothes do not say anything about you.

The trinkets and ornaments you wear do not define you.

Your tattoos and birthmarks are not your identity.

Your amount of sexual libido or prowess means nothing.

Your taste for certain foods is irrelevant to your soul.

You do not have any of the needs that the body has.

You have not been born or grown or aged or suffered.

You have not changed in any way due to body changes.

You never gained or lacked anything.

Your body's features have nothing to do with you.

The color of your skin says nothing about you.

Your ethnic background does not define you whatsoever.

You have not ever done anything that the body did.

You have never touched another person.

You have never seen another person with the body.

Your body joining with a body is nothing to do with you joining with your brother.

Your hair size, shape, length, color, style, is not you.

You are not that which you see in the mirror.

Your defects, disabilities, missing or damaged parts, have absolutely no bearing on your perfection.

Your differences and uniqueness has nothing to do with your perfect equality with all God's children.

The identity that is in you is the same as in everyone.

How long you've been in a body means nothing.

What generation you seem a part of it irrelevant to you.

The pride of being part of a certain family is artificial.

Your support of certain body-groups is mistaken.

Your preference for certain body types is part of your own body identification.

Your hatred of certain body types if part of your own body identification.

All the body's senses tell you nothing.

Every sensation is illusory.

You have never been born and you will never die.

Complements about your body have nothing to do with you.

Hatred towards your body has nothing to do with you.

When your body is attacked you are not attacked.

You don't really have a face or arms or legs or a butt.

Your eyes are not your eyes.

You are not from a certain part of the world.

Your cultural background is entirely made up.

Your prejudices are evidence you think people are bodies.

Your racism is a belief in being a body race.

Your homophobia is an over-identification with your body.

How your body smells does not define you.

You have no color, no shape, no size.

You do not move in a certain way.

You do not sit down or stand up or sleep.

You do not eat food or drink.

You cannot be affected or changed or grown.

You have never had any kind of appearance.

It's not great to be a [fill in body type], you are not that.

You are not what you inherited from your parents.

You are not genetic.

You are not stuck with any type of body.

You are not limited by bodies.

You are not worshipped when your body is worshipped.

You have never communicated with a body.

Your body is no more valid than anyone else's.

Your body is no better or worse than anyone else's.

Your body is not more important than anyone else's.

No-one has anything you don't have.

You are not good looking or ugly or plain or handsome.

Being naked does not expose your real self to anyone.

The makeup on your body does not change you.

You do not have an image, you are not an image

You are not fashionable or poorly dressed.

NOTHING ABOUT THE BODY IS TRUE OF YOU!

YOU ARE NOT A BODY. YOU ARE SPIRIT!

Anything that God did not give you is not true of you. "God did not create the body."

When the body is recognized as an illusion of NOTHINGNESS, it will disappear. YOU are all that remains.

"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 concept to replace my Self. I am in the likeness of my Creator. Love created me like itself."

What if you decide that you are not going to die?

Immediately this flies in the face of everything the world's population holds as true and inevitable. It flies in the face of an entire weight of collective thoughts and beliefs about what is normal and natural in this universe.

You wouldn't be the first to accomplish this either. St Germain for example was known to be "in a body", maintaining agelessness, for several centuries. Babaji is known to be hanging around without aging. There are others.

Jesus calls for every A Course in Miracles student to accomplish this also. He asks us to swear not to die. He tells us to choose resurrection, to not attack the body, to not make it sick, and to heal it. He asks us to make it a picture of health not a picture of crucifixion.

He asks us not to make the body age, or decay, or be sick, or die, but instead to maintain it in a state of guaranteed perfect health indefinitely, for as long as this is useful. That could mean thousands of years, or just a few.

You probably have assumed all your life that just because everyone else's bodies grow old and die and no-one can seem to cure death, that this is the only option. That death is inevitability and it's your fate. Particularly that death cannot be reversed, yet alone prevented.

You see the seasons come and go, the leaves die off, the flowers wilt, the animals turn to carcasses, and people are put in the ground. And we think this is normal and natural and unavoidable. Something to be "accepted" and adjusted to and made out to be something you can do "in peace".

But Jesus is asking a much higher calling for us. He wants us to use the body as a symbol of eternal life, a breath of immortality, to those who have grown tired of the fetid scent of death.

He wants us to allow the Holy Spirit to heal and resurrect the body through miracles, to present a picture of total health and loveliness to your brothers so as to teach them there is no sin and no attack.

He wants us to demonstrate, in person, physically, that there is no death, and that we have power over death. And that means that we make it possible for this exact body we have right now to not die. To not decay. To not grow old and withered and look like a prune. And to be incapable of corruption.

Are you willing to take up this challenge? If you're going to take this course the whole way then it is going to require of you at some time to actually commit to not dying. You cannot have a shred of belief in death or experience of death in your mind and being if you are to reach the end of the curriculum, which is resurrection - death's total opposite.

So you might as well decide right now. I am not going to die this time. I am going to move towards health, life, happiness, wholeness, healing, miracles, the power of the mind over the body, and I refuse to simply go the way of the worms along the funeral procession of death and decay.

How about you decide today, that you will not intent to die this time, you will not merely unconsciously accept notions that you will die, and you will not allow the body to die. It is your challenge to become miraculous and to heal the body's ailments and cure its diseases and undo death itself. To demonstrate your immortality using the body as a tool to prove your mind is stronger than death.

Few will rise to the challenge. It seems ridiculous. It seems impossible. It flies in the face of everything. Just stop and think for a minute. What if in this lifetime right now, with this body, you simply are not going to go through death? What if you're going to simply keep this body, heal it, resurrect it, protect it through miracles and the Holy Spirit, and maintain it in perfect functioning? For as long as you like?

Once the body is being healed by a sane mind, it cannot become sick, nor can it die. So now it is not possible to leave it through death. "A dream of death cannot be left through death but by truth". Truth means resurrection and life.

The body becomes a shining symbol of immortality and you can longer leave it through sickness or decay or suffering. The old doorway to darkness is closed. And the only way to then leave is to simply lay it aside, without decay, without attack, without sickness, in which the body does not corrupt or destroy or symbolize hell. And then it disappears.

What if you don't have to die physically? And what if you can resurrect all the way to invulnerability and immortality? And what if you can prevent the body from being attackable? And what if you do not have to keep aging? What if you can fly in the face of everything the world believes and choose not to die?

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

"No one dies without their own consent."

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"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."

"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 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."

"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"

"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. 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. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"Swear not to die, you 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."

Suffering is really in the mind. It is not really in the physical universe, in the world, or in the body. What is physical does not really suffer. The experience of suffering is psychological only.

The world and the body are a projection in the mind. The law of projection is one of giving, or of pushing outward, based on what is within. In its pure form this is the extension of the Kingdom of God. In its distorted ego form, it is the pushing outward of an inner state of sin, guilt, fear and denial.

The ego thought system in the mind therefore tries to deny and "get rid of" what it does not want, which ultimately it YOU, by first attacking you and then projecting the attack. The projection of attack, in an attempt to give without receiving, which is murderous, is an way the mind "hides from" its own content. The physical world and the body arise as make-believe images and now act to disguise what the real problem is.

This means really that it is your psyche that suffers, and your mind that is hurt, and it is the mind that needs healing. It is your beliefs that twist your thoughts, and distort your perceptions. And it is really only the mind that can seem to be sick.

But when the mind IS sick, it has entered into denial and separation. And as the law of projection now functions, the mind tries to dissociate (separate) from its own suffering. It tries to push "separateness" outside of itself, to create distance and delay between itself and the problem. This produces spacetime. And the whole physical world and body arise to SYMBOLIZE and represent the inner state of mind, as if the mind itself has become physical form.

This means that if the mind is sick, it WILL attack the body and render the body as a sickened image, a broken body, showing up as if deformed or malfunctioning or damaged. And this body now acts to testify that IT has been attacked. And since the cause of the attack is not SEEN, because it is in the mind, we instead look to the world to explain HOW it came to suffer.

We even look to the body itself to ask how the body could make itself sick, and also look to the body to make itself well. But the body cannot attack itself, or heal itself, because ONLY THE MIND puts the body there. And only the mind attacks the body. And only the mind heals the body.

Or to put it in a better way... if the mind attacks itself first, it will project an image of an attacked body in an attacking world. If the mind heals itself first, it will project an image of a healed body in a healed world. There are many statements in ACIM that support this. And it means that the only true way to heal the body is to heal the mind, so that IF the body is projected, its form will symbolize and represent and point towards its origins - as a mirror of a sane and harmless mind.

"The body is endangered by the mind that hurts itself. The body suffers that the mind will fail to see it is the victim of itself. The body's suffering is a mask the mind holds up to hide what really suffers. It would not understand it is its own enemy; that it attacks itself and wants to die. It is from this your "laws" would save the body. It is for this you think you are a body."

"And it grows old and dies, because that mind is sick within ITSELF."

"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."

"Yet must all healing come about because the mind is recognized as NOT within the body, and its innocence is quite APART from it, and where ALL healing IS."

"The lesson is the MIND was sick that thought the body COULD be sick; projecting OUT its guilt caused NOTHING, and had NO effects."

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body, so that IT will suffer pain. It is the obvious effect of what was made in secret"

"The glitter of guilt you laid upon the body would KILL it. For what the ego loves, it kills for its obedience."

"For your beliefs converge upon the body"

"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."

"Your PERCEPTION of the body can clearly be sick, but project this not upon the body."

"Defend the body and you have attacked your mind. For you have seen in it the faults, the weaknesses, the limits and the lacks from which you think the body must be saved. You will not see the mind as separate from bodily conditions. And you will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from the conception of the mind as limited and fragile, and apart from other minds and separate from its Source."

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness, because it cannot conceive of attacking anything or anyone."

"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."

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind MUST BE STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

"Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness."

"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."

Sounds like we need to get a handle on this atonement and forgiveness business because Jesus is claiming it can cure ALL sickness, whether it be mind or body. Sickness is actually rooted in guilt. It's a form of punishment and vengeance.

"Sickness is but a "little" death; a form of vengeance not yet total."

"Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt."

When there is sickness, it's really that the mind is sick. A sick mind believes it is guilty. It sees itself guilty because it believes it has really sinned. Its guilt demands punishment and projects attack which attacks the body.

"But sickness is not of the body, but OF THE MIND. ALL forms of DISfunction are merely signs that the mind has split, and does not accept a UNIFIED PURPOSE."

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body, so that IT will suffer pain." "and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."

"Unless the mind BELIEVES the body is ACTUALLY acting out ITS fantasies, it will attack the body by INCREASING the projection of its guilt upon it."

"A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed."

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness, because it cannot conceive of attacking anything or anyone."

Clearly there is a theme here that physical sickness is a form of guilt resulting from a sick mind. When there is guilt in the mind, the mind conceives of "sickness" and attacks the body with it. The body becomes sick, taking on the form of physical symptoms. And when the mind is guiltless the body becomes healthy because the mind believes in healing, harmlessness and life.

"The Holy Spirit KNOWS that ALL Salvation is escape from guilt."

"It (mind) will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey. Now is the body healed because the source of sickness has been opened to relief."

"(Atonement) It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. And that is cure indeed. For sickness now is gone, with nothing left to which it can return."

"There is no place where holiness is not, and nowhere sin and sickness can abide. This is the thought that cures."

"We will not be misled today by what appears to us as sick. We go beyond appearances today, and reach the source of healing from which nothing is exempt."

And we are reminded again that THE HOLY SPIRIT is the healer and the cure. "We will be still and listen for the Voice of healing which will cure all ills as one, restoring saneness to the Son of God. No voice but This can cure."

"Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take. Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. Atonement does not heal the sick, for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. And that is cure indeed. For sickness now is gone, with nothing left to which it can return."

To be clear, sickness is IMPOSSIBLE without guilt. Guilt IS sickness. The sickness of the body - illness, disease, damage, death, is all a form of guilt projected out as a shadow to disguise the guilt in the mind. "Guilt remains the only thing that hides the Father, FOR GUILT IS THE ATTACK UPON HIS SON."

"Minds ARE joined; bodies are not. Only by assigning to the mind the properties OF THE BODY, does separation SEEM to be possible. And it is MIND that seems to be fragmented and private and ALONE. Its guilt, which KEEPS it separate, is projected to the body, which suffers and dies, BECAUSE IT IS ATTACKED to hold the separation in the mind, and let it NOT KNOW its unity."

By associating a person with a body, believing the appearance of flesh and bones is "them", identifying them as physical, and thus making physical sickness a real and blinding deception, the body is confused with the mind. If the body is the mind then the body can cause sickness, which is level confusion and magic.

Thus to heal, the body must not be thought of as that which is truly sick. The body must not be thought of as the person. And the appearance of sickness must be recognized as an illusion covering up the mind's guilt. It's the guilt in the mind that is producing all physical symptoms. The mind is trying to destroy the body, having confused the body for the mind/self, as an attempt to destroy God's son.

In a sense, the notion of someone being "sick", is another way of saying "there's something wrong with you". Like when you accuse someone of "being sick" because of some disgust you have about what they're doing. The physical sickness is an accusation of guilt and corruption, or being dysfunctional and evil, a condemnation and an accusation of sin.

This is why the body is an effect or symbol of the mind, and its really the mind that is causing the body to die. This is why the body itself doesn't really "need" healing because it is just portraying the mind's sickness, and in and of itself is nothing but an image, faithful to its user and his/her intentions. Heal the mind of its guilt and the body MUST follow.

"The body needs NO healing. But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed! And it is here that Christ sets forth the remedy. His PURPOSE folds the body in His light, and fills it with the holiness that shines from HIM."

"And nothing that the body says or does but makes HIM manifest. To those who know Him not it carries Him, in gentleness and love, to heal their minds."

"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."

"With THIS as purpose IS the body healed. It is NOT used to witness to the dream of separation and disease. Nor is it idly blamed for what it did not do. It serves to help the HEALING of God's Son, and, for THIS purpose, it cannot BE sick."

"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."

"I have forgotten what I really am,

For I mistook my body for myself.

Sickness is a defense against the truth,

But I am not a body. And my mind

Cannot attack. So I can not be sick."

A collection of A Course in Miracles quotes...

"The body can be made a home like this, BECAUSE it lacks foundation in the truth. And yet, BECAUSE it does, it can be seen as NOT your home, but merely as an aid to help you reach the home where God abides.

With THIS as purpose IS the ***body healed***. It is NOT used to witness to the dream of separation and disease. Nor is it idly blamed for what it did not do. It serves to help the HEALING of God's Son, and, for THIS purpose, it cannot BE sick. It will not join a purpose not your own, and you have chosen that it NOT be sick. All miracles are based upon this choice, and GIVEN you the instant it is made. No forms of sickness are immune, because the choice cannot be MADE in terms of form. The choice of SICKNESS seems to be a form, yet it is one, as is its opposite. And YOU are sick or well, accordingly."

----

"Healing will flash across your open mind as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. There will be no dark corners sickness can conceal and keep defended from the light of truth. There will be no dim figures from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey.

Now is the ***body healed*** because the source of sickness has been opened to relief."

----

"The miracle returns the CAUSE of fear to you who made it. But it ALSO shows that, HAVING no effects it is NOT cause, because the function of causation is to HAVE effects. And where effects are gone, there IS no cause. 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."

----

"I am as God created me"

"Holy indeed is he who makes these words his own; arising with them in his mind, recalling them throughout the day, at night bringing them with him as he goes to sleep. His dreams are happy and his rest secure; his safety certain and his ***body healed***, because he sleeps and wakens with the truth before him always. He will save the world because he gives the world what he receives each time he practices the words of truth."

----

"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."

----

"A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed."

----

"A gentler dream, in which his suffering was healed, and where his brother was his friend."

----

"Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death. It is a reawakening or a rebirth; a change of mind about the meaning of the world. It is the acceptance of the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the world's purpose; the acceptance of the Atonement for oneself. It is the end of dreams of misery, and the glad awareness of the Holy Spirit's final dream. It is the recognition of the gifts of God. It is the dream ***in which the body functions perfectly***, having no function except communication."

----

"Every situation, properly perceived, becomes an opportunity to heal the Son of God. And he is healed BECAUSE you offered faith to him, giving him to the Holy Spirit and RELEASING him from every demand your ego would make of him. Thus do you SEE HIM FREE, and in this vision does the Holy Spirit SHARE. And since He SHARES it He HAS given it, and so He healed THROUGH YOU. It is this JOINING Him in a UNITED purpose that MAKES this purpose real because YOU make it WHOLE. And this IS healing. ***The BODY is healed*** BECAUSE YOU CAME WITHOUT IT and joined the Mind in which all healing rests."

----

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

----

"Health is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it remains without conviction. Only ***when DEMONSTRATED*** has it BEEN proved, and MUST compel belief. No-one is healed through double messages. If you wish ONLY to be healed, you heal. Your single PURPOSE makes this possible."

----

"The body, then, is not the source of its own health. Its condition lies solely in your interpretation of its function."

----

"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."

----

"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. ***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."

----

"Here its peace can come, and perfect healing take the place of death. 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.""

----

"Learning must lead beyond the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it. This can be accomplished only if the mind EXTENDS to other minds, and does not ARREST ITSELF in its extension. The arrest of the mind's extension is the ***cause of all illness***, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND'S FUNCTION. Block this, and you have ***blocked health*** because you have BLOCKED THE MIND'S JOY."

----

"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.***"

----

"***Your health*** is a result of your desire to see your brother with no blood upon his hands, nor guilt upon his heart made heavy with the proof of sin. And what you wish is GIVEN you to see."

----

"The body needs NO healing (directly). But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed! And it is here that Christ sets forth the remedy. His PURPOSE ***folds the body in His light, and fills it with the holiness*** that shines from HIM. And nothing that the body says or does but makes HIM manifest."

----

"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."

----

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

----

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body."

----

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

----

"A guiltless mind cannot suffer. The mind, being sane, heals the body."

Since the world does not contain any real causes, and absolutely everything is an affect of the mind on a higher level, this shines some light on what happens when you are attacked or hurt.

If it seems that someone comes along and hits you, and a bruise forms, this is an illusion.

The person hitting and the formation of the bruise are not actually connected by any kind of linear causality. Laws of physics DO NOT EXPLAIN how the bruise gets there.

The bruise does not show up as a result of the attack.

The bruise shows up because your own mind buys into the illusion of linear cause and effect, and USES the opportunity to demonstrate that the other person is the "cause" of your hurt. This is an attempt to demonstrate that you can be hurt, in order to prove your brother is a sinner, so that you can get rid of your sin!

Your own mind puts the bruise in your own body, all by itself. It doesn't get there by the "causal power" of another person. If you believe in the causal power of another person, what your mind is doing is it is actually twisting itself so that it can seem to attack itself from the outside in, through that person, and it is your mind which puts the bruise there.

This works in exactly the same way to how medication works, which is that you pretend that something outside of you will do something to you, your MIND decides whether or not to allow it, and IF it allows it, the MIND ITSELF puts the effects into the body, not the medication. All medication is a placebo. None of it has power to cause anything but illusions.

If the mind decides not to get well, IT WILL REFUSE the illusion of the medication and the medication will NOT WORK. Similarly, among those who refuse to believe in the cause-effect of certain foods, they can eat those foods WITHOUT EFFECT even if they would hurt other people. Mind over matter!

Jesus asks us in the Course to demonstrate that we cannot be hurt, or attacked, or sick, and that our brother is innocent because nothing they try to do us produces ANY EFFECTS.

If we produce sickness in the body after eating the wrong food, or we develop a bruise after being hit, or we walk around with a broken leg due to falling out of a tree, we are ACCUSING everyone else (ie the world) of doing this to us.

This means we are attempting to prove that we CAN BE HURT. This proof demonstrates for all to see, that someone else must be the sinner, because something happened that you *appear* to not want to have happened, against your will. Your demonstration of "being a victim" is actually a show that your mind puts on, for a purpose, to scapegoat the world.

What Jesus is therefore asking is, that we become invulnerable to attack, incapable of being sick, unable to be hurt, and that we refuse to CHOOSE to show up as damaged or broken. This means that when it SEEMS in the illusion that there is a linear causality of someone hitting you, YOU DO NOT develop a bruise. When you fall out of the tree, you DO NOT break your leg. When you eat a certain food, IT DOES NOT poison you.

This means you are supposed to get to where you can SUPERNATURALLY DEMONSTRATE that you cannot be hurt, sick, damaged, or made to suffer, in any way, by any cause in the entire world! At the physical level! He is asking us to show that we are holy by showing that the Son of God CANNOT BE DESTROYED, using the body as a SYMBOL of immortality.

Here is how Jesus puts it:

"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 that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail." !!!!!!!

He also speaks of this here:

"Sickness is an attempt to demonstrate that you can be hurt"

and here:

"A broken body proves the mind has not been healed"

and here:

"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."

and here:

"(regarding your brother) But every pain you suffer do you see as proof that he is guilty of attack. Thus would you make yourself (your body) to be the sign that he has lost his innocence, and need but look on you (your body) to realize that he has been condemned. And what to you has been unfair will come to him in righteousness. The unjust vengeance that you suffer now belongs to him, and when it rests on him are you set free (you projected your sin). Wish not to make yourself a living symbol of his guilt, for you will not escape the death you made for him."

Here Jesus is basically saying that you must not attempt to put sin and death onto your brother through attack of any kind (sickness also) because if you do, YOU will be attacked. This is the basic law of the one mind, that what you do to your brother you to do yourself. All attack is self attack. You cannot escape the consequences of your attempted attack on another, and they are not required to receive those consequences from you.

This means that if you demonstrate that you are sick or hurt physically IN ANY WAY, you are attacking your brother, trying to SHOW HIM what he must have done to you against your will, and are therefore projecting your sin! If you do this, you will suffer, and your will experience death. This also means YOUR MIND *IS NOT HEALED*, therefore you CANNOT experience peace. A broken body proves your mind is not healed. Your mind is proven to be healed when your body shows up as NOT BROKEN. Therefore, to escape death, you MUST NOT use the body for attack, thus rendering it INCAPABLE of being attacked by you or anyone.

Whenever you attempt to use the body for attack, which means, to fail to extend love through it to your brother, the body itself will become sick. The sickness in your body will directly correlate to your belief that you and your brother are sinners. Your attempt to project your sin will project it onto your body and destroy it. This is the ONLY WAY that bodies become sick. Not through external causes, not through the illusion of cause and effect, not through your brother.

We are therefore REQUIRED, and WILL NOT BE ABLE TO AVOID, to demonstrate that our body is absolutely invulnerable, in order to CANCEL OUT the illusion of cause and effect, to PROVE that the ego's laws mean nothing, to SHOW that our brother is as innocent as we are, and to TEACH that the Son of God cannot be hurt or affected by illusions in any way.

Can you imagine what a miracle it will be to witness someone demonstrating this? That nothing you try to do to them works? That you cannot hurt their body whatsoever? That their body cannot even die no matter how you try to attack it? Their mind will simply project an image of permanent health the whole time, IGNORING anything you try to do to it. And by this will be PROVEN your innocence, because no sin you try to commit WORKS, and therefore you CANNOT believe that you are sinful. Thus are you set free because your attempted sin HAD NO CONSEQUENCES. This is how you set your brother free from his belief that he sinned!

This is one of the most radical teachings in the course, so I understand that many people don't believe this or don't want to. But this is what Jesus has said. If your body is broken in any way, you are teaching vulnerability and suffering and sin. You cannot have sickness in the body and prove that you are innocent, or to be at peace. And you cannot be at peace with death. You cannot have sickness showing up if you want to be awake, and being awake you WILL NOT show sickness to anyone. The body MUST HEAL if the mind heals. And the body will become as immortal as the mind.

Cause and effect at the level of the world is entirely an illusion. THERE IS NO CAUSE in the world. Nothing causes you. Nothing is the reason why you are showing up in any particular form. Nothing has happened to you against your will. Nothing of this world can be found responsible for having power over you, for "making you" be a certain way, for instigating illness, to triggering suffering, or for making your body change in any way at all. Not even the forces of nature or acts of nature or whatever else. NOTHING.

Your body is 100% a projected image from YOUR MIND, and YOU are the one that determines how it is going to show up. Not this world. Not other people. Not food or water or weather or anything else. We are meant to demonstrate that our body is completely invulnerable, completely NOT DEPENDENT on anything of this world, and incapable of being affected by this world. This will demonstrate the the mind of love has power over all illusions and nothing can assail the Kingdom of God.

If we're sick, hurt, in pain, suffering, a victim, abused, damaged, missing something, lacking, attacked, upset, whatever... we are the ones who are putting it there, we are RESPONSIBLE for it, and no-one else has caused it. Only through this willingness to admit honestly to this truth, will you be able to access the SUPERNATURAL PROTECTION which comes from realizing the secret to salvation: "you are doing this to yourself". If you stop doing it to yourself, NOTHING ELSE WILL BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING TO YOU.

I'll let Jesus finish up with this section from "sickness is a defense against the truth":

"The body should not feel at all. If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. No response at all is in the mind to what the body does. Its usefulness remains and nothing more.

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 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."

A collection of quotes from A Course in Miracles about how and why the body is healed by miracles.

"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."

"The BODY is healed BECAUSE YOU CAME WITHOUT IT and joined the Mind in which all healing rests."

"Healing is the one ability that everyone CAN develop, and MUST develop, if he is to BE healed. Healing IS the Holy Spirit's form of communication, and the ONLY one He knows."

"The acceptance of sickness as a decision of the mind, for a purpose for which it would use the body, is the basis of healing. And this is so for healing in all forms. A patient decides that this is so, and he recovers. If he decides against recovery, he will not be healed."

"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 that the mind would use it FOR."

"It frequently happens that an individual asks for physical healing, because he is fearful OF BODILY HARM. However, at the same time, if he WERE healed physically, the threat to his thought-system would be considerably MORE fearful to him than its physical EXPRESSION. In this case, he is not really asking for RELEASE from fear, but for the removal of a symptom WHICH HE HAS SELECTED.

"It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey ... Now is the body healed because the source of sickness has been opened to relief."

"With THIS as purpose IS the body healed. It is NOT used to witness to the dream of separation and disease. Nor is it idly blamed for what it did not do. It serves to help the HEALING of God's Son, and, for THIS purpose, it cannot BE sick. It will not join a purpose not your own, and you have chosen that it NOT be sick. All miracles are based upon this choice, and GIVEN you the instant it is made. No forms of sickness are immune, because the choice cannot be MADE in terms of form. The choice of SICKNESS seems to be a form, yet it is one, as is its opposite. And YOU are sick or well, accordingly."

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

"Learning must lead beyond the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it. This can be accomplished only if the mind EXTENDS to other minds, and does not ARREST ITSELF in its extension. The arrest of the mind's extension is the cause of all illness, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND'S FUNCTION. Block this, and you have blocked health because you have BLOCKED THE MIND'S JOY."

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

"His dreams are happy and his rest secure, his safety certain and his body healed, because he sleeps and wakens with the truth before him always."

"Love must be extended. Purity is not confined. It is the nature of the innocent to be forever uncontained, without a barrier or limitation. Thus is purity not of the body. Nor can it be found where limitation is. The body can be healed by its effects, which are as limitless as is itself."

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, the mind heals the body because it has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness because it cannot conceive of attacking anyone or anything. I said before that illness is a form of magic. It might be better to say that it is a form of magical solution."

"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."

"Always in sickness does the Son of God attempt to make himself his cause, and not allow himself to be his Father's Son."

"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."

"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. Blasphemy, then, is SELF-destructive, not God destructive. It means that you are willing NOT to know yourself, IN ORDER to be sick."

"The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. 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. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your (physical) healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"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."

"Health is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it remains without conviction. Only when DEMONSTRATED has it BEEN proved, and MUST compel belief. No-one is healed through double messages. If you wish ONLY to be healed, you heal. Your single PURPOSE makes this possible."

"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. Yet the teacher of God does not make this decision alone. To do that would be to give the body another purpose from the one that keeps it holy. God's Voice will tell him when he has fulfilled his role, just as It tells him what his function is. He does not suffer either in going or remaining. Sickness is now impossible to him."

"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."

"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."

And NOT miracles.... "All material means which man accepts as remedies for bodily ills are simply restatements of magic principles. It was the first level of the error to believe that the body created its own illness. Thereafter, it is a second mis-step to attempt to heal it through non-creative agents." (Miracles are thought creations, creative agents).

Mind in its natural state, experiences a sense of safety. This safety is based on the fact that the mind doesn't see itself as at the effect of anything external. It does not believe in being caused against its will. It does not have backwards/false perception. It also does not position itself as a victim or at the effect of the world.

This produces a kind of internally supported strength, in which the mind is not undermining itself and it recognizes it has nothing to fear. It feels "self contained", whole, and undivided. This internal unity is experienced as protection and as immortality. The mind doesn't see itself as vulnerable to anything because it recognizes it cannot be attacked or threatened.

Reality cannot be attacked because reality is permanent truth. It is inherently immortal and exists forever. Anything real, which includes you and your mind, has eternal life. Permanence is your natural condition. And the mind in its sane state is in touch with this permanence, and so recognizes it can never be altered by anything, rendering it invulnerable.

If the mind decides to move into ego, it is moving into positioning itself as a victim. It begins to see itself as at the effect of external forces, and made to suffer against its will. Perception reverses because cause is seen as coming from the world towards the self rather than the other way around. And this brings with it all manner of threat and danger, based on the idea that causes outside of you can do something to you against your will.

This then results in a change in the internal experience of the sense of safety and invulnerability. It's as though the mind "breaks open" its shell of protection, and develops a "wound". The wound seems open and bleeding, psychologically. This wounded part of the mind feels exposed, raw, accessible, attackable and threatened.

When this happens you feel like you are vulnerable. It's as though you open up a doorway and take off your protective armor, and now it seems possible that the things of the world can come into you, past your boundaries, and directly attack the core of your being. This is because your sense of identity has shifted from immortal spirit to the mortal body.

Your sense of self sees itself as self conscious and descended onto the battlefield, identified with a body, viewing itself as frail and weak and limited and incapable, and it now seems as if others have power over you. This produces a feeling like your insides are opening up, have become brittle and thin. And you'll feel like people have direct access to who and what you are as an attackable thing.

This feeling of being vulnerable to attack, living in fear, feels like being very exposed and unsafe. It's as though you, who are supposed to be walking around inside a perfect suit of protection, have lost your armor and are now a weak helpless thing that anyone can attack at will. This makes you afraid and threatened and there is a constant feeling of dread and stress. And the ego is in this state all the time.

You may also find that you then conflict with someone or they try to attack you. Because of your identification with that which can be attacked, as a victim, your mind actually believes in horizontal cause and effect. Out of the exposed vulnerable wound in the mind, you form a kind of psychological artificial "bridge" to the other person. Or maybe better described as a "bond" or "cords of fear." It's as if by believing that the other person is the cause of you, you are "tied to" their will power, causally and psychologically.

By believing that someone else has power to attack and affect you, your mind sees itself as being controlled by, caused by, influenced by, some external power. And that produces a sense that you are being tossed around on the waves. You'll try to forget about the encounter but you won't be able to drop it, because you haven't forgiven it. And fear thoughts about it will keep being generated by your mind in response to the perceptual belief that you are being attacked by them.

These fear cords will feel like areas of exposure within yourself, as though you have opened up a direct line to the person and they can cross that bridge and attack your insides directly. By hanging onto the belief in their ability to cause you, you maintain this bridge across which flows attack and keeps you in a constant state of fear.

These bridges of fear are dismantled through a correction process of forgiveness, in which you recognize and affirm that you are NOT at the effect of that person. They are not causing you, cannot attack you, have no power over you, and are not guilty of anything. This actually psychologically dismantles these horizontal cause-effect fear cords and you can feel them disappearing or "closing off".

The removal of this psychological "funnel of attack" seems to "close off" your mind to this idea of external causes. It's like sealing up a wound or fixing a mental leak. And as the sense of exposure and threat is closed up, the closing up feels like the formation of a barrier of protection. And then you feel safer because you are no longer "bleeding mind", and no longer believe that something external has direct access to your innermost self.

Through forgiveness then, the undoing of false beliefs in being caused by things outside of you, you gradually "close up" the exposed wounds, and the mind stops "bulging out" and returns to a "deflated" state, where you feel much safer and more protected. Fear diminishes and you feel like external things can no longer come into you. They can't access you because you are not on the battlefield, you are not an illusion or a body or an attackable thing.

Eventually with practice this should result in a "sealing up" of those psychological woulds, breaking down of those bridges of horizontal causation, and a growing sense of being surrounded by naturally protective walls of truth. Invulnerability increases and you feel more like you are "out of reach" of illusory attacks. You no longer believe the world CAN do anything to you, not even death or sickness.

You sort of, reabsorb into heaven, into God's womb, into a deeply immersive sense of safety, protection, harmlessness, integration, wholeness, peace and fearlessness. Because in spirit identification, in truth, you are actually unattackable and immortal. You resume your sense of being invulnerable because you see yourself as innocent and harmless. And the more you can feel this sense of innocence and safety, the less you feel like the world can even get anywhere near to what you are. And where there is perfect safety there is perfect peace.

"As long as belief in God and His Kingdom is assailed by ANY doubts in your minds, His perfect Accomplishment is NOT apparent to you. This is why you MUST be vigilant ON GOD'S BEHALF."

"It is only your awareness that NEEDS protection, because your BEING cannot be assailed. But a real sense of being CANNOT be yours while you are doubtful of what you ARE. THIS IS WHY VIGILANCE IS ESSENTIAL. Doubts ABOUT being MUST not enter your mind, or you CANNOT know what you are with certainty."

"The Kingdom is perfectly united and perfectly protected, and the ego will not prevail against it. Amen"

"Now are the lilies of his innocence untouched by guilt, and perfectly protected from the cold chill of fear and withering blight of sin alike."

"You always choose between your weakness and the strength of Christ in you."

"The strength of the Soul leaves no room for intrusions."

"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. Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself: "I have forgotten what I really am, For I mistook my body for myself. Sickness is a defence against the truth, But I am not a body. And my mind Cannot attack. So I can not be sick."

"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 power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. 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."

When your mind is filled with love, it projects a perfectly healed body, free of pain, symptoms of sickness, suffering, damage of any kind. And it especially does not produce death. This healthy body is a symbol in the dream, pointing towards innocence and representing a sign that attack has not occurred. It teaches anyone who looks upon it that they must be innocent, because the absence of harm of any kind in this body image proves their sins have not produced effects. This weakens your brother's belief in his own sinfulness and facilitates healing.

"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."

When your mind is not filled with love, you are unloving towards yourself and towards your brother simultaneously. This attack is an attempt to create a gap of separation that comes between you. The body itself represents this gap and symbolizes the attack. It is the wall that you use to try to demonstrate that you are separate, as a separation device.

Having used the body for attack, the body itself now depicts your attitude towards yourself and others, which is a sick attitude of attack, thus showing up as what the world terms sickness, symptoms, damage and physical suffering. This body image now symbolizes death, and it does not point towards or represent innocence and life any more. It instead points away from it and accuses your brother of having produced effects in you, proving to him that he must be a sinner. This strengthens his belief that he is a sinner and imprisons him further, rather than healing him. It is an attack.

"For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies ARE accusers. They stand firmly in the way of trust and peace, proclaiming that the frail can HAVE no trust, and that the damaged HAVE no grounds for peace. Who has been injured BY his brother, and could love and trust him still? He HAS attacked, and will attack again. Protect him not, because your damaged body shows that you must be protected FROM him. To forgive may be an act of charity, but NOT his due. He may be PITIED for his guilt, but NOT exonerated. And if you forgive him his transgressions, you but ADD to all the guilt that he has really earned."

"Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of ANYTHING, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son. You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell."

"Sickness is but a "little" death; a form of vengeance not yet total. Yet it speaks with certainty for what it represents. The bleak and bitter picture you have sent your brother, YOU have looked upon in grief. And everything that it has shown to him have you believed, BECAUSE it witnessed to the guilt in him, which you perceived and loved."

"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."

"The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."

In order to thereby exonerate both your brother and yourself, and to prove and demonstrate with absolute conviction that forgiveness has truly occurred, in which there is no sin and therefore no effects of attack, the effects themselves must be removed from the body. The body HAS TO BE HEALED. It must be restored to a condition that it was in prior to the attack, and it must only teach and symbolize life and innocence.

If it is kept with conditions of sickness or damage or broken malfunctioning parts, the body remains an accuser. And because the body is proving and teaching and symbolizing sin and attack, it proves that your mind is not TRULY forgiving your brother and yourself. If you were to truly be healed, on the mental level, your body would be healed also.

"The mind, being sane, heals the body."

"A broken body is PROOF the mind has NOT been healed."

The fact is that if sickness or damage remain in the body "after forgiveness", the mind DID NOT complete the forgiveness. The forgiveness MUST bring healing to the body image also, so that it can symbolize and teach and depict a representation of, and point towards, innocence, harmlessness, healing and wholeness. If the body stays damaged, it continues to teach your brother of his sinfulness and does not heal him, and therefore proves that you also are not healed.

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing 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."

"Show THIS 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 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."

The final result of forgiveness MUST BE that not only is your brother's mind healed, AND his body is healed of anything you did to him, but also that your mind is healed, AND your body is healed of anything you did to it. Until that occurs, forgiveness has not been completed and the mind is still sick.

"For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"The Holy Spirit's picture changes not the body into something it is not. It only takes away from it ALL signs of accusation and of blamefulness."

If you do not PROVE that your BELIEVE that health and wholeness and healing and life and harmlessnes are the ONLY TRUTH, and you fail to DEMONSTRATE it with your body, by healing the body of all signs and symptoms of sickness, all disease, all damage, then your belief is UNATTESTED and WITHOUT CONVICTION. You have not put your money where your mouth is and you are lying, because the only way for the body to BE in a state of sickness if for you to MAINTAIN ATTACK, without which the body could not stay sick. The body MUST be healed in order for your mind's healing to be complete, because they are intimately related.

"Health (physical health) is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it remains without conviction. Only when DEMONSTRATED has it BEEN proved, and MUST compel belief."

When the body is healed and is no longer sick, it now COMPELS BELIEF in another that they must be innocent. It has a healing, teaching power. It is a demonstration of miracles. "The mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this."

The signs of accusation and blame are the physical symptoms. They will be taken away by the Holy Spirit, if you will let him. So that he can restore the body to the picture that HE WANTS IT TO SHOW, to teach the healing that HE wants to use it to teach. The picture of innocence. The picture of immortality.

"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."

This is what you must USE the body for, within this dream, WHILE you have one, before you disappear off to awareness of Heaven. When you are a teacher of God, fulfilling a function of "awareness of dreaming", and using the body only for communication (which is healing), the body must be healed and it must not show any sign of damage or attack or effects or consequences of sin or guilt in any way. To do so is an attempt to teach two things at once: 1) healing is true, 2) attack is true. And through such a demonstration no-one can learn anything because it is contradictory. The body is now showing a different PROOF than the person is CLAIMING.

"No-one is healed through double messages. If you wish ONLY to be healed, you heal. Your single PURPOSE makes this possible."

Jesus is black and white about this. Either you heal TOTALLY on ALL LEVELS - mind, emotions, body, OR the healing is not complete.

Sick bodies and dead bodies are not part of the aim of A Course in Miracles and are not something that Teachers of God are supposed to teach or demonstrate to others, or themselves. You are only to demonstrate symbols of LIFE and immortality through the body, so that it can become a sign of life and a witness and testimony to healing and harmlessness. Sickness and death of the body are a failure to accomplish this, and a dream of death cannot be left by death only by truth, which is first approached through mental and physical health. The happy dream must entail a healed body as well as a healed mind, not merely a state of mental "transcendence" of sickness that keeps the body sick and continues to teach death.

"Only the mind and body need atonement."

"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."

Summarized in this classic statement - the CENTRAL LESSON, from the manual for teachers:

"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. Yet the teacher of God does not make this decision alone. To do that would be to give the body another purpose from the one that keeps it holy.God's Voice will tell him when he has fulfilled his role, just as It tells him what his function is.He does not suffer either in going or remaining. Sickness is now impossible to him.

Oneness and sickness cannot coexist."

And this classic from "sickness is a defense against the truth":

"Now is the body healed because the source of sickness has been opened to relief." ... "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."

In A Course in Miracles, Jesus says that this world - Earth - is upside down, back to front, and inside out. Perhaps we should look at how this is the case, to realize just how OPPOSITE Earth is to heaven in its nature.

"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. In Heaven"

In this world, there is saying that "change is life, stagnation is death". You can find plenty of examples of this in what we call "nature".

For example when water stops moving and becomes still, it stagnates. Oxygen stops exchanging at the surface and the water becomes toxic. It can then become host to numerous bacterias and other nasty things. It begins to smell awful and would be dangerous to drink.

It seems then that movement of the water is life, because when it moves the oxygen can exchange and the water becomes infused with it. The oxygen in the water can then seem to support life, such as fish and aquatic plants. So long as the water keeps flowing, impurities are flushed away and the water remains relatively healthy. So it seems that in this world, the idea of "stillness" is equated physically with DEATH, and "movement" is equated with LIFE.

However, in heaven's reality, this is TOTALLY OPPOSITE. In truth, stillness is in fact life, because it means that there is no change, and therefore there is no end to the life, and life becomes immortal. Real life is eternal life. Life which never depletes or runs out or becomes toxic. Its stillness is its peace, and its peace is guarantee of its health. In fact life and health are now equated with what the world would call "stagnation".

From that view, what we would think of as "change" is in fact evidence of DEATH. Time is death, because it attempts to bring an END to everything. Anything that changes can suffer and die, and cannot be immortal. And so anything which seems to be born, to grow, to age and to die, is really NOT eternal life, and is NOT peace, and is NOT reality. This is the truthful perspective on this world, which recognizes that only CHANGELESSNESS is life, and therefore stillness is life, and change is 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."

"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."

So if you look at it, the physical world is set up to be completely backwards in its functioning. The laws of physics are totally upside down and the REVERSE of God's laws. The laws of "nature", or what we think of as "natural" in the world, is ACTUALLY completely unnatural. And it could not be MORE unnatural.

"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."

If you think about it, in the physical world, when you move towards stillness, it seems that you will move towards death. If you stop breathing, your body may die. Indeed, it seems to prove out that if you exercise more and are more physically active, moving and changing, this seems to be "good for your health". So now health is equated with CHANGE, instead of with stillness. And if you were to become sedentary and not move much, it is proven to indicate that your health will be worse. And indeed we seem to refer to "dead bodies" or "lifelessness" as a complete lack of motion.

But a complete lack of motion is GOD. Total stillness is the nature of reality. NOT change. NOT movement. NOT constant activities. So if the world has kind of "sign posts" pointing in a direction that the ego thinks you should be going, its signposts POINT AWAY from stillness. It suggests to you even biologically that you should move towards activity and away from motionlessness. And that if you were to move towards PHYSICAL PEACE, you are in fact moving towards DEATH. This is why some people think that dead bodies are "resting peacefully", which is utterly nonsense.

"Rest in peace" is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because rest comes from waking, not from sleeping. Sleep is withdrawing; waking is JOINING."

So here for example Jesus clarifies that REAL rest, real peacefulness, actually results from spiritual awakening in which you are awake and alert, NOT from sleeping or being unconscious. But the physical world would suggest that you "get some rest" when you are physically inactive, when you are LOSING consciousness, and when you are NOT awake. This is completely backwards from God's truth.

The more you look at this the more examples you will find, indicating that the PHYSICAL NATURE of planet earth, not even considering any kind of perception or interpretation of it - just its physical functioning and behaviors and ways, is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the truth of reality and to the nature of the Kingdom of God. This is because Earth is in fact TOTALLY OPPOSITE in its NATURE to God's creation. And because it is totally opposite, it cannot BE God's creation.

"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 statement literally states that Earth is opposite to heaven in EVERY way. And I could really go on at considerable length describing the WAYS that earth is nothing like heaven. This is not to reject the part of ACIM that says earth can potentially REFLECT heaven, in some kind of neutral way, but its fundamental functioning, the way the system is set up, the kinds of things which happen when you are active or inactive, etc, all point to the "laws of nature" of the physical planet being BACKWARDS.

There are similar things you can notice about guilt. You see the ego suggests that you should not look within because it says that if you do, you will approach the very thing you do not want. That if you look within you will find guilt and sin. And so as you begin to look within, guilt and sin seem to come into your awareness and the ego uses this to steer you AWAY from that direction. It instead points all its arrows outward away from yourself, away from God, and away from ever connecting with the Holy Spirit in your mind. All of its DIRECTIONS run CONTRARY to what is actually true.

"Do not be afraid to look within. The ego tells you all is black with guilt within you, and bids you NOT TO LOOK. Instead, it bids you look upon your brothers, AND SEE THE GUILT IN THEM."

It's similar in PHYSICAL terms in that as you approach things in the world which might symbolize becoming closer to reality, to peace, to freedom and so on, the more the physical world itself screams at you "go the other way". Or even, to suggest that if you keep going in this direction, you are going in completely the WRONG direction, and WILL NOT FIND what you're looking for. This is a DECOY. It is how spacetime is set up to give you constant messages that say "you're going the wrong way" when you are in fact going the right way, and vice versa. So that you are always moving AWAY from the truth.

"Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success." BACKWARDNESS IS BUILT INTO THE LAWS OF PHYSICS! THE WORLD'S NATURE IS INSIDE OUT!

The physical world therefore is in fact, so to speak, "inside out". It is a nothing pretending to be something. It is an unreality pretending to be real. It has a nature that could not be MORE unlike heaven. It makes it look like peace is associated with DYING and not with living. It steers you AWAY from stillness. And at every turn it deceives you and points you towards the very opposite of what you're looking for. It's all part of "seek and do not find."

Another example is outer space for example. In heaven, everything is light. Light is everywhere. In spacetime, however, the light has been reduced down, limited, withdrawn, condensed, SO MUCH, that all that's left are tiny little pin-pricks of light in the night sky. As though to suggest that MOST of the universe IS COMPLETELY EMPTY. That "space" itself is a LACK OF light and a lack of substance. And that all that remains of the presence of anything are tiny little specks we call atoms, in tiny little clusters, separated by billions of light years.

And then we look to the little bits of material that remain and we call it the presence of a very big planet, when in fact it is practically nothing in the big picture. It's the REMAINS of what is LEFT OVER when ALMOST EVERYTHING Has been removed. And now the presence of something is no longer recognized as the LACK OF something. The world is the ABSENCE OF a world. It is a LACK OF everywhereness. It is the opposite to heaven.

We can of course repurpose the world and the body and the weird backwards laws of physics, to use them to point in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION from which they naturally point. This is what is required in order TO use them for a higher purpose. Something which was made to KILL has to be used to support life. Something which points AWAY from God has to be used to point towards him.

"As sight was made to lead away from truth, it can be redirected." "Though it was made to fence him into hell without escape, yet has the goal of Heaven been exchanged for the pursuit of hell. The Son of God extends his hand to reach his brother, and to help him walk along the road with him. Now is the body holy. Now it serves to heal the mind that it was made to kill."

"For the body IS a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin, and it was MADE to limit the UNlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical; for it was made to limit YOU."

"Let not the world deceive you. It was made to be deception."

It is only possible for the Holy Spirit to repurpose everything in the world, PRECISELY BECAUSE everything in the world moving in the WRONG DIRECTION. And so it HAS to be used in an alternative and totally OPPOSITE way to what it was originally intended. For example the body was made to KILL the son of God. It is a device for SEPARATION, to reinforce impriosnment and keep minds from joining. But the Holy Spirit puts its to use by using it for a purpose TOTALLY OPPOSITE TO ITS NATURE.

When we do this, it does not CHANGE the nature of the things we made. It does not stop the world spinning, or does not make the clouds go away, it does not change the fact that dead bodies are motionless and living bodies are moving. It does not change the fact that water stagnates when it doesn't flow. But it looks at it from a different vantage point which INTERPRETS these things as not MEANING what they originally were meant to mean. Or to USE them in an OPPOSITE WAY to their own inherent nature.

Using something for an alternative purpose than it was DESIGNED TO FUNCTION, does not CHANGE its function. It just works within its limits and uses it as best as possible towards a different GOAL. Such as if you were to grow flowers in a machine gun. Or use what the ego made as an attack on God's children (bodies) to help them to LEAVE bodies permanently. That's the whole point. Everything we made as an attack on God is now being used for a higher purpose, which runs AGAINST its inherent nature, and uses it to undo itself. This is only possible BECAUSE the world IS back to front.

As heaven becomes reflected in the world, it does not change the fact that the world is still running IN REVERSE. And even the illusion of time is actually secretly an attempt to move INTO THE PAST, not the future. The world can reflect heaven when looked at in a heavenly way but NOT in terms of ITS FUNCTIONING. It will still always operate in the same way, with the same physics. Decomposed decayed rotten bodies will still appear to symbolize peace and stillness while objects in motion will seem to have energy, vitality and life. And all of this is STILL going to be backwards if you look upon it with love.

It needs to be more clear and more widely understood the sheer EXTENT of the ways in which this world - space and time - planet earth - all galaxies - all physicality - is COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to heaven's nature. They are not AT ALL alike. And only by recognizing this can you realize that the world was made to BE opposite to God. And that is why it is NOT GOD'S CREATION, AND WILL END. We can forgive the world BECAUSE it is a picture of crucifixion, but this will not stop it BEING a system of death. Hell becomes interpreted in a heavenly way, IN ORDER TO end it.

The world is kind of like a "rendering" of a world, a picture or image. It's not really a place with actual bodies and objects. It's pictures of them. Three-dimensional animated pictures. These images are projected by the mind as it "draws" the world.

Since the body and other objects are just pictures, they can be changed by the thing which is projecting the pictures, which is the mind. The mind is unlimited in its power to do this.

Within the "scene" that the pictures produce, such as an environment or a room or place, it may SEEM as though, based just on the pictures alone, that there are certain laws in place. We call it the laws of physics, the seeming rules or behaviors or limited ways in which the pictures in the scene can interact with each other. The limited restrictions which WE as its unlimited authors have placed upon it.

And then we might be convinced by these laws and think of them as what is "running" the environment, governing what happens and what is possible. But these are secondary artificial laws. They are in fact just more images of laws. And they too are being projected and rendered by the mind. By the movie-maker.

What you therefore need to realize is that the world is just an effect and is not really a cause, and the causes or laws of operation within it are not really the laws that produce the world. They are not really what governs what shows up in the world. They only seem to describe some of the inner workings of the picture itself, but they don't define how the picture really gets there.

The mind is actually the dreamer of the world and is responsible for the making of the world. It is projecting the world out using its unlimited power. It is making the planet and the bodies that seem to inhabit it. It is responsible for all the image-making.

When you see the picture of a world and you are deceived by it, because it is in fact an ILLUSION of a world, you will fall for the belief that you are bound by its laws and forced to operate entirely within what it says is possible. But this is deception and is not true at all. You are the CAUSE of the world, not its effect, and it has no power over you.

As a miracle worker, with a miraculous powerful mind, you are actually able to change the world, the body, the objects, by electing what the dream will contain. By choosing what images you will project. You actually override and re-write and modify the dream images with your mind. You can therefore "steer" the dream in any direction you so please, completely ignorant of any laws that the pictures themselves might suggest would limit what's possible.

This means that you are actually OPERATING the dream from outside of the dream itself. You are able to modify it at will. You can take objects out of it, and put objects into it. It will appear to the eyes in the dream world that objects are just "miraculously" appearing and disappearing out of nowhere, in violation of the laws of physics. But the mind can do this.

It's sort of similar to in "The Matrix" movies where, when the agents are tracking down the rebels they make a sudden "adjustment" to the matrix, sort of from outside of the matrix, and it causes what appear to be sudden physical changes in the environment. What once was a door becomes a brick wall. Exits are suddenly closed off and so on. The "black cat" walking past twice, a sign of deja-vu, hints to them that someone has tampered with the matrix itself, as though hacking the world from the outside.

As our minds awaken and become aware that the world is our dream, that we are dreaming it, and therefore our mind is actually producing the PICTURES in the environment, we also then realize that we can put whatever pictures there that we want. We have total power OVER the dream world. Nothing in it can do anything without our consent and anything we decide to cause to happen must happen. This is why you are ruler of the universe.

You are like the hand of God. You are the operator outside of the dream playing with chess pieces, moving things around, shuffling the scenery using back-door access. You have access to the 'code' that writes the images. You can rewrite the planet. You can modify bodies. You can switch objects out. You can transform anything into anything, from the outside. You pull all the strings. You are the puppet master.

This is what you get to when you are being miracle-minded, because miracle-mindedness means you are aware that this is nothing but a dream your mind is producing. You get in touch with what many people avoid, which is the fact that you are VERY POWERFUL. The mind is extremely powerful and can produce entire worlds, so moving a mountain from one place to another is in fact "easy" for such a power.

Jesus demonstrated that he had his hands on the controls and was able to modify the dream from its SOURCE, once removed from the seeming laws of the world. He showed that the law of gravity didn't mean anything to someone who can switch the laws OFF. He showed that objects were not locked into certain forms because the mind that was PICTURING the forms was able to change what it wanted to see. He showed therefore also that what we call sickness and death could easily be reversed and modified by mind-power alone.

To those in the dream, who think that the dream is reality, and who think it has causal power over them, which causes them to believe they are bound by its illusory laws and limitations, such changes are perceived as "miraculous". Quite literally miracles - physical reality distorting/violating miracles. Adjustments to "the matrix" suddenly show up as what they would think of as "impossible" changes. Changes which violate the seeming laws of reality as this world knows it.

"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 you are able to do TO this world, is a result of the recognition that you are not OF this world, OR in it. You are not really a part OF the dream. You are not a body. This is why learning that you are the DREAMER, that you are mind/spirit, is essentially in order to wake up FROM the dream and realize that you are the one making the world.

"Learning must lead BEYOND the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it."

You bring and use the power of God from outside spacetime, the power of heaven. You can get behind the scenes of the physical bubble of illusory laws and break ALL the laws. Walking on water is nothing for such a power. Calming storms, raising the dead, walking through walls, making food appear out of nowhere, preventing wars, erasing wounds, absolutely anything you can imagine to modify the world's pictures you can do it. There is nothing that your holiness cannot do.

You are under no laws but God's. You are under the laws of heaven. You are the dreamer and maker of the world of images. Spacetime is entirely RUN BY YOU. You are the ruler of the universe. "You have the power to dominate everything you see merely by recognizing what you are." You have power OVER DEATH because you can literally rewrite the body.

You can even if you so will cause the body to be unattackable. You can override anything that does seem to attack it by simply producing another body. You are indestructible and you can make the images of your dream appear to symbolize this. You can therefore make the body incapable of being sick or dying because you can maintain it indefinitely with supernatural mind-power. You can force it to remain in a state of showing up as unharmed and undamaged, making it IMPOSSIBLE for sickness or death to change it.

The world itself does not really have ANY POWER to change you or the body, if you do not wish it. It does not have the power to make you sick or to kill you. If you so will, you can hold the body in a state of suspended animation and semi-permanent symbolic perfection for as long as you see fit. You can force it to maintain perfect health even if the world is attempting to sicken it, and nothing will happen to it. What can possibly change an IMAGE which is being constantly RE-PROJECTED by a projector? You can do nothing to it within the projection.

"It is the dream in which the body functions perfectly, having no function except communication."

"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." "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."

Realize then that the reason you are SO POWERFUL and SO MIRACULOUS and you have total power OVER everything in spacetime, is because you are not IN it. You are not part of a dream. You are not an EFFECT of dreaming. You are totally causal. God has given you total absolute power over everything. You are unlimited in your power because your power is shared with him and inherited from him. There is literally nothing you cannot do, and moving mountains is MINOR.

All this entails is the proper recognition that you are the cause of the world, and not the opposite. You are not affected BY it whatsoever because YOU are the one who is DOING it. You are putting the world there. Projection makes perception. Perception is a result not a cause. What you project can be changed, producing a different world. By being totally responsible for CAUSATION and not being in any way identified with the EFFECTS you have produced, including the body, you become freed-up to manipulate the dream as much as you wish.

Now, in the big picture of course the point of all this isn't that you just carry on dreaming and stay in the dream playing with your miraculous (not magical) power. The main purpose is to help everyone in the sonship to be restored TO this power so that everyone realizes THEY TOO are dreaming the world. And in this awakening FROM the backwards false perception of the world, they can be restored to sanity and to EMPOWERMENT, returning to their permanently miraculous nature. And when everyone becomes lucid to the fact of dreaming, the dream can be ended.

Meanwhile, in time, and in terms of where the world is at now, we can use this miraculous power to serve God's will and to help others. It can be used to alleviate suffering. It can be used as a demonstration to PROVE to the minds of those willing, that they are NOT bound by the laws of this world. That they are not an effect of the dream, but that it is possible to have power OVER everything they were ever a victim of. This is why "miracles are teaching devices", they are capable of showing people they are under no laws but God's and have the power to set themselves and others free from bondage.

The proper use of miracles in this world is therefore for purposes of helping everyone to wake up, alleviating unnecessary burdens, showing the power of God, teaching people what the real laws of God are, showing them that they are not stuck and limited and small, and producing sometimes spectacular demonstrations of what is really possible as sons of God.

When Jesus performed his miracles sometimes it was to teach a lesson in this regard, and sometimes to simply be compassionate and kind to help those who were in need, starving and lacking, in pain and misery. And sometimes that meant raising the dead and healing the sick. Sometimes it means overriding body states. Sometimes it meant projecting different bodies entirely. And sometimes it meant demonstrating that the mind had total power over the crucifixion and was utterly unaffected by what appeared to be physical destruction.

You have total power over this world because you are not OF this world or bound by it in any way. We are to become teachers of God and masters of the universe. We are unlimited in our power and freedom. And there is literally nothing our holiness cannot do here. You can wipe away all suffering and heal all sickness and correct all minds and forgive all sins. You have the AUTHORITY OF CHRIST with which to command anything, and nothing can prevail against you. You made this world, and now you must unmake it.

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

"It is the witness to your state of mind, the OUTSIDE picture of an INWARD condition."

"YOU MADE THIS UP. It is a picture of what you think YOU are; of how you SEE yourself."

"Your picture of the world can only mirror what is within."

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing. You think you think them, and so you think you see them. This is how your "seeing" was made. This is the function you have given your body's eyes. It is not seeing. It is image-making. It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions."

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.

What does it mean that you are not the body? It's not what you think.

What you are, is whole, within. Like you are this little orb of light which contains the whole of God.

As a whole self, you increase by extending and creating.

When the separation idea was introduced, it was suggested that there was something separate from you or outside of you, or indeed that you were separate and outside of yourself.

This was the idea of sin, and it ultimately led to the invention of the body through OUTWARD PROJECTION FROM THE MIND. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards."

The body then is sort of this "shell", really an IDEA, which you have surrounded yourself with as a result of this belief that a) you are outside of yourself and b) there is something separate from your inner self.

It has thus formed a picture which seems to surround and enclose you. This is why when there is a body showing up it seems like you are "inside" it.

But it also then simultaneously seems as if you "are" the body and the stuff inside you is invisible and not yourself. This leads you to build a "bodily identity", to be identified with the body. In more extreme cases the outer bodily self seems to be the ONLY self, and the inner self is very hidden. We need to reverse that.

So the part of your mind that you split off and think of as separate from your inner self, forms a fake identity composed of a body image, which you now think is yourself.

So what happens when you stop having a split mind?

What is the purpose of saying "I am not a body I am free"?

The purpose is not to deny the body. It is not to identify yourself as being that which is inside the body while the outer bodily image remains either. It is not to disassociate from the body. It is not to escape the body. And it is not to think of yourself as "only mind and not a body."

The state you are meant to be returning to, is a state in which there is no separation in you, there is no sense of something having been split off as outside of you, and therefore of being whole "within" yourself. When you do that, what is going to happen to the body which was "outside you"? How is it going to even show up if there is no part of you that identifies AS IT because there is no part of you which exists outside of your inner self?

IT IS GOING TO DISAPPEAR.

It was only showing up there because your inner self projected it (the idea of sin projected outward) and it is only showing up because part of you believed that you were outside of yourself.

Your sense of identity formed a "bodily identity" or an identification not just with a body but AS a body. You can also think of it as an "external self". And however the mind is relating to its own identity, that is how it shows up. If the mind is thinking that it has separation in it, ie walls, it will materialize a body! And yet if the mind does not believe it has any walls within itself, the body will disappear because the mind is seeing itself as a WHOLENESS, not a split-off self.

This is also correlates to the creation of sickness. When the mind is more strongly believing that it is separated from itself, split in two and part of itself is outside the inner self, this belief in separation attacks yourself and makes you SICK. And that sickness will now manifest IN, or more accurately, is projected outward AS, a sick-looking body, which is really just a mental image of yourself as sick. The less you believe in separation, therefore, the less your mind is split and the less you believe you ARE an external self, the less your body image will show up as sick, and thus sickness will appear to disappear as well, leaving a "holy" and "immortal" body, just prior to its complete disappearance.

When that externalized identity is returned to your true "inner" identity, the "outer" illusory separate self is not there anymore. It's been integrated into the whole of what you are within. So there is no basis for the body. It has no grounds, no function, no purpose, no reason to be there. SO IT DISAPPEARS. The mind is not seeing itself AS one, it does not believe it has a second identity, so it STOPS PROJECTING THE BODY.

The presence of a body is simply a symptom or side-effect of you believing that you are not pure spirit and therefore you have a separate second identity. Identification "with" the body is nothing more than the strength of your belief that you MUST BE a body, because you must be outside of yourself , having gone "out of your mind."

It's not that the body exists on its own and you happen to "come into it" or incarnate into it or that it was there before you arrived or that it will remain after you leave. If you seem to go through that process of discarding bodies, you will reincarnate, because the discarding process (death) is really an attempt to SEVER yourself from yourself. What that means is, you have tried so hard to DISCONNECT your inner self from the part of you which became "outer", the part which identified with being "a body", and so CUT OFF part of yourself and destroyed it. All death occurs to the "projected self", not the inner self. And all death is just a testimony to how much SEPARATION and therefore false identification there was within you. And that mental state REMAINS, and will CAUSE ANOTHER BODY to be desired and projected.

That's what causes all death. Death is the self-attack of the inner self upon the outer self. Or to put it another way, what we think of as "mind" seems to be the inner self only, and we say that this mind-self attacks the body self, but the body self is actually another PART of your mind which is temporarily identified with being an external illusion. So one part of mind is attacking another part of mind. Mind is not just the part of you that is INNER, and it is not just the part of you which is INSIDE the body.

The body IS WITHIN THE MIND and it is an image being thought of, projected, imagined WITHIN the mind as a whole. One part of mind attacks the other and tries to destroy it, and that results in the illusory sickness and death of that other part of mind, but does not heal the desire to attack, and so the mind "makes" another body (reincarnation) and proceeds to attack it again. This will keep on happening until both parts of mind are rejoined as one so that there is no separation, then there will be no more bodies materializing as ideas of sin.

So then having destroyed part of yourself and yet still believing your identity WAS the outer self, your inner self is still projecting and split and MUST manifest another body. And this forms the basis for reincarnation - that you still believe you are a body and must have a body and so this magnetizes you to a body or causes one to materialize. YOU put your body into your mother's womb and YOU grow it and YOU cause it to show up the way it shows up. Sperm and egg coming together does NOT CAUSE bodies to appear. It is an illusion. Mind causes bodies to appear and arranges FAKE JOINING on an ego level (which must be an illusion of joining) to pretend that you are inherited from the dream.

So death is not a way to leave the dream, or to heal separation. It cannot accomplish this because it means that you simply attacked part of yourself with hatred and tried to destroy it and had identified strongly with "being a body" at least in part. The only way out of the dream is NOT THROUGH DEATH. "The dream is not left by death but by truth."

The dream is only left by truth by re-integrating the part of you which you split off and associated with a body, and returning its identity to be identified with the INNER self which remains hidden behind the body or seemingly trapped inside the body invisibly. You do not withdraw FROM the body, you withdraw the body itself. You withdraw belief in BEING a body. You must not try to "separate yourself from the body"!

If you do that all you're doing is adding denial on top of denial. Denial of the body is an unworthy form of denial - that's what this means. If you believe the body exists ON ITS OWN and HAS ITS OWN WILL and you then try to get away from it to "be only mind", you are SEPARATING YOURSELF MORE. You are trying to separate yourself off from the separate self which you already split off from yourself, adding another whole layer of denial and separation. This will make you more sick. The body in a sense should be embraced but only up to the point where you recognize that you are projecting it and therefore can un-project it through its PROPER UNDOING, by reversing your belief in separation. Without a belief in separation, there is no sin, and therefore sin cannot be made flesh and projected outward. No more body.

You withdraw the PROJECTION of the body through re-owning yourself and identifying with Spirit. This does NOT mean that the body exist at the same time as the spirit. It does NOT mean that the body WILL REMAIN once you have shifted identity to being ONLY spirit. It means the body MUST DISAPPEAR. It is only showing up because it is what you believe about your identity and what you think you are. When your mind is no longer believing that you are a body AT ALL and is completely whole and healed and no longer split or divided or separated off, there is no NEED for a body, no BELIEF in a body, no PROJECTION of a body, and your mind will STOP MAKING ONE.

That is when you are free. Not free of a body that carries on existing. Not free through deathin which the body CONTINUES. Not free because you laid the body down to die and then headed on over to God's party. But simply free of MAKING bodies at all. If you want to be free of reincarnation, and free of DEATH, you MUST STOP BELIEVING YOU ARE SEPARATE FROM YOURSELF, which means you must stop believing you are, or need to be, a body. And thus you will stop making bodies and your body will disappear entirely.

Doing this alleviates all signs of sickness and makes the body temporarily invulnerable and useful only as a communication device. Just prior to the body disappearing completely, it becomes a sign of immortality. Jesus writes about this clearly 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."

And here...

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. 2 Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. 3 Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. 4 Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. 5 Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. 6 When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. 7 The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body's condition."

Note that when he says "laid by" here he is not talking about making it die and laying it on the ground and letting it rot while you whiz off to heaven. He means literally, you stop making it, as evidenced by his statements about how he did exactly that.

Jesus already accomplished and demonstrated this through the PROPER UNDOING OF THE BODY through truth and the DISSOLVING of it through spirit identification, not "escape" from it through death or separation or denial or thinking that it still exist OR making it still exist. We are responsible for making ourselves show up as bodies, WE made the body with our mind and can un-make it! We made all sickness, all death, and the body itself. " "You made sickness and death and can therefore abolish both."

Here is what Jesus has to say about this whole process, which ultimately is the completion of the atonement and the RESURRECTION.... and guess what... not just the disappearing of the body, but the disappearing of THE WORLD (this universe), which is only showing up based on the exact same principle of mind believing in separation, and MUST DISAPPEAR when mind has returned to spirit identification.

""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 any time that 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 can not stay without illusion and the last one to be overcome is death. This is the message of the crucifixion; There is no order of difficulties 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 but 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"

Lesson 136, "Sickness is a defense against the truth", contains statements by Jesus which are hard to accept. They seem like extraordinary claims about what sickness is, how it is undone, and the impossibility of a healthy mind producing a sick body. It speaks of immortality, even at a bodily level.

In ACIM, sickness means a belief in separation from God. This applies to the level of the mind and it is in the mind that it is healed. However, the body is being projected by the mind and is "within" the mind, and reflects the mind’s condition. It is an out-picturing of the inward condition.

Every "form" of sickness which shows up in bodies is included in the scope of sickness applying to the mind.

Sickness projects a sick body. Bodies which have forms of sickness, suffering, damage, something broken or missing etc, are expressions of the belief in separation. These things can ONLY show up IF the mind maintains that belief.

Interesting stuff happens to bodies when the mind is healed. Sickness does not stick around on its own, nor is it sustained by the body or by the world. It is solely MAINTAINED by the mind, and so if it is showing up in the body, the mind IS maintaining it, thus believes in separation, thus is not healed. A broken/sick/dead body is PROOF that the mind has not been healed. When the mind IS healed, the body MUST therefore NOT PROVE that sickness is real, and therefore all signs and symptoms of sickness MUST disappear.

Let’s see what Jesus says which is so radical (my emphasis):

— "(Sickness) Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. WHEN THIS IS SEEN, HEALING IS AUTOMATIC. It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear."

So right off the bat, Jesus teaches us that all forms and expressions of sickness (including cancer, stroke, heart problems, broken limbs etc, and death), MUST DISAPPEAR when the purpose of the sickness is recogized. Later Jesus tells us that we make sickness in order to DEFEND ourselves against the truth. But we only keep the sickness so long as it serves this purpose, and when the purpose or "need" for the defense is gone, the sickness MUST disappear.

—"Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole."

Clearly then, sickness attacks and defends us against the truth. This includes all physical symtoms which is how the mind’s sickness shows up. If the mind is attacking the truth, it is also going to attack the body. The body will then become weak and sick. Since sickness is an attack on the truth, it is NOT POSSIBLE for there to be sickness if there is not attack, and it is NOT POSSIBLE to wake up to welcoming the truth without putting the sickness aside. Doing so must make it disappear, otherwise if it remains in any way, it continues to prove the mind is not healed.

Notice also how Jesus describes the mind as trying to twist, distort, make inept, and reduce to split-off parts. This act of the mind is HOW SICKNESS IS MADE. If the mind is TWISTING REALITY, it TWISTS THE BODY. If the mind is distorting reality, it distorts the body as well. Holy Spirit showed me this happening in a sudden vision not long ago, where the mind was literally "twisting" and distorting, like applying a psychic force, towards the body, making the body sick.

Our attempt to attack and change reality, attacks and changes our projected body image as well. We can’t hold a belief in attack in the mind AND keep a picture of a healthy body in the mind at the same time. The body WILL suffer if we attack reality, and if we DO NOT attack reality, the body MUST BE HEALED for the same reason - the mind cannot hold a picture of a sick body in the mind at the same time as believing in health/wholeness/truth.

Here is how ALL SICKNESS AND DEATH is implemented:

—"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, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more."

So yes, Jesus is literally saying, we can ONLY be sick if we DECIDE TO BE SICK. We can only be sick when we misperceive the truth and believe it is attacking us, and that we NEED A DEFENSE to keep us "safe" from it. We will then use separation as a device for trying to put distance, or a gap, between us and God. This puts a gap between us and LIFE. The result is that we cut ourselves off from LIFE. And that means, we just chose to be sick and to die.

Jesus also tells us here that sickness DOES NOT HAPPEN TO US against our will. This mean ALL sickness. And death. Neither sickness nor death can appear AT ALL unless YOU decide to make them appear. That’s quite some responsibility that you have! You MAKE sickness from guilt, as an attack, to make the truth go away, so that you can have an illusion of your EGO being safe. Since sickness does not happen against your will, neither does it HAVE any will of its own, and therefore CANNOT STAY if you will to accept God’s truth.

—"How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth. You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you made one with it. Thus is your "true" identity preserved, and the strange, haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust silenced and stilled. For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be."

Here Jesus is telling us that we attempt to BIND OURSELVES to the body in order to DEFEND ourselves against God/Life. By equating/identifying yourself with the body, you align yourself with the physical and attempt to SHUT OUT the mind. If you can identify yourself with the body, and if the body will then be sick and dead, this is HOW the ego attempts to kill the Son of God.

He also tells us that believing this distortion, which is also a belief in magic, and is also the authority problem, has the capability of bringing about DEATH. All death is a choice. Suicide. There is no accidental death. No-one dies without their own consent. He continues:

—"Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live, but cannot overcome your choice to die. And so the body is more powerful than everlasting life, Heaven more frail than hell, and God's design for the salvation of His Son opposed by a decision stronger than His Will"

"Your choice to die". Hmm. Yes. We CHOOSE it. Which means, it CANNOT HAPPEN if we do not choose it. Death is not caused by ANYTHING except your own mind. Sickness is not caused by ANYTHING except your own mind. Furthermore, sickness and death (which you made, and can abolish), does not continue when you decide NOT to be sick or die. When you decide NOT to be sick or die, SICKNESS AND DEATH CANNOT HAPPEN.

—"You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable cannot change. And what is wholly sinless cannot sin."

So you can pretend to die, if you want. You can pretend to be sick, if you want. But sickness and death are both a dream, not real, and what you really are cannot die. God does NOT SUPPORT SICKNESS AND DEATH in any way. He does not create them, he does not view them in a special way, he does not include them, he does not believe in them. God is ONLY LIFE, not life and death.

Here’s a clincher:

—"Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain where truth has been allowed to enter. And it comes to any mind that would lay down its arms, and cease to play with folly"

Read this and read it again. Sickness (illusions) cannot remain where truth has been allowed to enter. This means, ALL SICKNESS AND DEATH cannot *REMAIN* if the mind chooses to accept the truth. Accepting the atonement, or any act of forgiveness or miracles, MUST undo sickness and death in some way. And that includes at the body level.

Read it again. Truth has a POWER stronger than defenses (sickness, death). When truth’s POWER has entered the mind, sickness and death CANNOT REMAIN. Neither in the mind, nor in the body. NOWHERE. Because truth knows that sickness and death DO NOT EXIST at any level. If you STOP ATTACKING YOURSELF with sickness and death, you will STOP BEING SICK AND DEAD.

—"Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings."

Peace an truth TAKES THE PLACE of the vain imaginings that were "sickness and death". All sickness is imagined, made by the MIND. Stop dreaming it and it will cease to be.

Does the undoing of sickness affect the body? ABSOLUTELY!

—"It (mind) will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey. Now is the body healed, because the source of sickness has been opened to relief."

NOW IS THE BODY HEALED. When the mind heals its belief in sickness, the body MUST HEAL. The SOURCE of the sickness has received relief, and therefore the sickness must "clear up". It must disappear in a MIRACLE.

Now let’s break out the big one.... the IMMORTALITY OF THE BODY:

—"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."

Wowza! The body‘s health is guaranteed, ie it is IMPOSSIBLE for the body to be sick or die. In a state of truth in the mind, SICKNESS IS IMPOSSIBLE. It cannot exist, it cannot stay, it MUST be healed, 100%! You cannot have a sick body and a healthy mind at the same time!!!! This is also supported when Jesus says elsewhere:

"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."

So as Jesus has said here, the state of the body is ALWAYS a direct reflection or correlation to the state of the mind. If mind SEES it as sinful, it becomes SICK, and dies. This accounts for the sole cause of ALL SICKNESS in the entire world. And all death. BUT... IF you SEE IT AS HOLY, it becomes whole, it becomes INVULNERABLE TO ATTACK, it becomes INCAPABLE OF BEING SICK, and IT CANNOT DIE! Another word for that is, IMMORTALITY!

Let’s be clear here, before the controversy takes root, that Jesus also says that at some point this "invulnerable, deathless body", which doesn’t even need food or water (!), will likely at some point be laid aside. When it is not longer USEFUL it will disappear. But this does not mean it will be put down on the ground and made to rot. THAT IS DEATH! The holy body can only be "ended" by DISAPPEARING IT by the power of the mind. Nothing else can end it, and it CANNOT be ended by attack. Attack will merely KEEP it and create more sickness and reincarnation.

So yes, at some point the body can become incapable of being attacked in any way. Sustained by the power of God supernaturally. Eventually we will RECOGNIZE that we are not a body at all, and it has no usefulness, so our TRANSPARENT MIND will extend only transparency (total honesty). This will mean it STOPS PROJECTING A BODY. The body thus disappears into the nothingness from which it came. This is how the dream is left! It is the only exit. Leaving via DEATH is the TOTAL OPPOSITE OF CHOOSING LIFE.

Jesus concludes with a reminder:

—"Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. 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."

Note here that Jesus says we make a body identity which, separately, attacks the body. This gives a different meaning to body identification.

If we believe we are separate from God we will see ourselves as being an illusion, which will show up as an IMAGE - a body. He warns us here to be careful of MAKING OURSELVES SICK, beause our mind literally does have this power over matter/form. Every miracle demonstrates that the mind must be more powerful than the body. Therefore the mind has power over ALL matter.

Hoepfully it is clear from this chapter alone, that we do not NEED to be sick, sickness CANNOT STAY unless we want to KEEP mental illness along with it, when we choose the TRUTH it is *GUARANTEED* that all sickness and death must be UNDONE COMPLETELY, and it is God’s will that we be perfectly happy and healthy even in a body.

No-one needs to suffer. No-one needs to die. The body cannot be sick unless you make it so, and doing so will keep you from God. But choose again, and sickness will vanish before your eyes. All sickness can be reversed. All death can be reversed. There is nothing your holiness cannot do.

Lesson 136, "Sickness is a defense against the truth", contains statements by Jesus which are hard to accept. They seem like extraordinary claims about what sickness is, how it is undone, and the impossibility of a healthy mind producing a sick body. It speaks of immortality, even at a bodily level.

In ACIM, sickness means a belief in separation from God. This applies to the level of the mind and it is in the mind that it is healed. However, the body is being projected by the mind and is "within" the mind, and reflects the mind’s condition. It is an out-picturing of the inward condition.

Every "form" of sickness which shows up in bodies is included in the scope of sickness applying to the mind.

Sickness projects a sick body. Bodies which have forms of sickness, suffering, damage, something broken or missing etc, are expressions of the belief in separation. These things can ONLY show up IF the mind maintains that belief.

Interesting stuff happens to bodies when the mind is healed. Sickness does not stick around on its own, nor is it sustained by the body or by the world. It is solely MAINTAINED by the mind, and so if it is showing up in the body, the mind IS maintaining it, thus believes in separation, thus is not healed. A broken/sick/dead body is PROOF that the mind has not been healed. When the mind IS healed, the body MUST therefore NOT PROVE that sickness is real, and therefore all signs and symptoms of sickness MUST disappear.

Let’s see what Jesus says which is so radical (my emphasis):

— "(Sickness) Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. WHEN THIS IS SEEN, HEALING IS AUTOMATIC. It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear."

So right off the bat, Jesus teaches us that all forms and expressions of sickness (including cancer, stroke, heart problems, broken limbs etc, and death), MUST DISAPPEAR when the purpose of the sickness is recogized. Later Jesus tells us that we make sickness in order to DEFEND ourselves against the truth. But we only keep the sickness so long as it serves this purpose, and when the purpose or "need" for the defense is gone, the sickness MUST disappear.

—"Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole."

Clearly then, sickness attacks and defends us against the truth. This includes all physical symtoms which is how the mind’s sickness shows up. If the mind is attacking the truth, it is also going to attack the body. The body will then become weak and sick. Since sickness is an attack on the truth, it is NOT POSSIBLE for there to be sickness if there is not attack, and it is NOT POSSIBLE to wake up to welcoming the truth without putting the sickness aside. Doing so must make it disappear, otherwise if it remains in any way, it continues to prove the mind is not healed.

Notice also how Jesus describes the mind as trying to twist, distort, make inept, and reduce to split-off parts. This act of the mind is HOW SICKNESS IS MADE. If the mind is TWISTING REALITY, it TWISTS THE BODY. If the mind is distorting reality, it distorts the body as well. Holy Spirit showed me this happening in a sudden vision not long ago, where the mind was literally "twisting" and distorting, like applying a psychic force, towards the body, making the body sick.

Our attempt to attack and change reality, attacks and changes our projected body image as well. We can’t hold a belief in attack in the mind AND keep a picture of a healthy body in the mind at the same time. The body WILL suffer if we attack reality, and if we DO NOT attack reality, the body MUST BE HEALED for the same reason - the mind cannot hold a picture of a sick body in the mind at the same time as believing in health/wholeness/truth.

Here is how ALL SICKNESS AND DEATH is implemented:

—"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, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more."

So yes, Jesus is literally saying, we can ONLY be sick if we DECIDE TO BE SICK. We can only be sick when we misperceive the truth and believe it is attacking us, and that we NEED A DEFENSE to keep us "safe" from it. We will then use separation as a device for trying to put distance, or a gap, between us and God. This puts a gap between us and LIFE. The result is that we cut ourselves off from LIFE. And that means, we just chose to be sick and to die.

Jesus also tells us here that sickness DOES NOT HAPPEN TO US against our will. This mean ALL sickness. And death. Neither sickness nor death can appear AT ALL unless YOU decide to make them appear. That’s quite some responsibility that you have! You MAKE sickness from guilt, as an attack, to make the truth go away, so that you can have an illusion of your EGO being safe. Since sickness does not happen against your will, neither does it HAVE any will of its own, and therefore CANNOT STAY if you will to accept God’s truth.

—"How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth. You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you made one with it. Thus is your "true" identity preserved, and the strange, haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust silenced and stilled. For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be."

Here Jesus is telling us that we attempt to BIND OURSELVES to the body in order to DEFEND ourselves against God/Life. By equating/identifying yourself with the body, you align yourself with the physical and attempt to SHUT OUT the mind. If you can identify yourself with the body, and if the body will then be sick and dead, this is HOW the ego attempts to kill the Son of God.

He also tells us that believing this distortion, which is also a belief in magic, and is also the authority problem, has the capability of bringing about DEATH. All death is a choice. Suicide. There is no accidental death. No-one dies without their own consent. He continues:

—"Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live, but cannot overcome your choice to die. And so the body is more powerful than everlasting life, Heaven more frail than hell, and God's design for the salvation of His Son opposed by a decision stronger than His Will"

"Your choice to die". Hmm. Yes. We CHOOSE it. Which means, it CANNOT HAPPEN if we do not choose it. Death is not caused by ANYTHING except your own mind. Sickness is not caused by ANYTHING except your own mind. Furthermore, sickness and death (which you made, and can abolish), does not continue when you decide NOT to be sick or die. When you decide NOT to be sick or die, SICKNESS AND DEATH CANNOT HAPPEN.

—"You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable cannot change. And what is wholly sinless cannot sin."

So you can pretend to die, if you want. You can pretend to be sick, if you want. But sickness and death are both a dream, not real, and what you really are cannot die. God does NOT SUPPORT SICKNESS AND DEATH in any way. He does not create them, he does not view them in a special way, he does not include them, he does not believe in them. God is ONLY LIFE, not life and death.

Here’s a clincher:

—"Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain where truth has been allowed to enter. And it comes to any mind that would lay down its arms, and cease to play with folly"

Read this and read it again. Sickness (illusions) cannot remain where truth has been allowed to enter. This means, ALL SICKNESS AND DEATH cannot *REMAIN* if the mind chooses to accept the truth. Accepting the atonement, or any act of forgiveness or miracles, MUST undo sickness and death in some way. And that includes at the body level.

Read it again. Truth has a POWER stronger than defenses (sickness, death). When truth’s POWER has entered the mind, sickness and death CANNOT REMAIN. Neither in the mind, nor in the body. NOWHERE. Because truth knows that sickness and death DO NOT EXIST at any level. If you STOP ATTACKING YOURSELF with sickness and death, you will STOP BEING SICK AND DEAD.

—"Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings."

Peace an truth TAKES THE PLACE of the vain imaginings that were "sickness and death". All sickness is imagined, made by the MIND. Stop dreaming it and it will cease to be.

Does the undoing of sickness affect the body? ABSOLUTELY!

—"It (mind) will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey. Now is the body healed, because the source of sickness has been opened to relief."

NOW IS THE BODY HEALED. When the mind heals its belief in sickness, the body MUST HEAL. The SOURCE of the sickness has received relief, and therefore the sickness must "clear up". It must disappear in a MIRACLE.

Now let’s break out the big one.... the IMMORTALITY OF THE BODY:

—"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."

Wowza! The body‘s health is guaranteed, ie it is IMPOSSIBLE for the body to be sick or die. In a state of truth in the mind, SICKNESS IS IMPOSSIBLE. It cannot exist, it cannot stay, it MUST be healed, 100%! You cannot have a sick body and a healthy mind at the same time!!!! This is also supported when Jesus says elsewhere:

"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."

So as Jesus has said here, the state of the body is ALWAYS a direct reflection or correlation to the state of the mind. If mind SEES it as sinful, it becomes SICK, and dies. This accounts for the sole cause of ALL SICKNESS in the entire world. And all death. BUT... IF you SEE IT AS HOLY, it becomes whole, it becomes INVULNERABLE TO ATTACK, it becomes INCAPABLE OF BEING SICK, and IT CANNOT DIE! Another word for that is, IMMORTALITY!

Let’s be clear here, before the controversy takes root, that Jesus also says that at some point this "invulnerable, deathless body", which doesn’t even need food or water (!), will likely at some point be laid aside. When it is not longer USEFUL it will disappear. But this does not mean it will be put down on the ground and made to rot. THAT IS DEATH! The holy body can only be "ended" by DISAPPEARING IT by the power of the mind. Nothing else can end it, and it CANNOT be ended by attack. Attack will merely KEEP it and create more sickness and reincarnation.

So yes, at some point the body can become incapable of being attacked in any way. Sustained by the power of God supernaturally. Eventually we will RECOGNIZE that we are not a body at all, and it has no usefulness, so our TRANSPARENT MIND will extend only transparency (total honesty). This will mean it STOPS PROJECTING A BODY. The body thus disappears into the nothingness from which it came. This is how the dream is left! It is the only exit. Leaving via DEATH is the TOTAL OPPOSITE OF CHOOSING LIFE.

Jesus concludes with a reminder:

—"Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. 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."

Note here that Jesus says we make a body identity which, separately, attacks the body. This gives a different meaning to body identification.

If we believe we are separate from God we will see ourselves as being an illusion, which will show up as an IMAGE - a body. He warns us here to be careful of MAKING OURSELVES SICK, beause our mind literally does have this power over matter/form. Every miracle demonstrates that the mind must be more powerful than the body. Therefore the mind has power over ALL matter.

Hoepfully it is clear from this chapter alone, that we do not NEED to be sick, sickness CANNOT STAY unless we want to KEEP mental illness along with it, when we choose the TRUTH it is *GUARANTEED* that all sickness and death must be UNDONE COMPLETELY, and it is God’s will that we be perfectly happy and healthy even in a body.

No-one needs to suffer. No-one needs to die. The body cannot be sick unless you make it so, and doing so will keep you from God. But choose again, and sickness will vanish before your eyes. All sickness can be reversed. All death can be reversed. There is nothing your holiness cannot do.

"Only salvation can be said to cure."

There is only one problem - the sense of separation from God. God is immortality and permanent health. If you deny God, you are denying life and inducing death. It is ONLY the separation from God which CAUSES ALL SUFFERING, including all forms of sickness and death.

To deny God is to attack your health. Defending yourself against God is an attack thought, attacking your invulnerability. Sickness becomes a defense against the truth (God), made to "protect you from God", but with the actual effect of "protecting you from health." In sickness you are attempting to "save your life" by protecting yourself from life. This is clearly insane and cannot work.

"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."

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt (are mortal)."

"It is your task to heal the sense of separation that has made him sick."

"The problem of separation, which is really the only problem, has already been solved."

There is no other problem. ALL sickness is caused by separating from God. Denying God induces illness. Your mind is the sole cause of all suffering, even death. The ONLY solution is the atonement, which COMPLETELY erases all sense of separation and accepts God as truth. This makes the denial of health impossible, making sickness and death impossible. Atonement cures wholly because it represents WHOLENESS.

"The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness."

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness, because it cannot conceive of attacking anything or anyone."

"Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take. Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. Atonement does not heal the sick (but does result in this), for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. (which heals the sick) And that is cure indeed.

***For sickness now is gone***, with nothing left to which it can return." Atonement is the restoration of your immortality. It makes you utterly invulnerable. You can no longer be sick or die. Nothing can happen against your will. You have no need for defenses because you know you cannot be attacked. Nothing real can be threatened.

"The mind that serves the Spirit is invulnerable."

"Those who accept Atonement, ARE invulnerable."

"You are invulnerable BECAUSE you are guiltless."

"This heals the Separation, and places within man the one defense against all Separation-mind errors which can make him perfectly invulnerable." When you separate from (deny, oppose) God, you block your awareness of the presence of love (life) within you. Seeing lack and being in need, you seek for what is absent, outside of you. This begins "seek and do not find." You will not find it outside because it is inside.

You look for yourself, your love, your life and health, outside of you, where they do not exist. Seeking outside of yourself for this CAUSES sickness and suffering, because it takes you AWAY from God and life, which are WITHIN you. You try to find them where they do not exist, and the more you try the worse you suffer. Seeking for God outside yourself is the avoidance of God within yourself.

"Peace is an attribute ***in YOU. You cannot find it outside.*** All mental illness is some form of EXTERNAL searching. Mental health is INNER peace." Perceiving a lack of love within, you project lack without. This makes a world of lack. Coming from the internal attack on God, it is a projected attack-world. "The world was made as an attack on God." "The world of bodies is the world of sin." "The world is a (projected) picture of the crucifixion of God's son."

This is also a projection of, and a disowning of, causal power. You don't want to admit that YOU CAUSE YOUR OWN SUFFERING - ie you are the one denying health. You imagine that causation is outside of you, and you see yourself as caused BY it. This frames the world as "sinning against you" ie causing you against your will, making you a powerless effect. This sets you up to be a victim, or receiver of the world, which you now "sense" through the body's inputs.

You have given the world, which you are dreaming/hallucinating, all the power it seems to have. You have given YOUR power away in trying to empower it to have power over you. You have given it your causality and will. You think it has your life, and contains your self. And you see it as causing you. It is therefore attacking you. It is your enemy and your savior, because it does things to you.

The world now is seen as a world of sin, in which the world can hurt you. It decides when you will suffer. It decides how you become sick. It decides when you will die and how much pain you will endure. All of this seems to happen against your will from the outside in. Anything the world can do TO you, is against your will, regardless of it seeming to be positive or negative.

You then divide up the world into separate parts to try to "spiritualize" some and "demonize" others. You pick and choose certain aspects of the world to "do things to you" that you prefer. You try to avoid its attacks, while collecting its lovely treasures. You defend against its harsh weather with your little fragile house. You seek for its fancy cars while trying to avoid a crash. You want only the good food not the bad stuff. And so you make a bargain with the world, to try to induce it to "do only good things to you", while avoiding all the bad things. And when it seems to go well, you think you are "living the dream." But you have gained the world, and lost your soul.

"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."

The world is two-faced. The world is self-contradictory. It offers you pain, and offers you salvation from that pain. It hurts you, then offers you healing. It threatens to destroy you, then tries to save you. This is because the world has come from the belief that BOTH heaven and hell exist. That life and death are both possible. And so the world depicts the contradiction of opposites. It seems to partly help, and partly hurt.

As a result, EVERYTHING in the world is not one thing, but two. It is a world of dualities and a double-edged sword. Everything which seems to help, MUST also hurt. Everything which seems to hurt, in some way helps. Snake venom can be a partial medicine. Surgery can kill you. ALL foods have toxicity to them, some worse than others. All medicines exaggerate certain body functions while depressing others. The external manipulation of the body is thus seen as the only sane solution to being externally manipulated.

This is actually inescapable. Anything the world can seem to do to you against your will is MAGIC. All magic is a mixture of attack and defense. To be "affected by the world" is still a state of being victimized and in need, regardless of whether the effects are preferred.

We try to focus ourselves on finding the "least harmful solution" to problems, to minimize the risks, and to skew the picture to make it seem like there are "completely harmless solutions". We have a fictional idea that some things in the world are totally harmless. But the world HAS NO harmless solutions. EVERY one of its solutions is a problem in its own right. Its effects cause more effects.

In fact, the world has a somewhat sinister motive, which can appear to be hidden. It basically wants you dead. Sooner or later. Even if it gives you scraps and hopes and promises, every one of its helping hands is laced with poison. Its every attempt to "make you happy" sets you up for loss and sadness.

Anything it can give to you, it can just as easily take away. Anything you "get" from it, is a deception with a cost. This is because the world was made WITH and FROM the notion of the REJECTION OF LIFE. The world is made of the idea of death, because it came from rejecting immortality. So it cannot actually offer you life. It cannot give you wholeness. And it cannot provide a CURE for anything - or a cure for ITSELF. And being the inducer of death, it will do anything BUT cure death.

"There is a tendency to think the world can offer consolation and escape from problems that its purpose is to keep."

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

"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. ... 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."

Because the world comes from the wish to die, ie the wish to deny God and health, it is driven by a MOTIVE of death. That was the PURPOSE in making it, as an attack upon God and life. Death motivates the world, and everything in the world ultimately drives TOWARD death. It cannot therefore induce immortality, cure you completely, or restore your wholeness. It cannot save you, nor can it give you eternal life. It MUST fail, because it came from the failure to recognize the truth.

"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. No worldly thought or act or feeling has a motivation other than this one. These are the witnesses that are called forth to be believed, and lend conviction to the system they speak for and represent."

"Everything in this world is little, because it is a world made out of littleness, in the strange belief that littleness CAN content you. When you strive for anything in the world, WITH THE BELIEF THAT IT WILL BRING YOU PEACE, you are belittling yourself, and blinding yourself to glory." "There is NOTHING in the world to teach him that the logic of the world is totally insane, and leads to nothing."

"There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."

"There is a light which this world cannot give."

"It means that nothing outside yourself can save you; nothing outside yourself can give you peace. But it also means that nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace, or upset you in any way."

Anything the world "does to you" is magic. Magic is the idea of a cause outside of yourself affecting you against your will. It is the opposite to internally-sourced miracles. This takes the form of anything the world seems to do to harm you, as well as anything the world seems to do to help you.

While you may prefer the "good stuff", having the world "do good things to you" is just as much a state of victimhood. It still focuses on you getting from the outside, what you lack inside, without your insides changing. It's still a state where you WANT the world to do something "to you" against your will, FORCING you to "be happy." This is "forgiveness to destroy", because you seek for the world to be the source of change, rather than yourself.

Since the world attacks and defends, and since its motive is ultimately death, and since it CANNOT induce wholeness or a total cure, ALL of its remedies are AT BEST partial. All of its remedies MUST therefore do the opposite to what they claim to do, as well. They MUST be two-faced and deceptive. If it is to "help you", it MUST also hurt you. There is ALWAYS a price to pay, and it does not help to deny this.

This means that ALL foods have a negative side-effect. There is no such thing as a perfect diet. It means that ALL medicines have harmful side effects. All surgeries have high risks of serious threats to your health. All vaccines INDUCE what they are ultimately trying to avoid. In some cases literally, while in others the form is less obvious.

It may not take the form of a certain vaccine "causing the virus" it was trying to prevent, but the real PURPOSE of a vaccine is to "ward off death", which it CANNOT really do. And in fact it must IN SOME WAY, induce it, to some degree. It MUST induce other symptoms as a result of its "interference". Some of these symptoms may be mild to barely noticeable, while others may be life threatening.

This has nothing to do with the competence of medical workers, or the proficiency of scientists, or the wonders of modern medicine, or the seemingly wonderful "benefits" of an extremely wide range of magical solutions. It would APPEAR that "lives are saved" by such things. Provided you recognize that at the same time, lives were also attacked by such things. There is NEVER a possibility of a perfect total "cure" through ANY magical external means. ONLY atonement can be said to cure completely.

This simply goes back to the fact that the ONLY PROBLEM is the separation from God, which is the sole cause of inducing all sickness, suffering and death. The MIND creates what appear to be viruses and invasions, putting them into the world. The world only then APPEARS to be their source. ONLY by correcting THAT problem, will sickness and death TRULY become impossible. Anything which does not address this ACTUAL problem, will not ultimately ward off death, even if it appears to in the short term.

This is the main problem which ALL magical solutions share. They appear to change the body, BUT NOT the mind. They may make the body seem healthier, but do nothing to fix the dripping tap of death-inducing separation.

There is no pill for "the separation". There is no medication that can induce runion with God. There is no surgery which can cut out the ego. There is no bandaid sufficient enough to heal the wound of the denial of health. And no vaccine can EVER fully guarantee your safety or that of others. It may seem to do SOMETHING, but it cannot do everything.

What that leaves you with is one of two options.

1) Heal the separation from God, accept atonement, receive a complete CURE, and never suffer again. This makes all sickness impossible because you choose to stop causing it, and there is no other cause.

2) Avoid healing the separation, MAINTAIN sickness, choose from a selection of LIMITED and PARTIALLY EFFECTIVE magical treatments which WILL hurt you in some way, and try to live with the consequences.

If you think that you can elect to use magical remedies WITHOUT ill effects, you are in denial. They only seem to do anything BECAUSE of your denial. You might weigh up the seeming risks, look at the manmade "statistics", and decide for yourself (or preferably with God) as to whether to indulge in magic or not. But let's be clear, for your health as well, that any magical solution cannot ONLY heal. It has to also cause some form of harm. It is because you BELIEVE in harm that you think you NEED it in the first place, and this belief works against your health.

Maybe you are willing to accept that, although you cannot honestly be fully at peace about it. No-one who recognizes without denial what magical solutions ARE and WHY they exist and WHAT their motive is, can rest in peace. You can resign yourself to a compromise, willing to suffer in some ways to OFFSET the others. But this is how the world worlds. This is the laws of physics and entropy. You become willing to suffer a seemingly "smaller pain" in exchange for the reduction of a larger one. It's a tradeoff. You buy and sell risk in an effort to minimize cost, while always having a cost.

Do not pretend though that medicines or a vaccine or an injection or a pill or a certain kind of food or drink or even any form of salvation - sex, drugs, rock and roll - can undo the separation in the mind and truly prevent illness. Nothing external can fix the INTERNAL problem. The internal problem has CAUSED the external to appear, as an hallucinated world of suffering. And then you are looking to a made-up death-induced world, to save you from death. It cannot ultimately work.

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

This doesn't mean you shouldn't necessarily USE magic IF you need to, want to, or for whatever reason. Sometimes such thing can seem to alleviate suffering. People wouldn't likely take them if they didn't "seem to help". Some people cannot "live" without external support, major medications, physical apparatus, and various other help. Surgery can seem to save lives. But surgery can also induce complications.

"All material means which man accepts as remedies for bodily ills are simply restatements of magic principles. It was the first level of the error to believe that the body created its own illness. Thereafter, it is a second mis-step to attempt to heal it through non-creative agents. It does not follow, however, that the application of these very weak corrective devices are evil."

Your best bet is seeking spiritual guidance from a higher source - the Holy Spirit - Jesus - Angels etc.... as to what to choose. And if that means you have to "settle" for non-miraculous external help, for a non-whole treatment, due to what you are willing to accept right now, so be it. But then keep working on your forgiveness and moving towards the acceptance of atonement as well. Atonement is the GUARANTEE of health forever.

Please don't misinterpret that this post is telling you what to do or not to do, NOR is it trying to paint vaccines in an unfair or negative light or to "put you off". They are what they are. They can only do what they do. If you're okay with that, so be it. It's your free will choice.

There is a lot of resistance to this very radical part of ACIM, so let's look at it even more closely.

When you project sin onto others, you are accusing them of your own sins. You do this to dissociate from the sin, deny it and hide from it. You try to associate it WITH someone else, so that they are responsible for it, and you're let off the hook.

If you think of sin as CAUSE, you are trying to disown causal power and put it outside of yourself, making you AT THE EFFECT of it. You believe someone else is CAUSING you, affecting you. and deciding what you are.

However, this doesn't just happen on a mental level. It also happens PHYSICALLY. The body is a symbol, not an end in itself.

"It is still true that the body has no function of itself. This is because it is NOT an end."

"The body is the symbol of the world."

"The body is the symbol of the ego, as the ego is the symbol of separation."

It is a communication device. It REPRESENTS the MESSAGE that the mind is transmitting to another. It CHANGES FORM to DEPICT a symbol of the kind of relationship you are having with the person! This is because it is a separation device and takes on the form of "how much separation" there is between you and others. And sickness is a greater degree of separation than health, symbolically.

Images of a healthy, unharmed, pain-free, sickness-free body, SYMBOLIZE ideas of eternal life. It represents innocence and the absence of attack. It symbolizes healing and wholeness and harmlessness. It contains no "proof" that sin has ever happened to it, and there is no evidence that anyone has ever attacked it. Therefore it acts as a SYMBOL OF IMMORTALITY.

However, when the mind is sick, having attack thoughts and belief in sin, which starts the ball rolling with projection and scapegoating, this INFLUENCES the picture of the body. The body actually literally CHANGES FORM to a different symbolic form. Forms of sickness, damage, malfunction, attack, pain, deformity, disability, disease, infection, etc, are all attempts to SHOW your brother that you "think ill of him." The body thus because a SYMBOL OF DEATH. Or as Jesus puts it, a "picture of crucifixion."

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God."

"the one you made, out of your split mind, and which IS the symbol of death."

"Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of ANYTHING, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son. You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes (your body in a sick state), that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death (yes PHYSICAL), and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell."

We actually USE the body as a TOOL. It is a communication device. We actually hold it up as a picture for others to look at to REPRESENT what we think and how we relate. When we are in ego, we change the body into forms of sickness. And when we are with the Holy Spirit, we change the body into forms of health. This is because a "healthy body" DOES symbolize life and wholeness and happiness and innocence. Just as sick bodies SYMBOLIZE attack and suffering and pain and death.

Now here's the important part. The reason WHY you make the body sick ON PURPOSE in order to accuse others of sin. When your mind is healthy, cause and effect are in their proper order and you are extending love outward. You see yourself as the cause or dreamer of the dream. However, when you go into ego, your perception becomes backwards, and you start to see cause as OUTSIDE of you, and see yourself as AN EFFECT.

Your own mind does this, and the result is that it starts to "visualize itself" AS an effect. Whatever way it believes someone ELSE is to blame, or someone ELSE is sinful, it also imagines what kind of EFFECTS that would produce in you if it were true. If some person is believed to be attacking you, YOUR mind will DEPICT itself physically as the symbolic image of an ATTACKED body. Your mind implements the EFFECTS within the body, to correspond to its belief in the projected CAUSE that it sees as outside itself.

So now what's happening is, as cause and effect are reversed, your mind starts to attack itself from the outside in, through others. As you go to scapegoat and blame someone for CAUSING you, for sinning against you, you SIMULTANEOUSLY portray yourself as a victim. You do this mentally, BUT it also in turn CHANGES THE BODY. The body PICTURES what you think of yourself and how you see yourself.

"The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE."

Whatever you think you are, your body SYMBOLIZES it physically. If you think of yourself with attack and sin, which you later project, your body takes on a symbolic FORM of that attitude. It represents TWO things ... 1) what you think of yourself, and 2) what you think of others. These are actually one thing, because you are one with others.

So as you go to accuse yourself of sin, you ALSO go to accuse your brother of sin. The body COMES BETWEEN you as a separation device. It is now being USED to symbolically visualize the PRESENCE of attack, darkness, walls, blockages, etc. And so the body shifts its physical appearance (it's just an image in the mind), to represent your relationship to yourself and others. "Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of ANYTHING, ***you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son***. ***You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes***, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell. "

"For accusation is a bar to love, ***and damaged bodies ARE accusers***. They stand firmly in the way of trust and peace, ***proclaiming*** that the frail can HAVE no trust, and that the damaged HAVE no grounds for peace. Who has been injured BY his brother, and could love and trust him still? He HAS attacked, and will attack again. Protect him not, because ***your damaged body shows that you must be protected FROM him.***"

Bottom line, when your mind is accusing, your BODY accuses as well. It lines up with the mind's attitude. The body itself does NOT have its OWN state, its own attitude, its own decision, or its own mind. It CANNOT maintain itself. It is maintained by the mind, and the mind has power over it. The mind USES it and TELLS it what to do and HOW to show up. It MAKES the body appear in one form or another. And the PURPOSE of any chosen form is to COMMUNICATE through symbols.

So when you are accusing, which means you are projecting, which means you are splitting your mind, your mind causes the body to be used for separation, and this ATTACKS the body and makes it steer towards a PICTURE of crucifixion and death. The INTENT is that the body is acting to PROVE to your brother the consequences of what you claim HE DID. You cannot scapegoat WITHOUT it changing the body. The body is HELD UP as a picture to SHOW HIM effects, which YOU put there, which you accuse HIM of putting there.

So long as the body remains appearing to be sick in any way, and given the mind is the ONLY cause of it, and given the body can ONLY symbolize because it has no meaning or state of its own, the body HAS TO fall into line with the mind's purpose. If the body remains sick in any way, the mind HAS TO be continuing to use it for attack. The body is still showing a symbol of attack BECAUSE the mind is STILL attacking. There are no exceptions to this. It is so reliable that we can say, if the body is still sick, the mind HAS NOT been healed. And it also means if the body is still sick, IT IS STILL accusing your brother of sin.

"A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed."

"A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. 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."

It is NOT enough to claim that the mind can be healed WITHOUT healing the body. When the mind is healed, it FORCES the body to symbolize its new condition. The body cannot stay sick or keep sickness or hold onto any given state, because mind is USING IT as a symbolic form of communication. Whatever the mind wants to show a brother, the body HAS TO show. And so the body CHANGES FORM according to the mind.

This works for sickness just as it works for healing. The body cannot stay sick if the mind decides to be truly healthy. No more than it can stay healthy if the mind decides to be sick. Jesus even goes so far as to say that if your mind is truly healed, it WILL heal the body ALWAYS, and this makes it IMPOSSIBLE for the body to become sick. The mind is OVERRIDING any alleged external (projected) causes of sickness, and is TOTALLY OWNING control and power over it. Therefore, it does not CHOOSE to be sick, and so does not MAKE the body show up as sick. This makes sickness of the body IMPOSSIBLE.

"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."

"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."

It can't be stressed enough how extreme and unconditional this is. If you so choose, your mind will use the body for attack, which WILL ALWAYS attack the body and FORCE it to depict proof of sin. And this proof of sin will be held up to others to SHOW them what they did to you (allegedly). EVEN to the extent that you are willing to KILL the body entirely, IF it means that you can be exonerated from sin. And he is in fact saying that we do this.

We think it is even a SMALL PRICE to pay, if it means we can be seen as the innocent one, such that a dead body IS VERY STRONG PROOF that someone OTHER than the person CAUSED The death. You'll notice that whenever there is a physical death, it always looks as though the person DID NOTHING to cause it. This is because their mind has DISOWNED the cause by projecting it EXTREMELY, depicting themselves as POWERLESS AND HELPLESS, as if having no ability to choose at all.

"Death is an attempt to resolve conflict by not willing at all."

"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."

By PRETENDING not to be willing at all, to have no choice and no power and no say in the matter, we attack the body and make it show up as DEAD, in trying to ACCUSE THE WORLD OF SIN, so that WE will seem to be the helpless victim. A person who was "killed" NOT by their own hand. Someone who "died of" ANYTHING other than themselves. Died from cancer, died from starvation, died from a car crash, died from war, whatever. Anything so long as it appears to be NOT THE MIND. So that the person can HIDE the fact that THEY DID IT TO THEMSELVES. This is why death is an extreme LIE.

"The power of witness is beyond belief, because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness is believed BECAUSE he points beyond himself, to what he REPRESENTS. (the body is a symbol) A sick and suffering you (physically) but ***represents your brother's guilt***; the witness which you send (communicate physically), lest he forget the injuries (physical) he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture (of your body) YOU accept, if ***only it can serve to punish him***. 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."

So in death, you are using your body to try to PROVE that your BROTHER IS A SINNER. This is the EGO's use of the body. This is what happens when you use the body for attack. It destroys the body. It makes the body show up as sick and suffering and a victim, so that someone or something is framed for sin. That is the ONLY reason this happens. And the mind makes this decision alone.

"The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions which are responsible for the body's condition."

The alternative is that if you move towards RESURRECTION, towards life and wholeness and happiness and holiness, this TOO has an "influence on" the body. It has a healing influence, we could say. It causes the mind to DEPICT itself as a symbol of immortality. A symbol of having NOT been attacked, a symbol of being free from suffering, a symbol of eternal life. A symbol of invulnerability and harmlessness and the IMPOSSIBILITY of being sick or hurt.

As such "the mind, being sane, heals the body" and "now is the body healed by miracles." Again the body has NO SAY in this. It is just a symbol. It gets its FORM from the mind's relationship to others. It SYMBOLIZES the communication. As the mind heals the body CANNOT REMAIN SICK. It cannot maintain sickness or keep it, nor is there ANY OTHER CAUSE of physical sickness. Mind has TOTAL control over it.

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind MUST BE STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

The mind is STRONGER than the body and the body can only go along with the mind's wishes. If the mind heals, the mind overrides the body image and projects an image of a HEALTHY body. A body which is free from any symbols or signs of attack, harm, damage, breakage, scars, wounds, or anything else which might symbolize the OPPOSITE of eternal life.

Furthermore, when your mind forces your body to heal, because you WANT to SHOW your brothers that you LOVE him, and think HARMLESSLY of him, HE now looks upon your physical body as a MESSAGE. Its physical form PROVES what you THINK of yourself and him. In its healed form, it says "I have never been hurt and you have never hurt me." It PROVES he is innocent. It even proves this BEYOND anything HE tries to do to you.

Even if he thinks he HAS attacked you, YOUR miracle of healing proves to him that HE HAS NOT. And therefor he can no longer BELIEVE that he is a sinner, because you've USED the body to show him, symbolically, that anything he THOUGHT he did had NO effects. This triggers a HEALING IN HIS MIND, because your BODY no longer supports or TEMPTS him to believe that he is sinful. Therefore your body now is used as a HEALING DEVICE and IS SYMBOL OF THE INNOCENCE OF YOUR BROTHER.

"What you would **prove to him** you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but ***testifies to what you teach to him***. ***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*******. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing (physically) show your mind is (also) healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, ****and healed along with you****."

"Health (physically) is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it remains without conviction. ****Only when DEMONSTRATED has it BEEN proved, and MUST compel belief*****. No-one is healed through double messages."

"Show THIS 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 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 (physically) his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing (physically and mentally) is his comfort ***and HIS health***. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

So literally, the healing of your mind, without exception forces the healing of your body, which in turn HEALS YOUR BROTHER. Your healing becomes HIS healing. "When I am healed I am not healed alone." And UNLESS this occurs, forgiveness IS NOT complete. Again...

"*****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?"

If your brother is sinless, psychologically, he CANNOT have done anything to you PHYSICALLY, and therefore the physical is now REPURPOSED as a way to PROVE to him, psychologically, that he HAS NOT sinned. His sins had NO EFFECT on you OR your body. Your miracles REMOVED the evidence. And he can no longer SEE proof that he sinned. Which PHYSICALLY EXONERATES HIM. And this testifies that HE CANNOT have sinned, and now his MIND is healed because your physical body has played a part in weakening HIS belief in his own sinfulness. Something it could NOT do if it remains sick. In fact if it remains sick, your mind IS still accusing him of sin, and he knows it.

Some ACIM students think that there is no validity or importance whatsoever to changing the physical body, healing it, or for any reason. But Jesus is saying something totally opposite. He is literally saying you MUST heal it, otherwise it DOES continue to PROVE that your mind IS NOT healed. And any time physical sickness of any kind is showing up, something in YOUR mind is not healed. Physical sicknesses of different kinds in fact symbolize different mental attitudes.

"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." Different unforgivenesses (grievances, special relationships etc) produce different PHYSICAL FORMS of sickness.

"So closely is one translated into the other, that a careful study of the form a sickness takes will point quite clearly to the form of unforgiveness that it represents."

So here he is even saying you can DIAGNOSE what UNFORGIVENESS is present in the mind, based on the physical FORM of the sickness in the body. Because the body is always symbolic and the forms of sickness are symbolic. This is why you get backaches when you are carrying to much mental load, and your eyes develop problems when you don't want to see something, and someone "gives you a headache" when you don't like them, and your blood pressure "boils" when you get angry.

Physical sickness IS HOW you project your sin! If your mind cannot CONCEIVE of attack, it overpowers the body and forces it to show up AS HEALED. A mind that is TRULY devoid of attack produces a LOVELY BODY, devoid of any signs or symbols of attack of any kind. Not only does the body heal by miracles, it now becomes a SYMBOL OF ETERNAL LIFE. And symbolizing immortality, it is DEVOID OF HARM and CANNOT be sick, NOR can it die! It is now impossible for the body to die and decay, it can ONLY be left by TRUTH, by DISAPPEARING IT! "Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness, because it cannot conceive of attacking anything or anyone."

"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."

"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."

A radical teaching in the Course which not many are willing to accept, is that the condition of your body is still subject to the Golden Rule. That means that what applies to you applies to others equally. So when your body is sick, it IS attempting to attack both you AND your brother. It is not sick in isolation, it is a double-edged sword. And while your body is sick, it IS accusing your brother of sin, attempting to show to Him HIS sinfulness, attempting to attack Him and make Him dead.

Therefore the ONLY way to exonerate Him and to PROVE to Him in an undeniable way, that He must be innocent, is to demonstrate a body which has no signs of sickness or attack. YOUR health is HIS health. The body must become a symbol and representation of immortality, a sign of life, so that when your brother looks upon its loveliness He recognizes HE must be innocent because YOUR body shows no signs of effects, and therefore He cannot have attacked you. This is not merely wishful thinking. It requires a supernatural state of protection in which it becomes IMPOSSIBLE for your body to be attacked, sick, or dead.

This is also very clearly and radically spelled out in Chapter 27, section 2... "the picture of crucifixion", in which Jesus states we are to stop demonstrating sickness TO others, in order to teach only life and innocence. He even goes on to say that the Holy Spirit has prepared an alternative BODY, which is free from all signs of attack, and we are to show it to others to prove "brother, at your hand I live", defying all attempts by others to find signs of the effects of their attempted attacks, thus exonerating them.

There are few sections of the course less understood and more denied than this one.

Additionally, in Chapter 27 section 3 "the fear of healing" (!!) which follows on, Jesus opens with this statement, building upon this:

"Is healing frightening? To many, yes. For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies ARE accusers. They stand firmly in the way of trust and peace, proclaiming that the frail can HAVE no trust, and that the damaged HAVE no grounds for peace. Who has been injured BY his brother, and could love and trust him still? He HAS attacked, and will attack again. Protect him not, because your damaged body shows that you must be protected FROM him. To forgive may be an act of charity, but NOT his due. He may be PITIED for his guilt, but NOT exonerated. And if you forgive him his transgressions, you but ADD to all the guilt that he has really earned."

So what he is saying here is that a damaged body (sick, ill, diseased, broken, in pain etc) is ACTIVELY ACCUSING. In order to BE in states of sickness the mind has to entertain level confusion, has to project causality outside itself, sees itself as at the effect of external causes, and thus sees brothers as the CAUSE of the sickness, thus accusing anything other than yourself of causing the suffering. And then the body SHOWS a representation of this mindset, accusing your brother through PHYSICAL EVIDENCE, that HE must be the sinner who caused this. "Brother at your hand I die".

And so when you are making your body show up as sick, demonstrating self-attack, you attack both you and your brother, because separation comes BETWEEN you. The physical form of sickness is a weapon of accusation against both of you. Therefore... and this should be obvious unless you are into justifications and level confusions and denial, that the ONLY WAY to EXONERATE your brother, while you still have a body, is to NOT SHOW HIM any signs of sickness or damage in your body. If your body is still in a state of sickness, you ARE still accusing him, and therefore your mind CANNOT be healed. This is why, without exception, "a broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." There is no escape from this. You cannot have a sick body and a healthy mind.

This is a Course in miracles and it is a course in LIFE. It is not a course in being sick, which is a little death. It is a course in HEALTH. It is a course in healing. It is a course in removing ALL signs of attack and separation in the body PRIOR to being in a mental state capable of resurrection. The course ends in resurrection, not death. You MUST NOT SHOW SICKNESS OR DEATH TO THE WORLD!

Jesus goes on to say "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?"

And so when your brother attempts to accuse or attack your body, you must DEMONSTRATE (which means to show physically), that his efforts produced no EFFCTS, your body HAS no effects of sickness or damage, your body could not BE attacked, and you are a picture of invulnerability. "Sickness is a defense against the truth" speaks of this protection, which is SUPERNATURAL and defies all ego laws and laws of physics:

"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. "

And let us also remember from the manual for teachers:

"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. ...Sickness is now impossible to him. ....Oneness and sickness cannot coexist."

In this there are no exceptions. The condition of the body REFLECTS the condition of the mind, and the mind is the ONLY CAUSE of the body's condition. There are NO outside powers that bring oppression or suffering, including death. You are supposed to DEMONSTRATE LIVE that nothing can hurt you or your body. Not even your brothers attacks. And even as he attempts to attack you, it has NO EFFECT, proving IN FORM in undeniable evidence, that he MUST NOT have sinned because it had no consequences, and therefore He is innocent. His innocence is proved to him through your miraculous demonstration. "The mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle DEMONSTRATES this."

To suggest you can have sane healthy mind while the body remains sick is DENIAL, it is a split mind, and impossible. It is your responsibility to SHOW that nothing happens to you against your will, you cannot be attacked unless you attack yourself, and "no one dies unless they choose to do so" - which means NO ONE ELSE can make you die if you do not choose it. The message given by the mind and the message given by the BODY MUST BE ONE, otherwise you are giving double messages and are a LIAR.

So yes, this DOES MEAN, that the state of your PHYSICAL BODY is actually important while you have it, it is part of the MIND's experience, it is not exempt from your demonstration of sanity, it is supposed to be USED to communicate health and healing, and therefore YOU MUST STOP MAKING IT SICK OR DEAD in order to complete the Course! The course ends in resurrection, not death. No-one escapes a dream of death through death. You HAVE to make the body healthy and healed and whole and free from sickness of every kind BEFORE your mind can be ready to overcome death entirely. And that means there is a supernatural POWER that you must demonstrate to others. This is why "Miracles are teaching devices."

All those who would say the body doesn't matter, or it isn't able to be sick, or it doesn't exist, or mind is separate from body, or sickness isn't real, or whatever other DENIAL BULLSHIT, I suggest you reconsider and read what Jesus has actually said. HE says the body must be used as evidence of immortality and innocence, and you can't do that if it's still in a state of corruption. I suggest you look at Chapter 19 - obstacles to peace - the INCORRUPTIBLE BODY. Here is the opening paragraphs:

"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. But you who would RELEASE him are but honoring the Will of his Creator. 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. But what obeys it not, it CANNOT kill. You have ANOTHER dedication which would keep the body incorruptible and perfect as long as it is useful for your holy purpose."

It's time to start raising the dead and showing that you cannot be hurt in any way, on any level, even in form.

We are not supposed to be moving TOWARDS death, in any way. Not even physically.

From Chapter 19 section 9 - "the attraction of death":

"And so it is with death. Made by the ego, its dark shadow falls across all living things, because the ego is the "enemy" of life.

And yet, a shadow cannot kill. What is a shadow to the living? They but walk past, and it is gone. But what of those whose dedication it is NOT to live? The black-draped "sinners," the ego's mournful chorus, plodding so heavily AWAY from life, dragging their chains and marching in the slow procession that honors their grim master, lord of death? Touch any one of them with the gentle hand of forgiveness, and watch the chains fall away, along with YOURS. See him throw aside the black robe he was wearing to his funeral, and hear him laugh at death. The sentence sin would lay upon him, he can escape with your forgiveness.

This is NOT arrogance. It is the Will of God. What is impossible to you who choose His Will as yours? What is death to you? Your dedication is NOT to death, nor to its master."

CLEARLY, if you are moving toward death, you are moving away from LIFE, and God's Will is that YOU LIVE. "It is not God's will that you suffer". You MUST NOT MAKE YOUR BODY DIE otherwise you are NOT DOING GOD'S WILL. This IS what the Course is teaching. STOP DYING!

Even if the body is not real, even if it is an illusion, you CANNOT continue having it be sick or dead while maintaining the you are awake and spiritual. You MUST use it to demonstrate immortality, health, happiness and holiness. You MUST use it to bring healing to others. You MUST use it as a communication medium through which miracles are performed for others. And you must use it to EXONERATE your brother of all sin. If you are moving into physical sickness, you HAVE defenses against the truth. If you are moving toward death, YOU DO WORSHIP IT.

You are supposed to become CAPABLE of overcoming death entirely, making death impossible for you, PROVING it is impossible for you, and not ALLOWING OR CHOOSING death to "happen to" the body against your will. "No one dies without his own consent." You CANNOT have a sane mind without a healthy body. "The mind, being sane, heals the body." "Those who are sick do not love themselves for if they loved themselves they would heal themselves".

It is all simple and clear. This is a Course in the LIVING and a moving closer TO LIFE, which is God. You cannot approach God, who is life, and have sickness and death be maintained on any level. The body MUST RESURRECT and become holy. Failure to do so is failing the course.

---

Below is the full quote from the course about how you use the body to teach the innocence or sinfulness of another:

"Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of ANYTHING, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son. You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell. Yet this is writ in hell and NOT in Heaven, where you are BEYOND attack, and prove his INNOCENCE. The picture of yourself you offer him you show YOURSELF, and give it all your faith. The Holy Spirit offers you, to give to him, a picture of yourself in which there is NO pain, and NO reproach at all. And what was martyred to his guilt becomes the perfect witness to his innocence.

The power of witness is beyond belief, because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness is believed BECAUSE he points beyond himself, to what he REPRESENTS. A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. 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.

Sickness is but a "little" death; a form of vengeance not yet total. Yet it speaks with certainty for what it represents. The bleak and bitter picture you have sent your brother, YOU have looked upon in grief. And everything that it has shown to him have you believed, BECAUSE it witnessed to the guilt in him, which you perceived and loved. 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 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 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.

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. No worldly thought or act or feeling has a motivation other than this one. These are the witnesses that are called forth to be believed, and lend conviction to the system they speak for and represent. And each has many voices, speaking to your brother and yourself in different tongues. And yet to both the message is the same. Adornment of the body seeks to show how lovely are the witnesses for guilt. Concerns about the body demonstrate how frail and vulnerable is your life; how easily destroyed is what you love. Depression speaks of death and vanity of real concern with anything at all.

The strongest witness to futility, which bolsters all the rest and helps them paint the picture in which sin is justified, is sickness in whatever form it takes. The sick have reason for each one of their unnatural desires and strange needs. For who could live a life so soon cut short, and NOT esteem the worth of passing joys? What pleasures COULD there be that will endure? Are not the frail ENTITLED to believe that every stolen scrap of pleasure is their righteous payment for their little lives? Their death will pay the price for all of them, if they enjoy their benefits or not. The end of life must come, whatever way that life be spent. And so take pleasure in the quickly passing and ephemeral.

These are NOT sins, but witnesses unto the strange belief that sin and death are real, and innocence and sin will end alike, within the termination of the grave. If this were true, there WOULD be reason to remain content to seek for passing joys, and cherish little pleasures where you can. But in this picture is the body NOT perceived as neutral and WITHOUT a goal inherent in itself. For it becomes the symbol of reproach, the sign of guilt whose consequences still are there to see, so that the cause can NEVER be denied. Your function is to PROVE to him that sin can HAVE no cause. How futile MUST it be to see yourself a picture of the proof that what your function IS can never be.

The Holy Spirit's picture changes not the body into something it is not. It only takes away from it ALL signs of accusation and of blamefulness. Pictured WITHOUT a purpose, it is seen as neither sick nor well, nor bad nor good. No grounds are offered that it may be judged in ANY way at all. It has no life, but neither is it dead. It stands apart from ALL experience of fear OR love. For now it witnesses to NOTHING yet, its purpose being open, and the mind made free again to choose what it is FOR. Now is it not condemned, but waiting for a purpose to be GIVEN, that it may fulfill the function that it will receive.

Into this empty space, from which the GOAL of sin has been removed, is Heaven free to be remembered. Here its peace can come, and perfect healing take the place of death. 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."

The simple way to let this be achieved is merely this; to let the body have no purpose from the past, when you were sure you KNEW its purpose was to foster guilt. For this insists your crippled picture is a lasting sign of what it represents. This leaves no space in which a DIFFERENT view, ANOTHER purpose, can be given it. You do NOT know its purpose. You but gave ILLUSIONS of a purpose to a thing you made to hide your function from yourself. This thing WITHOUT a purpose CANNOT hide the function that the Holy Spirit gave. Let, then, ITS purpose and YOUR function be both reconciled at last, and seen as one."