Here is a simple and effective forgiveness process which I did this morning with Holy Spirit.

You start by figuring out where you are on a spectrum from Life to Death. The spectrum has these stages:

Love/Innocence > Separation > Sin > Guilt > Fear > Punishment/Suffering > Death.

On whatever issue you want to do forgiveness, or even just a general forgiveness, locate what you seem to be *most directly aware* of right now. For me this was "fear".

Whatever stage you are most aware of, thats the stage which has not yet fully "projected" into the next stage. And all the stages beneath it are currently unconscious. I was experiencing fear because separation/sin/guilt were unconscious and I hadn't yet entered punishment.

Once you've located where your conscious mind is at, work your way backwards through the stages to undo each layer of belief. If you don't need one or more of the earlier steps because you didn't find yourself in them at the beginning, you can skip them. e.g. if you mostly feel guilty, you probably don't need to undo fear.

At each layer of awareness/belief, there are a few steps to go through.

1) You believe that the step is real, and you need to undo this belief. Holy Spirit can help here. Recognize you believe in "real" this (e.g. real fear), and affirm that it is not real (e.g. "fear is not real, I am not afraid").

2) You should then start to have the insight that the only reason you are experiencing this step is because the step you didn't get to yet (unconscious) is CAUSING this step. Separation demands sin. Sin demands guilt. Guilt demands fear. Fear demands punishment. Punishment demands death. Therefore the step isn't there in its "own right", as an isolated 'thing'. It's a projection from another level and is being generated by another level. Seeing this helps you to realize the current level of belief is not the CAUSE of it. It is an EFFECT. And since it's not a cause, it is not real, so you can let it go. Undo the belief by affirming it is not REAL. "There is no real fear" "There is no real guilt" etc. Fear does not cause fear. Guilt does not cause guilt. Sin does not cause sin.

3) Once you can realize that your current level of awareness/belief (the stage you're at) is coming from a hidden level, and you undo the current level by cancelling the belief and the illusion that it was real in its own right, notice that if you do not correct the next level, it will REPRODUCE the experience that you just got done removing! You can remove fear, but if you don't remove guilt, it will reproduce fear. You can remove guilt, but if you don't remove sin, it will reproduce guilt and fear. We have to work our way ALL the way to the Atonement in order to uproot the whole problem.

4) Having undone belief that the current step is real, and affirming you do not believe in it, and having released it (Holy Spirit can help), your mind should have shifted to being aware of the next step/level. If you undid the belief properly, you will feel "free" of the step you were on, should no longer be experiencing it, and will become aware of the experience of the next step. So if you were feeling fear, you should no longer be feeling fear, and will now be feeling guilty. Guilt will be the main thing you are conscious of. Or whatever comes as the next level from where you're at.

5) Continue on through the steps this way until you get to the recognition that sin is not real, separation has not happened, and therefore you are IN the experience of the atonement. If you have undone the belief that the punishment is real, that the fear is real, that the guilt is real, and that the sin is real, and that the separation really happened, you should now be in the TRUTH.

The truth should make you aware of GOD. God's truth should be in some way in your mind, whereby you should now be able to ACCEPT that you are innocent, because you do not believe you sinned. You should be able to realize that you are forgiven, because you did not really do anything. And you should be aware that God still LOVES YOU 100% because you are WORTHY of love, having not done anything wrong.

You may find yourself feeling "I AM FREE". You may experience JOY. You should feel RELIEF. Especially now that you can affirm "I have not sinned, I am innocent". Your mind is now experiencing the truth as your primary, conscious experience. Forgiveness accomplished. And because this has been ACCEPTED and OWNED, and because you've seen through all the illusory levels of the ego thought system, you are now PERMANENTLY FREE of what you forgave. It will not come back, because it has no foundation. The Atonement principle has completely undone the "cause" at its roots.

Your mind is now IN a state of forgiveness. You are in the Holy Spirit. You are now the light of the world. You are the Prodigal Son, and you've come Home!

Often when you're having emotional reactions to situations, you can't for the life of you remember how to forgive or where to start.

There could be so much unconsciousness going on that all you are aware of are the intense feelings you're having and all the stress that's unfolding.

If you remember to forgive at all, it will probably seem like a stupid idea, that it won't be helpful and there isn't even anything to forgive here.

If you're particularly convinced that someone or something other than you is the problem, and are all caught up in the drama of it, you may even refuse to forgive, or it may not even pop into your mind until you've had time to cool off.

The ranting, vicious, violent ego can be hell-bent on finding someone else guilty, and in those times it seems completely justified in holding its viewpoint, convinced that what it's seeing is completely true and obvious.

When I get into these kind of mindsets I don't even know where to start with forgiveness. It's like my mind is just all numb and forgetful. My awareness has become blocked and I can't even remember how to forgive at all.

To forgive, I find myself starting with some really basic and probably not very effective statements, to just try to start *somewhere*. Like, "I remember I'm dreaming". Like, sometimes you just need to START even if you can't remember what the truth is at all. Just start saying something even remotely forgiving with at least a tiny bit of truth to it - A LITTLE WILLINGNESS - and gradually it will chisel away at the psychological insanity and begin to reveal and remind you of a greater awareness.

As that awareness then starts to return to you, you will start to remember a bit more solidly the learning that you've achieved long-term, and you'll start to remember greater truths, become more confident in your clarity, and be able to get toward what the "real" problem is, is what you're doing to yourself. As your forgiveness process progresses, it actually opens you up more to reveal a greater awareness of HOW to forgive more effectively and with more truth and certainty.

A willingness to just go on this forgiving adventure at all is all you need to get the motor started. It will be all sloppy and vague and seemingly in effective at first, but keep going. All will be revealed. And you can come all the way back to peace through surrender.

You may find it hard to accept the truth, because you do not believe it about yourself. You look within yourself to see if it applies there and find yourself wanting. Your self doubts and your limitations work against your attempts to believe it.

What I'm finding is it can be more effective to borrow some clout from God. The train of thought goes along the lines of, "Is this true of God?". I ask myself if God can have this thing, this false thing, this problem, this suffering, this sickness, whatever it is.

For some reason I seem to be much more convinced that God is perfect and immortal and incapable of any kind of suffering than I am. So I use that fact. I contrast it against his nature and ask myself if I can believe that God has this. And usually I cannot, usually it seems ridiculous to even suggest it, and this helps me to be unconvinced of it also.

The underlying process here is simply "being one with God" more and more. Sharing everything with God. If something is true of God it is true of me. If it is not true of God then it is not true of me either. I am part of God. If I have something, God has to have it also. If God has something, I have to have it also. No exceptions, because we are one.

So if you are finding it a struggle to convince yourself that certain things are not true of you, that you don't have sufferings or illnesses or fears or guilts or whatever, instead of "doing it all by yourself" or in relation to yourself, do it in relation to God. Include God in the equation and question. You may find it a lot more effective and easier to let things go when you can see the impossibility of God having anything wrong with him.

You might also consider that this kind of practice is not merely one of many tools, but is in fact the end goal. We are supposed to be increasing our oneness with God. We are supposed to be seeing ourselves as sharing everything with him, and being like him in every way, having been created in his perfect likeness. To be one with God and like God is to remember your own true nature! This is the goal of the course, reunion with God and Self.

"But to heal is still to make whole. Therefore to heal is to UNITE with those who are LIKE you, because perceiving this likeness IS to recognize the Father."

"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."

"And every dream serves only to conceal the Self Which is God's only Son, the likeness of Himself, the Holy One Who still abides in Him forever, as He still abides in me."

"Shut off from your Self, Who remains aware of His likeness to His Creator, your Self seems to sleep, while the part of your mind that weaves illusions in its sleep appears to be awake."

"Here is your answer to the world, and God's as well. For here it is you join with Him, His likeness being yours in this alone."

"God created man in his own image and likeness" is correct in meaning, but the words are open to considerable misinterpretation. This is avoided, however, if "image" is understood to mean "thought," and "likeness" is taken as "of a like quality." God DID create the Son in His own Thought, and of a quality like to His own. There IS nothing else."

"The Soul, because of its own likeness to its Creator, is creative. No Child of God is capable of losing this ability, because it is inherent in what he IS."

"YOU are a miracle. God creates only "that which, or one who, is of surpassing excellence or merit." Man is capable of this kind of creation, too, being in the image and likeness of his own Creator. Anything else is only his own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the Creations of Light are real."

Was talking to Holy Spirit last night, and received some unexpected input about miracles.

This is hot on the heels of the stuff I posted from "the mechanism of miracles" which made a few basic points: 1) your brother implements denial to block love and health, 2) this produces sickness, 3) another brother must shine light into their mind to heal them.

So I asked, if someone has implemented denial, how does my love remove the denial? Like, if the person has unconsciousness and a layer of denial and isn't aware of love, put in place by their belief or mind, how can love fix that?

He said, "HEAL".

What then came to mind is that denial IS a state of sickness or LACK. Holy Spirit said it was "loss". And therefore when you love the person it "heals" the loss by supplying love to the absence of love. He also said this "shines away" the denial and restores awareness.

I then wanted to know, while it seemed to make sense that love can heal or bless or restore the absence of love in someone, mind-to-mind, how does this tie in with moving mountains or walking on water or multiplying bread and fish?

He said, "POWER".

What then came to mind is that love is POWERFUL, it is strong, it has certainty, it is like an unstoppable force. Mind is very powerful. "Mind over matter" becomes very emphasizes the more you go towards love.

This also revealed that the ego has tried to make love out to be WEAK, just as it has rendered innocence as VULNERABLE to attack. In truth, real innocence is completely protected (if I defend myself I am attacked etc). Similarly love is NOT WEAK, love is very, very strong. Love IS POWER.

Since love is very powerful, we need to unlearn the ego's teaching that love is just some kind of wet blanket of softness and gentleness and weakness. Love is very strong. Love is integration, wholeness, unified will, focused intention, single-mindedness, and not being opposed. It is very, very powerful.

This power makes it possible to move mountains literally, or to animate the body to walk on water, or multiply objects, or raise the dead etc. It is STRENGTH in the truth. Love is energizing, miraculous, powerful, healing, effective and firm. As you increase the love in you, you become more powerful and capable of doing these kind of miracles. Just as Jesus says that some healers have healed others but not raised the dead, due to faith not being whole. When faith (trust in love) is not whole enough it makes it seemingly more difficult to perform the more advanced miracles.

What I then asked about is, if we are to SHINE OUR LIGHT into the minds of others, does this mean that all healing miracles are directly "mind to mind"? He said "essentially". Your mind is not only capable of shining into other minds but also enlightening other minds. You can supply the love they are missing. You can heal them directly FROM your mind TO their mind, bypassing the body entirely. You can restore them to health in MIND and this reflects physically. The change in their mind and the undoing of their denial alleviates the denial they had, the block is shone away, which automatically results in health and healing of the body as a result of their mind being healed. So we should target love/healing at the person's MIND.

One thing I've been trying to practice lately is to PRAY for someone in such a way as to be very sincere and LOVING, to muster as much love as possible, to ask for love to be sent and for the person to be loved. To just shoot for the highest level of love and lovingness. This seems quite effective.

"I am not weak but strong"

"I am not afraid but all powerful"

As Jesus says, "it is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive". Here he means that it is the privilege of those who have RECEIVED LOVE for themselves, to be ABLE to express love toward others to GIVE THEM the love and in turn heal them. To be forgiving is to be loving.

The ego's prayer: Please help God because this situation is totally what I do not want. I am not grateful for it at all, it totally sucks, save me, for me. Pleeeeeease.

Holy prayer: Thank you God for your love and for extending your love through me, thank you for restoring peace and love and happiness in my life and everyone's life, and thank you so much for loving us and encouraging us. I receive and extend your love to everyone in this situation, thank you so much.

See the difference? Please is the opposite of thank you.

The ego's prayer has NO EFFECT. It is completely devoid of power. It keeps you separate from God. It identifies you as very distant from the solution. And it renders you as 'really victimized'. You are going before God and saying, hi God, I am a great big victim, I am asking you to save me but I want to stay in misery. No thanks to you.

Holy prayers are POWERFUL because you are joining with God in oneness, aligning with His power, opening up to extending HIS love, and are willing to not only share His love but to share in the certainty and knowing that all is well, and therefore all is or will be healed. It is a statement of truth compared to the ego's statement of how everything sucks.

We like praying with the ego. It doesn't work. We need to learnt to pray with God. It is far more effective.

The appearance of the sickness is actually an illusion which covers up what the problem is. The sickness, the symptoms, are actually there to function as a distraction, to make you focus on the body and to make the body real. This is a protective mechanism to try to defend your ego-aligned self against a misperception of the truth.

It's not that the form of the sickness is the problem. The PURPOSE of the sickness is the problem, which is to act as a defense. There is a perceived NEED for a defense, and that manifests as physical symptoms. But the appearance of it, the physicality of the sickness, is not really the cause or the thing that's happening.

What's happening is the underlying attempt by the MIND to shut out God and to cling to the body. It just happens to CREATE symptoms such as pain and disease, in order to try to get the awareness to fixate on the body, to think that the body is very real, and therefore IGNORE the truth - to shut it out of awareness.

So sickness is an escape from reality. If someone has cancer they don't need to be healed of cancer. They need to be healed of the belief that they need cancer in order to protect them from reality. As Jesus says, when the purpose of the sickness is recognized, and when it is understood to be an illusion, it must disappear. If you had no more "use" for the sickness, and it wasn't serving a purpose of any kind, it would have no basis for the mind to keep sustaining it, and it would vanish.

So it's like, someone gets exposed to truth but their ego misinterprets it and their interpretation scares or threatens them, so they put up a "shield" of protection, which cuts them off from Life and blocks life-sustaining "energy" flowing in the system, and creates distortions in the body image. The body image then shows a sickness to symbolize the need for escape, and to provide an escape. Therefore the sickness is always a form of distraction and an attempt to make the body MORE real than the truth. Trying to make illusions more real than reality produces sickness.

If you could be convinced that you don't really have a need for the sickness because the purpose of it was misinformed, and what you experienced as a threat is not really a threat, and it's not a threat because you're not really the ego self that sees it as a threat, then you'd be willing to let it go and stop using it to protect you. You'd see no purpose in it, no need for it, and no use for it. So it would disappear.

The trouble is that once sickness is implemented, its symptoms and suffering can be so effective at distraction, so effective at absorbing your attention, so effective at making the body seem real and frightening, that you have all kinds of peripheral reactions as a whole other "layer" of experiences. You start trying to defend yourself against the defense! And that means you start to view the sickness as though you did not choose it.

Theres's a very good reason why you do not want to admit to having chosen the sickness, and it's because if you did, you'd have to own up to that and wouldn't be able to hide behind it. The sickness was made to block awareness and to shut out the truth, so if you were to admit you made it, you would not longer be able to receive its benefits of defending you.

You don't want that, so instead you shut out awareness that you made it, perceive that you did not want it or ask for it, and then launch into a series of reactions to the sickness as though it is attacking you, you want it to go away, etc... but you really don't. Not honestly. If you really wanted it to be done with you wouldn't react to it at all, you'd just admit to the ways you wanted and needed it and would drop those, having come to accept that the truth was true and your misinterpretation of the truth was invalid.

Fighting with sickness therefore is part of the huge distraction that sickness presents, and can have you spinning your wheels trying to just deal with the symptoms and discomforts. Part of you is saying you want it to go away, while another part of you - now unconscious - is actively choosing to keep it, because in the bigger picture you're still terrified of what you saw in the truth and are trying to protect yourself. It therefore frightens you to think of actually being HEALTHY, because that would mean you'd take away your PROTECTION, and then the truth would be able to attack you again. So efforts to become "well" actually can have a lot of resistance and a lot of defense against, because it actually threatens you more to become free of the sickness, IF you are still misperceiving the truth.

Perhaps a key then lies simply in the mistaken perception you originally had which seemed to show you that you needed to become sick in order to defend yourself. You need to look at what you perceived and why you perceived it. But you need to look at it with Holy Spirit or a higher perspective of truth. You need to be willing to have been mistaken. This is why you need to APPLY FORGIVENESS, to undo the ILLUSIONS that you were under that made you misperceive, creating the need for a defense. You need to disassociate from the ego identity in some way so that you do not take the truth as a threat, and do not see it as meaning that you are going to stop existing.

The primary "cause" of sickness, if you will, is the simple fact that you have bound yourself to the ego, are perceiving what IT perceives, are interpreting the truth THROUGH it, and therefore you become frightened whenever you are exposed to the truth. The truth is that the ego is not real and does not exist, and everything it believes in is false. If you are identified with it and think that it is you, then whenever the truth comes along you will be frightened that you are being attacked by it, that it implies you do not exist, that you are not real, and that's horrifying. It is a misperception, but it's horrifying. And who would not want to defend themselves against that?!

Correction is needed therefore, and a forgiveness is needed and a willingness to consider that who you are is not the ego. You need some reassurance and clarity and perspective that just because the truth says something, does not mean it is attacking you. Who you thought you were was mistaken. How you were perceiving was mistaken. What you saw in the truth was projected onto it by your own mistakes. It amounts to a willingness to accept that the truth is TRUE, and not that the truth contains evil intentions. If you can accept that the truth is true, and not false, and that what you thought was true is false, then you have the key to unlock the NEED for sickness to protect you from it.

When there is no misperception of the truth, there is no need for sickness, and you will not create it or use it.

Sickness isn't really the problem that needs healing. Sickness showing up in form is an ILLUSION, because it covers up the underlying secret ambition of self preservation, and is meant to be a distraction and a smoke-screen. That's why sickness isn't real. It's not the problem that needs to be corrected. Trying to treat the sickness or the symptoms of sickness therefore will fail.

It should be obvious that since sickness is an attempt at self-preservation, making oneself sick and likely to die in the name of self-preservation is insane.

You can't sell God, because God is not tangible. So what's the dam issue with supposedly being guilty for selling spirituality?

You can't really sell spirituality because you can't sell Spirit. You can't hoard and deny spirit to someone and then charge for it, because spirit is free.

Love is the only reality which can be shared, and love is the only "thing" which can be exchanged, being present everywhere already and open to all. Anyone can have access to it already, for free. You can't get it from anyone else, and nobody can take it away either. It's available to you right now freely. Because it is freedom.

Everything else is an illusion. Everything in this dream world, all of the ways that people do stuff. Whether they are selling objects or services or time or effort or information or therapy or whatever, it's all the same illusion.

It is the spiritual ego that has come up with this idea that "spirituality within a real dream" would be a sin. That first and foremost, the dream is real, and secondly, if you try to do anything spiritual for ego purposes within the real dream, that's a sin. Fuck that stupid logic. It's nothing more than the ego's attempt to spiritualize the dream while simultaneously repressing that spirituality behind a wall of sin.

So now this behavior over here, you know, selling knock-off goods for a huge markup and making tons of evil profit... that's ok and acceptable. But, if you try to sell someone a loving service or some healing or spiritual education or something that really helps them in a worthwhile way, then, you know.... SIN BE UPON YOU!

This is all because of the ego's back-ass claptrap system of logic. Bad and evil and terrible nasty things are okay to charge an arm and a leg for, but truly helpful beautiful love and spiritual inspiration which might get you out of the dream - NOooooooo... not allowed to mix that with the nasty evil money. No way.

It's bullshit. It's basically the ego's split mind, in which it has created a persona and a shadow. All of the stuff the ego approves of and wants to keep it puts into the persona, and all of the guilty sinful stuff it shoves into the shadow to get rid of it. The ego has a huge interest in getting rid of any real spirituality. So it shoves it into the guilty shadow department.

So it now divides up the world into "good and bad" and "right and wrong", and firmly puts any kind of spirituality into the "wrong" camp and anything that symbolizes much more "egotism" into the right camp. And now it's okay that the right stuff be acceptable and paid for, but you dare to charge money for the wrong stuff, suddenly it's a sin.

ITS ALL THE SAME! You especially should charge money for your spiritual services and products and you perhaps should be getting even MORE money for that than you would get for selling a pile of doughnuts. Why is it LESS VALUABLE?

I've seen so many well intentioned, good-hearted, spiritual people, develop a spiritualized ego version of value, where they try to symbolically implement spiritual concepts into their behaviors in the illusion. This is LEVEL CONFUSION! It does not work. And in almost every single example, these people's endeavors either never barely get off the ground, they flounder and struggle and then die, or they just flat out die before they get started.

This world is not READY to function on a basis of never-ending generosity and gratitude and freedom and selfless giving. To expect it to do so is to set up a tiny tent in an unnoticed corner and be basically ignored. The system will not acknowledge you. People have LEARNED that money symbolizes value, so why is it not okay to align money with what is truly VALUABLE? Why can we charge for guns and wars, but not for peace and love? SINNNNNNNN!!!!!

And then there will be this super-selfless symbolic notion of "money is evil" and "profit isn't spiritual" and .. you know, you should not have any more at all if you are spiritual because money is "real ego" and illusory spirituality within the dream is "not ego". So... only charge for the parts of the dream that you deem as ego and don't charge for the spiritual parts. It's bullshit. Self deception.

So many potential "spiritual businesses", or services, or people trying to create a community, or people opening up retreat centers, or creating courses, or spending hours and hours writing books, or putting their heart and soul into healing practices, just basically FLOP because they have fallen for the ego's trick of a level-confusion based model of what's the right thing to do. ie... ALWAYS, do not earn money from your "spirituality" in the dream, otherwise you are SINFUL.

i.e., if it doesn't LOOK LIKE it's spiritual, and if there isn't a lot of SACRIFICE happening, then you better say some hail Mary's. And heaven forbid you might actually value yourself and your time and effort enough to ask for money and make some profit. I mean, okay, let's all start a non-profit organization and have the absolute bare minimum of income to get by and barely be able to expand the business at all, it can't possibly grow because there isn't enough cash flow, and it just sits there shriveling up.

Imagine just how amazingly helpful a "spiritual business" could be if it actually were profitable and made some money and not only supported the people who were providing the service, allowing them to enjoy abundance, but also produced enough funds to expand and produce far more materials, goods, services, and helpful support, than could have been possible on a bare-minimum income. Why not?

Why do we have to grovel for donations and suffer in the gutter of hell trying to scrape by just because we're being all spiritual and "good" and buying into the ego persona of people-pleasing, self sacrifice and loss? Like, what is actually going to happen if you strike a profit? Will there be a lightning bolt? Is God going to judge you? Will you be a SINNER? How about some healthy guilt?

It's one thing to let Spirit guide you and be all lovely and everything is free and "don't mind me", but ... IS IT EFFECTIVE? Is it working? Not really. It's a matter of playing small and having false humility. Just make some goddam money and get on with it. Then use that extra money to be even more effective at helping people with even more products and goods and services.

Sure money isn't that important, really. It's just an illusion. It's not meaningful. It's not something you want to keep accumulating for some ego desire. So don't do it for that reason. Do it because IN THIS WORLD, according to the stupid rules of this society, you need to function based on money in order to find success and be effective. It's the rules of the game. It's the system that we're immersed in.

Try to go outside of this and unless you have really, really strong faith and miracle-working power, you're going to find yourself poor. I've seen it happen to many people who deserve better. There is nothing wrong with making money and enjoying it. Is it real? Is it a real sin? Does it prove you are really a sinner? Can you do it without believing that it is sinful or guilty whatsoever? Wouldn't that be SPIRITUAL?!

Don't be yet another heartfelt wannabe trying to be of service to God and not using any of the tools that are possible when you can afford it. Don't set up shop and be all.. you know, I won't charge anything, I'll just barely even mention that I would ... maybe accept donations, if you shoot me first. And .. maybe I should pay YOU to take this stuff off my hands? Wouldn't that be truly selfless.

This is all just symbolism. Trying to make the dream spiritual and trying to behave in a certain way within it in order to "be" spiritual or seen as spiritual. Don't do that. It's an egotistical belief in sacrifice and limitation. That's not the abundance God has planned for you and its not the abundance God wants you to experience. Why can't you be RICH AND SPIRITUAL? What does it matter if your spirituality is going to override any sense of sin or guilt relating to the riches anyway? Then you can REALLY make an impact on this crazy world.

The only reason people do all this is because of the belief that the WORLD IS REAL, and therefore if you are "being spiritual" inside a real world, you must SACRIFICE in order to not associate yourself with the parts of this real world that are clearly the realm of the ego. And so this is nothing more than the age-old attitude of believing the world is real and that it contains some good parts and bad parts. That's NOT SPIRITUAL AT ALL.

If the world is not real, and sin is not real, and you can't be guilty, and there's nothing to fear, then WHY THE FUCK NOT make some money and enjoy it and get yourself into a situation where you actually CAN make a big difference because you have the FUNDS to pull it off? Many things in this world you simply cannot do without money. You can't run a website without costs. You can't create books without a cost. You can't provide a training course without some costs. You can't heal people without it costing some time. That's just how it works here. Accept it. It's okay to require money.

Are you comfortable only with a donation? Then that shows you how much you believe in sin. Are you able to move past donations to maybe an optional, soft-sell? Hmm.. okay... you still believe in sin. Can you go all out and make TONS OF MONEY from your enterprise? hmm... totally and utterly sinful right? NO! It's hilarious to think this can prove sin or make separation real or that God would blink an eye and be pissed at you. Wake up.

Knock yourself out. You can't sin anyway.

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

The Holy Spirit is a real spirit from God that has unlimited power. He can heal anything. He can undo anything. He can also move mountains. There is nothing he cannot do. The Holy Spirit is with you and would like for you to develop trust in him, to the point where you might be willing to allow him to enter you and help you on a practical, experiential level.

It is a matter of willingness, trust, letting go, surrendering your ego attempts to fight with everything, and allowing the Holy Spirit to come into you. He is invited every time you show at least some willingness to move in the direction of atonement and forgiveness. But without your "permission" or your knowing that it's safe to allow Him to help you in a supernatural way, He will not take those measures because He knows that you might be frightened.

I was having a period of time that was very difficult emotionally and kept turning to the Holy Spirit to help me to forgive and to let go. In heated moments of tremendous emotional upset I started to say over and over again, "I surrender". Or, "I let go". I would say it repeatedly many times, and would start to experience a sense of relief. Because if there's one thing the ego does is it controls, holds on, attaches, clings, manipulates, bears grudges, resists, fights, and tries to dig in its heels. By surrendering willingly, you cut right to the core and drop the ego activities quickly.

I did this many weeks, often at night before falling asleep. And each time I would ask the Holy Spirit to help me to forgive and let go. I know he helped me with thoughts and insights and so on. But what was more important, was that over time, each time I went and surrendered, he often would start to remind me to surrender. He would say "relax" or "let me". And so I would relax, physically, because when you relax the body physically it also is a sign that you are willing to receive. Physical tension can be a sign of active resistance. So I would physically relax and let go and just focus on surrendering over and over and over.

And as it turns out, this gradually developed to where my surrendering of ego was, in a way, also an opening up to or surrendering to the Holy Spirit. I was moving away from ego, towards Him. And in surrendering, as you let go, you become more allowing, more trusting, more willing to step aside, more open to receiving love and support and help. And so I developed trust in the Holy Spirit, to the point where I would start to ask Him, willingly, but tentatively at first, to "come into me and heal me". To help me to heal. And in fact, I started to experience things happening.

At first it would be that my hands would shake, involuntarily. Or maybe my feet. And I didn't really know what this was "doing" but I learned that it was a side effect of whatever He was doing. And so I gradually learned to let go more and more and trust Him more, that He knows what He's doing. Over time this increased and the vibrational, spiritual, supernatural healing intensified and became more effective, stronger and more powerful. My whole body would shake and vibrate in ways that I cannot re-enact. And after this period of activity, actual emotional energy would have been significantly reduced, maybe even removed completely, resulting in me laughing, without having to go through the normal processes to release it.

This also escalated through further trust and willingness to allow Him to help me to heal with physical maladies, pains, symptoms and effects in the body. He is just as capable. If I am willing, and not afraid, and trust, and open myself up, I can let Him heal sickness of all kinds. I'm not quite to the point of trust yet where I can let something just disappear instantly but I'm working towards it, continuing to deeper my trust and openness to allowing the Holy Spirit to work miracles through me. And it also has been starting to extend to others.

I say all this not to brag and ONLY to ENCOURAGE that any and everyone try this for themselves if you have not done so already. I have no idea how people relate to the Holy Spirit but I do know that until I invited him to come into my "body" and "do whatever he wants", all of this supernatural healing was not happening. He wasn't seemingly "removing all the consequences" for me, and only through surrender and trust did I start to be WILLING to allow him to actually remove all consequences, emotional or physical or otherwise, FOR ME, through no effort of my own.

Before, I thought I had to do all the correcting and undoing on my own, which was my ego trying to do the course by itself. If you have never experienced the Holy Spirit actively DOING SOMETHING, in ways that have manifestations that you can SEE and FEEL, then you are in for a surprise. There is literally nothing He cannot do if you will let him. He frequently says to me, when I am tempted to solve or fix something myself, "let me", I stop and allow, and immediately he shakes me all over the place (side effects) as he proceeds to heal it for me. I don't have to do anything but allow and try to not interfere, and stay relaxed.

Have a go, if you have time. Spend time time each day surrendering and letting go, feel the relief, open up to allow and trust and invite the Holy Spirit to work in and through you. Put aside fear of "disembodied spirit doing stuff"... you have to learn to trust past that. Spirit is perfectly capable of doing ANYTHING, it's only a matter of how much we are willing to get out of the way and LET HIM. If you develop this trust far enough there is no miracle you cannot perform, nothing you cannot heal and no limits to what He can do through you for others. I've already started to allow Him to heal others through me, and he is quite effective.

I received this inspired definition of what A Course in Miracles is today.

A Course in Miracles says it is a "required course", that you do not have any option on whether or not to take it, and that only the time that you take it is voluntary. It says there is a curriculum which you must follow which you do not have any say in defining, meaning there are no other curriculums.

This is a point of much controversy and misunderstanding. But Jesus is telling the truth.

The "Course", if you will, the actual Course that Jesus is referring to in the book "A Course in Miracles", is not a Course that exists AS the book, but the book is REFERRING to the Course.

The Course, the one curriculum, is referring to every metaphysical truth and every metaphysical step which must at some point be taken in order to return to God. This applies to everyone, everywhere, all the time. There are no exceptions or options. It doesn't matter who you are, what religion you belong to, what you believe, you do NOT have a say in determining what the metaphysics of existence is, how it operates, what the laws are, or how you are meant to function.

There IS only one truth. And from that One Truth, following the separation, extends all of the metaphysical levels and layers and facts, which are on an absolutely colossal scale in the trans-personal, trans-temporal mind of the One Son of God. The structural composition of the levels of mind, the stages of separation, the steps that you have to go through in order to fall asleep, the things you MUST experience if you take those steps, are all absolutely irrefutable FACTS. There is a "WAY", there is only ONE way, and it is this one way that Jesus has labelled "A Course in Miracles".

Stop right there before you associate the book form with what the Course is. Jesus, outside of the book, is referring to the metaphysical structure of reality and the illusion and everything that can possibly take place in it, the "true nature" of existence, and in His book titled "A Course in Miracles" He has chosen to NAME that experiential metaphysical structure "the curriculum." There is no room for bending the rules or breaking the laws of the curriculum.

As a result of choosing separation, certain things came into existence which have a certain structure, a certain behavior, a certain inter-relationship with each other, and it is all entirely based on metaphysical facts. Everything that seemed to happen after the separation happened according to completely clear-cut causes and effects. Basically, by choosing ego, you MUST experience very exact "effects", and it is only by reversing those exact effects that you can be free of the ego. You took 3 steps forward, you MUST take 3 steps back.

Therefore there IS only one real curriculum. Either you are moving away from God or toward God. Movements toward God are the curriculum. This applies to everyone in all walks of life regardless of whether they heard of "A Course in Miracles" or not. In a way, though, Jesus has associated the term with the curriculum, because at the beginning He says:

"This is a Course in Miracles. It is a required Course."

Therefore Jesus is really referring to the one universal curriculum, the one universal metaphysics, and the steps required in order to follow the curriculum, as "A Course in Miracles". Not the book per se. The metaphysical structure of the dream and all of its levels and layers and facts and side-effects is all what defines the fixed curriculum, and taking a "course" in that, is the "Course in Miracles".

It is called a Course in MIRACLES because if you take an actual step in following the curriculum, making actual metaphysical progress in awakening, no matter what belief system you are surrounding those steps with, you are performing miracles. Corrections of mind.

It must be true that you are ALWAYS inside of the curriculum, you are always taking the curriculum, and you are alway bound by its rules. However, the option you have is whether or not to LEARN, i.e. take the curriculum, and so you are free to choose WHEN to learn it, i.e. when to take the next steps toward God. You do not get to choose what those steps are because they are based on the metaphysics. You can continue to be in DENIAL of this truth, which is an attempt to not take the curriculum, but you cannot CHANGE this truth, and sooner or later you MUST take it.

The curriculum therefore exists outside of the "book" of the Course, and applies in ALL belief systems at all times. There is only one "real" path to God. There are corrections necessary in order to awaken to the one truth. Whatever so-called path you are using, even if you never heard of A Course in Miracles, it MUST contain at least some metaphysical truth IF it is going to WORK at all. If it is not in alignment with the metaphysical truth and if it does not advance you along the ONE curriculum, then it CANNOT work.

Also different belief systems and religions either make the metaphysical truth clear, or obscure it, to varying degrees. Some belief systems obscure more than others and may obscure heavily. For example, satanism most likely is going to be very effective at denying the curriculum and electing "not to take it yet". Similarly there are many other delaying maneuvers.

However, what we see as the BOOK, "A Course in Miracles", the FORMAT it takes, and the way it describes the metaphysical truth, is perhaps one of, if not THE, most effective, clear, inspired, ACCURATE, least obscuring, and maximally EFFICIENT formats on the planet today. It can save significant time, because it very closely aligns to the one curriculum, and very effectively teaches about what the metaphysical truth is.

The BOOK, "A Course in Miracles", is piggybacking, or describing, the "real course", which is the curriculum, which is experiential and applies to everyone at all times. The book itself is not necessarily "required" to be read or followed in order to awaken. HOWEVER, whatever FORM of a path you choose, whatever the belief system, whatever theology, it MUST, *ABSOLUTELY MUST* correspond to the metaphysical truth taught in A Course in Miracles if it is going to WORK at all, and if it does not, it will NOT work and will only delay your awakening by producing more delusions.

You can wake up to the ONE TRUTH, through many many many paths. In fact, "all paths lead to God" is true because even the most obscure, highly delaying, extremely denying paths still have at least some amount of the curriculum applying to them, still present lessons, still offers the truth in some small way, and is still governed by the same ONE metaphysical system.

For example, Christianity's interpretation of the metaphysics is correct in some areas and a little off in others. It is correct that there is One God, and that Christ is God's One Son. It is also true that as Jesus (as Christ) said, He is THE way, THE truth, and THE light. Not one of many. THE ONLY ONE. And it is also true that no-one can come to the father but by Him. HOWEVER, Christianity is mistaken in its claim that this means you are forever separate and non-equal with Christ, that other FORMS of paths to God are wrong, that the Christian religion is the only "way" to God, and that all other paths are evil. That's not true.

Christianity CAN be an effective path to awakening and to becoming equal with Christ, but in many many of its flavors and interpretations, it is riddled with a heavy weight of delusion, illusion, confusion, and deception, which masquerade as truth but actually are part of the delaying maneuvers which attempt to PUT OFF the true curriculum. The only way Christianity can WORK is when it is in correct alignment with the truth that has been described in the book "A Course in Miracles", and is following the ONE CURRICULUM which Jesus has basically named "A Course in Miracles" (beyond the book).

Effectively that means that anyone who takes the Christian path (or any other religion or system), CAN ONLY wake up to the truth IF they have actually either inadvertently or on purpose taken the One Curriculum, which IS actually A Course in Miracles. Remember that Jesus begins the Course with "This is a course in miracles. It is a required Course." He goes on to say this is the only curriculum and that you do not have an option about what the curriculum entails. That means, if you woke up "through" Christianity, you actually DID take A Course in Miracles - the metaphysical, experiential, spiritually corrective path back to God, which is present in EVERYONE's mind and MUST be followed in order to return to God.

In this respect, A Course in Miracles, the one true curriculum, IS the only way to God, it IS the way that Jesus is referring to that HE woke up to being Christ, it IS the way that Buddha woke up, it IS the way that any other ascended master woke up, and It MUST be the way that everyone wakes up.

All of the rest of the descriptions and forms and formats and supposed ILLUSIONS of separate paths that people seem to be taking, where they might claim "I am not doing A Course in Miracles", or that they don't believe in it, or that they aren't taking the One Curriculum, are heavily clad in ILLUSIONS that make it seem like they are not taking the One Curriculum, BUT THEY ARE.

*cue meme with "there is no escape" and evil laugh*

Either you are taking A Course in Miracles and learning the metaphysical truth and following the one curriculum and are waking up to God, which is THE ONLY WAY, which does not necessarily have to entail having anything to do with the book whatsoever,

OR

You are delaying the one curriculum, are attempting not to take the "Course", and are in denial.

THAT is the true nature of A Course in Miracles. It is not just a Course that you are only taking IF you are doing your forgiveness or IF you own the book of IF the book is in your hands with you studying it. It is ALWAYS the course, whether you like it or not, and you are always taking it, whether you like it or not!

It is not just a book. It is not just a bunch of text and a set of lessons and a manual. That's just one format. One expression of ACIM. It's one way of explaining what the Course is, one way of TEACHING what the Course is. The Course is the one metaphysical curriculum for awakening which applies to everyone at all times. There are many ways to teach it. The BOOK "A Course in Miracles" is Jesus's way of teaching it, and is a very accurate way. There are an unlimited number of ways of teaching it. Some will appear to be extremely close to the true nature of the one curriculum, and some will seem to be so far removed that you would not say it is the one curriculum at all. But there is no escaping the one curriculum.

This is the metaphysical nature of A Course in Miracles. And this is why it is REQUIRED, and this is why Jesus said it is required. He is not lying. You just have to get your definition of what the "Course" is correct so that it makes sense.

If Christians are making ANY headway towards God, they are taking A Course in Miracles. If Muslims are making ANY headway toward God, they are taking A Course in Miracles. If Hindu's are making headway toward God, they are taking A Course in Miracles. What Jesus has described AS A Course in Miracles is the one, the only, the profound metaphysical teaching, which is completely factual and 100% FIXED and cannot be changed and has no exceptions. That's what He has revealed to us and has attempted to outline and teach in the book. Whether you opt to use the book or not, you are still bound by the curriculum and you still cannot take any other curriculum that works without it being a curriculum in miracles.

Being separated in bodies, we have become accustomed to seeing ourselves as CONFINED. As though completely fenced in.

But this is utterly UNLIKE the way we really are.

It is far more accurate to say, you are everywhere, and in all people, and share everything with everyone. You overlap them, merge with them, join with them, part of you is in them and they in you. This is your natural state.

Bodies were made to isolate you and confine you and separate you off from the parts of you which are IN your brothers, to make it seem as though you have been disallowed to connect, join, communicate, or love each other.

The body is the idea of sin or separation. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards".

When studying ACIM then, from Jesus's perpsective, your true nature is that you are not confined to your body, you are unlimited, you are everywhere and in everyone, you share everything and literally are inside of other people.

In that context, you can better understand why he says so many things about the Golden Rule applying, about what you do to your brother being done to you, how you cannot attack without attacking yourself, how recognizing your brother's truth recognizes your own etc.

All healing therefore is actually the undoing of CONFINEMENT and ISOLATION, restoring the CONNECTION and COMMUNICATION with your brother, lifting away the separations that have been put in place BY BODIES to split you off from others, and restoring the wholeness and unity that is natural to you.

Health IS oneness with your brother. Healing IS the repair of the RELATIONSHIP between both of you. Separation and blocks to awareness do not just apply to YOU, they apply BETWEEN you and your brother. Your sickness is an attack on BOTH of you.

Just because you have BECOME ISOLATED by the separation idea, you think that in your confinement, anything the course is saying applies to your CONFINED SELF. As though it speaks only of your isolated "self' that is inside your body. IT DOES NOT. It is recognizing that you share fully with all brothers and that in your NATURAL condition you are everywhere and one with all people, actually literally IN THEM. And therefore, the idea of separation is not just something "inside" your mind, it is what MAKES YOU ISOLATED from others.

Holy relationships are therefore completely natural. They do not just mean two *separate* people being holy toward each other. They actually mean two individuals who have FULLY JOINED AND MERGED MINDS and are essentially sharing the same space! You are in your brother and your brother is in you. "One mind contains all minds. One brother is all brothers." You overlap with your brother and join with and share with them like a FUSION of individuals.

It's far more effective then to realize that every form of separation, every block to awareness, every form of sickness, every way you isolate or are in denial, is not simply something you "do to yourself', it is something you do TO BOTH OF YOU, IN-BETWEEN the two of you. Your bodies were made to imprison you AWAY from each other, and being set free from that imprisonment doesn't mean you remain NON-SHARING, it means you return TO OVERLAPPING WITH EACH OTHER, beyond the bodies.

The body when used as a communication device is therefore completely overlooked, it's form or attempted isolation is turned into a holy temple, and the light in your mind shines PAST it directly PAST the body of your brother and extends INTO their mind. Communication is direct mind-to-mind or soul-to-soul sharing. This produces the ERASING of separation and therefore the reversal of all sickness and death.

This is why Jesus says "no-one returns to God alone". You return to TOGETHERNESS. Unity. Sharing. Oneness. Mutual holiness. Joined minds. Shared interests. Overlapping experience. Equality. Blending into your brother as though they are yourself. Sharing space with all brothers. Collapsing separation and collapsing spacetime.

You are the cause of everything you experience. You cannot be victmized against your will. This is the secret of salvation. "You are doing it to yourself." You are responsible for choice because you have free will.

When you DISOWN this responsibility, forming a block to awareness - which is a DENIAL that you are the cause, your mind splits and dissociates.

You do not see the cause of your suffering within yourself because it is blocked from awareness behind your denial. So you reason logically, "if it is not coming from me, it MUST be coming from something that is not me."

Immediately you look outside yourself for a cause. This projects cause outside of yourself. The groundwork has been laid to BLAME anyone and anything, even randomly, for causing what you are experiencing.

So the JUSTIFICATION for anger or any kind of attack, is based on your belief that YOU aren't the one causing it.

IF it were true that someone else is CAUSING what you are experiencing, agaist your will, you WOULD be justified in seeing yourself unfairly treated, and right to be angry.

But since other people are NOT the cause of you, your anger cannot EVER be justified. That justification is based on a MISTAKEN BELIEF that YOU are not the one doing this to yourself.

Your inability to see that you are the cause of your experience, is an act of irresponsibility. So you disown responsibility and give it to someone else. They are now seen as the responsible party. And now anything that happens is THEIR doing.

If you were to remove the blocks to awareness and the denial, and heal the split in your own mind, you would become aware that you are the CAUSE of EVERYTHING you experience. And in that awareness, you would see it is OBVIOUS that no-one else can EVER be involved in causing you against your will.

The notion of blaming anyone for anything then becomes complete nonsense. The only way to blame someone is to start out with the FALSE PREMISE that YOU aren't the one doing it.

This is true no matter what the situation seems to be like, who seems to be doing what to whom, what you think of it, how you judge it, whether its moral or not, whether it's kind or not. No matter who seems to victimize who, if you are angry, you are DISOWNING your power.

Anger is therefore NOT an expression of POWER, it is an expression of POWERLESSNESS. It is an ILLUSION of power, which is actually the OPPOSITE to what it appears.

Those who are powerless are angry. Those who are powerful cannot BE angry. Those who have true power can be assertive, WITHOUT being angry. They also can be most effective. Those who are powerless can only attack and force because they lack any true strength to accomplish anything.

Being angry is NOT being assertive. It is being DESTRUCTIVE, in which there is an attempt to assert at the same time as an attempt to TAKE AWAY the power of another.

True power does not take away the power of others, it EMPOWERS them, recognizing they are one with you. You cannot accept your own empowerment if you are busy believing that others should have no power. You must actually give power TO others, in a healthy way, in order to BE powerful.

If it seems someone has power over you, it is because you have disowned your power and GIVEN IT AWAY through sacrifice and not through sharing. You have lost it because you are at war with yourself. What appears to be their power is really your disowned and projected power, which you must reclaim and reintegrate.

When no-one is seen as having power OVER you, all are seen as having power WITH you as equals. And then there is no competition and no-one "overpowering" others. When there is equal power there is mutual self-responsibility and no grounds for aggression.

People get angry because they are confused about what is causing something. And who woudn't be angry if they thought they had no power to change something, or that they were being caused against their own ability to cause. Owning up to BEING THE CAUSE erases the entire basis for projected responsibility, and makes anger IMPOSSIBLE.

Those who are at peace, are fully empowered, and never angry. Because they see that only forgiveness is justified and nothing can disturb their peace.

Surrendering is always a great way to let go, give up ego resistance and settle into being guided. It allows you to admit to the truth and stop pretending. It's a way to dissolve denial and get to the real root cause behind things. It helps you to sink deeper into the Holy Spirit and allow yourself to be helped. It entails giving up on trying to do it all yourself, trying to fearfully depend on your own strength, and builds trust.

Without surrendering ego activities, you will remain "in control" and clinging tightly to problems and upsets, thinking that the more you do this the more you will avoid further suffering. But it works the opposite way. The more you try to control, the less control you have. Everything falls through your fingers when you try to grab it. You have to let it go. You then can gain everything by holding onto nothing.

As I surrender to the Holy Spirit and let go, I feel myself being willing to drop egotism, drop controls, drop the fight, and that puts me in a position of being open to support. The Holy Spirit can't do or take anything from you against your will. But in order to become able, you have to show a little willingness. And that means being willing to admit the truth, which in turn means surrendering or letting go of the ego facade, bravado, prowess, fake strength and "total independence."

It is natural for you to be completely 100% dependent on God. This doesn't mean you have no free will. It means you trust and will in accord with His will. You want what He wants because you know it's for your best, and He wants only good for you. You are a co-creator with God. The ego sees surrendering as death. It doesn't want to drop defenses. It doesn't want to let anything go. Attachment and possession are its motto, which keeps you bound to stress and fear and problems. Let all that fucking shit go.

It can literally be as simple and easy as saying over and over again, "I surrender", "I let go". Just say it or think it to yourself. The less time you leave in-between each repetition the more effective it is because it keeps you from drifting back off into problem solving. Usually now when I do this Holy Spirit steps in and starts healing me very quickly, and it was by doing this that I developed trust in Him to come into me and help me.

By surrendering, you open up to receiving. It's kind of like a willingness to let everything go to shit, which at first seems like it's going to be a terrible move and life will suck. But the truth is that when you let it all go you transcend the shit and it no longer seems important to do anything about it at all.

Especially if you are afraid, if you are fearing and worrying and doubting and are riddled with uncertainty, you need to surrender that shit. It means you're relying heavily on your own little ego self which is totally inadequate and is not the source of certainty or strength. Certainty (fearlessness) is an attribute of Knowledge, which is of God/Love. You can't experience certainty by "going it alone". You can only be fear-free by being joined with God, Holy Spirit, Jesus, higher-self, love, whatever you want to call it. Dependency on God is freedom.

The instant you start to surrender and let go you'll feel relief from the fear/anxiety. As soon as you surrender you'll start sighing, as an expression of how you admit that what you've been doing isn't working. It seems like a disappointment to admit that the ego's strategies are all bullshit. That your best "I can do it myself" reliance/independence simply is not working. Admitting to failure is a great step toward surrendering because it admits the truth, and that means opening a window for truth (healing) to access you. All your strategies suck. and aren't working. Let go and let God.

Surrendering will make you happier. Surrendering will bring you peace. Surrendering will make you calmer and less stressed out. Surrendering will open you up to spiritual healing and miracles. Let Holy Spirit manage the body. Let God in. Receive love. Be healed.

(Comments on "the mechanism of miracles.")

"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth."

... Here I initially thought Jesus is talking about a typical form of denial, like, not wanting to admit something. But Jesus seems to be referring to the fact that you can deny LIFE and health and thereby implement all forms of sickness and even death. Miracles then can reverse the "denial of life", ie death. Miracles resurrect.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves."

...Loving yourself can heal your sickness. All sickness is a lack of love.

"Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES."

...This seems like a quandry, people want to not be sick, but behind the denial they do, so they continue to deny what would make them well - the admission of love.

"If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick."

...Recognizing you are love heals all sickness.

"The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH."

...To help someone heal, you must not believe what THEY are believing about themselves. They are in denial of their love, you must acknowledge their love and overlook their denial/belief in being unloveable.

"The sick must heal THEMSELVES, for the truth is IN them."

...At first this suggests you cannot heal anyone else.

"But, having OBSCURED it, the light in ANOTHER mind must shine into theirs, because that light IS theirs."

...So since someone has "disabled" themselves, blocking the source of their own healing, and while requesting help are also rejecting it, someone ELSE needs to help them. The light in YOU as a miracle worker IS the "same" as the light in the other. Therefore you can cause THEIR light to BYPASS their own denial.

"The light in them (the miracle worker) shines as brightly, REGARDLESS of the density of the fog that obscures it. If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP."

...Even as your brother sees themselves as imprisoned, you have to see them as NOT imprisoned. Not buy into the illusion of the denial or sickness. You must not "give power to" the sickness and must not believe it HAS any power, otherwise you are making it real and giving it strength, which reinforces it. You must deny the belief that THEIR denial (showing up as sickness) has any power, including the belief that the sickness is too difficult to heal.

"Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN."

...Recognizing your brother as "not really sick" and remembering his true self/love for him, recognizes it in both of you. You remember FOR both of you. Ie you put the ove back into both of your minds.

"To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember."

...Some have interpreted this to mean that your brother "is" you which is almost true. You are identical and you share with him. When you can see that what is true of him is true of you, YOU are remembering God. For both of you.

"Perceive in sickness but another call for love, and offer your brother what he believes he cannot offer himself."

...Love is the basis of miracles. Expressing love can heal sickness. But notice it also says OFFER... which doesn’t mean it is forceful, and it potentially can still be rejected. There is a line in ACIM which says "miracles are not always effective because of what love is" or something like that.. because they respect freedom.

"Whatever the sickness, there is but one remedy. You will be made whole as you MAKE whole, for to perceive in sickness the appeal for health, is to recognize in hatred the call for love."

...This is quite advanced. To perceive WHOLENESS requires no fear and complete love. Perception has to be very "correct" in order to *recognize* that the sickness is a call for love, and to not be deceived by it. The person has implemented sickness through denial of love, via hate. You have to not believe the hate.

"And to give a brother what he REALLY wants, is to offer it unto yourself. For your Father wills you to know your brother AS yourself. Answer HIS call for love, and YOURS is answered. Healing is the love of Christ for His Father, and for HIMSELF."

...You must give love to both of you. This is why "you can only give the miracles you have received". In order to share love which will heal your brother, you must be IN the love yourself. If you are not willing to love yourself, you cannot heal others. But if you do love yourself and are healed, you CAN heal others.

Your brother really wants love, but has denied it to himself. To give it to him, you must love him "as you love yourself". Loving your brother shares it with both of you and restores unity and wholeness to both of you. Worth repeating:

"Healing is the love of Christ (sonship) for His Father (father of all souls) and for Himself (all brothers and yourself).

Love yourself so that you can love others. Love works miracles.

As you work to forgive yourself and recognize your own innocence, you become more loving. But you're going to find that this cannot happen in isolation.

As you increase your light, and no longer believe sinfulness or guilt within yourself, you're going to encounter the fact that other people still regard themselves as sinful and guilty.

This puts you in a position where you "have more" than they do, and are in a lighter place than they are.

"Miracles supply a lack." "Miracles are given by those who temporarily have more to those who temporarily have less."

If you were to simply "drop down" to where they are at, through false empathy, you will lose your light. You also can't maintain a forgiving perspective on yourself if you still run into the obstacles to peace that other people put in place.

So that means that sooner or later, as you continue to ascend into the light, you're going to have to start moving past other people's guilt. Whatever their belief or darkness is, if you don't forgive it in them, you can't maintain your state of mind.

"When I am healed I am not healed alone."

That means you begin to no longer support other people's self attack. You start to question whether they are guilty. And you start to support the light in them as well. You begin to steer them towards the light, so that you can remain in light.

As this progresses, it's going to become very natural that as you become more loving, you will automatically uplift others as well. You will have to not believe that they are guilty, in order for you to not be guilty. You can't have different rules for them and you - that's ego.

So that means that you becoming healed, you begin to turn into an instrument for healing.

"Those who are healed become instruments of healing."

This isn't even really optional, unless you want to go back into darkness. By stepping into light and recognizing the Golden Rule, and developing what is now a shared interest, you literally HAVE to have a healing and forgiving attitude towards others in order to maintain your own. This isn't a passive state of just sitting there observing, it's an active DOING and a going out and an expressing towards others in relationship.

This positions you as a healer and a forgiver of others. And I don't mean in the sense that you do forgivenesses about the stuff you think other people do to you. If you have BECOME healed, you are now in a position to undo the confusion of others and shine past their blockages.

Your mind becomes constructive, rather than destructive, as it realizes that only by supporting light can it move towards heaven, and only by moving towards creation can it move away from its own self destruction. This puts you in a position to constructively assist others who are trying to destroy themselves.

"By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others. The message which he then gives to others is the truth that THEIR MINDS are really similarly constructive, and that their own miscreations cannot hurt them. By affirming this, the miracle worker releases the mind from over-evaluating its own learning device (the body), and restores the mind to its true position as the learner."

It is not only your duty and role, but also your right and privilege, to assist others in this way, healing them and enlightening them and steering them towards their innocence.

"Having been restored to your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself. You now share MY inability to tolerate the lack of love in yourself and in everyone else, and MUST join the GREAT CRUSADE to correct it."

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

The correct and effective forgiveness of yourself does lead to an automatic function of healing on earth, in relation to others, which you share with the Holy Spirit. This function positions you as the light of the world.

"Forgiveness is my function as the light of the world."

"Do His work, for you SHARE in His function. As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares His with you on earth."

In this function, this natural role, you profess Christ. And this professing or expressing of Christ is a healing function which is given to others. To those who have less light than you, in order to raise them up and resurrect them.

"The Disciples were officially and specifically told to heal others, as Physicians of the Lord. They were also told to heal themselves, and were promised that I would never leave them or forsake them. Atonement is the natural profession of the Children of God, because they have professed Me."

This is the point at which you become a miracle worker who is in service to others.

"Miracles are the maximal service you can render another."

Serving, therefore, is what you automatically do, or move into doing, as your own awakening progresses. If you have received miracles then it is automatic that you will give them. To receive them you have to recognize your innocence, which you have to believe is true of everyone, otherwise it cannot be fully believed. And this recognizing that the same truth (golden rule) applies to everyone makes you ready and willing and able to reinforce it in others."You can only give the miracles you have received."

Thus you join the great crusade, you become the atonement, you are now part of the plan and a mechanism which God is using to bring about the healing and awakening of your brothers. As a Teacher of God you now function as part of God's way of bringing everyone home, because atonement is more than just about your own personal salvation, it's about the salvation of the entire sonship.

Your ego is not going to like this. But in order to be fully forgiving you're going to have to find a way to find everyone innocent, no matter what they seem to do.

This includes every degree of criminal behavior, every form of attack, all abuse and torture and sexual perversion, every single way that one person might seem to hurt another. Even if you see it, even if it is continuing, you STILL have to find a way to see innocence. God does not turn anyone away for any reason.

How are you going to do that? Society is definitely not going to support you in this. Most people across the world are so full of guilt they don't even know what innocence is. They see the whole world through a filter of guilt and darkness, which translates anything anyone does into a sin.

Being incapable of forgiving, most people will just react with fake horror at the first sign of anyone else's mistake, and will jump at the chance to scapegoat them. To hate and to blame, to condemn and accuse, to demand their punishment, even their death. This is very unforgiving.

If you are to see that an "evil criminal" is completely innocent, you're not going to be able to maintain your USE of them as a scapegoat. The only way you could really find them guilty is by finding yourself guilty, then trying to shovel that off onto them. And this is what most people are doing.

We have to become able to reognize that all insane behavior is just a mistaken state of mind, people acting on confusion and delusion, various forms of madness and dysfunction and unhealed wounds. And all of this calls for healing, not further harm.

The key is that when we witness someone seeming to make a horrendous mistake, we see it NOT as a sin, but as merely a mistake calling for love. And the only way to do that is to NOT enter into the game of projecting guit. You must not find them guilty of what they appear to be doing. No matter what it is they seem to do, even if it's what we'd call some horrendous murder.

Typically when someone does something wrong, all of society will jump on them in justified anger, point a finger, blame and hate, and want that person to be punished. This is not forgiveness and is part of those people's insanity. They are trying to take the opportunity to get rid of their own guilt and madness, by conveniently attaching it to someone else's mistake.

When you forgive enough, you can no longer side with the people that want to have a witch hunt. You can no longer accept that when someone does something to hurt another it's completely justified to be angry at them and want them to be punished. You can no longer tolerate and accept other people taking advantage of the situation to deal out some punishment that they think is deserved.

All punishing, all accusing, all hurting, all destroying, all anger, all attack, all guilt, has to stop. It can hardly be corrective to USE any of these as a response to someone that DOES any of these. To punish someone who is doing something wrong is a double punishment. To hate someone who is hating does absolutely NOTHING to improve the situation. It just adds insult to injury and is hipocritical.

The only proper response to anyone doing anything is to love, and to help them to return to love, through healing and help. Nothing else is sane. Nothing else is effective. There has to be rehabilitation, reintegration, therapy, healing, love, support, encouragement and a desire to have the person return to the community, welcomed with open-arms and loved.

In fact, if any one person is relegated to evil, deserving of punishment, or we decide they "should be guilty", we are not helping anything at all. We are just reinforcing ego and making it worse. Punishment is not education, it is the opposite, and has the opposite effect. It is not a deterrent, it just reinforces ego patterns.

Only forgiveness works. And in order to forgive, it must be seen as justified. And the only way it is justified is if YOU perceive that everyone DESERVES it, because you do not see or recognize or support guilt in them. And the only way to not support guilt in them is to not have any in yourself. Only the self-accused condemn. Only the innocent can be forgiving. And those who project guilt are more guilty than those they project it upon.

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in this view are all your sins forgiven. What is sin except a false idea about God's Son? Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God."

"But first, lift up your eyes and look upon each other in innocence, born of COMPLETE forgiveness of each other's illusions, and through the eyes of faith, which see them not."

"And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt?"

"Yet forgiveness is the means by which I will recognize my innocence. It is the reflection of God's Love on earth. It will bring me near enough to Heaven that the Love of God can reach down to me and raise me to my home."

There are two approaches to ACIM. One is to learn the theory about what is true or false. The other is to actually change your mind and transform your awareness so that you wake up to experiencing it.

Theory is learned on a horizontal level. It involves the intellect. It involves trying to understand what ACIM says and means. It's analytical and it studies the words, the levels, the structures, the relationships of things, the definitions of words and the "description" of the truth. it dwells on the form and the word choices and so on.

Some people have an easier time learning the theory than others. Some people are not as intellectually able to get their heads around the intricate depths and nuances of Jesus's genius. For some the theory seems complex and off-putting. And many people get the theory profoundly wrong, while others are very accurate in their discernment of it.

Sometimes there are debates and fights about what the course says and means. This is all to do with the horizontal approach. It's an intellectual battle in which sides try to convince each other that their understanding of the course is the correct one. And in many cases some people may well be correct while others are very lost. There are some people who are so incredibly lost on the theoretical level that they are practically learning a totally different belief system. They think they're heading toward reality while heading away from it.

Then there is a vertical movement away from hell toward heaven, away from darkness toward light, away from ego towards the Holy Spirit, away from the body towards the soul, and away from the world towards the Kingdom of God. This is a transformational movement which does actually require a vertical change of mind, an awakening, a willingness, an opening, and a trust.

In the vertical learning we actually have to apply the theory. The mind has to be transformed. Beliefs have to be undone. Healing has to take place. Your life and your curriculum presents you with challenges and lessons which you have to learn. Your relationships have to change and your sense of identity has to alter. This is not achieved through theory.

Some people struggle to accurately understand the course's theories on the horizontal level, and turn a blind eye to this fact by trying to focus on something more experiential. They may focus on love or feeling. This can produce progress upwards to some extent, but then the faults in the theory hold them back.

It can hold them back such as, for example, someone believing that Earth is God's Kingdom, which is going to pull the person in the completely wrong direction. So while they're trying to go up, faults in the theory are pulling them down. It's like a handicap. There are some quite loving-seeming people doing ACIM who nevertheless say things which are profoundly wrong and delusional.

On the flip side, there are also people who become expert at the horizontal theory. Great intellects and scholars and theologians who are very good at discerning accurately the logical structures and relationships of things. Of realizing how everything fits together and correctly putting everything in its proper place. Some people are very good at this. But at the same time, those same people can at times become lost in this understanding and fail to apply the course to move vertically. The "study" of the course then becomes a handicap that keeps them from opening their minds and actually encountering reality.

I think for the most part the ideal is to be proficient at both. We need theory in order to help us to make sense of things, to guide us in the right direction, to clarify meanings, to have a proper framework so that you know what you're supposed to be doing and why. But to also then take that and use it, apply it, live it, look at how it works in your life, use it to change your mind, to develop trust, to actually open up to reality, to a different kind of vision, and to shift your sense of identity away from the body. As the workbook begins:

"A theoretical foundation such as the Text is necessary as a background to make these exercises meaningful. Yet it is the exercises which will make the goal possible. An untrained mind can accomplish nothing. It is the purpose of these exercises to train the mind to think along the lines which the course sets forth."

So yes you need to be pretty accurate with the theory, but the purpose of that is so that you can be more effective and efficient in your application of it to your life. Your living curriculum of lessons, holy relationships and life events is where you will be having to apply the principles.

"The miracle is the means, the Atonement the principle, and the healing is the result."

It's not enough to be excellent at the theory and not apply it to change yourself. It's not enough to try to change yourself while being absolutely all over the place on the theory. If you really want to shoot for the stars you need to understand the course in principle, and apply it in practice. The two work together to atone your mind correctly, heading in the appropriate direction for the appropriate reasons. Otherwise it's like sailing your boat in the wrong direction.

As Jesus once said to me, "you understand it, now you just need to apply it."

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

Miracle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communication means sharing. Not sharing where one person hands over something to someone else, who now possesses that thing, but the first person doesn't. It means, you both have access to the same state at the same time concurrently. In other words, communication means Oneness.

When there is a breakdown in Oneness, where separations are introduced, it' like erecting walls that come between. Separate parts of mind - or individuals - now seem to be on either side of the wall, like the Berlin wall. This wall breaks communication. It makes it hard to share and join and connect.

Once communication has broken down, i.e. sharing has broken down, we get into a state where there is barely any real sharing. Separate individuals now seem cut off from each other with various forms of distance between them.

The physical world with all its illusions arises out of this breakdown in communication, resulting from separation and illusions of fragmentation and distance. "Spacetime" really means "distance from here."

When communication is diminished, it degrades and devolves into what we commonly think of as forms of communication. These forms of communication are severely strained because there is so much separation involved.

While you can write or speak to others, across a gap of separation there must be misinterpretation. Information will be lost, mis-perceived, and disagreed upon. When two people seem to be a little more eye-to-eye, communication may be elevated, or they may seem to share more.

But there is also an illusion of sharing. Prowess at using the ego's forms of communication doesn't necessarily mean there is openness to true sharing. There are excellent "communicators" in the world but they are not necessarily One with God, or experiencing the same exact identity and state of being as the One Son of God.

The body limits communication, and every way that we use it to express through its forms, are breakdowns in communication. Once in the body this way, unless you are so awakened that you are communicating from pure love, you will feel this urge to try to, or to have to, force others to see things the way you see them.

This happens because you know that there is a major difference between the way you perceive separately and the way they perceive separately. You have to make egoic efforts to force them to listen, and the ego then produces this fictional idea that ... if you could just get people to "get" what you are saying, if you could just get them to "see" your point of view, or if you could just shake the denial out of them to get them to agree with you wholeheartedly, THEN this would be communication. However, this is impossible to achieve.

This automatic compulsion to coerce others to see things your way, is simply because you are not both sharing the same direct experience and there is no Oneness. This means the other person will have to be changed in order for them to seem to share what you are experiencing, and this change can only be brought about through force, in defense of what you perceive as being the whole truth.

While there is a separation, there cannot be perfect communication. The ego will attempt to claim it is possible to KEEP the separation between you and others, to communicate only through its approved channels, and to nevertheless perfectly transfer what is in you to others, or to precisely get from others what is in them. This is impossible and will never work. The separation distorts the message and will always inhibit it.

True communication in ACIM means Oneness. When there is a revelation, God is communicating fully to you. When there is full awakening, you are then able to share in full communication. The Course speaks of how we are to use miracles to help us to "raise the level of communication". What this means is decreasing separation so that there can truly be real sharing - oneness.

"To be with a body is not communication."

"The whole aim of the miracle is to raise the level of communication."

"11. Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer love is received, and through miracles love is expressed."

"Like any communication medium, the body receives and sends the messages that it is given. It has no feeling for them. All of the feeling with which they are invested is given by the sender and the receiver."

This also means that, in fact, the ego does not facilitate communication - it blocks it. It spins illusions of communication to try to bridge the gap of separation which it itself put in place, which is "special communication" (that's not an official course term but it could be). Illusions of successful communication, or the ways that you improve the ego's forms of communication, covers up and distorts real communication.

In truth then, nothing that the ego attempts to "share" goes anywhere. It's ultimate form of communication is attempted death, whereby the body is used as the ultimate weapon to try to prove that oneself is dead and therefore so are others. And yet, this has no effect on others. The more you enter into the ego the more cut off from others you become, and the effects of what you attempt to bring about cease all the more.

This is also why nothing real can be threatened. The ego cannot attack God. The more it attempts to attack God the less effective it is. The ego's attacks are withdrawals from God. The more it tries to bring about death, the more confined and separated it becomes, and this keeps all of its effects securely at a distance from God. The Kingdom of God cannot be assailed because the ego's forms of communication - "attack" - is actually an act of failing to will anything real.

"Exclude any part of the Kingdom from yourself and you are not whole."

"The body no more dies than it can feel. It does nothing."

"Nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace."

"Nothing can destroy your peace of mind because God goes with you wherever you go."

"There is no death because the Son of God is like his Father. Nothing you can do can change Eternal Love."

Communication means sharing. Not sharing where one person hands over something to someone else, who now possesses that thing, but the first person doesn't. It means, you both have access to the same state at the same time concurrently. In other words, communication means Oneness.

When there is a breakdown in Oneness, where separations are introduced, it' like erecting walls that come between. Separate parts of mind - or individuals - now seem to be on either side of the wall, like the Berlin wall. This wall breaks communication. It makes it hard to share and join and connect.

Once communication has broken down, i.e. sharing has broken down, we get into a state where there is barely any real sharing. Separate individuals now seem cut off from each other with various forms of distance between them.

The physical world with all its illusions arises out of this breakdown in communication, resulting from separation and illusions of fragmentation and distance. "Spacetime" really means "distance from here."

When communication is diminished, it degrades and devolves into what we commonly think of as forms of communication. These forms of communication are severely strained because there is so much separation involved.

While you can write or speak to others, across a gap of separation there must be misinterpretation. Information will be lost, mis-perceived, and disagreed upon. When two people seem to be a little more eye-to-eye, communication may be elevated, or they may seem to share more.

But there is also an illusion of sharing. Prowess at using the ego's forms of communication doesn't necessarily mean there is openness to true sharing. There are excellent "communicators" in the world but they are not necessarily One with God, or experiencing the same exact identity and state of being as the One Son of God.

The body limits communication, and every way that we use it to express through its forms, are breakdowns in communication. Once in the body this way, unless you are so awakened that you are communicating from pure love, you will feel this urge to try to, or to have to, force others to see things the way you see them.

This happens because you know that there is a major difference between the way you perceive separately and the way they perceive separately. You have to make egoic efforts to force them to listen, and the ego then produces this fictional idea that ... if you could just get people to "get" what you are saying, if you could just get them to "see" your point of view, or if you could just shake the denial out of them to get them to agree with you wholeheartedly, THEN this would be communication. However, this is impossible to achieve.

This automatic compulsion to coerce others to see things your way, is simply because you are not both sharing the same direct experience and there is no Oneness. This means the other person will have to be changed in order for them to seem to share what you are experiencing, and this change can only be brought about through force, in defense of what you perceive as being the whole truth.

While there is a separation, there cannot be perfect communication. The ego will attempt to claim it is possible to KEEP the separation between you and others, to communicate only through its approved channels, and to nevertheless perfectly transfer what is in you to others, or to precisely get from others what is in them. This is impossible and will never work. The separation distorts the message and will always inhibit it.

True communication in ACIM means Oneness. When there is a revelation, God is communicating fully to you. When there is full awakening, you are then able to share in full communication. The Course speaks of how we are to use miracles to help us to "raise the level of communication". What this means is decreasing separation so that there can truly be real sharing - oneness.

"To be with a body is not communication."

"The whole aim of the miracle is to raise the level of communication."

"11. Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer love is received, and through miracles love is expressed."

"Like any communication medium, the body receives and sends the messages that it is given. It has no feeling for them. All of the feeling with which they are invested is given by the sender and the receiver."

This also means that, in fact, the ego does not facilitate communication - it blocks it. It spins illusions of communication to try to bridge the gap of separation which it itself put in place, which is "special communication" (that's not an official course term but it could be). Illusions of successful communication, or the ways that you improve the ego's forms of communication, covers up and distorts real communication.

In truth then, nothing that the ego attempts to "share" goes anywhere. It's ultimate form of communication is attempted death, whereby the body is used as the ultimate weapon to try to prove that oneself is dead and therefore so are others. And yet, this has no effect on others. The more you enter into the ego the more cut off from others you become, and the effects of what you attempt to bring about cease all the more.

This is also why nothing real can be threatened. The ego cannot attack God. The more it attempts to attack God the less effective it is. The ego's attacks are withdrawals from God. The more it tries to bring about death, the more confined and separated it becomes, and this keeps all of its effects securely at a distance from God. The Kingdom of God cannot be assailed because the ego's forms of communication - "attack" - is actually an act of failing to will anything real.

"Exclude any part of the Kingdom from yourself and you are not whole."

"The body no more dies than it can feel. It does nothing."

"Nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace."

"Nothing can destroy your peace of mind because God goes with you wherever you go."

"There is no death because the Son of God is like his Father. Nothing you can do can change Eternal Love."

For a long time I have focused on "the secret of salvation". This is to do with realizing that you are the cause of everything you are experiencing. And therefore that you are responsible for all your own suffering. On the one hand it's humbling and on the other hand it's empowering, because if you can realize you're the one doing it you have the freedom to stop.

But l notice now that the secret of "how to be saved" applies in the case where you are not yet saved. It's helpful when you are in the suffering and need to get out of it. That's kind of the context of it, it's a tool you can use to recognize who is doing what to whom, so that you can stop doing it.

I have noticed also that with the secret of salvation, we are focusing a lot on taking responsibility. Which initially is seen as inciting guilt, and then moves into trying to be fully responsible for everything. But the further secret is, that if we try to take full responsibility ALONE, where "separate me" is fully responsible for everything, then we are still generating fearful outlooks, because depending on ourselves alone is a state of rejecting God.

So I've been locked into a stage for a while of trying to be fully responsible, but trying to take that responsibility in isolation, rather than GIVE that responsibility to the Holy Spirit. I feel that I personally am somewhat moving beyond this stage now and into more of the "I am saved" stage. By which I mean, I have recognized that it is my attempts to do anything "alone" that is the source of all suffering, because that's how I "be separate". And "I" can't be fully responsible without sharing that responsibility with God.

Whenever I try to be separate, I essentially am attacking myself, which makes errors, produces more ego fear, and induces suffering. This all comes about after I have judged and given meaning to things, using my own faculties for judging. Which means really, using my own past learning. This always leads to errors because it's lacking a lot of facts. And I keep being shown now just how wrong I can be when I don't know all the details.

So I'm now finding that if I admit to not knowing what anything means, and am willing to stop trying to judge anything I see, and instead seek out the Holy Spirit to join in his vision or interpretation, then this circumvents the whole process of going into error. Or rather, I guess I'm saying that if I seek the state of forgiveness sooner, then I don't go into judgement, and thus don't hurt myself. Which reminds me of this...

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus KEEPING it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made, in order to BE forgiven. "

This is what I am atuning to now. Trying to become closer to the Holy Spirit and more identified with my real self, so that I do not go INTO judgement or MAKE errors. Because as soon as you make errors, you'll start believing you've got a whole mess on your hands that you need to fix, problems to solve, fears to address and self-inflicted suffering to be undone. ALL of that can be avoided if you don't make the errors in the first place!

It's far more effective at preventing a movement INTO fear, when I try to remain OUT of the battlefield. Being willing to not be the one to judge, or decide, or plan, or figure out, or deduce meaning, I stay well out of the entire "fight" that we have with the world. If I don't do this and I go into solo-mode, ego pilot mode, then I start to "make a world" that's riddled with separations and conflicts and unresolved problems and threats and dangers.

I have been finding of late therefore that I actually feel... and this is a word Jesus just threw in my mind.... INSULATED.... against dangers. That is to say, I feel like there was an entire version of "the world" which I thought was out there, which has been scraped off the surface of my mind and isn't there anymore. An entire layer of experience and suffering and a sense of threat and engagement and littleness and fear. It's just gone. It's like I have stepped out of an entire world and it has disappeared. At least to a degree, and now I look upon what's left through much calmer and less aggravated perspectives.

I see now therefore what Jesus means about how false perception makes you see a world that looks like hell, and how as you move into more abstract states of mind you lift off of the world entire layers of vulnerability, fear, struggle and suffering. Its like a whole veil has been lifted to some degree, so much that I have been feeling like I'm in a different world. Like I literally just stepped out of one planet and am on another one where a lot of the strife doesn't exist.

And I am thankful for that, because there is a noticeable contrast between how much safer and calmer and happier I feel now without the tremendous burden of being some kind of "soldier on the battlefield" fending off the hounds of hell. I am simply not making as many errors, generating as much fear, producing as much control, making up as many problems, or developing as many meanings for things. And in fact as I look at objects now they appear to be new and fresh and interesting.

It's weird but Jesus basically says that we are to adopt a perspective in which everything is given ONE meaning, from a whole viewpoint where "wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles", where we look upon a forgiven world without trying to understand it, having given up all our past learning and become willing to be empty, to just surrender and let go of trying to know or do or control everything. I'm taking my hands off the steering wheel and the car is finding a a smoother path.

"The holy instant is the Holy Spirit's most useful learning device for teaching you love's meaning. For its purpose is to SUSPEND JUDGMENT ENTIRELY. Judgment ALWAYS rests on the past, for PAST experience is the basis on which you judge. Judgment becomes impossible without the past, for WITHOUT it you do NOT understand anything. You would make no ATTEMPT to judge, because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not know WHAT ANYTHING MEANS. You are afraid of this, because you believe that, WITHOUT THE EGO, all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that, without the ego, ALL WOULD BE LOVE."

"Each man makes one ego for himself, although it is subject to enormous variation because of its instability, ***and one for everyone he perceives***, which is equally variable." UrT4C2

Did you know you've made an ego for other people, just as much as you've put an ego inside yourself? That's what he's saying. You have invented an ego for other people and you interact WITH that ego rendition of the person rather than seeing them for who they are. And we're not talking here about just seeing them as a body, but even overlaying their body with another layer of modification.

He's also goes on to say that as your ego and the ego you made for another interact, they change and affect each other.

"Their interaction IS a process which literally alters both, because they were not made either BY or WITH the unalterable.

"It is particularly important to realize that this alteration can and does occur as readily when the interaction takes place IN THE MIND as when it involves physical presence. THINKING about another ego is as effective in changing relative perception as is their physical interaction." UrT4C2

For me I was quite shocked to realize that I had made an ego for a particular person, and I was interacting with it. And this ego was a very reduced view of that person. It focused on their body only, seeing their body as though it was all there was to the person. In fact, strangely even seeing the person as if they had NO mind at all and were entirely physical. All sense of them even being there or having a presence or personality was mostly gone, replaced by a seemingly empty shell of an appearance.

It was also shocking to see that I was interacting with that ego and not with the person. I was not giving them any credit and was not seeing past their body form. I had taken their body form to be them almost entirely and was very blind to anything else. I now had a special relationship that had stripped that person down so much that it felt like I was interacting with a small child who was regarded as defective and weak and very sinful and treacherous.

It was strange to realize I was even doing this. And when I realized I was doing this I also realized I could step back from that version of them and get outside of it, to take a look at the person more directly and with more presence. It wasn't just "my ego" that was causing a clouding of how I see. It was the fact that I had also produced a kind of "mirror" ego that was projected onto that person and had substituted for them. That ego or "image" of a self was now masquerading as them to my awareness, and I was relating only to it. I was in a relationship with a fantasy character.

I then thought to myself, I don't even know how I got into this state. How did this happen? How could I have built up such a false view of a person that was so out of touch with them it made it seem like the person wasn't even barely there any more. That the person seemed to be so different from how they used to be that I barely recognized them, as if I thought that person was not even really there anymore, and yet they were.

So now begins the task of dismantling the egos we've made not just for ourselves but even for other people. These are narrow, condemned, faulty, dysfunctional, guilty senses of identity which have become counterfit selves standing-in for other people. It's now not simply just a matter of my finding out what my own real identity is, it's also a matter of finding out what is the true identity of others. Have I even seen them really? Do I even know what they're really like? It's not just that I'm not my thoughts or emotions or body, they're not theirs either, and they're not the version of them that I made up.

For sure my ego has a dominating tyrannical overpowering and attacking view of others. But in fact its view of what I think is them is in fact a view of further egos that my mind believes exists. Its relationship is with these artificial figures that aren't even the actual persons. It has special relationships with these "dream figures" like in a private world, subjectively interpreting that these make-believe fictional entities are actually out there to be interacted with, and that this is all that's there.

"Who sees a brother's body has laid a JUDGMENT on him, and sees him not. He does not REALLY see him as sinful; he does not see him at all. In the darkness of sin, he is INVISIBLE. He can but be IMAGINED in the darkness, and it is here that the illusions you hold about him are NOT held up to his reality. Here are illusions and reality kept SEPARATED. Here are illusions NEVER brought to truth, and ALWAYS hidden from it. And here, in darkness, is your brother's reality IMAGINED as a body, in unholy relationships with other bodies, serving the cause of sin an instant, before he dies." UrT20H6

"Can the ego teach truly, when it overlooks truth? Can it perceive what it has DENIED? Its witnesses DO attest to its DENIAL, but hardly to WHAT it has denied. The ego looks straight at the Father and does not see Him, for it has denied His Son." UrT10F17

"The other has many forms, for the content of INDIVIDUAL illusions differs greatly. But they have one thing in common; they are all insane. They are made of sights which are NOT seen, and sounds which are NOT heard. They make up a PRIVATE world which CANNOT be shared. For they are meaningful ONLY to their maker, and so they have no meaning at all. In this world their maker moves alone, for only HE perceives them.

Each one peoples his world with figures from his INDIVIDUAL past, and it is because of this that private worlds DO differ. But the figures that he sees were NEVER real, for they are made up ONLY of his REACTIONS to his brothers, and do NOT include their reactions to HIM. Therefore he does not see that he made them, and that they ARE NOT WHOLE. For these figures HAVE NO WITNESSES, being perceived in one SEPARATE mind only.

It is THROUGH these strange and shadowy figures that the insane relate to their insane world. For they SEE only those who remind them of these images, and it is to THEM that they relate. Thus do they communicate with those who ARE NOT THERE, and it is THEY who answer them. And no-one hears their answer save him who called upon them, and he ALONE believes they answered him. Projection MAKES perception, and you CANNOT see beyond it. Again and again have men attacked each other, because they saw IN THEM a shadow figure in their private world." UrT12E1

When I think about how I used to practice forgiveness, it all seemed so mechanical. I didn't really understand what forgiveness was, even if some version of it was spelled out in various books. I didn't understand what part Holy Spirit played, or what to expect of Him. It seems to have taken a very long time to refine this.

At first, I understood forgiveness was about 'it hasn't really happened' and forgiving for what people have NOT done, and that this entailed some form of taking back projections and stopping scapegoating. I tried various people's techniques and so on for releasing what I'd taken back, and sometimes it seemed to work a bit, not often. Most of the struggle seemed to be remembering to even forgive at all, or how to do it.

Over time I adopted another method which I felt provided new insight into how this works, and that involved some fairly clear steps to take, including going into the feeling and finding out where it came from and seeing that I did it to myself and then trying to see out 'the truth' about me. And in some ways that seemed to be quite powerful. But it still was pretty much me doing this on my own.

If I would ask Holy Spirit to help me forgive, he would perhaps help me with insights or wording and so on. But still it seemed to all be about me changing my perception, finding the real cause, stopping believing things that weren't true, discerning what was true or false etc. And still Holy Spirit was sort of more of an advisor or guide.

More recently, however, I became willing to start to experiment with allowing Holy Spirit to come into me, Himself, and to do whatever he needed to do. It was kind of baby steps at first. Just exploring and learning to trust. I would invite Him into my 'body' and He would seem to move in me and do some energetic/emotional changes, if I was willing. Sometimes he would do this 'flush' thing where, once he has done some setup, excess emotions/fear/stress drain out of me. Or, he would lift this 'stuff' up from my feet all the way up to and out of my head.

While this was helpful to me I didn't know why other people weren't talking about this or doing this. I didn't know in what way it fit with ACIM, and yet I knew it was Holy Spirit doing this. He would say "surrender" or "relax" and I pretty much knew that right after that he was going to perform a healing of some kind. But like anything, in order to 'open up' to this stuff it requires willingness, trust, curiosity and the ability to listen, to ask questions and build a relationship.

More recently I gradually have received more clarity from various sources about forgiveness, what it is, what it does, and what other aspects of Holy Spirit's thought system I need to align with, such as taking responsibility, being unconditional, acceptance, etc. Michael Murray has a good handle on those 'tools' and the metaphysics behind it.

What came to me then was that instead of attempting this kind of mental-oriented process of forgiving through thought and perceptual adjustments, which is very head-oriented, I would begin to open up my heart to Holy Spirit and become willing to *receive* His healing. I think the turning point was when I realized that "He will correct all the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him" really literally means that HE will do the correction, not just of my perception, but also of all the side effects, symptoms or consequences that came about as a result. And that includes things going on in my body, my emotions, and the world around me.

He began to literally 'cleanse' me of guilt and sin instead of me trying to wrap my head around them or see them from a different vantage point. I could talk myself into higher truth in an intellectual way, but here Holy Spirit was starting to stir in me and move through me and heal me. Preparing the way perhaps for working through me on behalf of others. This was something I desired and wanted to explore and open up to. Now when I forgive, I know that toward the end of it, and maybe even before I get done with 'my part', Holy Spirit is going to likely step in and do something. And I mean, DO something. Action.

As I explore this more, and open up to miracles, and make myself a channel of Holy Spirit's healing power, I am allowing my 'forgiveness' to be more a practice in, ultimately, receiving healing from God (mental/emotional/physical) rather than me trying to use my head to figure out how I'm innocent. It is more experiential. I want to *experience* God. I want to *experience* truth and not have it just be some mental exercise in discernment. And it's even more than that.

What about God? What about love? I feel a stirring that I want to spend the rest of my time simply focusing on .. how to be unconditionally loving, how to receive and extend God and His miracles, and how to just love love love love love. It's not mental. It's not intellectual. It's in the HEART. God is love. I want to be in the love with God. I want everything to be focused around and centered on love. And I want to be open to God being the one who heals my mind and emotions and body, and those of others too. I want to share in God's love and receive it, instead of thinking (with ego) I have to do all this work myself. Yes I need to still take some steps and have a willingness, but I realize more and more that 'waking up' isn't anywhere near as heart-felt a 'concept' as being reunited with God. Who wants to clinically wake up unless it's all about a grand reunion?

I want God to be in my practice of A Course in Miracles, and that has much less to do with the methodical mechanical forgiveness processes I used to think were 'the way to do it'. Maybe I needed them in order to realize they are unrefined or less effective than God's way. We are meant to open up to allow Holy Spirit to flow through us fully and openly, to direct us, to speak for us, to heal through us, and to be our mind. All this 'doing it on my own' stuff is very tiresome and unnecessary.

Thank you God for revealing the truth of your light and love experientially in my life and extending it all those I meet. As Jesus outlines in the beginning of the Text about miracles (in the unsanitized version):

"You should begin each day with the prayer 'Help me to perform whatever miracles you want of me today."" - Jesus.

In order to perform a miracle, your mind has to be in a state of love, because miracles are expressions FROM love. Miracle mindedness is a state of love, and when you express from that state your expressions have power, capable of healing others. Love is strong and "there is nothing my holiness cannot do." Being miracle minded is the same thing as being right minded, which is equated with true perception. It's quite an "advanced state".

It's not enough to be slightly loving. It's also not enough to just be caring for someone or feeling enamored. Love has to be felt deeply and strongly. I have to admit that I spend almost all of my time not in this state. I can at times push myself to receive love and experience it, but typically there is too much fear and blocks to awareness. It's not possible to perform miracles in these states, and people who are working on purifying their minds are not miracle workers. "Miracles are everyone's right (in a state of love), but purification (to get to that state) is NECESSARY first."

I've had a few times where, for whatever reason, I've felt especially filled with love. In those moments I also feel strangely powerful and miraculous, as if the love itself is capable of doing anything. Without love, miracles are impossible. Love is literally an absolutely required ingredient for miracle working. It's through being intensely loving and EXPRESSING from that place of strength, that you can literally perform miracles. You can heal the sick and raise the dead.

I used to think miracle working entailed far more complexity, saying the right words, having the ego be more aggressive, being adamant, being commanding etc, but without love nothing happens. Holy Spirit became very excited one time when I was sending love to someone and He said "that's all you need!". It seems too simple but it's not. Real love has a POWER in it. It's a supernatural power. It can cause really extraordinary things to happen. A mind in a state of love is very strong.

The challenge then, is getting yourself into a state where you are loving enough. It's not merely an intellectual state. Strong love must be present and being felt. Often it is quite difficult to get into that state, to really really love, because of all the blocks and fears that we have. It might even be quite an alien state seemingly so far out of reach that we just can't seem to be loving enough. It requires a suspension of fear, which is love's absence, for long enough to be able to perform the miracle. Jesus even says that you might well go back to being afraid afterwards, but so long as you can get yourself into a loving state, you can work miracles.

Miracle DOING is an active expression, an act, FROM a state of love. Miracle mindedness is the readiness to express love, by being in a state of love. Love is wholeness. The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness. Perception has to be whole, purified, and true, in order to be loving enough to be miraculous. It's really so simple... all you need is love and you instantly are capable of performing incredible miracles, but getting yourself into such a holy state is all of the "work" of purification, learning to forgive, healing and letting go of past hurts and all the rest of it. All of the workbook lessons, which aimed toward developing Christ Vision, are trying to get your mind to be loving enough that it is miraculous.

Miracles EXPRESS only from love and love is powerful.

"The distinction has also been made here between "miracle-mindedness" as a STATE, and "miracle-doing" as its expression."

"The love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another."

"The value of the Atonement does not lie in the manner in which it is expressed. In fact, if it is truly used it will inevitably BE expressed in whatever way is most helpful to the receiver, not the giver. This means that a miracle, to attain its full efficacy, MUST be expressed in a language which the recipient can understand without fear. It does not follow by any means that this is the highest level of communication of which he is capable. But it DOES mean that it is the highest level of communication of which he is capable NOW."

"Miracles ... They occur naturally as an expression of love."

"ALL expressions of love are maximal."

"Miracles are a kind of exchange. Like all expressions of love"

"Prayer is the medium of miracles. Prayer is the natural communication of the Created with the Creator. Through prayer, love is received, and through miracles love is expressed."

"Miracles are natural expressions of total forgiveness. Through miracles, man accepts God's forgiveness by extending it to others. "

"The power to work Miracles BELONGS to you. I will create the right opportunities for you to do them. But you must be ready and willing to do them, since you are already able to. Doing them will bring conviction in the ability. I repeat that you will see Miracles through your hands through MINE. Conviction really comes through accomplishment. Remember that ability is the potential, Achievement is its expression, and Atonement is the Purpose."

"Expressed through you, the Holy Spirit will accept this gift which you received of Him, increase its power and give it back to you."

"We have emphasized that the miracle, or the EXPRESSION of Atonement, is always a sign of real respect from the worthy TO the worthy."

"The miracle is an expression of an inner awareness of Christ and acceptance of his Atonement. "

"Be confident that you have never lost your identity and the extension which maintains it in wholeness and peace. Miracles are AN EXPRESSION OF THIS CONFIDENCE. They are reflections both of your own proper identification WITH your brothers, and of your own awareness that YOUR identification IS maintained by extension. The miracle is A LESSON IN TOTAL PERCEPTION. By including ANY part of totality in the lesson, you HAVE included the whole."

"The answer is NEVER perform a miracle without asking me IF you should. This spares you from exhaustion, and because you act under direct communication the trance becomes unnecessary. Because miracles are expressions of love, it does NOT follow that they will always be effective. I am the only one who can perform miracles indiscriminately, because I AM the Atonement. You have a ROLE in Atonement, which I will dictate TO you."

"Those who witness for me are expressing, through their miracles, that they have abandoned deprivation in favor of the abundance they have learned BELONGS to them."

"We once said that there is no order in miracles because they are all maximal expressions of love."

"Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind which is working THROUGH the body but not in it."

"I KNOW that miracles are natural, because they are expressions of love."

The purpose of sickness is to make you and the body seem to be "one".

The ultimate goal of sickness, which is "death", is the attempt to fully unite who you really are with the body, so that when the body is destroyed, it is claimed that "you" are destroyed.

The whole point of this happening is our attempt to destroy the Son of God - Christ, by associating His identity with something which CAN appear to be attacked, like tying a metal ball to His ankle and throwing Him in the ocean.

Sickness therefore is the way that we attempt to destroy ourselves, to try to prove that we are not God's Son. The closer that we can get to achieving this, the more it would seem we have become "the ego" - a fully separate self, which is symbolized by the BODY. If we are the body, and if the body is destroyed, then we would seem to be destroyed along with it. This is the illusion of death.

Forms of sickness vary, but pain in particular is a good example. Pain screams for your attention, day and night. It blasts your awareness with such a loud signal in the body that all of your waking moments are consumed with it. It is a particularly effective way to associate you with the body, because it leaves very little room for ignoring it.

Similarly, other "severe" diseases and so-called accidents can produce such intense long-term suffering such that the body is thoroughly identified with, and believed to be the Self. When the body is challenging you constantly with reminders about how sick you are, how disabled you are, how suffering you are, and how much pain you are in on many levels, it acts as a device for shutting out God. And it can lead to hopelessness, and eventually to death.

In the ego's glorious moment of triumph, it *seems* to achieve the death of the Son of God, through destruction of the body. The body can ONLY be destroyed IF the Son of God has fully granted permission for this to occur, i.e. has done it to Himself, and therefore has chosen to die. (Or at least to seem to, because He is immortal.)

Sickness then is only there as a way to bind you to the body, so that you will seem to be pulled away from God. God is the truth, and sickness puts distance between you and God. Therefore, "sickness is a defense against the truth" because it seems to allow you to escape "into" the body, in effort to find a way to move closer to death, because death is seen as the opposite of Life. Life is God, so death is an escape from God.

If the only purpose of sickness, in defense against truth, is to SEPARATE YOU from God through intimacy with the body, then the HEALING of sickness MUST entail a movement TOWARDS God and away from "body reality". The person must dis-identify from the body, and recognize that they are not physical.

Another way to express this, is that you must realize that the truth of who and what you are is not "form". The only way this can be true, is IF form itself is NOT truth. While the body and its experiences remain true or real to you, you will believe that YOU are those truths. That you are physical and that you can be hurt.

Withdrawal of "reality" from the body, and therefore from all form, is the path to healing sickness and death. In other words, withdrawing a sense of truth from what is actually an ILLUSION, and placing that sense of truth back where it belongs, aligned with the REAL TRUTH which is of God.

If you believe that the body is ever "really sick", or that what you're witnessing is a "real sickness", or that something is "really happening" to you or others, as evidenced by all of the signs and sensations of suffering, then you will be stuck. You must shift your perception to recognize that what you're SEEING is actually an ILLUSION OF SICKNESS. It is not real sickness, because there is no such thing.

What you're seeing, what you're experiencing, as sickness, is actually just an ILLUSORY IMAGE which is PRETENDING to be sickness. It is not really there. It is not really happening. No matter how it appears, no matter the severity or mildness, no matter the form or how long it's been present, it cannot be reality. Otherwise YOU will become the sickness, and the body, and you will die.

Either God's truth is the truth, or the ILLUSION is the truth.

Either God's truth is real, or sickness is real.

Either God's truth is the only truth, or the body has truth to it.

God did not create the body because the body is not real.

Learn then that when you perceive sickness, IF there is a measure of reality to your experience of what you're perceiving, you are MISTAKEN, and you are actually seeing an illusion, but are thinking that it is reality. You have GIVEN truth to it "I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me". Because you GAVE it truth, you can withdraw the truth from it. To do this you have to PLACE the truth somewhere else, and recognize where it really is. Shift the truth to be God's truth, and the truth will be removed from the sickness.

The truth is true and nothing else is true. The body is not the truth. Sickness is not the truth.

Work on this until you can literally look at the sickness and NOT BELIEVE IT. Recognize it is an ILLUSION. It's like a three-dimensional fake hologram being projected by a Spirit that is floating around in space pretending to be physical. It is not a REAL sickness, it is make-believe!

When you can look at sickness as NOT REAL, you will find yourself feeling HAPPY. You will be happy because you are not making errors, you are being forgiving, you are not falling for the illusion (it's a mind trick!), and you're not buying into it. You will find yourself smiling as you affirm and see "this is not real".

Recognizing that illusions are not real, lifts FEAR from you, because fear is a reaction to perceiving a real illusion. You could only be afraid IF what you see is really happening and IF what you see was not designed by God. Only real illusions can frighten! If illusions are NOT real, they cannot frighten. But you must BELIEVE that they are not reality. You're seeing something that isn't really there, it isn't really happening, and it is quite literally.... NOTHING.

Sickness is nothing. Death is nothing.

This "collapsing" of the illusion, this stripping it of its illusory reality, this taking away of belief in it, this withdrawing of the conviction that it is true and therefore suffering with reactions, is all part of forgiveness. Overlooking the error. Overlooking sin. Overlooking an illusion that you always thought was reality, but is in fact smoke and mirrors.

Your body's eyes will show you sickness. But your MIND's EYE will show you the truth - that the sickness is an illusion. The mind then is shining a light of truth - God's truth - and this has POWER to disperse and undo and correct what appears to be the sickness. IT MUST GO! Jesus has said, "illusions that are understood to BE illusions MUST disappear".

When someone is upset, it isn't real.

When someone is sick and suffering terribly, it isn't real.

When war is happening, it isn't real.

When someone is dying, it isn't real.

If this stuff were real, we would HAVE to be very upset! We would have an extremely hard time not being upset by this, because our mind is actually convinced that it's reality and will react to it with fear and suffering.

But imagine that these things are NOT real? This is just a dream, an illusion. You could see these things and NOT BELIEVE THEM, and LAUGH!!!!!!!!!

Too radical? Too ridiculously crazily outside the box of normal thinking? Too wild to be true?

This world is not your home.

There is a fairly simple question that can be asked to determine if planet Earth is real, exists, or is God's creation.

There are machine guns in this world. Machine guns full of bullets. The bullets are projectiles which shoot out of this gun and may penetrate other objects. Upon doing so it is capable of ripping holes in things, and if those things are biological organisms it is capable of mowing them down and destroying them and killing them.

Now, that's simply physical fact. That's what the gun does. That's how it functions. That's what it's capable of.

It does not matter if you forgive the gun, it will still function this way. It does not matter if you see it with false perception and hate it, or see it with true perception and love it. It will still function as a bullet-launching death machine, capable of seriously damaging and destroying anything it touches.

Your healed perceptions of the machine gun do not stop it from launching bullets. Nor does your perception change the shape of the gun from being still in the form of a gun. It still has a barrel and a set of machinery and metal bullets. It doesn't matter how many years you've been doing ACIM spiritual practices, it in no way changes a single fact about how that object functions.

Now you have to ask yourself, whether God in his infinite mercy and wisdom and gentleness and love, would EVER conceive of such an object? Because if that machine gun exists, and has reality, then it MUST be of God. It must be part of God's will. It must be what he wants. And God himself must endorse it. In fact God must have designed it himself and co-created it.

How does that sit with you? Even if you forgive the machine gun and send it love and do not blame it and do not project sin or guilt onto it, does it still have a design and capacity for mowing down citizens? Yes it does. Even if you are high on a cloud of spiritual consciousness, does the machine gun still operate according to physical laws? Yes it does. Is it still capable of murder regardless of how spiritual you become? Yes it is.

So you have to ask yourself, would God create such a device? Would God's world, which should be heaven, contain such a device? Could God have willed that such a device be possible? That there can be scenarios in which some of God's other heavenly-created objects are capable of being utterly ripped apart and destroyed in a matter of seconds? Is such a thing allowed and possible and sanctioned in heaven? Is it even a POSSIBILITY, that in God's perfect absolutely infinite immortal reality, that there can be things mowed down with metal bullets?

You have to come to terms with this because the answer is quite important. The ONLY WAY that planet Earth, the physical planet, the solid matter, all of space and time, can have come from God or be in any way God's will, is if God is a maker of weapons. And even if we lift away labels such as weapons and say "that's a lovely beautiful piece of machinery isn't it" in some kind of blissful state of rose-tinted-glasses, we STILL are going to have to accept that IF IT IS PART OF THE KINGDOM, GOD WANTS OBJECTS TO BE BLASTED APART.

So we're really asking now, what is God's nature and will? Can you sleep at night knowing that God is a God who facilitates and supports and contributes to the making of weapons of mass destruction? Is that within God's laws? Does God allow AND support such a thing? Because if he does, what kind of a God is that? And how would a loving, beautiful, gentle, kind, happy God, come up with a design for a very effective "killing machine" as part of HEAVEN?

I think MOST sane or semi-sane people in the world would have to agree, that if God is loving it is HIGHLY unlikely that God could ever be conceived of as personally willing the creation of a machine gun. Not even if the gun is radically forgiven, which has no real effect on the fact that it is still capable of being used to mow bodies down. And regardless of how beautiful and shiny the paint is, regardless of how lovely the sights and sounds of bullets flying are, the fact remains the machinery still functions to attack and destroy. Is is okay with you that God's kingdom, immortal and unattackable, indestructible, has items in it which can in fact still destroy things? God would be contradictory would he not? And heaven would be full of holes.

The only sane conclusion we can come to is that either God is murderous and is responsible for personally willing the making of machine guns and bullets and death and destruction, OR God is not that kind of a God. And if God is not like that, NOTHING like that can exist. Because anything that does exist, HAS to be a part of God's mind and will. Part of his heart. God has to love it and create it otherwise it is nothing and nowhere.

Either, machine guns exist and are real and God created planet Earth and physical bodies and space and time and all the galaxies, which means God must be murderous and cruel, OR, God would never sanely allow, make possible, condone, or contribute to, the making of such objects. And therefore, if God did not create machine guns, planet earth is absolutely unreal, bodies do not exist, destructible objects are absolutely nothing, human bodies don't exist, and there is no world.

Personally for me I can only accept that God's most-beloved Kingdom of heaven CANNOT EVER CONTAIN such objects. Not in any way. Not with any kind of perception or repurposing. Not merely that they don't exist, or haven't been created yet, but that even the POTENTIAL for them to be created does not exist. It must be IMPOSSIBLE for weapons to exist in God. I absolutely cannot bring myself to ever accept or conceive of being able to be at peace and loving with God with the loophole that he is a maker of murderous articles. They simply CANNOT EXIST in heaven's reality.

To me, this is so clear and black and white, there is absolutely no way that there is ANY OTHER way for the machine gun to exist and for it to simultaneously imply that God is benevolent. Either God is loving and exists and is real, OR, machine guns exist and God is murderous and self destructive. That's the choice you have to make. Either earth and bodies exist along with machine guns, OR THEY DO NOT. And quite frankly, we should ALL be recognizing by now that THEY DO NOT.

There will be no machine guns in heaven. Not today. Not ever. And similarly, there are no bodies, and no planet Earth. That is A Course in Miracle's teaching. There IS no other interpretation.

Would you trust life or death decisions to the Holy Spirit? And if not, why not?

We are ego-identified idiots here. We don't know what we're doing, what's right, what's in anyone's best interests, or how to judge anything. And we're not as expert as we think we are.

We have in this world people who become highly educated, experts in their field, professionals, authorities, experienced individuals. But even these people usually trust their own world-based learning, their own egos, their own judgement.

I have personally experienced many many times over how such exalted persons can be incredibly blind, totally unaware of God or anything spiritual, completely indoctrinated into institutions, and yet proud of their prowess and achievements in highly advanced fields. And they can be VERY mistaken and lost. This includes highly advanced doctors, specialists, scientists, gurus of all kinds.

For me I've had to go through some seriously difficult situations, life-or-death decisions, medical body-health decisions. I've had a partner who was in intensive care twice, in hospitals for over 6 months, and multiple serious health concerns. It was stressful and difficult and filled with very important and serious life choices. Decisions to be made, does she live or die?

Who do you turn to? You might ask family and friends and those you trust. People will give their opinions. But ultimately for me I knew that I could not really "handle" the severity of situations, and had to surrender and get humble. I had to make room for the Holy Spirit and God.

Sometimes when life gets really shit it really pushes you towards God because you can reach some really dark hellish places filled with fear where you just start reaching out and asking God for help. And you then find that the Help he has provided through the Holy Spirit, Jesus, etc, is not only effective and correct it is highly trustworthy.

Their guidance and support and healing has a power and accuracy and rightness far above and beyond all humans and all institutions and all educated fields and professions. Their expertise and knowledge and insight is absolutely unparalleled. Their access to all information, all outcomes, all scenarios all futures etc is absolutely beyond the reach of anyone on the planet.

So when you get into situations like that, and you need help and you reach out for spiritual help, and it comes, and you trust it, and you learn that it works and is right, you trust it more and more. And so you listen and you turn to it, it's like a compass in your back pocked. You whip it out whenever there's something important to deal with. Or even for little things.

Would I trust life or death decisions to the Holy Spirit? Absolutely! If they told me to do or not do something, I would very likely go with that even if it flew in the face of whatever everyone else said or suggested. I would place his truth and rightness above everyone, because he has proven to me over and over again how trustworthy he is, how helpful and healing he is, and how his wisdom is always right.

I cannot pretend to know everything, or to judge anything correctly, or to be educated enough, or professional enough, or experienced enough, or to have accumulated enough facts and information, or done enough research, or any other such way that our little egos go wild with trying to play God. I don't want to play God.

I want God to be God, and me to do his will. That is all it's about. Knowing your place as second to God, dismantling the authority problem, not trusting artificial external authorities, and turning to God for EVERYTHING.

Many people would think that doing this is totally irresponsible, that trusting "spiritual guidance" would be insane and not good enough and not accurate and who knows where it's coming from. They would say you have to listen to the experts and believe the science and follow the rules and laws and all that shit. It's all made up bullshit. You have to trust someone that TRULY KNOWS which is the Holy Spirit. His credentials are massively above and beyond anything any person on this planet can offer you.

It is in fact irresponsible and arrogant to put ourselves into a position where we think we know enough to be able to decide ANYTHING important on our own. ACIM tells us to trust the Holy Spirit in ALL THINGS. For all decisions. Even the risky ones. Even the ones to do with the body and health. Even things to do with serious life scenarios and problems and stuff that no-one can see to solve. Even things which defy all possibilities and seem hopeless. He is there to HELP, so that you are NOT ALONE EVER.

It does take time and willingness to develop this TRUST. And it can be a long process especially if there is fear, trusting in your own strength and the abilities of yourself and others. If you trust in egos and external saviours. If you trust in magic and traditions and regimented groups of people who think they know everything and decide everything for you. It can take time to wean off all that and be spirit-driven. But it is absolutely the best thing you could ever do, guaranteed!

And the good thing is that when you TRUST spirit and RECEIVE the help and can SEE that it is right, you absolve yourself of guilt because you're allowing God to decide FOR you. You don't have to do this all on your own, alone, trusting in your petty arrogant weakness, or that of others who masquerade as unquestionable authorities. Put your life into the hands of God and your way will be made straight. Follow his word and his advice and his path and your life will become much more manageable. Who wants to carry the whole weight of the world on their shoulders? Not me.

"What worry can beset the one who gives his future to the loving hands of God? What can he suffer? What can cause him pain, or bring experience of loss to him? What can he fear? And what can he regard except with love? For he who has escaped all fear of future pain has found his way to present peace, and certainty of care the world can never threaten." UrW194L7

"Place, then, your future in the hands of God." UrW194L8

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father." UrT3C13

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

"Who dwells with shadows is alone indeed, and loneliness is NOT the Will of God. Would you allow one shadow to usurp the throne that God appointed for your Friend, if you but realized ITS emptiness has left YOURS empty and unoccupied? Make NO illusion friend, for if you do, it CAN but take the place of him whom God has called your Friend. And it is he who is your ONLY Friend in truth. He brings you gifts that are not of this world, and only he, to whom they have been given, CAN make sure that you receive them. He will place them on YOUR throne, when you make room for him on his." UrT26G3

"That is why we suggested before that there was help in reminding yourselves to allow the Holy Spirit to decide for God for YOU." UrT6G9 "Forget HIM not, and He will make EVERY decision for you, for YOUR Salvation and the peace of God in you." UrT13H13

"Leave ALL decisions to the One Who speaks for God, and for your function as He KNOWS it." UrT13I6

The course appears to say that christ vision (true perception) isn't simply a state in which you "do not see the world". It's a state in which you see the forgiven world - the physical world - the world of bodies still, but through christ's eyes. And at the same time, that this vision is so open and inclusive that it sees ALSO beyond the physical, it sees the real world.

I used to think the course was saying we had to simply "look past bodies" ie not see them at all in order to see christ in people. But here it is saying clearly that we are to use christ vision to still look upon the physical world, while also seeing past it.

Christ vision CAN still see bodies, events, happenings, and the whole world as the forgiven world. It is forgiven because it is overlooked or "looked past", to the light beyond, which christ vision does see, but it also still sees the world below. We see the world as a thin veil which we see mostly THROUGH to a light beyond, but still see the veil - until the final instant in which the veil lifts completely.

I think this tells us that essentially your goal isn't to try "not to see" bodies. As per the quote about how it's almost impossible to deny the body, and trying to do so is an unworthy form of denial. Instead, we are trying to find a way to see that is more inclusive and open that can see the light that is beyond the bodies while ALSO translating the bodies into the forgiven world.

I see this as a vision which goes out and acts sort of like an x-ray vision, which is causing the view of this world to become somewhat "transparent" like an x-ray of a body, where you can see through and beyond it to the light shining behind the x-ray, but this also allows you to see the x-ray image properly. Christ vision is fixated on the light beyond but INDIRECTLY still can see and INCLUDE the physical things in its sight, in a forgiven way.

Only at the very very end of the road might we perhaps completely overlook bodies and physicality to such an extent where the veil LIFTS entirely, we see the face of christ ONLY, and then return to heaven. At this final moment the world is forgotten entirely and not seen. We pierce the veil and go beyond. But this NOT going to happen until the very end of the road.

Before we get there, we definitely are meant to be using christ vision to see THIS world in a forgiven way. What this means is that christ vision INCLUDES EVERYTHING in sight, while strictly false-perception body-like perceptions see EXCLUSIVELY and ONLY see the physical, believing it to be real and all there is. Spiritual sight open up awareness to detect and see the subtler light "between the lines" and "beyond the forms", which physical-only sight cannot see.

"Christ's vision ...has power to translate all that the body's eyes behold into the sight of a forgiven world."

For a long time I think I bought into the idea of an either/or exclusive approach to this, in which as some people say - if we see the body at all we're not being forgiving. But we're not supposed to not see the body at all until the very end. We are MEANT to see the body, and MEANT to see the forgiven world, THROUGH the eyes of Christ, BEFORE the world disappears from sight. Otherwise we're skipping ahead.

This means that seeing the christ in someone DOES NOT MEAN that we do not still see the body, only that the body is translated in its meaning as a part of the reflection of heaven WHILE also being past it to a light which is growing ever brighter. Seeing with Christ is an expanded more inclusive full-spectrum vision, while seeing through "eyes of fear" ie ego exclusive narrow vision shuts out some of the signal.

This alleviates the rather awkward and seemingly insurmountable "issue" of trying NOT to see bodies at all, or to see only beyond them while excluding them. I don't think Jesus is asking us to NOT see the physical world - until the final moment of ascension. he's asking us to see something ADDITIONAL permeating it and transcending it, in which the physical becomes like a thin veil - still seen but given much less emphasis and belief.

We don't need to be rushing to try to DENY the physical world from our sight. We need to be focusing on seeing it in a different way so that we can arrive at the FORGIVEN WORLD first, which is a more inclusive and whole way of perceiving, prior to the world disappearing from sight entirely.

Trying to "not see the body at all" is an unworthy and unnecessary form of denial, spiritually bypassing the required step of seeing the world forgiven "in another light" first. To just try to "not see bodies" isn't very effective. We need to learn that bodies aren't all there is to see, first, and the strengthen our seeing of the light beyond, AS bodies begin to fade out.

All the bodies ... that the body's eyes see .... are translated into a forgiven world ..... by christ vision ..... seeing the body in a different way.

"Christ's vision ... has power to translate all that the body's eyes behold into the sight of a forgiven world."

And yet christ vision also overlooks and sees beyond the body, to a light beyond it, at the same time.

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body and mistake it for the Son whom God created (yet it just got done saying christ's vision sees bodies differently). It beholds a light beyond the body (as well); an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation (does not dwell on making out that each separate object is truly separated). And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events (all physical bodily things!), without the slightest fading of the light it sees (beyond those things)."

"By focusing upon the "good" in him, the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight, and will at length be seen as little more than just a shadow circling round the "good."

"Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight."

"Today I let Christ's vision look upon all things for me and judge them not, but give each one a miracle of love instead."

"Christ's vision looks on everything with love (including this world). Yet even Christ's vision is not His reality. The golden ASPECTS of reality, which spring to light under His loving gaze, are partial glimpses of the Heaven that lies beyond them."

"For light must come into the darkened world, to make Christ's vision possible even here. (even in the physical)"

"Christ's vision is a miracle. It comes from far beyond itself, for it reflects Eternal Love and the rebirth of love which never dies, but has been kept obscure. Christ's vision pictures Heaven, for it sees a world so like to Heaven (the physical world forgiven) that what God created perfect can be mirrored there."

"Christ's vision is the bridge between the worlds (false and true perceptions), and in its power can you safely trust to carry you from this world (physical seen exclusively) into one made holy by forgiveness (forgiven world)."

"For forgiveness is the only means whereby Christ's vision comes to me."

"Christ's vision looks through me today. His sight shows me all things forgiven and at peace, and offers this same vision to the world."

"Ours are the eyes through which Christ's vision sees a world redeemed from every thought of sin (the forgiven world)."

"RIGHT-MINDEDNESS listens to the Holy Spirit, forgives the world, and through Christ's vision sees the real world in its place."

"Christ's vision does not use your eyes, but you can look through His and learn to see like Him."

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it (still sees it) as nothing more than just a fragile veil (transparent), so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant (at the end). It is seen at last for only what it is (a veil of illusions). And now it cannot fail to disappear (AT the end when the physical is faded OUT and christ is faded IN), for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot (the veil lifts, you see ONLY christ, the physical world disappears), with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

Jesus writes: "See the point about miracles as a perception corrector (for himself) ***before*** he can effect (perform) miracles as CREATIVE ENERGIZERS (for others), which they are."

Becoming a miracle worker has two phases. As Jesus writes here, in the first phase there is an emphasis on the correction of YOUR perceptual flaws. This GIVES WAY, to the second phase, which is the ability to EXTEND love to others as a creative energizing power, which can heal them.

This is because miracles express FROM a loving state of mind, and in the initial phase you are NOT loving enough to express them yourself. You have to shift perception FIRST, to get INTO a loving state, before you can PERFORM a miracle.

This all hinges around a very simple mechanic. The question of, are you in a state of mind in which you are willing to EXTEND?

When you are in the first phase, you are still much too selfish, too in the dark, too afraid, too unwilling, and riddled with sin, to be able to truly extend maximal love to others. You can't PERFORM miracles very effectively. The mind is deluded with false perception and temptation. In this stage, your mind is very much IN NEED of help itself. It can't effectively get out of the way or give or supply the lack in others, because it itself is too lacking.

In this first phase, our main function is PURIFICATION. We need to RECEIVE healing for ourselves. The mind has to be trained. Fear has to be undone. Sin has to be forgiven. Blocks to awareness have to be removed. All the ways that we are HOLDING BACK THE LIGHT have to be dissolved. It's kind of like, you are a light of healing, but while your light is covered up with ego bullshit you cannot SHINE enough to effectively "shed light" onto others. You are too dark.

"Miracles are everyone's right (the right to PERFORM them), but purification is necessary first."

So you have to go through a phase, which could be quite extensive, of purification for yourself. Here you can RECEIVE miracles, ie outside help, FROM those who are already miraculously powerful. That could be another miracle worker who can SUPPLY YOUR LACK, because they "temporarily have more" than you, or it might be healing received from Jesus or the Holy Spirit. Our task here is also to practice forgiveness and learn to undo sin through atonement.

Now, you can probably imagine what's going to happen as, over time, your mind becomes LIGHTER. Or rather, the various ways that you are unwilling to EXTEND LIGHT into the minds of others, unwilling to join, and are too focused on separation, is removed. What's going to happen as you open up, develop trust in your brother, forgive yourself and him, and remove the blocks to unconditional love?

You're going to gradually SHINE more, becoming brighter and more able and willing to ALLOW love to extend through you. You're learning to line up with God's will. To let go of ego. To connect and communicate. To express love more unconditionally. Special relationships are melting into holy relationships. And your mind is becoming UNBLOCKED. So it's not getting in the way of the extension of the mind itself.

As this progresses, you are gradually approaching the second state of miracle mindedness and more consistently "being the light of the world." As you UNVEIL yourself, you are more willing and able to express love and extend LIFE. You start becoming more able to GIVE to others and to serve, to be truly helpful. And you begin to represent God and Christ more. Your mind is reconnecting with other minds and your heart is opening to love.

By becoming less blocked, less inhibited, less afraid, less selfish and less separated off, you are resuming your NATURAL FUNCTION of miraculousness. Being miraculous is actually permanent. Even God is miraculous and so are all His creations. "Miracles are a universal blessing from God" "God's miracles" "You are a miracle" "The miraculous nature of the soul" etc. Miracles are supposed to naturally be happening ALL the time.

When we talk of miracles as ONLY the shifts in perception which LEAD UP TO the state of miracle mindedness, we are missing half the story. This would imply that once your mind IS shifted into truth, you STOP being miraculous. This is not AT ALL true. In fact what happens is you are uncovering your PERMANENT and natural innate miraculous NATURE, which puts you back in touch with being ALWAYS miraculous.

As your mind becomes healed, YOU become able TO heal others. As you become more loving and unafraid, you are able to GIVE the miracles you have received. As you become more in line with the Golden Rule, you are able to recognize that giving and receiving are ONE. As you remove the blocks to awareness, you become more JOINED with other minds and SUPPORT and STRENGTHEN them.

"Those who are healed become instruments of healing."

So the first phase is all about uncovering your natural miracle working ability and nature, and the second phase is about starting to get in touch with and EXPRESSING that nature. First becoming stronger in the truth, then GIVING that truth to others. First receiving healing that you need in order to BE healed, then GIVING that healing to others effortlessly.

Some people focus only on the aspect of ACIM which discusses the "benefits to you" of reaching the atonement "for yourself". Your sole responsibility. But this misses an entire other half of the story. The rest of the story tells us of how, having been restored to our natural condition, we become empowered to WORK MIRACLES ourselves, by being able once again to EXTEND God's Power to others.

"Having been restored to your original state, you naturally ***become part of the Atonement yourself***. You now share MY inability to tolerate the lack of love in yourself and in everyone else, and MUST join the GREAT CRUSADE to correct it. The slogan for this Crusade is "Listen, Learn, and DO.""

Jesus is ALSO clear in the course that he does not intend for us to WAIT until we reach 100% atonement before working any miracles. In fact, he describes it as an ability to be PRACTICED.

"The power to work Miracles BELONGS to you. I will create the right opportunities for you to do them. But you must be ready and willing to do them, since you are already able to. Doing them will bring conviction in the ability."

He states that as we ATTEMPT to perform miracles, sometimes we will have successes and that DOING THEM will BRING conviction in the ability. That we need a bit of convincing and the only way to get that is to TRY to perform them. Perhaps we will fail at first. Perhaps we will be too involved in the ego to get a result. But if we don't TRY, we will not discover what we can do or learn from mistakes.

"Miracles are taken first on faith" also tells us that initially we have to TRUST and have faith in order to perform miracles, because we are OUT OF TOUCH with the miracle-minded state. And so we need Holy Spirit or Jesus to do the work for us. To help us out where we fail. But LATER, as we get more in touch with our innate miraculousness, we become more able to directly PERFORM them ourselves.

He also describes how if we were to just TEMPORARILY suspend fear, or uses words to focus the mind in prayer, that this would be sufficient to bring about a miracle. EVEN IF we then return to a state of fear afterwards. He also discusses how "some of you have healed the sick at times but have not raised the dead because your faith was not whole." A PARTIAL faith can bring about "minor miracles", while a FULLER faith (a more healed mind) can bring about what would seem to be "more difficult" miracles such as raising the dead.

Becoming ABLE to perform a miracle, is clearly a PROGRESSION, something to be experimented with, explored, discovered, learned, strengthened, so that we can GAIN confidence in the ability. We will see lesser miracles and later more significant ones as we hone the ability. As our mind becomes more purified, it becomes easier. As our ego gets more out of the way, we become more powerful. As we trust more, we gain God's Power more. And as we become more truly loving, we are able to supply a lack of love in others, healing and enlightening them.

This is also why Jesus says "an untrained mind can accomplish nothing." Meaning that a trained mind CAN accomplish something. A trained mind is more ABLE to perform miracles for others.

We are to gradually unlock our potential as miracle workers. We are to "test the waters" and dabble and TRY to perform them. We are to experiment with working with the Holy Spirit. And we are to learn from our failures and forgive our faults and fears, so that we can become more effective healers. Once we reach consistent miracle mindedness we'll be so empowered that we can effortlessly perform miracles all day every day. "Every day should be devoted to miracles."

So miracles "benefit both the giver and the receiver". As you attempt to give them, even from a non 100%-atoned state, they LIFT YOU UP, as well as lifting others up. As you flow and give the love that you DO NOT have, you tap into the flow and it starts to move, and it starts to LIFT YOU out of the darkness. You get healed as well as the other person. But once you have BEEN healed, and are sustaining a higher level of functioning, the healing you extend has less need to heal YOU, and focuses more on the healing you GIVE to others.

"Miracles are the maximal SERVICE you can render to others."

Being miraculously MINDED, as a state, is distinct from miracle DOING/WORKING, which is an EXPRESSION FROM that state.

"The distinction has also been made here between "miracle-mindedness" as a STATE, and "miracle-doing" as its expression. "

Becoming closer to the miracle-minded STATE is the first PHASE of learning to be a miracle worker. Miracle DOING/WORKING is the EXPRESSION/extension of that state, which entails the PERFORMING of miracles for others. This second state is completely natural and automatic and effortless and MANDATORY. You cannot become loving WITHOUT being willing to GIVE love. You cannot be healed without a willingness TO HEAL. And you cannot accept atonement or miracles without a recognition that it is to be SHARED with others.

When we are greatly distracted by, tempted by, and lost in the world, it is hard to recognize the secret of salvation.

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF."

But the real key part of this isn't just that you are doing things to yourself, rather than it being others who do it. It's that it can ONLY BE YOU who can hurt yourself.

Jesus describes many times that you have hurt yourself. You have hurt your mind. You have attacked yourself.

"Because you had attacked yourself, and BELIEVED THAT THE ATTACK WAS EFFECTIVE, you behold yourself as weakened."

"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally, you will demonstrate that NOTHING HAPPENED. Therefore, by attacking, you have NOT DONE ANYTHING."

"By doing this UNCONSCIOUSLY, you try to keep the fact that you must have attacked yourself FIRST out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe."

"You HAVE attacked him, and you MUST have attacked yourself first."

It is easy to place a lot of focus on other people. On forgiving the world. On healing the body. On world events and problems. It is easy to spend a great deal of time caught up in relationships and dramas. But all of these forms of suffering are really quite far down the line in terms of what came first, and where the real power is.

What comes first happens quickly and so close to home, that it is easy to miss. YOU .... attack yourself....... BEFORE. ... the entire world happens.

"Only the self-accused condemn."

You accuse yourself FIRST. You attack your invulnerability FIRST. You try to undermine your immortality FIRST. You position yourself as afraid FIRST. You make yourself a victim FIRST. You see yourself as lacking FIRST. You condemn yourself FIRST. You accuse yourself of sin FIRST. You do everything to yourself FIRST.

THEN ..... having attacked yourself, the whole thing starts to cascade into projection and blame and dissociation and denial and displacement and various other ways to "disown" responsibility for what you have done to yourself.

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you."

It then becomes possible to become confused as to WHO did this to you. You deny that you did it to you. You pretend that someone else did it to you. You shift the responsibility. You hide from your own self attack. You don't want to look at the fact that YOU are trying to self destruct. All self attack is an attempt to kill God's son - which is YOU - which is suicide. And eventually this results in suffering, sickness, and death, ALL OF WHICH are self inflicted.

"It means that you cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness." "YOU CAN BUT HURT YOURSELF. This has been oft repeated, but is difficult to grasp as yet."

"For you HAVE hurt yourself, and made your Self your enemy. And now you MUST believe you are not you, but something alien to yourself and "something else," a "something" to be feared instead of loved."

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

This doesn't have ANYTHING to do with anyone else, or the body, or the world, or spacetime. It's entirely to do with. ... do you love yourself or not? Do you accept and live in your IMMORTAL nature which is given by God, or do you DENY that you are immortal and TRY to make yourself mortal? The only ambition of trying not to be mortal, is that you try to destroy (kill) yourself. But since your immortal self cannot die, you confuse yourself with a body and kill it instead, as a representation of yourself dying.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves"

"Yet you CANNOT crucify God's Son, for the Will of God cannot die"

"What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

The attack upon YOURSELF, is all the only problem. You thinking that you attack others, is YOUR problem of being confused, and you are mistaken. You thinking that others attack you, is you being confused, and you are mistaken. NO ONE has ever attacked you against your will. You have never suffered against your will. You have never been sick against your will. You have never died against your will.

"Would you not rather live than choose to die?"

"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."

Salvation, and the secret of salvation, is simply that ANYTHING you experience other than immortality, YOU are doing to yourself. You are the SOLE cause of it. There are no external causes of suffering. There are no external causes of sickness or death. "There are no accidents in salvation." Nothing in the world can do ANYTHING to you against your will. No one can vioalte you or offend you or hurt you against your will. You CANNOT BE A VICTIM unless you deliberately decide to be one.

So this really has nothing at all to do with anyone else. It is entirely to do with .... are you going to forgive yourself, or not? Are you going to love yourself, or not? There is another subtle part to this though. Your soul and your mind are two different things. Your soul is your self, your identity in christ. But your mind is a medium that your soul uses for expression. Your soul does NOT need salvation because it is permanently immortal. It has never been attacked and never will. But your MIND is confused and HAS tried to hurt itself. It DOES need "healing" or correction.

This means that, even your own self attack, even your mind's efforts to destroy you, even your belief in sin and evil, even your death wish, in truth has NO EFFECT on your immortal soul. Nothing changes about the truth of you. Even your self induced suffering is not REAL suffering. Even your self inflicted pain is not real pain. And as you try to kill yourself off, you as the son of God is totally unaffected.

This means that EVEN IF you attack yourself, you are not REALLY attacking yourself. You have not REALLY ever done anything to yourself. "I am still as God created me."

Recognize first that ALL attack is SELF attack. This is not easy when you have slipped down the slipper slope into projection. It has to all come back to YOU being totally responsible for sin. BUT, you must not stop at being responsible for sin because it is not real. You need swift correction, so that you will recognize you HAVE NOT even sinned against yourself. You must admit that YOU are the ONLY cause of ALL your suffering, and decide to STOP HURTING YOURSELF. And then you can receive healing.

This simple truth, that YOU are the only one hurting yourself, and YOU can decide to love yourself instead. .. is the CORE of A Course in Miracles. Once you love yourself, or. .. seek first the Kingdom of God (which is you) .... your way will be made straight. Everythign else will fall into line naturally, including performing miracles, healing the body, and undoing the world.

"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."

"When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will rest you, but YOU cannot. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW, for if you did, you could never have grown weary. Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

All that I do I do unto myself.

If I attack, I suffer. But if I

forgive, salvation will be given me."

"As prayer is always for yourself, so is forgiveness given you. It is impossible to forgive another, for it is only your sins you see in him."

"I repeat again that if you ATTACK error, you will hurt yourself."

"To see a body as anything EXCEPT a means of pure extension is to limit your mind and HURT YOURSELF."

"To you the miracle CANNOT seem natural, because what you have done to hurt your minds, has made THEM so UNnatural that they do not remember what is natural to them."

"I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"When he thinks that he is hurt in any way, it is because he has forgotten who he is, and that he is as You created him." "If ever I am sad or hurt or ill, I have forgotten what You think, and put my little, meaningless ideas in place of where Your Thoughts belong, and where They are. I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"I will not hurt myself today."

"His thoughts can frighten him, but since these thoughts belong to him alone, he has the power to change them, and exchange each fear thought for a happy thought of love. He crucified himself. Yet God has planned that His beloved Son will be redeemed."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."

Once upon a time, in heaven, there was a rebellion against the will of God. The children of God believed they were separate, and threw themselves into a nightmare world of magic and hell and death.

God saw this and, loving his Children, created the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was a divine idea in God's mind, a single perfect idea of healing the entire separation. A thought of miraculous power and of love. An expression, as though a voice, calling his children to return, and providing them with all he help and healing they would need.

The Holy Spirit was established as the single perfect solution to the thought of separation, the bringer of the atonement, the very idea of resurrection and healing. The miracle, which was given by God to completely and fully and successfully heal the entire sonship.

The Holy Spirit has been endowed with all of the power in heaven and earth. All of God has been given him and he is absolutely unlimited in his capabilities. He is the mechanism of miracles, because he alone is in a state of the transfer from hell to heaven.

He is your only appointed friend, he is your only teacher, your only qualified therapist, and your comforter. He has been given to you by God as the only help you need to return to heaven, to become a miracle worker, to act as a healer, and to resurrect the dead.

His healing capability is perfect and flawless and guaranteed to always work. He never fails. His healing is powerful and effective and there is absolutely nothing beyond his reach. There is no situation he cannot resolve and no sickness he cannot undo.

He is your guide through foreign lands and alien worlds. He is there for you. He has been created as a permanent part of reality, bridging your mind and God's mind like a bridge, guaranteeing your absolute success in returning to reality.

The Holy Spirit cannot fail. He is beyond all flaws, beyond weakness, and beyond death. There is nothing he cannot do, and nothing he cannot do through you when you are willing to let him. He can undo all the consequences of all wrong decisions, all faulty choices, all attempts to make yourself suffer, and all forms of sickness. The reversal of death is effortless to him.

He has been given to you by God as the single perfect solution to your desperate attempt to be separate. He is the answer to the questioning and the doubting and the fearing of God. He provides the vision for you to see, the power for you to heal, and the guidance and comfort to guarantee all outcomes.

Your mission is to align with him, follow his guidance, turn to him for all decisions, depend on him for healing, work with him to heal others, and help to facilitate and extend his perfect function in the world. Your destiny is to be a healer with the Holy Spirit. He is the power that works miracles through you. Utilizing his power is the natural expression of all the children of God for the good of all.

He is not of this world. He is of God and of heaven. He brings to you and to this world a power and a functioning which is in complete violation of all the world's laws. He stands for an opposite and alternative solution, a happier dream, and the only way home. He will guide you and strengthen you and support you and work through you. He will speak for you, see for you, decide for you, heal for you, and resurrect you. And he will guide you back to eternal life. With him you are unstoppable and all powerful. With him there is nothing your holiness cannot do as a miracle worker, the light of the world, a teacher of God, a physician of the Lord, and a representative of God.

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you CAN see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His RESULTS, you will understand where He MUST be, and finally KNOW what He is."

"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."

"Lead not your little lives in solitude, with one illusion as your only friend. This is no friendship worthy of God's Son, nor one with which he could remain content. But God has given him a better Friend, in whom all power in earth and Heaven rests. The one illusion that you THINK is friend obscures HIS grace and majesty from you, and keeps his friendship and forgiveness from your welcoming embrace. Without him you are friendless. Seek not another friend to take his place. There IS no other friend. What God appointed HAS no substitute. And what illusion CAN replace the truth?"

"Make NO illusion friend, for if you do, it CAN but take the place of him whom God has called your Friend. And it is he who is your ONLY Friend in truth. He brings you gifts that are not of this world, and only he, to whom they have been given, CAN make sure that you receive them. He will place them on YOUR throne, when you make room for him on his."

"All therapy is release from the past. And that is why the Holy Spirit IS the only therapist."

"The Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist. He makes healing PERFECTLY clear in ANY situation in which He is the guide. The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION. He needs no help for this. He WILL tell you EXACTLY what to do, to help ANYONE He sends to you FOR help, and will speak to him through you, IF YOU DO NOT INTERFERE. Remember that you ARE choosing a guide for helping, and the wrong choice will NOT help. But remember also that THE RIGHT ONE WILL. Trust Him, for help is His function, and He is of God."

"Do not, then, think that following the Holy Spirit's guidance is necessary merely because of your own inadequacies. It is the way out of hell for you."

"Leave ALL decisions to the One Who speaks for God, and for your function as He KNOWS it. So will He teach you to remove the awful burden you have laid upon yourself, by loving not the Son of God, and trying to teach him guilt INSTEAD of love."

"Make no decisions about what it is, or where it lies, but ask of the Holy Spirit EVERYTHING, and leave ALL decisions to His gentle counsel. The One Who knows the plan, of God which God would have you follow, can teach you what it IS. Only His wisdom is capable of guiding you to follow it."

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

"Perception is not an attribute of God. His is the realm of knowledge. Yet He has created the Holy Spirit as the Mediator between perception and knowledge. Without this link with God, perception would have replaced knowledge forever in your minds. With this link with God, perception will become so changed and purified that it will lead to knowledge. That is its function as the Holy Spirit sees it. Therefore, that is its function in truth."

"The Holy Spirit was God's answer to the separation, the means by which the Atonement could repair until the whole mind returned to creating. The Atonement and the separation began at the same time. When man made the ego, God placed in him the call of joy. This call is so strong that the ego always dissolves at its sound."

"The Atonement principle was given to the Holy Spirit long before Jesus set it in motion."

"Therefore, says reason, if escape from guilt was given to the Holy Spirit as His purpose, and by One to Whom NOTHING He wills CAN BE impossible, the means for its attainment are MORE than possible. They must be THERE, and YOU must HAVE them."

"The seemingly new abilities that may be gathered on the way can be very helpful. Given to the Holy Spirit, and used under His direction, they are very valuable teaching aids."

"The Holy Spirit is the way in which God's will can be done on earth as it is in Heaven."

"The Holy Spirit is the mind of the Atonement. It represents a state of mind that comes close enough to one-mindedness that transfer is at last possible."

"The Holy Spirit is the MOTIVATION for miracle-mindedness. It is the will to HEAL the separation by letting it go. It is IN you because God placed it in your mind, and although you can keep it asleep you cannot obliterate it. God Himself keeps it alive by transmitting it from His Mind to yours as long as there is time. It is partly His will and partly yours. The miracle itself is just this fusion or union of will between Father and Son."

"The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Joy. It is the call to return, with which God blessed the minds of the separated Sons. This the vocation of the mind."

"The way to LEARN TO KNOW your brother is by perceiving the Holy Spirit in him. We have already said that the Holy Spirit is the bridge or thought-transfer of perception TO knowledge, so we CAN use the terms as if they were related, because in HIS mind they are. "

"The Holy Spirit is the IDEA of healing. Being thought, the idea GAINS AS IT IS SHARED. Being the call FOR God, it is also the idea OF God."

"The Holy Spirit is the mediator between the interpretations of the ego and the knowledge of the Soul. Its ability to deal with symbols enables it to work AGAINST the ego's beliefs in its own language. Its equal ability to look BEYOND symbols into eternity also enables it to understand the laws of God, for which it speaks."

"The Holy Spirit is the perfect teacher. It uses only what your minds ALREADY understand, to teach you that you do not understand it."

"The voice of the Holy Spirit IS the call to Atonement, or the restoration of the integrity of the mind."

"The Holy Spirit is the radiance that you must let to banish the idea of darkness. His is the glory before which dissociation falls away, and the Kingdom of Heaven breaks through into its own."

"The Holy Spirit is the call to awake and be glad."

"The Holy Spirit is the Christ mind that senses the knowledge that lies beyond perception. It came into being with the separation as a protection, and inspired the beginning of the Atonement at the same time."

"The text explains that the Holy Spirit is the Answer to all problems you have made."

"The Holy Spirit is the home of minds that seek for freedom. In Him they find what they have sought."

"The Holy Spirit IS the translator of the Laws of God to those who do NOT understand them."

"We once said that the Holy Spirit is the Answer. He is the answer to EVERYTHING, because He knows what the answer to everything IS."

"The Holy Spirit is the part of the mind that lies between the ego and the Soul, mediating between them ALWAYS IN FAVOR OF THE SOUL."

"The Holy Spirit is the light in which Christ stands revealed."

"We have said that the Holy Spirit is the MOTIVATION for miracles. This is because He ALWAYS tells you that ONLY the mind is real, because only the mind CAN BE SHARED."

"Remember that the Holy Spirit is the ANSWER, not the question." "The Holy Spirit is the bridge to Him, made from your willingness to UNITE with Him, and created by His joy, in union WITH you."

"Remember that the Holy Spirit is the communication link between God the Father and His separated Sons. If you will listen to His voice, you will know that you cannot either hurt or BE hurt, but that many need your blessing to help them hear this for themselves."

"The Holy Spirit is the Highest Communication Medium."

Somewhere in your mind, before all the consequences and side-effects that cascade, spiraling down into hell, there is a FIRST STEP. There's an initial "something" that you do, which leads to all the rest. It's the CAUSE of every aspect of your life, of all the ways you suffer, all the ways you relate to others and the world. It is even the cause of the world itself.

We need to dig deep and find out where this whole mess is STARTING, if we want to truly be free of the problem. Things which happen later are not actually the problem. Consequences and effects, projections and blame, perceptions and false identities, these are all things that arise later. They are not where the problem starts.

The course has a ton of material discussing many aspects of things that happen AFTER the initial problem begins. And this can be distracting. The world is a projection, so it's not the starting point. Your special relationships stem from your mental attitude, so they are not the cause. Even your holy relationships are just ways of relating FROM a certain state of mind, and arise from that state. Even miracles are really EXPRESSIONS from a certain mental state, so are not the starting point.

What is it that comes FIRST? Where does it START? What is the fist step on the staircase leading to hell? What is it that we keep doing, that is so fundamental and so primary, so deep within us and so causal, that it LEADS TO all this other stuff - our body issues, our life dramas, our relationships, our world, our perceptions, all stemming from it. What is the very core tiny little thing that we FIRST do that has a side-effect of producing the illusion of spacetime? We do know this:

"Separation from God is the only lack he really needs to correct. But his Separation would never have occurred if he had not distorted his perception of truth, and thus perceived himself as lacking."

Here Jesus suggests that a sense of separation is the only problem to correct. As it says elsewhere, we seem to have ONE PROBLEM, requiring ONE SOLUTION. But he also goes on to say that your mind went into a distorted sense of "what is true", and by doing this, PRODUCED "the fall of man" (THE separation). So even the sense of being separate from God is in a way further down the line from the initial act that causes it.

We know at least the problem we have IS NOT other people. Our relationships with them, issues with them, the things they seem to do to us, the things we do to them, that is all just an arena of effects and consequences, further removed from the actual issue. We're also told that the real problem is IN OUR OWN MIND, not out there in the world.

"Some of them are shared illusions, and others are part of your personal hell. It does not matter. What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His."

"Guilt is ALWAYS in yourOWN mind, WHICH HAS CONDEMNED ITSELF."

"I am the means by which God's Son is saved, because salvation's purpose is to find the sinlessness which God has placed in me."

What this is now telling us it that at some point, we condemned ourselves. Individually. I at some point attacked myself. And this is backed up with:

"It can be but myself I crucify."

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain." "Nothing in the world can bring oppression."

"I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts."

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF."

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

"Only the self-accused condemn."

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No one dies without their own consent"

"What has been FORGOTTEN then appears to be fearful, but ONLY because the dissociation was an ATTACK ON TRUTH."

"Because you had attacked yourself, and BELIEVED THAT THE ATTACK WAS EFFECTIVE, you behold yourself as weakened."

"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally"

"You HAVE attacked him, and you MUST have attacked yourself first."

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

So now Jesus is saying essentially that our INITIAL PROBLEM involved the denial of creation, which was an attack and a dissociation from the truth - a disowning of yourself. That includes the denial of God (the ego's religion), and the denial of your real self - your soul. The rejection of your truth and your identity. That was in fact a SELF ATTACK.

And as evidenced by the rest of the quotes, if you were not to "do it to yourself", if you were not attack yourself with YOUR OWN THOUGHTS, you would not have any problem or suffering of any kind. And here is the final clarification:

"Attack in ANY form has placed your foot upon the twisted stairway that leads FROM Heaven."

We also know that "sin is attack". We also know "sin is insanity". We also know we have an authority problem of trying to deny God's authority and authorship. We also know we tried to sin against his will by trying to attack him. We also know we made a world as an attack on God. So you attacking is where this all BEGINS.

"Listening to the ego's voice MEANS that you believe it is possible to attack God. You believe that a part of Him has been torn away by YOU."

"We have repeatedly emphasized that the ego DOES believe it can attack God, and tries to persuade you that YOU have done this."

Now, is it that other people attack you? No. Is it that the world attacks you? No. Is it your relationships attacking you? No. Is it your perceptions? No. "Perception is a result not a cause". "Projection makes perception" What you PROJECT comes before what you PERCEIVE, because perception is the RESULT of what you want to see. You look first WITHIN and then project it out and then perceive it. It's more to do with how YOU are attacking.

"What is projected OUT, and seems to be EXTERNAL to the mind, is NOT outside at all, but an effect of what is in, and has NOT left its source."

"It is the witness to your state of mind, the OUTSIDE picture of an INWARD condition. As a manthinketh, so does he perceive."

So not only is perception not the issue, but also even projection is not the issue. You projecting is not the problem. Where you project FROM, or WHAT IS IN YOU TO PROJECT is the problem. The content in your mind is the problem. And even if you DIDN'T ever project anything, you'd STILL have the same problem. Because the problem comes BEFORE PROJECTION. Projection is just the mental mechanism by which you GIVE what you HAVE.

So nothing that you project, or project onto, any blame of sin where you are projecting YOUR OWN SIN onto others, anything to do with making the world or interpreting it or having perceptions about it, NONE of that is the real issue. That's all side-effects further down the line of cause and effect, stuff that happens as you keep mis-stepping on the descent into hell. We want to know what is the PRIMARY CAUSE OF ALL HELL.

This is why Jesus talks about how you have to realize AT LEAST that the problem is in your own mind, not outside of you. That your ideas didn't leave their source. That your projections are deceiving you, and what you perceive is just a manifestation of your inner wishes. That the problem is really IN YOUR MIND, and it's there that you have to look for the solution that God put there - the Holy Spirit in you.

"That is because I do not yet realize that God has placed the answer together with the problem, so that they cannot be separated by time."

"But bring the problem to the only place which holds the answer lovingly FOR you."

"Problem and answer lie together here, and having met at last the choice is clear."

"The miracle forgives; the ego damns."

What it boils down to is that YOU HAVE CONDEMNED YOURSELF TO HELL. Other people didn't do this to you. The world didn't do this to you. Your body isn't doing it to you. Even God didn't do this to you. YOU are the one responsible for having chosen to suffer. YOU are the one who is pretending the Son of God can die. YOU are the one with the death wish. YOU are the one attacking yourself. YOU are the one who is taking a step onto the stairway to hell. And YOU are the one who has to CHANGE YOUR MIND in order to stop doing this.

"But until you change your mind about those your ego has hurt, the Atonement cannot release you."

"And then change your minds to THINK WITH GOD's."

"will to change your mind ABOUT the world"

"Now the source of thought has shifted, for to change your mind means you have changed the source of all ideas you think or ever thought or yet will think."

"It is not pride that tells you that you made the world you see, and that it changes as you change your mind."

"To free the world from every kind of pain is but to change your mind about yourself."

"But you can NOT remove the Power to change your mind"

"For you must change your mind about the purpose of the world, if you would find escape."

"And it will change entirely as you elect to change your mind, and choose the joy of God as what you really want."

"You must change your MIND, not your behavior, and this IS a matter of will."

"The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself."

"you must learn to change your mind ABOUT your mind. Only by this can you learn that it IS changeless."

"you MUST change your mind and help others change theirs"

As you can see, Jesus is quite clear that the ONLY problem is IN our own individual mind, the only problem is that we have CHANGED our mind ABOUT OUR MIND, in a wrong direction. And the only solution is to CHANGE YOUR MIND ABOUT YOURSELF in the direction of God. That is where is all STARTS. It starts with YOU. With your relationship with YOURSELF.

That's because ultimately the separation is about ONE THING. Your attack upon YOURSELF. Your effort to LACK LOVE about yourself. Your attempt to DESTROY yourself. Your self attack, your self destruction, your suicidal thought system of egotism that leads to self-induced death, and your effort to NOT BE IMMORTAL.

So for all its words and all its topics, all the things we might spend time dealing with, trying to clean up the mess and consequences, it really boils down to the CORE issue WITHIN you.... which has nothing to do with other people AT ALL, and nothing to do with the world AT ALL.

One thing which, if you change, if it's corrected, LEADS TO everything else AUTOMATICALLY correcting itself as an EFFECT and consequence. And since heaven is in you, seeking FIRST the kingdom of God (seeing yourself as holy and sinless) DOES make your way straight. Because all other CONSEQUENCES follow on from that, from your inner content. If you are the Kingdom, then ONLY GOOD can come from you and to you.

"What if you looked within, and saw NO sin?"

"And as we look within, we see the purity of Heaven shine in our reflection of our Father's Love."

You need to learn to love yourself again, to accept you are still as God created you. And that is all. Your one responsibility of accepting the atonement for yourself, which ONLY YOU CAN DO. because ONLY YOU are your only enemy.

And that means embracing your lovability. And that is only possible if you think you DESERVE love. And you can only deserve love if you are not GUILTY. And to be not guilty you have to recognize you HAVE NEVER SINNED. And therefore you remain as God created you, INNOCENT AND SINLESS FOREVER. You must embrace your TOTAL SINLESSNESS if you are to stop attacking yourself. Attack of ANY kind has to be purged from your whole mind. This is the process of PURIFICATION.

"The state of sinlessness is merely this: The WHOLE desire to attack is gone, and so there is no reason to perceive the Son of God as other than he is."

"My sinlessness ensures me perfect peace, eternal safety, everlasting love, freedom forever from all thought of loss; complete deliverance from suffering."

"Let us not, then, attack our sinlessness. For it contains the Word of God to us, and in its kind reflection we are saved."

"Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. Over and over this must be repeated until it is accepted."

"Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. You are and will forever be exactly as you were created."

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

This is all an inside job. The secret of salvation simply states it - you are doing it to yourself. No-one else, nor the world, is doing anything to you. You simply need to stop doing it to yourself, and you will be free!

"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.

In A Course in Miracles, there is a significant theme of allowing the Holy Spirit to fulfill his function, without you interrupting it, and without you attempting to take over his role as healer and therapist. But it may not be obvious how far this goes and what this implies. So let's look at what your role in this world is supposed to be.

As an ego, you stand in the way, you direct everything, you control everything, you make all decisions on your own, you tackle all challenges alone, and you believe you have the power and capabilities to succeed independently and with no reliance on spirit. It's kind of a state of "I don't need you God, leave me alone."

In this mode, we are trying to be God. We have an authority problem. We hold life by a tight grip of attempted control and brace ourselves against difficulties believing we do not want any help.

We're unwilling to acknowledge that we might not be capable, that we are too weak, that we cannot succeed, or that we need anyone. It's an attempt to be "independent" in a separated way, attempting not to depend on God at all. It is actually a form of isolation, imprisonment, desperation and failure.

As we attempt then to become more spiritual, there will at first be a transitionary phase in which we try to keep our selfish egotism while trying to turn it into something more spiritual. This is the ego's "seeking" and not finding, which results in a spiritualized ego. The spiritualized ego is quite capable of regarding itself as a hero, a savior, a fixer, a healer, a rescuer, a saint, and exalts itself to a very high level of what it thinks of as holiness.

"All unhealed healers follow the ego's plan for forgiveness, in one form or another.

In this phase, the person will attempt to be the one who heals others, to be the one who has power, to be the one who can perform miracles, to be the one who still relies on themselves but with a higher demand of achievement and perfectionism. The ego self can still adopt a mode of trying to be like Jesus, but it is the trying part where it all falls down.

You might take on various healing modalities or start to tap into forms of guidance, but these will likely be limited because there is still much ego interfering. The ego still wants to be the center of attention, the doer, the one who causes the results. And in fact the ego will even use aggression, anger, forcefulness, intensity, loudness, as "tools" that it believes will cause miracles to occur. And it's fairly guaranteed that these will not work.

But it's important to try to do this, and to fail. Because in the failing you may become more willing to give up on the effort to go it alone. You will recognize what does not work. You will give up on this false hope of being a superhero, and begin to seek a deeper surrender to something larger than yourself.

As you go beyond this phase, you begin to surrender to the holy spirit, ask for help, seek guidance, and reach out beyond yourself for love, support, comfort, healing and guidance. This means a willingness to put aside your self-driven ego efforts, your "going it alone", your "being the one who does it". It means getting out of the way, not merely sitting on the sidelines but removing the ego self that would need to sit on the sidelines. It means opening up to the spirit, to the spiritual eye.

This overall entails a deepening of trust, of allowing there to be something not of you, that is there to help you. It means putting aside the idea that you will be powerful in and of yourself, and no longer being the central figure. Instead of being self-reliant, you must become willing to rely on HIM to HELP you, knowing you cannot go it alone. In a way, it's like you turn more into a medium or channel through which something "not of you", something prior to you, operates. And you want it to, and trust it to, because you know you cannot do this alone.

So what does this really mean? What is our proper role in this world? Everything points to a state in which we ourselves become an open window, a portal, a doorway, through which THE HOLY SPIRIT functions. And in this role, WE do not get to be heroes. And as this doorway, "we need do nothing" is very literal in that it applies to our own self. We no longer need to source or cause things, to be the one who does things, we merely need not interfere with WHAT HE does through us. And he WILL act through us if we will let him, which includes allowing Him to heal minds and bodies.

We're told that he will direct us everywhere we go. We're told that we will be told very specifically what to do. We're told that he will heal through us as we allow him to heal us. We're told not to place limits on what Jesus/HS can do through us. We're told that what HE allows "us" to do, ie what he does through us, is not of this world - meaning it is capable of doing things WE have no clue how to do.

We're told that WE do not understand anything, and HE knows how to heal because that is his function. We're told HE is the only therapist, not us. We're told that OF ourselves we have no power, but there is a power in us that works THROUGH us FOR us.

We're told the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of our wrong decision (all effects, symptoms, errors, manifestations, sicknesses, problems) if we will LET HIM (allow him to ACTUALLY DO IT).

We're told not to assume his function. We're told that when he heals he never fails because he knows how to succeed and cannot fail. We're told to not interfere, to not get in the way. We're told to let him literally SPEAK through our mouths to let HIM to talk others, which means literally channeling him. We're told to let HIM use our bodies, to allow our body to be a device for HIS communication and healing.

We're told to adopt His Christ Vision and to see WITH him how HE sees, so that His vision becomes shared with us - that we tune into it, but do not originate it. We're told this vision is GIVEN to us, we did not create it, so we need to accept it. Were told the atonement is GIVEN to us, and needs only our acceptance and allowance, which means we do not MAKE IT or define it.

We're told that we had everything before the separation and we must now re-receive INHERITANCE FROM GOD. What God wills that we have and be, not what we make of ourselves. We're told that we're still as God created us and that because He created us, we do not MAKE ourselves or redefine ourselves, so must stop trying to be the gatekeeper who decides what is true and false but to instead accept HIS definition of us. We're asked to make NO decisions on our own, relying heavily on guidance. The list goes on.

This all requires a laying down and surrendering of our entire ego effort for control and definition of who and what we are, what the truth is, what we have, and what God would have us do. A willingness to ACCEPT as our own, that which GOD HAS DECIDED we should have and be and share in. And to do so willingly and joyfully, knowing and trusting it is for our highest good to take on board HIS provision, decision, mind, will, power and safety. We are to EXTEND creation, we are not to invent things which are not in alignment with what God has already created.

All of this points to a clear picture that in our natural God-given state, we are not in the business of being something "of ourselves". We're not inventing or reinventing. We're not trying to make something as substitute for what God already created. We're not trying to give ourselves a function that God did not give us, some kind of heroic role that makes us look good or that we think is better than the "chore" of doing God's will "against our will".

Our only function in heaven is creation, our only function on earth is healing. We're more or less asked to completely surrender all control and resistance and unwillingness. We're asked to do GOD'S will, rather than our own separate interests. And to settle into returning to being ONLY what God has decided is true of us.

So our proper function, our natural way of being in harmony with Creation, is basically to be what God defines you to be, to act in accord with HIS will, to create WITH him, to extend FROM him, to communicate and share what HE would have us know, to perform the miracles HE directs, and to have complete total trust and dependency on him for EVERYTHING. To be in a kind of symbiotic relationship of happy dependency. "God and his miracles (you) are inseparable."

Learning to adopt this position allows you to become "a miracle worker". But not because you are a powerful independent superhero, but because you have let go and let God, you have surrendered deeply all efforts to BE God, you have given up "trying" in favor of trusting Holy Spirit's supernatural power which never fails, and you have become a conduit through which HIS POWER can move to cure all ills, solve all problems, and correct all suffering. And that means you are now allowing God to operate THROUGH you in the world.

It is humbling. We do not get to be the center of attention. We do not get to be the false savior. Our inflated spiritualized ego needs to be dissolved and replaced with SHARING. And we simply settle into being OF SERVICE to God, trusting Him in all things, doing what He bids willingly, listening to and following his instructions, and being a representative of His Will. Nor does this mean you are some kind of slave, unwilling worker, coerced victim or person who is being forced to do what they do not want to do. You must be WILLING to recognize and trust that His will is for your good.

So the question is, do you want to be on team ego, or do you want to be on the Holy Spirit's team? Are you willing to adopt HIS function, shared with him in trust, or do you want to keep being the hero of the dream? And are you willing to allow a supernatural power to move THROUGH you, in this world, to perofrm miracles which are not OF you, and which are not of this world?

Are you willing to be a FOLLOWER? A disciple? A willing participant in the great crusade and a professor of Christ?

"The therapist does not heal; he LETS HEALING BE. HE can point to darkness, but he CANNOT bring light OF HIMSELF, for light is NOT of him. But being FOR him, it MUST be for his patient."

"The Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist. He makes healing PERFECTLY clear in ANY situation in which He is the Guide. The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION. He needs no help for this. He WILL tell you EXACTLY what to do, to help ANYONE He sends to you FOR help, and will speak to him through you, IF YOU DO NOT INTERFERE. Remember that you ARE choosing a guide for helping, and the wrong choice will NOT help. But remember also that THE RIGHT ONE WILL. Trust Him, for help is His function, and He is of God."

"ANY attempt you make to correct a brother (which includes attempting to heal him), means that you believe correction by YOU is possible, and this can ONLY be the arrogance of the ego. Correction is of God, Who does not know of arrogance. The Holy Spirit forgives everything, BECAUSE GOD CREATED EVERYTHING. Do not undertake HIS function, or you will forget YOURS."

"Accept ONLY the function of healing in time, because that is what time is FOR."

"As you awaken other minds TO Him through HIM, and not yourself, you will understand that you are not obeying the laws of this world, but that the laws you ARE obeying WORK. "The good is what works" is a sound though insufficient statement. ONLY the good CAN work. Nothing else works at all. This course is a guide to behavior. Being a very direct and very simple learning situation, it provides the guide who tells you what to do. If you do it, you will SEE that it works. Its RESULTS are more convincing than its words. THEY will convince you that the words are true."

"the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM.

I WILL to let Him by allowing Him to decide for God for me."

"All miracles mean Life, and God is the giver of Life. He will direct you VERY specifically."

"Make no decisions about what it is, or where it lies, but ask of the Holy Spirit EVERYTHING, and leave ALL decisions to His gentle counsel. The One Who knows the plan of God, which God would have you follow, can teach you what it IS. Only His wisdom is capable of guiding you to follow it. Every decision you undertake alone, but signifies that you would define what Salvation is, and what you would be saved FROM. The Holy Spirit KNOWS that ALL Salvation is escape from guilt. You have no other "enemy" and against this strange distortion of the purity of the Son of God, the Holy Spirit is your ONLY friend."

"Today I will make NO decisions by myself."

""Take up thy cross and follow me" should be interpreted to read "Recognize your errors and choose to abandon them by following My guidance.""

"I have repeatedly asked MY pupils to follow me. This means that, to be effective teachers, they MUST interpret teaching as I do."

"Only then will your MIND will to follow me. Without your will, you cannot be rehabilitated. MOTIVATION TO BE HEALED is the crucial factor in rehabilitation."

"You once said that souls cannot rest until everyone has found salvation. This happens to be true. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. The Disciples were officially and specifically told to heal others, as Physicians of the Lord. They were also told to heal themselves, and were promised that I would never leave them or forsake them. Atonement is the natural profession of the Children of God, because they have professed Me."

"I must found His church on you, because you, who accept me as a model, are literally my disciples. Disciples are followers, but if the model they follow has chosen to save them pain in all respects, they are probably unwise NOT to follow him."

"RELEASE yourselves to Him Whose function IS release. Do NOT assume His function FOR Him. Give Him but what He asks, that you may learn how LITTLE is your part, and how great IS HIS."

"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."

"Yet what makes God's teachers is their recognition of the proper purpose of the body.As they advance in their profession, they become more and more certain that the body's function is but to let God's Voice speak through it to human ears. And these ears will carry to the mind of the hearer messages that are not of this world, and the mind will understand because of their Source.From this understanding will come the recognition, in this new teacher of God, of what the body's purpose really is; the only use there really is for it."

"The Holy Spirit does NOT work by chance, and healing that is of Him ALWAYS works. And unless the healer ALWAYS heals BY Him, the results WILL vary. But healing itself IS consistence, because ONLY consistence is conflict-free, and only the conflict-free ARE whole. By accepting exceptions, and acknowledging that he can SOMETIMES heal and SOMETIMES NOT, the healer is OBVIOUSLY accepting INconsistency. He is therefore IN conflict and TEACHING conflict.

Can ANYTHING of God NOT be for all and always? Love is incapable of ANY exceptions."

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

Most people feel some sense of unworthiness. Some people feel it very strongly. Unworthiness means you do not believe you deserve to be loved. You're not good enough or smart enough or perfect enough or something enough. There is something lacking about you, something missing or something wrong with you. Something which proves that you can't and shouldn't be loved.

That which you believe is true and real, you will accept and allow and agree with. If you believe that something is wrong with you, that you are guilty or a sinner or are ashamed or remorseful about something that happened, even if you are upset about it you will believe that you deserve what you are experiencing. Whatever you accept as true, you will believe you are worthy of. Worthiness, deserving, entitlement, all correlates to what you accept and therefore allow and agree with.

If you do not feel worthy of love and forgiveness, it is because you believe you ARE worthy of something else. It means you believe that guilt is real. Believing in guilt means you accept that you are guilty, you agree that you are guilty, you believe that you should be punished and not loved, and will agree with anyone who comes along to punish you for you, ultimately on your behalf. Even if it hurts, you will not stop them, because you yourself believe that you are worthy of it.

When you are feeling unworthy or less than wholly lovable, you will experience some form of victimhood. You'll see yourself as unfairly treated, that what you are experiencing is not what you want, that you wish you could have a "do-over" and fix what you did, and that you feel deeply bad about what happened. These feelings seem very genuine.

In particular, feeling very bad about yourself, unworthy of love or attention or credit, feels very sad and depressing and unhappy. It makes you feel as though you are weak and have no power. Maybe someone took your power away. You see yourself as helpless and suffering.

It simultaneously will seem as though someone else has power over you. Someone else was hurt, or someone else attacked you, or someone else decided you are not good enough by not treating you well. Someone else has more than you, and you have less. You don't measure up, you fall short of the standard, you're not man or woman enough, or something is just lacking about you. These experiences are a perception of you being a victim. It seems so unfair, it seems so un-asked for, it seems like what you do not want. No-one seems to love you and there doesn't seem to be anything you can do about it.

Perhaps there is even something about you physically, mentally or emotionally which seems to be hideous or unacceptable or just not good enough that anyone would love it. Overweight? Underweight? Ugly? Bad hair? Pimples? Poor clothing? The wrong kind of physique? A strange voice? The list goes on of all the reasons why someone would not love you.

In this state of mind, there doesn't SEEM to be anything that you are doing to put yourself into this situation. It seems deserved. It seems like there is no way out and nothing you can do to change it. You WISH that it would not be this way, but you do not see a way out. You don't see how you can escape this, and instead have to avoid the people who judge you and who have decided for you that you are a sinner.

The experience and feelings that go along with this unworthiness or guilt can be deep and profound. You can feel really awful about yourself. You can feel as though God wouldn't love you, no-one would love you and nobody wants you. It seems tragic. You just seem to want someone to come along and rescue you or be a friend or side with you or whatever. But they don't show up. Funny that.

All of these feelings are unpleasant and seem to suggest there is nothing you are doing to put them in place, that you are trying so hard to get out of it and that you just feel really bad about what you did or what you are. It SEEMS like you do not want this, that your guilt is genuine, you feel really awful about what you did, and it seemed so real, you actually caused someone or God to be hurt and it's had a real effect and someone got damaged and there's just no way to undo it.

So now you're stuck feeling guilty, and you deserve it, but your feeling of guilt is almost like a plea for forgiveness or a wish that someone else will forgive you for you. It feels as though you feel really really bad for doing something wrong, a kind of remorse, as though you recognize clearly that it was not the right thing to do, and just feel terrible about it.

But what we now need to address is the fact that all of this is bullshit. There are illusions at play here. There is denial. There is unconscious material which is not being admitted to. There are cover-ups taking place. There is dishonesty. There is irresponsibility. And there are ego devices in place that actually have a hidden agenda and purpose for all of these feelings, which you at first will not want to admit to.

The suggestion that you in ANY way might be using this guilt, remorse, shame or unworthiness for a secret purpose, that you actually might want it to be happening because you're getting some kind of benefit from it, will initially be experienced as a slap in the face. It will seem like a blasphemy, which will trigger you to react with "how could you say that" and "how dare you" as though this is completely the opposite of what you're experiencing. It will seem insensitive.

The problem is that your mind has placed itself into a perceptual experience of being a victim and is very confused and deluded and simply does not see the truth. It does not recognize what it is doing or how it is using unworthiness on purpose. It doesn't want to admit the truth and sees the truth as a threat or offense or attack.

This is simply because, whatever your scope of awareness is right now, which you will believe is full and whole but really isn't, determines what information you have and what facts you are aware of. Although your perception is limited, you see yourself as being aware of everything there is to be aware of, because your awareness only shows you what is within its range right now and anything outside of it seems not to exist. You may not even suspect that there is more to this than meets the eye.

Because of this, based on the evidence you ARE aware of, you will simply conclude (erroneously) that it does not SEEM as though you want to be guilty, it does not look as though you are choosing this on purpose, and you are ONLY aware of the seeming causes of this unworthiness and the consequences it produced, ie the justification for WHY you feel guilty, and the explanation for why it is both logical and sensible to feel this way.

For example if you are aware that someone did something to you, seeming to cause you to feel ashamed, and you see no other causes, you will sensibly conclude that you feel this way because of what they did to you. But this doesn't mean this is the truth or the real reason why you feel this way. There is more truth that is outside your awareness which you haven't admitted to yet.

Or if you did something yourself, you sinned, and thus you feel guilty and ashamed, you will conclude that you're supposed to feel this way because what you did was awful, and therefore it is justified and normal. People refer to this as your "guilty conscience", as though you have this "conscience" which regulates and honestly perceives whether what you do is good or bad at all times. However, only the ego has a guilty conscience, and the conscience has absolutely nothing to do with truth. It is purely based on judgement and ego-based errors in perception, denial and an unwillingness to admit the real truth.

Guilt will always feel as though it is genuine and heartfelt and that you are truly sorry and feel bad about what you did. That is its purpose. It is meant to make you experience in this way. It is, however, a very effective cover-up for a deeper experience which is completely opposite. There are some facts which you are unaware of which would show you that your guilt is actually not pure and sacred and sincere. There are some facts which would reveal that your guilt is actually a device for further sinning and for increasing separation.

When you make-believe separation and move into sin - the belief that separation really has happened in reality - you are believing that you committed an act of murder. Such an act does not happen "by accident". It is deliberate, intentional, pre-meditated destruction. It was on purpose, you wanted it, and you chose it. The whole reason for sin originally was to establish separation from God SO THAT you could go off by yourself and pretend to have your own separate existence, be ruler of your own universe and act like God without God.

There was nothing accidental about that, you didn't do it "by mistake", and it wasn't a cosmic "oops". It was vicious, it was an attack, and according to your belief in sin, which you WANT to believe, it produced a tremendous amount of "real" consequences such as that God has been changed, God has been hurt, God is justified in getting revenge, and you now have no option other than to go off by yourself and hide in a corner.

The purpose of the original sin was to bring about a separation from God and therefore from yourself. It required you to disown yourself. Sin was an attempt to disown yourself by destroying yourself and what you are. Following sin, based on the logic of separation which naturally proceeds all the way to death, you CONTINUED to implement a "getting rid of what I am" mentality. This led to the invention of guilt as a cover-up story.

To disown yourself and to be less responsible for choosing and for who and what you are, you invented guilt as if to say, you didn't REALLY mean to sin, you didn't want to do it, it sort of happened on its own, or God abandoned you or cast you out of Heaven, or it happened to you against your will, or, having really hurt God you now feel sorry that you did it. It's as though you have had a change of heart! Suddenly you enter into this guilt as if to say, I'm really sorry that I did that, I wish I could take it back. But this is a total lie.

Guilt is a layer of denial. It represses the fact that you DID want to sin and you did want to be separate. It covers up the very deliberate choice that you made with an ILLUSION of you seeming as though you couldn't possibly have wanted this. You sinned, you attacked, and then all of a sudden... what did I do? How could I do this? What was I thinking?

Well... this shift may on the surface APPEAR to indicate that you did not want to sin and regret it, but this is not at all genuine. You did want to sin and you will do everything in your power to KEEP the sin in place and never question it and never attempt to be open to the possibility that it can be healed or undone or that it never happened. You never want to let sin be threatened.

Therefore you have to build this fictional illusion that you do not want sin, which actually is an act of further separation. You look at the sin and you try to get rid of it, just like you tried to get rid of God. You separate yourself off from it, judge it, attack it, and tell yourself that it and you have nothing in common. The movement from separation to sin is exactly the same motive, purpose, and goal, as the movement from sin to guilt.

In terms of illusions, the appearance of them as if they are true will tell you, no no, I didn't really want to sin... it was a mistake, I didn't realize what would come of it. Bullshit to that. You actually did know and you chose it and tried to MAKE it happen. And now you then cover this up with a facade of guilt as if you couldn't possibly have wanted this. But this pretend remorse really covers up the fact that you are USING guilt now as a device for not only keeping the sin in place, continuing to believe it cannot ever be changed, but also as a way of disowning it and yourself.

Guilt causes sin to go unconscious. It is your attempt to shut sin out of your awareness and pretend that you do not want it. Your not wanting of something is an attack, using a device of separation to get rid of something. It worked for you to get rid of God, and now again it works for you to get rid of sin. By being guilty and SEEMING to be all ashamed and unworthy and nobody-can-love-me-now, you paint a picture of the reasons WHY sin cannot be undone and WHY guilt is justified, making guilt the truth and protecting sin from healing.

Having blocked out sin, which is the sole cause of guilt, your mind will no longer be aware of the sense of sin. Instead, your conscious awareness only remains aware of this new fictional guilt that you invented - fake guilt, not real guilt. It is not genuine guilt, it is not honest guilt, it is not true guilt, it is completely artificial and a lie. But being unaware of the sin that came before it, guilt is now squarely in your conscious awareness and seems to be the truth to you.

Guilt explains why you should be punished. Guilt also explains that sin cannot ever be undone. It justifies keeping the sin, pushing it into the past, as though it's done and over with, and can never be changed. It puts the decision-maker or cause of why you are guilty outside of yourself, so that you do not appear to be the one who decided to invent the guilt in the first place.

You are guilty because of "what you did to God" or you are guilty because of "how you hurt another person". Their hurt, their suffering, is used as the justification for why you should be guilty, and because you believe (through sin) that their suffering is real, you see it as the cause of your guilt. Lo and behold, you have successfully disowned the power and honesty and choice of being the one who put the guilt in place, and will now come across consciously as NOT being the one who wanted any of this.

In the guilt you'll put on this performance, this sob-story, about how you don't want to feel this way, you wish it never happened, it was unfair, someone else made this happen, you didn't choose it, if you could do something to undo it you would - EXCEPT FOR what would actually undo it - we won't let ourselves go there, believing that because it was a sin in the past it is a given - irreversible and never to be questioned. Anything but that.

Since you then believe you are guilty, you will believe you do not deserve forgiveness. To forgive would mean to UNDO the guilt and question whether you sinned. You do not want that and you have no intention whatsoever of ever going there to look at that. You want to stay as far away from the sin as possible, which is what makes it unconscious. If you do not deserve to undo sin or be loved ever again, you now believe you are not worthy of love.

It is through your own belief that you are guilty, which is you agreeing that you should be guilty, that you will accept and allow the guilt, even if on the surface you will experience it as unwanted. From inside of the guilt, from inside the unworthiness, which means that you are blocked from being aware of love by a barrier of denial, it will SEEM as though this is just a horrible experience that you would never want to choose... because you do not SEE that you did choose it, OR that you chose it on purpose for a very "evil" intention of bringing about the death of the Son of God.

So then you'll experience that you are worthy of punishment and unlove and mis-treatment and being attacked and hurt, because you do not believe you deserve anything better. Your allegiance has to be somewhere, so if it's not to God, it's to the ego - the thought system of pain and suffering and death. Not much of a substitute, but it's your only choice. And secretly, it's what you wanted. Being closer aligned to the ego will allow you to further you plan, which has been in place since the start and never questioned, of becoming a separate individual in your own reality, where death is life and separation from God is absolutely true.

In this unworthiness you will feel powerless, helpless, victimized, profoundly "not wanting" this at all. Or do you? Secretly you do. You are getting away with murder. You wouldn't feel guilty unless you believed that sin is real. Guilt keeps sin real. You wouldn't believe you deserve to suffer and die unless you believed guilt was justified and therefore that you should be punished.

You might seem on the illusory surface not to want the suffering at all, to be not choosing it at all, to be completely averse and horrified and terrified about what is going to happen to you, but this also is a huge bullshit lie. You are deliberately positioning yourself to suffer SO THAT you can continue your plan of separation and death and keep justifying why the Son of God should die.

The more that separation is implemented the more there will seem to be this huge rift between what you APPEAR to be wanting, versus what you are secretly really wanting. And since the ego is a split mind, always there will be a conscious self-will which seems to not want to suffer or be guilty or upset in any way, but there will be an unconscious self-will which is constantly trying to bring about death and disaster.

You actually believe you deserve to die, because of what you did. And you want to believe it. Death is what you want. It's what this entire dream is all about - you choosing death over life, ego over God. And isn't it strange how you flipped from attempted murder of God and His Son, to suddenly now seeming like a victim? Like you went from being the victimizer, to being the one who is being victimized?

Isn't that like a perfect cover-up for a victimizer, to portray themselves as innocent, to show themselves as being the least likely to sin, to fake their own helpless death (suicide) in order to prove that they are so powerless that it couldn't possibly have been them who did it? Their secret sin and hidden hate goes to the grave with them, and is the reason they go there. Who would suspect the most innocent-seeming person of hiding a malice against God which has attempted to destroy all of Creation? Who would suspect someone who is so powerless, helpless, hopeless, weak, afraid, suffering and unfairly treated by life?

It's the perfect cover. It's the perfect mechanism of denial, layer upon layer of projection, disownership, displacement of blame, irresponsibility, pretending to have no choice, and picturing yourself as the least likely one to have sinned. We're all playing this game of who can seem to die without anyone suspecting that they wanted God to be dead. It's the desire to want God to be dead which CAUSES you to die.

So yes, you can feel guilty, ashamed, remorseful and unworthy, and these can seem like such unfair, un-asked for, unwanted experiences. But we have to get very honest here if we want to actually have a chance of being set free by the truth - any hope in hell of actually being forgiven and for this whole mess to go away.

We have to be willing to admit that our guilt is not genuine guilt, or real guilt, or truthful guilt. It is fake guilt, denial, and a cover-story for something even worse. We have to admit also that our feeling of unworthiness is a tremendous cover-story once again for how we couldn't possibly want any of this, life is totally unfair, other people have been really judgemental and mean and accusatory, and how we "don't deserve this".

Those who feel unworthy will be constantly saying "I don't deserve this". Bullshit! This is the conscious ego persona claiming that it doesn't believe you deserve this, and that you are just trying to preserve your integrity and innocence, while unconsciously the ego shadow is hell-bent on staying as unworthy as possible.

You are fundamentally worthy of God's unconditional love all the time forever. But if you can position yourself as unworthy and justify why you are unworthy, this will seem to "explain" why and how you should not be loved by God. But isn't this just another way for you to attempt to assert that you CANNOT be loved? If you cannot be loved, guess what that means? It means that you have STOPPED GOD. And what's another word for stopping God? Murder.

So your unworthiness will be all sorrowful and you'll feel like you didn't ask for it and you don't want to be this way. But you do. You have to own up to that if you want to be free. And typically those who are in a victim mindset will NOT want to ACTUALLY take the steps necessary in order to undo the real problem. They will make HUGE amounts of noise about their desire to have this go away, how they don't want to suffer, and complain extensively about how unfair this all is, but the one key thing that they need to DO to ACTUALLY solve this problem - the undoing of separation and sin, they will avoid at all costs.

And so when you listen to a victimy person, you will notice that they are forever staying paralyzed, they are always staying exactly where they are, keeping all of their problems, keeping all of their suffering, but making huge screeching noises about how they want this to go away. They don't want it to go away. The one thing that would undo it, they do not want. Anything else they want, any other possible pathway or solution or answer they will be open to, but not the undoing of the unworthiness.

How are you going to be able to maintain that God cannot love, and therefore God is not love, and therefore God has no power to love you, and therefore you have power OVER God, unless you assert strongly that you cannot be loved? Your unworthiness is an authority problem. It is arrogance. It is you trying to stop God from loving. You justify it with guilt. You support it with an explanation of having sinned. You want to KEEP all of the ways that justify you being attacked and hurt and rejected and punished, because it allows you to GET AWAY WITH MURDER.

Your rejection of God's love, because you "don't deserve it", is bullshit. It is not true. You DO deserve God's love. You do not WANT to admit to deserving God's love. Your unwillingness to admit that you are USING your unlovability as a weapon, is keeping you in the dark and maintaining your agenda of death. Oh, poor me, I guess I sinned too much, I'm too guilty, God, you might as well not love me, just pass me by and go love someone else, you're really better off not loving me anyway, you wouldn't want to love someone like me, I'm SAVING YOU from unnecessary unjustified love and hurt by me turning away from you.

And so this unworthiness is really a denial of love and an attempt to explain why you should not be loved. Not that you cannot be, but that you should not be. And you will explain that because of your sinfulness, because of your guilt, you really do not DESERVE the love - that you're doing love a favor by saving love from having to love you. You believe the love will not WORK and that therefore you would be causing love to waste its efforts. Or in other words, your deserving to die comes from your attempt to make God die by stopping God's love from extending, ceasing the extension of Life.

It's almost like an admittance that you hurt someone so bad that they really should not love you, they shouldn't even try to, because they would be wasting their love unnecessarily and that you are saving them from this additional loss by not being worthy. So now you are God's savior, which makes your ego happy. So long a you stay unworthy, which SEEMS to be the illusion of wanting to be loved so badly, wanting to be forgiven, wanting to be seen as worthy, it REALLY is an attempt to do the exact opposite - to reject love as much as possible.

If God is permanently loving then you have to admit at some point that your belief in guilt and sin and unworthiness is YOUR belief. It is not God's view of you. You must also own up to and take responsibility for making the DECISION that you are guilty and unworthy, which reveals that you actually CHOSE it and put it in place on purpose, for a reason. You being responsible for all of this reveals the truth that every single part of what you are experiencing is a form of denial, is part of your ego plan, is untrue and dishonest.

You wanted to sin. You wanted to use guilt to cover up the sin and disown it. You wanted to be unworthy of love so that you could reject God. And you wanted to die to prove that God was dead. No-one else decided any of this for you. God didn't make it happen. It wasn't other people who caused you to be unlovable.

This is ALL part of your plan, every step of the way, and you wanted all of it. That means, that you have done this all to yourself, but it also means that therefore, if you change your mind and admit to the truth, you might STOP doing this to yourself and actually have a REAL HOPE of being free from this suffering. Unworthiness is hardly a joyful experience.

You will say you cannot forgive yourself for what you did. You do not want to. You don't believe in your innocence because you chose to believe that guilt is true. And not just because you did something really bad, but so that you could hide your sin and increase the attack on God.

Being guilty for murder is hardly a restoration of the state that existed prior to the murder, and guilt can hardly be said to be an atonement or compensation for attack. If you sin by attacking someone and its hurts them, what are you going to offer to them to compensate them? If you were to offer them love, healing, undoing of the sin, and reversal of all effects, that would be true "repentance". A miracle of healing would be true repentance. But you don't choose that. Instead you choose to go into guilt.

In this world, guilt has been terribly confused with love. People hurt those they "love" (but really don't) then go into guilt. Guilt is supposed to be some kind of position of being sorry, or remorse or regret, and then they will attempt to perform actions which make it up to the person, based on that guilt, as though that will atone for the sin. Guilt is not a gift, it's a slap in the face. It's an attempt to kick them while they're down. It's an attempt to save face. It is dishonest.

If you sin and hurt someone, the response from you should be that you RETURN TO LOVE, so that you can be as truly helpful as possible and heal the problem. And that person, IF they are in their right mind, should encourage you to return to love, through forgiveness, in order to RESTORE the state of innocence and invulnerability which seemed to be disrupted. Thus both of you are now better off. But if you instead move into guilt as your offering of atonement, you're really being selfish and are not atoning at all.

If the person you hurt is not in their right mind and has an ego agenda, they will likely seize the opportunity to notice that you made a mistake and, instead of forgiving you to help you to return to love, they will use this to get rid of some of their own sin and guilt. They will attack you, justifiably, accuse you, put you in the dog house, put limits on you, reject you from their "love", or generally separate from you as a justified punishment. This is a completely insane response and not in any way justified or honest or exhibiting integrity.

This is the ego's version of atonement, that you sinned so you must sacrifice in order to make up for it. You must lose something, you must be less loved, and you must give something away that you value and be at a loss, in order to "pay" for your crime. There is no justice when any Son of God is found to be guilty. Not only has one person been attacked, but now a second person has fallen from Grace and has entered into guilt. So now two people are suffering, which is hardly an improvement.

Being guilty and unworthy of forgiveness is exactly what your ego wants, and is exactly what it uses to pretend to be sorry about what happened. If you are TRULY regretful, you will return to love as quickly as possible, regain your sense of deserving love as quickly as possible, repair the "damage" by offering a miracle of healing, and give the TRUE GIFT of love. This will be a real atonement. This will undo the suffering and reverse the problem and restore peace. But the ego doesn't want that, and anyone with an ego will condemn and demand guilt as though it makes sense. It is insane.

Many forms of "love" are really guilt. Feeling guilty that you didn't do enough, feeling guilty that you hurt your loved one, feeling bad about not being able to help someone, feeling guilty that you caused someone to suffer or lack, etc... these are not positions of honesty or responsibility or repentance or atonement. These are positions of the ego using the situation to reinforce itself and increase separation and unconsciousness and death. And a "crime punishable by death" is the ultimate bullshit.

When someone makes a mistake, it must be innocent, because no-one in their innocent right mind deliberately sins. If it is a mistake, it is forgivable, calls for forgiveness and love and a restoration of communication and communion. It calls for even greater sharing and love, in order to correct the problem of the error in perception.

So at some point when you admit all this to yourself, you will have to learn to drop the entire "sob story" of how you are unworthy and guilty and ashamed and remorseful and regretful. None of these are genuine and every one of them is a dishonest plot to move you further towards death.

This "correct perception" of these perceptual errors allows you to RECOGNIZE these illusions as ego devices and not as truth. If you believe them then you have failed to recognize them, and they will remain. But illusions, when recognized for what they are REALLY doing, leads to their undoing and they must disappear. Therefore there is a healing and a release.

Yes, you feel like shit and unworthy of love, but.... do you want to keep spinning your wheels on this or... do you want an honest, real solution which will ACTUALLY repair the damage and heal you and set you free of this guilt and restore your worthiness for being loved? That is what forgiveness offers you. That is the escape from death that the truth offers you, if you are willing to own up to it.

Unworthy? Ashamed? Guilty? Mad at yourself for what you did? Self loathing? Low self-esteem? Bullshit!

You ARE permanently lovable, permanently worthy, permanently innocent, and permanently forgiven. Your self-hate is not justified. Your attempted self-destruction is not justified. Your guilt is unfounded. Your sadness is completely unfounded. Your fear of punishment is a total lie. And you have not really sinned at all.

God is very happy with you right now. Can you accept it as the truth? At least in your willingness to approach this truth, it may bring to light the ways that you are trying to believe the opposite, so that you can look at it honestly and let it go.

God loves you. Always has. Always will. And there is nothing that you need to "do" to make it up to Him or win Him over or convince Him of your innocence. You do not need to "atone" for a sin that you didn't really commit. You do not need to "atone" or "pay" for hurting God, because you haven't. You're just mistaken, and so long as you want to keep being mistaken God will STILL continue to love you unconditionally. At some time you will be ready to accept that, in truth, you deserve to be loved forever, and you are.

"Nothing you can do can turn me away, nothing anyone can say, 'cus I'm with you now and as long as you stay, loving you's the right thing to do, loving you is the right thing." - Carly Simon