Death is a thought which takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshipping of death as Savior and as giver of release.
Embodiment of fear, the host of sin, god of the guilty and the lord of all illusions and deceptions, does the thought of death seem mighty. For it seems to hold all living things within its withered hand; all hopes and wishes in its blighting grasp; all goals perceived but in its sightless eyes. The frail, the helpless and the sick bow down before its image, thinking it alone is real, inevitable, worthy of their trust. For it alone will surely come.
All things but death are seen to be unsure, too quickly lost however hard to gain, uncertain in their outcome, apt to fail the hopes they once engendered, and to leave the taste of dust and ashes in their wake in place of aspirations and of dreams. But death is counted on. For it will come with certain footsteps when the time has come for its arrival. It will never fail to take all life as hostage to itself.
Would you bow down to idols such as this? Here is the strength and might of God Himself perceived within an idol made of dust. Here is the opposite of God proclaimed as lord of all creation, stronger than God's Will for life, the endlessness of love and Heaven's perfect, changeless constancy. Here is the Will of Father and of Son defeated finally, and laid to rest beneath the headstone death has placed upon the body of the holy Son of God.
Unholy in defeat, he has become what death would have him be. His epitaph, which death itself has written, gives no name to him, for he has passed to dust. It says but this: "Here lies a witness God is dead." And this it writes again and still again, while all the while its worshippers agree, and kneeling down with foreheads to the ground, they whisper fearfully that it is so.
It is impossible to worship death in any form, and still select a few you would not cherish, and would yet avoid while still believing in the rest. For death is total. Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible. For here again we see an obvious position which we must accept if we be sane; what contradicts one thought entirely can not be true unless its opposite is proven false.
The idea of the death of God is so preposterous that even the insane have difficulty in believing it. For it implies that God was once alive and somehow perished, killed, apparently, by those who did not want him to survive. Their stronger will could triumph over His, and so Eternal Life gave way to death. And with the Father died the Son as well.
Death's worshippers may be afraid. And yet can thoughts like these be fearful? If they saw that it is only this which they believed, they would be instantly released. And you will show them this today. There is no death, and we renounce it now in every form, for their salvation and our own as well. God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death and see the life beyond.
"Our Father, bless our eyes today. We are Your messengers, and we would look upon the glorious reflection of Your Love which shines in everything. We live and breathe in You alone. We are not separate from Your Eternal Life. There is no death, for death is not Your Will. And we abide where You have placed us, in the Life we share with You and with all living things, to be like You and part of You forever. We accept Your Thoughts as ours, and our will is One with Yours eternally. Amen."
It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. 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. Can you who see yourselves WITHIN a body, know yourself AS AN IDEA? Everything you recognize you identify by EXTERNALS, something OUTSIDE itself. You cannot even think of GOD without a body, or some form you think you recognize. The body cannot KNOW. And while you limit your awareness to its tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur that surrounds you.
God cannot come into a body, nor can you join Him there. Limits on love will ALWAYS seem to shut Him out, and to keep you APART from Him. The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that, within it, is YOUR Kingdom, where God can enter not. Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe.
This fragment of your mind is such a tiny part of it that, could you but appreciate the whole, you would see instantly that it is like the smallest sunbeam is to the sun. Or like the faintest ripple on the surface of the ocean. In its amazing arrogance, this tiny sunbeam has decided it IS the sun; this almost imperceptible ripple hails itself as the ocean. Think how alone and frightened is this little thought, this infinitesimal illusion, holding itself apart, against the universe. The sun becomes the sunbeam's "enemy," which would devour it. And the ocean terrifies the little ripple, and "wants" to swallow it.
Yet neither sun nor ocean is even aware of all this strange and meaningless activity. They merely continue, unaware that they are feared and hated by a tiny segment of themselves. Even that segment is not LOST to them, for it could not survive APART from them And what IT thinks it is in no way changes its total dependence on them FOR ITS BEING. Its whole existence still remains IN THEM. Without the sun, the sunbeam WOULD be gone; the ripple WITHOUT the ocean IS inconceivable.
Such is the strange position in which those in a world inhabited by bodies seem to be. Each body seems to house a SEPARATE mind, a DISCONNECTED thought, living alone and in no way joined to the Thought by which it was created. Each tiny fragment seems to be self-contained, needing each other for SOME things, but by no means TOTALLY dependent on their One Creator for EVERYTHING. And needing the whole to give them ANY meaning, for by themselves, they DO mean nothing. Nor HAVE they any life apart, and by themselves.
Yet, like the sun and ocean, your Self continues, unmindful that this tiny part regards ITSELF as you. It is not missing; it could not EXIST if it were separate, nor would the whole BE whole without it. It is not a separate kingdom, ruled by an IDEA of separation from the rest. Nor does a fence surround it, preventing it from JOINING with the rest, and keeping it apart from its Creator. This little aspect is NO DIFFERENT from the whole, being continuous with it, and at one with it. It leads no separate life, because its life IS in the Oneness in which its being was created.
Do not accept this little, fenced-off aspect as your Self. The sun and ocean are as nothing, beside what YOU are. The sunbeam sparkles only in the sunlight, and the ripple dances as it rests upon the ocean. Yet in neither sun nor ocean is the power that rests in you. Would you remain WITHIN your tiny kingdom, a sorry king, a bitter ruler of all he surveys, who looks on nothing, but who would still die to DEFEND it? This little self is NOT your kingdom. Arched high above it, and surrounding it, with love, is the glorious whole, which offers all its happiness and deep content to EVERY part.
The little aspect that you think you set apart is no exception. Love knows no bodies, and reaches to everything created like itself. Its total lack of limit IS its meaning. It is COMPLETELY impartial in its giving, encompassing ONLY to preserve and KEEP COMPLETE what it would give. In your tiny kingdom you have so little! Should it not, then, be there that you would call on love to enter? Look at the desert, dry and unproductive, scorched and joyless, that makes up your little kingdom. And realize the life and joy that love would bring to it, from where IT comes, and where it would return WITH you.
The Thought of God surrounds your little kingdom, waiting at the barrier you built, to come in and shine upon the barren ground. See how life springs up everywhere! The desert becomes a garden, green and deep and quiet, offering rest to those who lost their way, and wander in the dust. Give them a place of refuge, prepared by love for them, where once a desert was. And every one you welcome will bring love with him, from Heaven for you. They enter one by one into this holy place, but they will not depart as they had come, alone.
The love they BROUGHT with them will STAY with them, as it will stay with YOU. And, under its beneficence, your little garden will expand, and reach out to everyone who thirsts for living water, but has grown too weary to go on alone. Go out and FIND them, for they bring your Self with them. And lead them gently to your quiet garden, and receive their blessing there. So will it grow, and stretch across the desert, leaving no lonely little kingdoms locked away from love, and leaving YOU outside. And you will RECOGNIZE yourself, and see your little garden gently transformed into the Kingdom of Heaven, with all the love of its Creator shining upon it.
The holy instant is your invitation to love, to enter into your bleak and joyless kingdom, and transform it into a garden of peace and welcome. Love's answer is inevitable. It will come, because you came WITHOUT the body, and interposed no barriers which would INTERFERE with its glad coming. In the holy instant, you ask of love only what it offers everyone, neither less nor more. Asking for EVERYTHING, you will RECEIVE it. And your shining Self will lift the tiny aspect that you tried to hide from Heaven, straight into Heaven. No part of love calls on the whole in vain. No son of God remains OUTSIDE His Fatherhood.
Be sure of this; love has entered your special relationship, and entered fully, at your weak request. You do NOT recognize that love has come, because you have not yet let go of ALL the barriers you hold against EACH OTHER. And you will NOT be able to give love welcome separately. You could no more know God alone, than He knows YOU without your brother. But, TOGETHER, you could no more be UNAWARE of love, than love could know you not, or fail to recognize ITSELF in you.
You have reached the end of an ancient journey not realizing yet that it is over. You are still worn and tired, and the desert's dust still seems to cloud your eyes, and keep you sightless. Yet He Whom you welcomed has come to you, and would welcome YOU. He has waited long to give you this. Receive it now of Him, for He would have you KNOW Him. Only a little wall of dust still stands between you. Blow on it lightly and with happy laughter, and it will fall away. And walk into the garden love has prepared for BOTH of you.
"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.
What can correct illusions but the truth? And what are errors but illusions which remain unrecognized for what they are? Where truth has entered errors disappear. They merely vanish, leaving not a trace by which to be remembered. They are gone because without belief they have no life, and so they disappear to nothingness, returning whence they came. From dust to dust they come and go, for only truth remains.
Can you imagine what a state of mind without illusions is? How it would feel? Try to remember when there was a time, - perhaps a minute, maybe even less, - when nothing came to interrupt your peace; when you were certain you were loved and safe. Then try to picture what it would be like to have that moment be extended to the end of time and to eternity. Then let the sense of quiet that you felt be multiplied a hundred times, and then be multiplied another hundred more.
And now you have a hint, not more than just the faintest intimation of the state your mind will rest in when the truth has come. Without illusions there could be no fear, no doubt and no attack. When truth has come all pain is over, for there is no room for transitory thoughts and dead ideas to linger in your mind. Truth occupies your mind completely, liberating you from all beliefs in the ephemeral. They have no place because the truth has come, and they are nowhere. They cannot be found, for truth is everywhere forever now.
When truth has come it does not stay a while, to disappear, or change to something else. It does not shift and alter in its form, nor come and go and go and come again. It stays exactly as it always was, to be depended on in every need, and trusted with a perfect trust in all the seeming difficulties and the doubts which the appearances the world presents engender. They will merely blow away when truth corrects the errors in your mind.
When truth has come it harbors in its wings the gift of perfect constancy, and love which does not falter in the face of pain but looks beyond it, steadily and sure. Here is the gift of healing, for the truth needs no defense, and therefore no attack is possible. Illusions can be brought to truth to be corrected. But the truth stands far beyond illusions, and can not be brought to them to turn them into truth.
Truth does not come and go nor shift nor change, in this appearance now and then in that, evading capture and escaping grasp. It does not hide. It stands in open light, in obvious accessibility. It is impossible that anyone could seek it truly and would not succeed. Today belongs to truth. Give truth its due, and it will give you yours. You were not meant to suffer and to die. Your Father wills these dreams be gone. Let truth correct them all.
We do not ask for what we do not have. We merely ask for what belongs to us, that we may recognize it as our own. Today we practice on the happy note of certainty which has been born of truth. The shaky and unsteady footsteps of illusion is not our approach today. We are as certain of success as we are sure we live and hope and breathe and think. We do not doubt we walk with truth today, and count on it to enter into all the exercises that we do this day.
Begin by asking Him Who goes with you upon this undertaking that He be in your awareness as you go with Him. You are not made of flesh and blood and bone, but were created by the self-same Thought Which gave the gift of life to Him as well. He is your Brother, and so like to you your Father knows that you are both the same. It is your Self you ask to go with you, and how could He be absent where you are?
Truth will correct all errors in your mind which tell you you could be apart from Him. You speak to Him today, and make your pledge to let His function be fulfilled through you. To share His function is to share His joy. His confidence is with you as you say:
"Truth will correct all errors in my mind,
And I will rest in Him who is my Self."
Then let Him lead you gently to the truth which will envelop you and give you peace so deep and tranquil that you will return to the familiar world reluctantly.
And yet you will be glad to look again upon this world. For you will bring with you the promise of the changes which the truth that goes with you will carry to the world. They will increase with every gift you give of five small minutes, and the errors which surround the world will be corrected as you let them be corrected in your mind.
Do not forget your function for today. Each time you tell yourself with confidence, "Truth will correct all errors in my mind," you speak for all the world, and Him Who would release the world as He would set you free.
No one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. 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 which carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to 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. The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself.
Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that it is done.
Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real? All this cannot be done unconsciously. But afterwards your plan requires that you must forget you made it, so it seems to be external to your own intent; a happening beyond your state of mind, an outcome with a real effect on you, instead of one effected by your self.
It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your "reality" which makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control. But what you have forgot can be remembered, given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion. Your not remembering is but the sign that this decision still remains in force, as far as your desires are concerned. Mistake this not for fact. Defenses must make facts unrecognizable. They aim at doing this, and this they seem to do.
Every defense takes fragments of the whole, assembles them without regard to all their true relationships, and thus constructs illusions of a whole which is not there. It is this process which imposes threat, and not whatever outcome may result. When parts are wrested from the whole and seen as separate and as wholes within themselves, they become symbols standing for attack upon the whole, successful in effect, and never to be seen as whole again. And yet you have forgotten that they stand but for your own decision of what should be real, to take the place of what is real.
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 slaves 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?
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.
Such is the simple truth. It does not make appeal to might nor triumph. It does not command obedience, nor seek to prove how pitiful and futile your attempts to plan defenses which would alter it. It merely wants to give you happiness, for such its purpose is. Perhaps it sighs a little when you throw away its gifts, and yet it knows with perfect certainty that what God wills for you must be received.
It is this fact which demonstrates that time is an illusion. For it lets you think what God has given you is not the truth right now, as it must be. The Thoughts of God are quite apart from time. For time is but another meaningless defense you made against the truth. Yet what God wills is here, and you remain as He created you.
Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain where it has been allowed to enter. And it comes to any mind that would lay down its arms and cease to play with folly. It is found at any time; today, if you will choose to practice giving welcome to the truth.
This is our aim today. And we will give a quarter of an hour twice to ask the truth to come to us and set us free. And truth will come, for it has never been apart from us. It merely waits for just this invitation which we give today. We introduce it with a healing prayer to help us rise above defensiveness, and let the truth be as it has always been:
"Sickness is a defense against the truth.
I will accept the truth of what I am,
And let my mind be wholly healed today."
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.
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. 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 defense against the truth,
But I am not a body. And my mind
Cannot attack. So I can not be sick."
Do not mistake effect for cause, nor think that sickness is apart and separate from what its cause must be. It is a sign, a shadow of an evil thought that seems to have reality and to be just, according to the usage of the world. It is external proof of inner "sin," and witnesses to unforgiving thoughts that injure and would hurt the Son of God. Healing the body is impossible, and this is shown by the brief nature of the "cure." The body yet must die, and healing it is but a brief delay in its return to dust, where it was born and will go back.
The body's source is unforgiveness of the Son of God. It has not left its source, and in its pain and aging and the mark of death upon it this is clearly shown. Fearful and frail it seems to be to those who think their life is tied to its command and linked to its unstable, tiny breath. Death stares at them as every moment goes irrevocably past their grasping hands, which cannot hold them back. And they feel fear as bodies change and sicken. For they sense the heavy scent of death upon their hearts.
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. Forgiveness must be given by a mind which understands that it must overlook all shadows on the holy face of Christ, among which sickness should be seen as one. Nothing but that; the sign of judgment made by brother upon brother, and the Son of God upon himself. For he has damned his body as his prison, and forgot that it is he who gave this role to it.
What he has done now must God's Son undo. But not alone. For he has thrown away the prison's key; his holy sinlessness and the remembrance of his Father's Love. Yet Help is given to him in the Voice his Father placed in him. The power to heal is now his Father's gift, for through His Voice He still can reach His Son, reminding him the body may become his chosen home, but it will never be his home in truth.
Salvation is a promise, made by God, that you would find your way to Him at last. It cannot not be kept. It guarantees that time will have an end, and all the thoughts that have been born in time will end as well. God's Word is given every mind which thinks that it has separate thoughts, and will replace these thoughts of conflict with the Thought of peace.
The Thought of peace was given to God's Son the instant that his mind had thought of war. There was no need for such a Thought before, for peace was given without opposite, and merely was. But when the mind is split, there is a need of healing. So the Thought Which has the power to heal the split became a part of every fragment of the mind which still was one, but failed to recognize its oneness. Now it did not know itself, and thought its own identity was lost.
Salvation is undoing in the sense that it does nothing, failing to support the world of dreams and malice. Thus it lets illusions go. By not supporting them, it merely lets them quietly go down to dust. And what they hid is now revealed; an altar to the holy Name of God whereon His Word is written, with the gifts of your forgiveness laid before It, and the memory of God not far behind.
Let us come daily to this holy place, and spend a while together. Here we share our final dream. It is a dream in which there is no sorrow, for it holds a hint of all the glory given us by God. The grass is pushing through the soil, the trees are budding now, and birds have come to live within their branches. Earth is being born again in new perception. Night has gone, and we have come together in the light.
From here we give salvation to the world, for it is here salvation was received. The song of our rejoicing is the call to all the world that freedom is returned, that time is almost over, and God's Son has but an instant more to wait until his Father is remembered, dreams are done, eternity has shined away the world, and only Heaven now exists at all.
Until the second step at least begins, one cannot share in prayer, for until that point, each one must ask for different things. But once the need to hold the other as an enemy has been questioned, and the reason has been recognized if only for an instant, it becomes possible to join in prayer. Enemies do not share a goal, and it is here their enmity is kept. Their separate wishes are their arsenals; their fortresses in hate. The key to rising further still in prayer lies in this simple thought; this change of mind:
We go together, you and I.
Now it is possible to help in prayer, and so reach up yourself. This step begins the quicker ascent, but there are still many lessons to learn. The way is open, and hope is justified. Yet it is likely at first that what is asked for even by those who join in prayer is not the goal that prayer should truly seek. Even together they may ask for things, and thus set up but an illusion of a goal they share. They may ask together for specifics, and not realize that they are asking for effects without the cause. And this they cannot have. For no-one can receive effects alone, and choose a cause from which they do not come to offer them to him. Even the joining, then, is not enough, if those who pray together do not ask, before all else, what is the Will of God. From this Cause only can the Answer come in which are all specifics satisfied; all separate wishes unified in one.
Prayers for specifics always ask to have the past repeated in some way. What was enjoyed before, or seemed to be, -- what was another's and he seemed to like, -- all these are but illusions from the past. The aim of prayer is to release the present from its chains of past illusions; to let it be a freely chosen remedy from every choice that stood for a mistake. What prayer can offer now so far exceeds all that you asked before that it is pitiful to be content with less.
You have a newborn-chance each time you pray. And would you stifle and imprison it in ancient prisons, when the chance has come to free yourself from all of them at once? Do not restrict your asking. Prayer can bring the peace of God. What time-bound thing can give you more than this, in just the little space that lasts until it crumbles into dust?
What if miracles are practically nothing, just brief moments of correction, like brushing a piece of dust off some furniture?
What if you can just have Jesus heal something right now and be done with it and move on like nothing happened?
What if miracles were so natural and normal that they weren't anything special at all?
What if miracles were happening all the time, and to perform one was effortless and could be done at any time without strain?
What if all the drama that accompanies tolerance of suffering were cut through like a knife in a matter of seconds, no longer to be dwelled on or fought with?
What if you were miraculous all the time?
"The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream, in which it acts as if it were a person, to be seen and be believed. It takes the central place in every dream, which tells the story of how it was made by OTHER bodies, born into the world OUTSIDE the body, lives a little while, and dies, to be united in the dust with other bodies, dying like itself. In the brief time allotted it to live, it seeks for other bodies as its friends and enemies. Its safety is its main concern. Its comfort is its guiding rule. It tries to look for pleasure, and avoid the things that would be hurtful. Above all, it tries to teach itself its pains and joys are different, and CAN be told apart."
You can see from statements like this, that the body is clearly identified as being PART OF A DREAM. Now, if you're considering whether or not the world ITSELF is a dream, or whether it's just your thoughts ABOUT the world that is a dream... consider what this says.
Firstly there is no dream without the body. That's a strong tie.Then we're told the body acts, within the dream, as if it were a person. So this places the body INSIDE a dream and its actions are INSIDE a dream.
It takes the central place IN every dream. INSIDE the dream.It tells a story of being made (childbirth, which is physical) by the dream. Meaning the body AND physicality are part of the dream.To be united in the dust (death) with other bodies, tells you that the dream comprises sickness and death of bodies along with graveyards and cemeteries.
Other bodies dying like itself tells you the physical conditions of things is part of the dream as well.
It seeks for other bodies as friends and enemies, as part of the dream, so all relationships in the world are also part of a dream.It seeks for comfort and pleasure, so now all comforts, all pleasures, sex, hobbies, etc, are all part of dreaming. And many of these are quite physical.
All of this is providing evidence that a dream is not merely a dream about the world, but that the dream ITSELF comprises the world, the body, other bodies, childbirth, relationships, physical sickness and death, comforts and pleasures, etc.... this is all dream.
As confirmed by "The body is a dream."
It's not merely that your perception of the body/world is a dream, or that your interpretation or thoughts about the world/body are a dream. But that the world ITSELF, fundamentally physical matter, IS a dream. It's a dream world, not a real world.
The whole planet is a dream. The whole galaxy is a dream. The whole universe is a dream. All the bodies and animals and plants and all matter is a dream. And dreams are not reality.
"The world IS perception" also tells you that the world ITSELF is perception, not just "seen by" perception.
"The world is false perception" also tells you that the world is utterly bound as part of falsely perceiving ITSELF. That mind is projecting a false world TO see, in the mind, as part of perception. This doesn't mean you perceive the world in terms of "I look at the world" like it's a separate thing. What it tells you is that your mind MAKES the world IN ITS PROJECTING, and then perceives it, and believes it's there and solid and real, when in fact it is just a PART OF perception itself. In your mind.
"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts."
"Both heaven and earth are in your mind."
That makes your mind pretty big and pretty powerful, given it houses an entire universe of galaxies. This is all dream stuff, and you are the dreamer of a universe of dreams. And dreams only happen while you sleep. After that, they go bye bye.
"As the world spins into the nothingness from which it came."
"Eternity will shine away the world."
"The stars will disappear in light."
"There is no world."