I used to think that "false empathy" meant when you are basically empathizing with someone, sympathizing, or sort of getting into their emotional drama etc....

Now I see it is more than that. It means really `joining` with someone in, and agreeing about, ANY kind of ego scenario, relating to ANY appearance or ANY illusion that covers up the immortal, God-created Real Self.

If a person comes along and is in any way demonstrating belief in being anything less than God created them, perfectly whole and holy and innocent and invulnerable, then that's an ego drama. If I go along with it, buy into it, join with them in it, participate in it, take it seriously, listen to it, judge it, engage with it or any of that, that's me entering into false empathy.

It's kind of like a false Oneness... a false joining, that says, I will join with you in a subjective illusion and pretend it is objectively real, and the two of us will then be 'infected' with this ego attitude and at least we'll agree with each other that this it the truth.

Real empathy then would entail absolutely not joining in ANY ego whatsoever, overlooking all ego, persona, and appearances, not believing in or taking seriously ANY presentation that runs against that (including anyone seeming to be sick, diseased, afraid, upset, etc)... holding the light, holding the truth, being a beacon, a leader, and strength that invites the other person to remember who they really are.

ACIM says of healing: "Forgiveness is not real unless it brings a healing to your brother and yourself. You must attest his sins have no effect on you to demonstrate they are not real. How else could he be guiltless? And how could his innocence be justified unless his sins have no effect to warrant guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just because they would entail effects that cannot be undone and overlooked entirely. In their undoing lies the proof that they are merely errors. Let yourself be healed that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother and yourself."

What this is saying is that when you fully believe the truth, that you are not a victim, that forgiveness has been performed, and that atonement has been claimed, there MUST be a DEMONSTRATION OF HEALING, in both yourself and your brother, to SHOW that what seemed to happen in sin has had NO REAL EFFECT.

This correlates with a part in the bible which says that signs must follow those who believe, meaning, supernatural manifestations of truth must be exhibited as proof that what you believe is true. Not just a belief intellectually, but a DEMONSTRATION.

"You must attest his sins have no effect on you to demonstrate they are not real."

If your brother does something to you and it has an effect on you, this proves his guilt. Jesus is asking us to prove his innocence, by not allowing such effects to be shown.

And just think about this:

"Forgiveness is not real unless it brings a healing to your brother and yourself."

Heaven = "Logical AND" e.g.

"I have everything, AND so do you"

"God is made of love, AND so am I"

Ego World = "Logical Exclusive OR"

In ego, no two objects share anything. You can say something like:

(ObjectA but NOT ObjectB) OR (ObjectB but NOT ObjectA)

The ego combines negation "NOT" in order to exclude, and combines it with selection between two things "OR", which doesn't allow for "BOTH", producing an "exclusive OR" - a fundamental state of inequality and difference.

When one thing is one way, it MUST be different to another thing, therefore the other thing is not the same. e.g.

"An apple is not an orange"

"Its either an apple or an orange but not both"

"I have the apple, therefore you do not"

This entire universe and all the "laws" within it are based on this ego logic of "exclusion".

The entirety of Heaven is based on the simple logic of "inclusion", which is the logical "AND" operation.

ACIM asks us to learn to "think like God": "To think like God is to share His certainty of what you are. And to CREATE like Him is to share the perfect love He shares with YOU. To this the Holy Spirit leads you, that your joy may be complete because the Kingdom of God is whole."

Wholeness, and sharing, entail "AND". We BOTH have everything. Me AND you. When it stops being AND and goes into "either or but not both", you're going into ego.

It should be obvious that Heaven is all about "inclusiveness" and Earth/this universe we made is all about "exclusiveness". That is why "Heaven and Earth are opposites in every way."

Denial can be used two ways.

1) Deny God's truth and replace it with lies.

2) Deny lies and replace it with God's truth.

One defends the ego and makes God unreal. The other defends God and makes the ego unreal.

Denial of God has progressed very far and is responsible for everything that happens in this world.

Denial of ego is the only way to resurrect and return to safety.

Sometimes, denial is combined with level confusion. When this happens, you use denial incorrectly in the name of thinking that it's making you more spiritual, but instead it's increasing separation.

Denial of the body for example could go one of two ways. You could deny that it is real, which is correct, if done as a recognition that it is unreal and not as an attack on it seeming to be real.

Or, you could be believing the body is real and attempt to PRETEND it is not there, by using denial to attack it to try to make it go away. This will separate you from it and produce sickness, instead of transcending it.

In other words, denial needs to be used honestly and with clarity. If you are "in denial" about how you are using denial, that can be a problem.

Proper use of denial will entail a clear RECOGNITION of what something IS, without avoiding it or pretending to make it into something it is NOT.

Clear perception of what the ego is, what the body is, what illusions are, is all that is needed in order to "deny the ego". MISTAKEN perception will lead to the improper use of denial, because it means you see the ego as real instead of an illusion, and will then use denial to fight with it to try to make it go away.

When you are sick or someone is sick or has any other problem, you need to be careful about your desire to heal it.

Having perceived something that you think is real, you WILL have a reaction to it. The reaction is PART of the misperception which led to you believing something real was happening in the first place. The reaction WILL entail fear because you must be afraid when you witness something that you think is real but is not.

So your reaction might compel you to want to "do something" to fix it, heal it, change it, make it go away, etc. And based on that motivation, you might go either way... you might either:

a) Continue making it real and react to it and try to force it out of your life. This will make it even more real, keep it, empower it, and is a further attack on you and the person.

b) Stop and realize you need to apply forgiveness, retrace your psychological steps, and undo the faulty perception which led to this reaction. THEN you might be in a position to offer a miracle.

So just be careful where you're coming from. You turn into a false savior when you think there is a real problem to solve.

The challenge you have is to NOT believe there is a real problem, to demolish and dismantle every trace of belief that the problem is happening, get your perception corrected so that you can see the truth, and recognize that NOTHING has happened. The illusion is not real. And then you are in a position of appropriate sanity and power to bring about miracles if needed.

This means, you need to get into a really unconditionally loving place within yourself, and feel that love in your heart. It is NATURAL for miracles to occur when you do so, like they are practically effortless.

But when the Course talks about love it doesn't just mean the degree of love you can experience as a separate ego self. It means GOD, all of God, as all the love there is. The power of love. Which is beyond all other powers. That love inspires miracles. And those miracles MUST entail sharing and extending love to another.

It's not something that occurs because you stand on the opposite side of the street to someone and think fondly of them, or decide to lift your sins off their shoulders in an act of forgiveness.

Miracles EXPRESS love, which is a power, which is directed by intelligent Spirit, and which heal every aspect of existence. Miracles are ACTS OF GOD. Mind, body, emotions, finances, relationships, employment, social unrest, war, you name it, all healable.

This all comes naturally when there is love being extended.

A miracle is then like a kind of 'glow' of spiritual power, of unconditional love, which expresses and radiates and shines with such intensity that it has authority over all darkness and illusions and literally corrects all faults and errors, restoring a divine order.

God is involved in miracles because God is love.

This has nothing to do with your mental somersaults or thought-therapy. It only has to do with love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God heals.

The Course talks about the development of trust. What is that?

Well, at first you trust the ego and its false truth. You don't trust God, and you don't trust the real truth. You have trust, it's just misplaced.

Trust is the same thing as faith which means, that you learn over time that God's truth is true and the ego's truth is not true. Also you learn that God's truth can be trusted, and you come to learn that the ego that you used to trust is actually not trustworthy.

The ego's trust is based on you being unaware of its motives and the side-effects of believing in it. It wants you to think its your friend. It wants you to think it is cohesive and makes sense and is sane. It doesn't want you to see the ways in which it does stuff which undermines its trustworthiness.

While the ego has the wool pulled over your eyes you will trust it. You'll trust everything about it. You'll trust your senses. You'll trust the idea that you are a physical body. You'll trust your body's senses, your memory, your perceptions. You'll trust that the world is really happening.

But these are in fact forms of mis-trust in God, because to have so-called trust in illusions is to not trust at all.

Learning to trust God means that you become convinced that God's way is the truth, that you can depend on it, that you rely on it, and that you want it. And that HAS to entail you relinquishing your trust in the ego's version of reality.

You have to to unlearn the trust you've placed in the ego in order to reveal the trustworthiness of God.

God can be trusted because God is love and wants only to love and support you. The ego can't be trusted because it is the anti-christ and would like you to cooperate with its plan of death. It's a slight difference.

As you gain trust in God's truth, you begin to seriously question trusting the ego's world. And that means when the ego makes shit happen you have trust in God moreso than the appearance of what's happening. You trust God more than events suggest you should. You ignore what the ego is screaming at you through all your senses, and listen within instead. That's having faith. Faith is trust.

It's safe to trust God.

Honesty is the basic machinery of awakening. It means you have a willingness to accept what is true regardless of whether it suits your ego or makes you look good. It means putting the truth before your own personal position, and being willing to be seen in its light.

All parts of any forgiveness process entail honesty. You have to be honest to admit to and discern what is true and what is false. You have to be honest with yourself in accepting responsibility for having chosen everything you are experiencing. And it takes a lot of honesty to admit that you are not being victimized by anyone but yourself.

So honesty is really all about putting aside all of the ego pursuits, perspectives, and self-serving and face-saving attitudes, which are really all *lies*, and owning up to what's really going on. It's a matter of owning up to what is real rather than what you want to make of the situation.

Honestly also requires us to surrender every ego activity that we're using to try to win favor or defend ourselves or make ourselves look better. It means being what you really are, admitting to what really is, and accepting reality without you changing it.

Honesty is the best policy, because it is sanity. It is awakening. It is awareness of truth. It is allowing and accepting God's nature and presence. Sometimes it will take for you to really examine what you're doing and why and to have a 'little willingness' to admit the ways that you're mistaken or are trying to deceive. So really it all boils down to... is it really true... is it really factually real and true as in Holy Spirit's truth.... or is it false.

Honesty is the truth. Dishonesty is the lies.

So if we're to wake up to God and truth and reality, we're going to have to be really really really really really completely willingly honest at all times. Otherwise we're kidding ourselves, and fooling ourselves, and deceiving ourselves, and then we are the ones who end up suffering.

In all honesty, we are still as God created us. It we are willing to completely admit and accept that, it's game over for the ego.

Honesty gives you access to the truth which sets you free.

Miracles are everyone's right. Both their receipt and their expression.

God is not in a state of choosing whether to perform a healing. God is not waiting to make a healing occur. God is not considering whether it's right or wrong to heal. God is not delaying healing for some special reason.

God is always the same. God has already fully given all of Himself, to the maximum extent possible.

Prior to the separation, all of God was already given and received fully! You already had perfection.

The idea of the separation was an attempt to PUSH AWAY that which you ALREADY HAD and to deny that God has given it.

Every effort in the ego to make the separation real, tries to deny the reality of God's abundance.

If it seems rare or inconsistent that miracles occur, or that minds are joined at all, that's because the ego's separation has been so "severe" that what was once whole and full and freely abundant has been reduced to barely a trickle.

Such is the ego's resistance, the use of the physical form to repress and counteract the receipt of God's abundance, that when a rare miracle seems to happen everyone's like, oh my God, that's so fantastic. And when anyone shares a little bit of mind, it's like, wow, that's a special ability.

No. Miracles are everyone's right. They are natural expressions of love. When they are not happening, something has gone wrong. And in the ego's world, something has MAJORLY gone wrong, resulting in what appears to be miracles that are few and far between. Those willing to even entertain the possibility of miracles, yet alone becoming able to perform them, is even more uncommon.

A miracle, as an expression of God, and all miracles combined, are merely the abundance of God being shared. All of God's abundance was ALREADY shared. You already had it prior to the illusion of separation. You already had immortality, eternal life, divine health, and absolute invulnerability.

That we now claw and grasp at tiny morsels of miracles is a profoundly opposite state of being, where the idea of accessing even a PART of any of these God given promises is considered "miraculous" and applause-worthy. Miracles are supposed to be happening ALL THE TIME, for EVERYONE!

Recognize then that when attempting to perform a miracle, the doing so should NOT entail in any way notions that God has not yet given all that He is. You need to erase from your mind all beliefs that God has not given, will not give, is waiting to give, etc. You must stop looking and WAITING for God to do the miraculous. This means, you have a ROLE to fulfill to facilitate and support the miraculous expression of God, and you need to TAKE ACTION!

It MUST be true that God has ALREADY done his part! It's not God's FAULT that miracles aren't happening. It's not His responsibility that miracles aren't happening. God is not in error, God has not failed, God is not broken, and God did not decide to stop sharing eternal life with you or anyone.

It is US who have fucked up. Or more to the point, it is our choice to produce "ego" - resistances to sharing God - which are defenses against God's will being fully expressed and extended. We are trying to stick our thumb in the tap to stop the flow. We've become spiritually constipated. We are constantly trying to STOP miracles from happening. Like, all the time. Our state of denial and defense is so profound that we're actually convinced God is no longer GIVING eternal life. Our unwillingness to RECEIVE eternal life is a choice for death.

To perform miracles again, we must OVERCOME the separation, OVERCOME the ego, and TAKE BACK what is rightfully ours. We're not really taking it back from someone who has taken it from us, and we're not really victims of theft, but it SEEMS like we are. In order to take back our miracles, therefore, our divine right, we need to be willing to SURRENDER and own up to our natural role as Christ.

All that we have GIVEN AWAY, needs to be reclaimed. All that we have blocked, needs to be set free. All that we have chosen to live without, needs to be accepted once again.

So performing a miracle must entail you're not sitting there waiting for God to do something. Your role is not to go to God asking Him to do something. He's already done his part! Your role is not to look at the ego and keep checking it to see if it is changing "on its own", as though some other will is deciding to manifest the miraculous effects. These are all ways that we are still blaming God for our disowning of power and abundance. These are ways of disowning the miracles.

If God has done His part fully, and if we have rejected our part, and if it's us who have given away God's gifts, then performing a miracle is simply RE-RECEIVING what God has already given. Miracles are natural. It's taking it back, by ceasing to disown it. It's ceasing to believe that "someone else" or "some cause else" is the reason why we don't have eternal life. We need to take it back from our own imaginary thieves, who are really scapegoats for our own choice to NOT receive God's love.

The Christian miracle workers focus quite a lot on taking back what the devil has stolen from you. This doesn't recognize that you did it to yourself. Yet, in the ego's universe, it can seem as though there are "bad spirits" or other negativity which causes sickness etc. Really, though, we should be careful not to battle against "forces" that we ourselves have put in place, otherwise we're really trying to wage a spiritual "war" against our own decision to believe in the ego. Evil is not reality. There is no need for a spiritual war against an imaginary enemy, but there IS need for us to responsibly reclaim what is naturally ours - that we have given away.

Really, there is no enemy, such as sickness or death, it's just us pretending to disown and disallow God. When we own up to that and recognizing that we're doing this to ourselves, we will be supremely confident in working "miracles" because we will know with clarity that NOTHING CAN STOP US other than ourselves. So fear has absolutely no foundation and cannot stop the truth from manifesting.

Let's stop blaming God for sickness or trying to turn to Him to do something about it. He's already done everything that's real and everything that's true. He hasn't stopped loving. He hasn't stopped sustaining PERFECT HEALTH. He hasn't stopped infusing Eternal Life into us forever and ever. It's us who have chosen to resist and fail to claim it.

Therefore, recognize miracles are already FULLY GIVEN. The work we have to do now is to stop blocking them and learn to RECEIVE them. And this happens through SURRENDER, relaxation, openness to Holy Spirit, and ALLOWING Him to flow and rebuild by God's Will.

Holy Spirit said to me, simply, "Surrender, and let God do the rest". This is key to performing miracles. They are not effort. They require surrender of the ego, a calmness, an openness, and an allowing of God's Will to be done. You are a conduit for the extension of LOVE to flow THROUGH you. You just need to stop blocking it. When you allow God, miracles will be effortless, normal, abundant, and constant!

Only the truth is true. God established the truth. If I want the peace and happiness that God wills for me, I must be willing to let go of what is not true.

I must be willing to accept God’s truth as it is, without changing it or making it be what it is.

Trying to make the truth be what it is is the ego authority problem. I am trying to tell God what God is against His will.

I must be willing to put aside what I think is true, and admit that it is false, if I am to accept the truth as God created it.

I can’t accept God’s truth and hold onto my own separate truth. They can’t both be true.

If I want God’s peace and happiness, if God is all that I want, I will have to surrender. I will need to be willing to allow God to be the way God is, without my opinion.

What I believe does not matter. I cannot establish the truth. I can only accept it, or deny it. If I want God, I will have to stop being in denial, and that means I will have to surrender the things I thought were true but which disagree with God.

I have to be willing to surrender my ego. I have to stop denying God’s truth.

I want the peace and happiness of God, therefore I am willing to put aside my own idea of what the truth is, and to open up to what God has to share with me.

Do I want my little world, or the one God Created for me? Am I willing to accept God’s Will for me? Am I willing to allow God to decide for me in every way and on every matter? Will I trust Him?

To accept the truth as God created it, to accept God’s will, to accept God’s decision, must entail that I trust Him, because I have to take His word for it. Without figuring out on my own what the truth is, I have to trust God’s answer is correct.

I want to trust God. I want to be willing to accept God’s truth. I am willing to put aside my own ego and surrender to the truth God has already created.

I want the peace of God. I accept the peace of God. Above everything else, I want peace.

I surrender and trust you God. Choose for me.

"Holy Spirit will undo all the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him. I choose to let Him by allowing Him to choose for God for me."

This might sound selfish, but most of the course is about you and what you are doing to yourself. It’s you who have attacked yourself. It’s you who needs healing. It’s you who needs to take responsibility for accepting atonement for yourself.

It’s you who’s been hurting yourself and choosing suffering. It’s you who has the free will. It’s you who have chosen away from God and needs to choose Heaven. It’s you who believes you are unworthy and needs love. It’s you who have condemned yourself with sin. So it’s really you that needs the help.

It’s not primarily about you saving the world or fixing others. You are not strong enough TO help others until you have undergone some healing. This is the main theme. Your self.

It’s only as a result of your own inner transformation that you attain a position of authority, power, miraculousness, love and wisdom, to be able to then bestow healing and help onto others in blessing. Only love can be shared with others. If you don’t have the love, you can’t give it. You’ve got to be bolstered, healed, recovered, saved. Shaped into someone who does have access to love and who can be helpful.

Giving and receiving become more unified as you yourself open up to receive love. You can only give the miracles you have received. You’re no use to anyone if you are no use to yourself. You have to take your power back. You have to become stronger in the truth. To allow more of your light to shine.

It’s not selfish to work on yourself. Gradually you’ll open up to sharing what you’re learning. You can’t see God in everything if your own mind is not aware of God within it. You look within first then look without. Trying to put everyone else first in denial of you receiving, is sacrifice. It’s like you are a battery, you have to become charged up before you can overflow your power onto others. Or as the analogy goes, if your own cup is half full, it hasn’t enough to overflow to others.

This doesn’t entail doing everything on your own, or being self reliant, and not opening up to trust and depend on spirit. You do need to develop trust in Him. But realize most of your ascent to the atonement is to do with SELF healing. And only after a certain amount of healing is accomplished within you do you become able to exhibit signs of miraculousness. As Jesus says, miracles are everyone’s right, but purification (of yourself) is NECESSARY first.

Go to God. Get the love. Give the love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In attempting to forgive the hell in the world, we might really be trying to make it real and then make it go away. This is an attack. The problem is that we have combined what the world IS (an unreal illusion), with a sense of reality, and now they appear to be one thing. This makes the world seem real.

To forgive or undo it, seems to entail getting rid of it entirely, in order to remove this illusory thing, and the reality gets thrown out with it, because the sense of reality seems tied to the world. As if you can't be free of the world without out also being free of its reality. So you try to throw the whole thing out at once.

But it is not actually the world that's real, and the sense of reality must NOT be thrown away. Instead, focus on allowing the world itself to be UNREAL, and let it "remain" as unreal, yet recognized as unreal, while you lift away from it the sense of reality. Give the realism back to God and let the world just be unreal. Take away the meaning you gave it and allow it to be meaningless world, because meaning belongs to God.

Let the world be an unreal world on its own, separate from the reality, and just reassign the reality to where it belongs. This allows you to not ATTACK the world or to effort to make it go away. It is merely re-framed it in the proper light - as the awareness of dreaming, in the recognition that the world is just a dream.

This awareness paves the way to allowing it to disappear naturally without force. Because when an illusion - an unreal world - is recognized AS an illusion, it must disappear. First take away its reality, then watch it vanish on its own. You must un-bind reality from the unreal world and take back the power you gave to it, first.

Look upon it as unreal, as without reality and without power, and then you are recognizing it for what it is. Recognizing it as unreal, given that you are still lingering in it for now, allows you to be in it but not affected by it. If the whole thing is unreal then it has no power, no will, no mind, no life, no meaning, no cause, no existence and no threat.

"For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

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

I suspect that miracle impulses are not mere "urges" or "compulsions" to love, but rather I suspect they are actual "pulses" of an energetic expression, like a ball of light or a little spark of life force which a person transmits. And I think these pulses can be expressed/created by loving minds and transfer to others, causing instant healing.

I had one experience of this. My wife was very angry about something and yet, the night before I had been sending her a lot of love. So I was in a very open loving space. And as I looked at her and loved her, I felt a little pulse of concentrated energy shoot out of me and go into her. Instantaneously she went into laughter, the angry mood was immediately gone, and she said "don’t make me laugh!". I hadn’t done anything but shine love and it seemed the "impulse" that shot out of me had a miraculous healing effect on her mind.

ACIM says:

"Miracles are a spark of life."

"Miracles are energizers."

"Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life."

"Miracles are *expressions* of love."

"Miracles are thought creations."

"Miracles are thoughts."

"The Holy Spirit is the mechanism of miracles."

"Miracles arise from a miraculous state of mind."

These to me suggest that "a miracle", an impulse, is a kind of created "spark of life", like a ball of energy or life force, which is created by a loving mind and transfers to others. Upon receipt, this acts like a drop of detergent. As Jesus says it "breaks up erroneous thought". This "miracle" pulse is like a droplet of healing.

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain" is, I think, NOT metaphoric. They are actual droplets of healing power. Drops of life, which supply the lack of life and thus produce resurrection and reversal of sickness and all symptoms of love’s absence.

As expressions of love, it is not enough to say a person is simply radiating love. Rather, that the love literally generates a force that "travels" in the "form" of a love spark, which induces instant healing upon receipt. The eyes of Christ give birth to them. They are many in number and unlimited in supply. They are a power surge.

I have only experienced this impulse once. One time that I was loving enough - really pushing the envelope. I imagine that these impulses just naturally erupt like extraneous sparks from a light-filled person. I could be wrong but I have no other explanation.

As ACIM says, miracles cause healing, they are not the healing itself. They are a remedy. Meaning they are applied to something to cause effects. They entail a GIVER and a RECEIVER, which means something goes out of you into another. They happen naturally when you are loving. You emit them, like little thought creations, little ideas of love and healing. They are transmitted and render a service to another upon receipt.

Giving and receiving must occur simultaneously.

This means that in order to receive love and healing, you must give love and healing.

Which in turn means, that the only way for you to be healed, is to extend healing to others.

Which therefore means, that your willingness to heal your brothers heals you.

"I will be healed as I let him teach me to heal (self and others)."

This is a key point because when you focus on "your" healing or "your body" that in fact is falling short of extension. As you fixate on "what is wrong with me", you are failing to forgive and overlook it.

What's needed is the re-establishing of your function of healing, which happens through extending PAST the body to others.

If you seem to be sick, it is because you have not loved yourself AND other enough. As ACIM says, those who are sick do not love themselves. But to love yourself you have to love PAST yourself because love has to be shared.

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

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

As you become willing to give, you are praying to receive. You can only receive by becoming part of the giving. When prayer is asking to get and not give, it is asking for sacrifice. And when prayer is asking to give and not receive, it is asking for sacrifice.

You have to be included in the prayer that asks to receive, because you must be part of the functioning of giving. The "flow" through you as a conduit for God only works when you are willing to be part of the transmission of that which you want to affirm is in you and through you.

When the mind's extension is arrested ie held back, through the body, and begins to fixate on your body or another body, it is not fully joining minds. It is falling short. Love is being held back. There is resistance and fear. This induces illness.

Once illness is induced and you are deceived, the temptation is to continue believing that since you are sick, you need to address the sickness. But focusing on the sickness does not look past it. It is the sharing, extending, and looking past your body that re-establishes the proper functioning of the mind. Once mind is extending/forgiving past the body, it is shining a light, and that light heals your body indirectly.

So the trick to this is that if you need healing it is because you are not healing. To heal, you need to heal others. By being of service, you receive support. By extending love you receive love. As ACIM says "Love goes out because of what it is, but you are needed that it can begin." If you block it is cannot extend. You must participate in the giving, to open up your vessel so that love can flow through.

Jesus tells us, "you are healed because you wished him well." As you wish your brother well it heals you. If you attack your brother you will attack yourself. If you try to accuse your brother of sin, you will be accused. If you prepare a list of effects and suffering that you wish your brother to endure, you can be sure that you will be the one who experiences them. You cannot be healed alone, nor can you escape the effects of your thinking.

It's important to realize then that not only is healing not "just you getting healed alone", but also sickness is not about "you being sick alone". Sickness is an attempt to come between brothers and to attack BOTH you and your brother, driving a separation between you, using the body as a separation device and attempting to increase the rift.

Making the body "more real" by focusing in it, increases its symptoms, in an effort to convey that it strongly comes between you. Your sick body acts like a solid brick wall blocking you off from others, attacking them keeping you imprisoned. Similarly healing cannot entail merely the repair of "your self", it HAS to entail the REJOINING and SHARING with your brother, to undo the rift that caused the sickness in the first place.

No-one is sick in isolation. In contagion do the sick seek to kill others. Sick bodies are accusers. If "you" seem to go into sickness it is because you are attempting to accuse your brother of your sins. Which means you believe you are sinful AND that your brother is sinful. And this means you see yourself in a sickened state AND your brother in a sickened state. It may well be that you seem to be the only one suffering but it is because psychologically you have separated yourself off from others.

No-one heals in isolation. Isolation must end for there to be healing. To be healed yourself, you cannot hold grievances against others, you cannot project sin, and you cannot find your brother to be guilty. By the Golden Rule, what applies to you applies to them. For you to experience healing, mentally and or physically, you have to be willing to see your brother healed. "Forgiveness is not real unless it has brought a healing to your brother AND yourself."

The temptation is to think you are the only one sick. The belief in "I am alone" produces sickness because it ends sharing. Therefore the opposite, "We are joined", produces health because it acknowledges that in their natural healthy state, minds are joined as one. And you can only ever join in LOVE.

It's almost as though you should "ignore" (overlook) what seems to be "exclusive sickness" and focus more on extending love to others, which shines past the sickness and erases it. If your sickness is a barrier to sharing, sharing is the remedy. The sickness was an attempt to disable yourself so that you could NOT share. The solution is to share and extend love in defiance of the barriers you've erected so that they are shone away.

Sickness then is an attempt to isolate, to cut yourself off, to be exclusive and special, to be different, to not share, to hide and to be in the dark. Healing must then be a matter of joining, reunion, equality, sharing, coming into the light, opening up to extension, and allowing your brother back in. This means receiving all of the sonship again, developing holy relationships, and moving past the illusions of separation.

When Christ Mind is shining through a body in wholeness and love, the body is shone past, making it illuminated and healed and transparent, eventually to disappear entirely. Bodies are interference, originally made as devices for separation. To use them with the Holy Spirit is to UNDO them. "The body cannot remain without illusions."

"Christ is within a frame of holiness, whose ONLY purpose is that He may be made manifest to those who know Him not; that He may call to them to come to Him, and see Him where they THOUGHT their bodies were. Then will their bodies melt away, that they may frame His holiness in them."

"The body needs NO healing. But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed! And it is here that Christ sets forth the remedy. His PURPOSE folds the body in His light, and fills it with the holiness that shines from HIM. And nothing that the body says or does but makes HIM manifest. To those who know Him not it carries Him, in gentleness and love, to heal their minds. Such is the mission that your brother has for YOU. And such it MUST be that YOUR mission is for HIM."

Your miracle WORKING, DOING, PERFORMING, is supposed to restore the right mindedness of SOMEONE ELSE WHO IS *NOT* IN THEIR RIGHT MIND!!!!!!!

"We said in a previous section that ***the miracle is an expression*** of miracle-Mindedness. Miracle-Mindedness merely means Right-Mindedness in the sense that we are now using it. Right-Mindedness neither exalts nor depreciates the mind of the miracle worker ***nor of the miracle receiver***. However, ***as a creative act***, the miracle need not await the Right-Mindedness of the receiver. *******In fact, its purpose is to restore him TO his Right Mind.******* But it is essential that the miracle worker be in his Right Mind, or he will be unable to reestablish Right-Mindedness ***in someone else.***"

"All forms of not-Right-Mindedness are the result of refusal to accept the Atonement FOR YOURSELF. If the miracle worker DOES accept it, he places himself in the position to recognize that those who need to be healed are simply those who have NOT done so. "

"The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept Atonement himself. This means that he knows that mind is the only creative level, and that its errors ARE healed by the Atonement. Once he accepts this, HIS mind can only heal. 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 overevaluating its own learning device (the body), and restores the mind to its true position as the learner. "

"Healing was an ability which was lent to man after the Separation, before which it was completely unnecessary. Like all aspects of the space-time belief, healing ability is temporary. However, as long as time persists, healing remains among the stronger human protections. This is because healing always rests on charity, and charity is a way of perceiving the true perfection of another, even if he cannot perceive it himself."

"It must be understood, however, that whenever a man offers a miracle to another, he IS shortening the suffering of both."

"Miracles supply a lack."

"Miracles are given by those who temporarily have more, to those who temporarily have less."

"Miracles strengthen both the giver and the receiver."

In every way, being right minded does NOT entail a state in which OTHERS ARE FREE FROM SUFFERING. And because of this, MIRACLES have a PURPOSE to offer healing TO THOSE WHO ARE LACKING or who have not yet chosen to enter miracle mindedness themselves. This is why "Miracles are a SERVICE, they are the maximal service you can render to another." Miracle working is all about what you DO to HELP OTHERS who are NOT WHERE YOU ARE AT. And this easily proves the fact that just because you are healed it does NOT MEAN that you no longer see people in need, lacking, sick, suffering or dying. You simply do not believe it is true of them, but you STILL HEAL THEM THROUGH MIRACLES.

Miracles are a CREATIVE ACT. "Miracles are a spark of life".

If you want to experience any of the attributes that are true of God, such as love, peace, happiness, health, joy, power, etc, then it does entail actually moving closer to God. God has these attributes in him as part of his nature, permanently. And the place in you where you have these attributes is the place he put them, which is within your real self - your soul.

In order for you to experience these things, it actually entails getting in touch with your real self and being aligned with God's will. You can't stay separate from God and expect to feel what it's like to be like God. You have to actually be willing to be close to God, close to love, close to permanent happiness, close to peace, close to that which creates these things.

God is the creator of these things, not you, not the body, not the world. They dwell inside of you in the very same place where you are joined with God, at your inner altar. If you want peace, you have to go there to find it. If you want to be loving, you have to share love with God. If you want to be happy, you have to be with God as well.

This means identifying with your real holy perfect self as God created it. This also means if you are not experiencing these things it's not because there is something wrong with you, it's because you're not being true to yourself and have distanced yourself from God. So the remedy is to simply move back closer to God again. The question then, really, is, where are you, and how much distance (spacetime) have you put between you and the reality of peace, love and happiness?

"A Son of God is happy ONLY when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make." UrT7L2

"The step I take today, my Father, is my sure release from idle dreams of sin. Your altar stands serene and undefiled. It is the holy altar to my Self, and there I find my true Identity." UrW309L2 "Oh my brothers, if you only knew the peace that will envelop you and hold you safe and pure and lovely in the Mind of God, you could but rush to meet Him where His altar is." UrU5A8

"We clear a holy place within our minds before His altar, where His gifts of peace and joy are welcome, and to which we come to find what has been given us by Him." UrW104L4

"Only at the altar of God will you find peace, and this altar is in you, because God put it there." UrT9I18

"If you would look within, you would see only the Atonement, shining in quiet and in peace, upon the altar to your Father. Do not be afraid to look within." UrT13C7

"A miracle reawakens the awareness that the spirit, and not the body, is the altar of Truth. This is the recognition that leads to the healing power of the miracle." UrT1B22G

There is a reason why the Holy Spirit is invisible to the body's eyes. There is a reason why Heaven is invisible to the body's eyes. There is a reason why Christ is invisible to the body's eyes. The body's eyes CANNOT SEE REALITY and they never will. That which is invisible "to the Earth" is real. What has "become" visible - this planet, is FAKE VISIBILITY. It is a block to sight, crammed in front of your face so that you will be distracted by illusions and NOT SEE. The time will come when all things VISIBLE will end. That includes this planet. Christ Vision is how you see the invisible, which MUST ENTAIL no longer seeing that which you THOUGHT was visible, which is in fact non-existent.

"When you made what is NOT true visible, what is true became invisible. But it cannot be invisible in ITSELF, for the Holy Spirit sees it with perfect clarity."

"What witness to the wholeness of God's Son is seen within a world of separate bodies, however much he witnesses to truth? He is INVISIBLE in such a world. Nor can his song of union and of joy be heard at all. Yet is it given him to make the world recede before his song, and sight of him REPLACE the body's eyes."

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there. But still and white and lovely will it shine through all eternity. There was no time it was not there; no instant when its light grew dimmer or less perfect ever was. Who knows the Father knows this light, for He is the eternal sky which holds it safe, forever lifted up and anchored sure. Its perfect purity does not depend on whether it is seen on earth or not. The sky embraces it, and softly holds it in its perfect place, which is as far from earth as earth from Heaven. It is not the distance nor the time which keeps this star invisible to earth. But those who seek for idols cannot know this star is there. "

"How can man "come close" to others through the parts of him which are really invisible? The word "invisible" means "cannot be seen or perceived."

"By making him invisible, the world of retribution rose in the black cloud of guilt which you accepted, and you hold it dear."

"Judge not what is invisible to you, or you will NEVER see it. But wait in patience for its coming. "

"What love would look upon is meaningless to fear, and quite invisible."

"For, in the NEW perception, the mind CORRECTS it when it SEEMS to be seen, and it becomes invisible."

"These might be called the Teachers of teachers because, although they are no longer visible, their image can yet be called upon."

"For the little spark that holds the Great Rays within it, is ALSO visible, and this spark cannot be limited long to littleness."

"But the time will come when all things visible will have an end. The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen"

"Here is what is really here made visible, while all the shadows which appeared to hide it sink to obscurity."

"Nor will what you saw before be even faintly visible to you. Today we are trying to use the new kind of projection."

If the EFFECTS of sin remain and are not healed or undone, there remains PROOF that SIN HAPPENED. This is not good enough. Jesus states clearly that these effects continue to condemn your brother. PHYSICAL SIN has to be undone through miracles. The effects of sin MUST BE REVERSED. Miracles reverse EVERYTHING that the world says can NEVER BE UNDONE. That includes PHYSICAL EFFECTS AND PROOF.

If the proof is kept, you CANNOT CLAIM your brother is now innocent. A sin-believing mind MAINTAINS the proof in order to CONTINUE TO CONDEMN, and the effects CANNOT STAY without a sinful cause. Keeping effects while trying to change only the cause is an attempt to PARDON, not forgive. Jesus states that when you forgive, BOTH you and your brother must experience healing, which means NEITHER of you can continue to SEE the effect and consequences of sin. Otherwise IT HAS NOT BEEN UNDONE, and therefore there HAS NOT BEEN ATONEMENT.

"The unhealed CANNOT pardon. For they are the witnesses that pardon is unfair. ***They would retain the CONSEQUENCES of the guilt they overlook.*** Yet no-one CAN forgive a sin which he believes is real. And ***what has consequences MUST be real, because what it has DONE is there to see.*** Forgiveness is NOT pity, which but seeks to pardon what it knows to be the truth. Good cannot BE returned for evil, for forgiveness does not first ESTABLISH sin, and THEN forgive it. Who can say and MEAN, "My brother, you have injured me, and yet, because I am the BETTER of the two, I pardon you my hurt." ***HIS pardon and YOUR hurt can NOT exist together.*** One DENIES the other, and MUST make it false.

To witness sin and yet forgive it is a paradox which reason cannot see. For it maintains what has been done to you DESERVES no pardon. And, by GIVING it, you grant your brother mercy, ***but retain the proof he is not REALLY innocent. The sick remain accusers. They cannot forgive their brothers AND themselves as well***. For no-one in whom true forgiveness reigns CAN suffer. ****!!!!He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes!!!!****. And thus he MUST have overlooked it, and removed it from his own. Forgiveness CANNOT be for one, and not the other. Who forgives IS healed. And in his healing lies the PROOF that he has truly pardoned, and ***retains no trace of condemnation*** that he still would hold against himself or any living thing."

"***Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless?*** And how COULD his innocence be justified ***UNLESS his sins have no effect*** to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE ***they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors.*** LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. ***************************A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed.************************* A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

"The sole responsibility of God's teacher is to accept the Atonement for himself."

The ego is completely against the idea of being responsible for everything.Since ego believes strongly in sin and guilt and the reality of victimhood, it believes that if you take responsibility, YOU are the one who is sinful and guilty and a victimizer.

It wants to avoid this at all costs. It believes that responsibility is condemnation. It sees responsibility as INDUCING GUILT.

But it is vital that we learn to be responsible WITHOUT the sin and guilt and accusation. We are responsible for BELIEVING IN and USING these things, but we are NOT at the effect of these things.

We need to own up to what we have done to ourselves, which we cannot do if we constantly blaming the cause of them on everything and everyone other than ourselves.

But while we believe in sin and guilt being real, we are going to be RELUCTANT to OWN THIS POWER, the power of decision, because it implies that we are the guilty ones.

We have to go through a phase of trying to take responsibility, while also sorting out the fact that the sin and the guilt are not real. And this usually will entail at first a strong ego REACTION to trying to be responsible. As if it's not possible to be responsible WITHOUT inducing guilt.

And when you tell people about how they are responsible for MAKING THEMSELVES SICK, you will often notice that there is an EGO REACTION along the lines of it being "guilt inducing". But this is because we struggle to distinguish between the power and freedom brought about by responsibility, and the EGO'S USE of responsibility for condemnation.

Ego believes that "if you did it", this is SIN. That it proves you are a sinner. And this is a DEFENSE against salvation. It's a way of AVOIDING ever becoming empowered or free from suffering. It's a way to keep the ego and the belief in sin going. So the ego will steer you AWAY from responsibility at all costs, believing that all it does is make you a criminal - which means imprisonment, not freedom.

While you FEAR RESPONSIBILITY, as an ego reaction to the mixing of responsibility with sin, you will not want to own up to the fact that YOU are being self destructive, ALL your suffering is self inflicted, and YOU have the power to STOP IT.

We have to take brave steps to entertain the possibility that we are responsible for everything we experience, which is really a matter of OWNING UP TO CAUSALITY, which really means OWNING YOURSELF. And so you can see that sin and guilt are attempts to disown yourself and to disown responsibility. In a strange way, the ego disowns responsibility by MAKING YOU RESPONSIBLE for something you DIDN'T do.... such as sin.

You have to sort out what it is you are responsible FOR, recognize you are NOT responsible for "really sinning", and therefore become willing to TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY (thus power and causation) WITHOUT the sin and guilt attached.

You ARE responsible for being innocent. You ARE responsible for accepting this innocence, which is accepting atonement for yourself. And you ARE responsible for BEING TRUE to yourself. Which means you are responsible for CAUSATION, and the freedom of choice, and the power of decision. And none of this has anything to do with inducing guilt.

Your whole mind is supposed to be everywhere.

The mind inside your body seems to be your conscious mind. The mind outside your body seems to be your unconscious mind.

While what is within your body seems to be different and separate from what is outside your body, you will see yourself as being the limits of your conscious self. Parts of you which are unconscious will be seen as outside of you.

Guilt which you put into your unconscious, so that your conscious mind can pretend to be innocent, will come up as seeming "events" in the outer world which come to teach you lessons. You will see them as attacks on your identity, at least at first, depending on your willingness to use them differently.

When what is within you is the same as what is outside of you, and when there is no further need for a separation to keep the two apart, the body will have no purpose and will disappear.

When what is within you is seen as also being within others, whereby what is in both of you is the same Christ mind, the same Self, your whole mind will be experienced as everywhere. That's because, like God, you are omnipresent.

The body was made only to create a sense of separation in the mind, a split between what hides within it and what hides outside of it. Its only purpose was to maintain an illusion of division so strong that it suggests the limits of your conscious self is the confines of the body.

You built a wall around the conscious self which, through a condensing of that idea, formed the illusion of bodies. Bodies are a barrier between what has been retained - the little innocent self - versus what has been rejected - the larger body of unconscious guilt which is disassociated from and appears to comprise "other people", i.e. "not self".

What is happening outside of the body is just a drama being orchestrated and run by the unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind. Events which happen in it represent the content of your own mind coming up into awareness to be reconsidered for forgiveness.

Forgiveness must entail a repair of the inner joining with the outer, of the separate embodied self rejoining with and beyond the embodied selves of others. What is in you is in them. What you are is what they are. You are one.

Joining of minds, which is miraculous, causes the body to be healed, because the body temporarily disappears. Its shift into invisibility, in light of the truth of oneness, heals it of its use as a device for separation.

Attempting to anchor self more heavily into the body and to tie the self to the body, simply makes the body more real and reinforces the separation between yourself and yourself. Such is the purpose of sickness which defends against unity by reinforcing separation, i.e. reinforcing the reality of the body as a wall that comes between you and your brother.

Your brother IS yourself. Those "others", those "not me"'s outside of you, ARE you. They are parts of the split mind of the sonship. You are to be reunited with them and share with them and join with them. This overlooks the body and it becomes meaningless and non-existent. It must disappear as inner and outer, self and not-self, become One.

In oneness there can be no separations.

You are everywhere. You are the whole sonship. You are the One Omnipresent Son of God.

We may think that when ACIM refers to the past it may be talking about 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago.

But when you think about it, the world seems to present a continuous unbroken stream of events. Objects morph from one state to another without any seeming gap in between. It's not like the present is "missing" in this sequence. Actually Jesus refers to it as a continuum, as in the continuum of spacetime.

In this continuum bodies and objects appear to constantly exist from one moment to the next, seamlessly. And yet, we're also told in the course, that at no time does the body really exist in the present. It is always slightly away from presence in the past and the future. We're also told that in holy instants the world may disappear, as happens in revelation also.

So the apparent illusion of a continuum of time in which we seem to think of the past as "a long time ago" and in which there seems to actually BE a present moment, this is not really the nature of time. Time is delay, denial and avoidance. Somehow there is a gap, of space, between the real present moment and everything that appears. And yet everything appears to always be present in this timeline, without a gap.

This MUST mean, that time is more of a vertical "immersion" or sinking down into density, away from true presence, which is above the battlefield. It must be a general sense of distance or avoidance of reality, which results in a more dense experience and a seeming solidity of matter. "The past" must not so much refer to certain measurements of time "ago", but rather to the general sense of how heavily you are in denial, and therefore how "darkened" your mind is.

Jesus describes in the course that with shorter distances we tend to think of it as space, and as distance increases we tend to think of it as time. This means distance from immediacy is spacetime. And without ANY distance there is no spacetime. Total stillness would eradicate it. Slight distance produces an illusion of a world which is slightly "laggy" and seems to gloss over the present with an illusion of a present.

"The continuity of past and future, UNDER ITS (ego) DIRECTION, is the only purpose it perceives in time, and it closes over the present, so that no gap in the EGO's continuity can occur. ITS continuity, then, would KEEP you in time"

So the ego illusion actually produces a sense of past, seamlessly and smoothly transitioning into the present, and continuing on to the future, in a continuous stream. But Jesus is saying this is an illusion. And the "present" in this continuum of time is NOT really the present. In time we're not quite in the real present of eternity because it's always a bit removed from it, and filled with images that make it seem like there is no moment at all.

As such the ego has made time look as though it's a totally closed system and it hides the real eternity beyond it. The real eternity is the real present. It is not a state of change or transition or delay or distance or avoidance or denial. And it does not entail the imaginary images of "right now" that the illusion of spacetime shows to us. If you want to find out what the real present is you have to go to heaven.

The body's eyes do not forgive. They do not overlook any illusions. All they see is the forms of error, and everything they look upon is an illusion. They literally are incapable of seeing past illusions at all. Which means they cannot forgive, at all.

The body's eyes are completely unforgiving. They are blinded by perception of form. They are not designed to see beyond physical objects, and rely entirely on photons of light for vision. Without photons they see only darkness and they are literally incapable of ever seeing even the slightest glimmer of the light of reality.

The body's eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see. They are devices designed for fixating on the images of physical form, which is made of sin, and do not see anything else. They are literally blinded by sight of forms and we call this "seeing" - where vision is blocked by objects rather than seeing through or past them.

The eyeballs are permanently hardwired into the physical level of perception. As sensory devices, they can only sense illusions. Since they cannot see past illusions, they cannot forgive, because to forgive is to overlook illusions. And so physically sight is really permanent false perception. And the body will constantly send false perceptions to the mind for interpretation, where the mind gives them either the meaning of reality or unreality.

This is why you need another kind of vision, entirely free from dependency on the eyeballs, in order to see reality. To be forgiving, at the mind level, must entail you somehow looking past what your body's eyes see. The body sees only the outside surface of nothingness, pretending to be somethingness. To see REAL somethingness, you cannot use the body.

Forgiveness is of the mind, in the mind, for the mind, moving beyond the body, overlooking all of the forms of physical chaos, and seeing a light beyond them. What lies beyond all physical forms is the real world. This cannot be seen with the eyeballs, but it can be seen with True Vision. True Vision is direct mind seeing, based not on photons or artificial light.

In order to shift into true perception, you have to shift away from dependency on physical sight. Which also means learning to categorize everything the physical eyes sees as an illusion - false, unreal, and not happening. While fixating on the physical world, and believing what the eyes see, you are blinded from seeing the real world.

Forgiveness, ie true perception (atonement, salvation, the miracle, etc), occurs when the mind recognizes that all of the images of physical forms coming in through the physical eyeball sensors are illusions, not to be believed. The mind overlooks the sensory input and looks past it. In effect it bypasses the world and every signal coming from the world. It looks past it all to the light of the face of Christ.

Christ looks upon christ, love looks upon itself. Forgiveness does not look upon bodies, mistaking them for the son of God. It looks past bodies to the light. In effect, everything the body sees must be overlooked. In other words, you need to see past what you see. Look beyond the flesh and bones to reality.

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen , for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality."

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

In order to be invulnerable and not a victim of the world I see, it is necessary to recognize that no-one ever does anything to me.

Part of this recognition must also entail recognizing that, therefore, I never do anything to anyone else.

Therefore if I want to experience life in which nothing happens to me against my will, I must also be willing to not attempt to force my will onto other people.

If I am trying to control or manipulate or stop or fix someone then I'm not allowing them total freedom. They must be acknowledged as being completely free to choose whatever they want, and that it is absolutely none of my business.

Only in granting such a full freedom to someone, can I also access the fact that, therefore, I too have the freedom to choose absolutely whatever I want, and that my own choice is absolutely none of anyone else's business.

Not being victimized by the world goes hand in hand with not being a victimizer of the world.

It is not possible to be a victim without being a victimizer.

It is not possible to be a victimizer without being a victim.

Any attempt I make to see someone else as a victim of myself, which means, I am not allowing them total free will, am not acknowledging their free will, and am trying to influence their free will, not only causes me to see them as a victim but also to see myself as one.

I will attempt to control their will in an attempt to manage my perception of being victimized by them, to try to "stop them" victimizing/causing me, even though this reaction is purely based on my own mis-perception that they are victimizing me (because I am victimizing myself) in the first place.

It is not possible to affect the free will of another without it affecting my own will. As I see them I will see myself. My attempt to victimize them will victimize myself. And I will have then done this to myself.

When I can accept the total freedom of another and let them have their total freedom and not try to control them at all, I will simultaneously stop trying to control myself. I will acknowledge my own freedom. I have a vested interest in allowing others to be as they choose, regardless of their choice, since it acknowledges my own freedom unconditionally.

This marks the end of victimization. It marks the end of being a victim.

A victim is someone who tries to control others.

A victimizer is someone who believes other control them.

They're both the same thing.

Victims and victimization is impossible when there is a complete recognition of the freedom of will that we all equally enjoy, our God given natural right to freely create and choose and extend. God gave free will to all his creations to necessarily endow them with the ability to create as freely as Himself. The ego is every attempt to deny this and oppose it.

All victimization and victimhood will end completely in this acceptance of the mutual freedom of all brothers including me and you. There can be no victims or victimizers when the free will of all concerned is fully recognized. The secret to salvation is that we are only doing this to ourselves. We are our own worst enemy, and our own savior.

I am not a victim of the world I see because I am not victimizing the world I see. I am not a victim of the world I see because I am not victimizing myself.

It's interesting how Jesus redefines the meaning of words. It means that when you first read something He says, you might "read into" its meaning based on the meaning of words that you already have, and therefore not understand what He's saying.

Example: "death".

Jesus clearly says that the entire dream of separation is a dream of death.

Jesus clearly says that even a slight amount of unhappiness or grievance is a state of death.

Jesus clearly says that all forms of sickness are "a little death."

Jesus clearly says that the separation idea was an attempt to oppose God's will and to be totally opposite to His creation. His creation is life, so this is an idea of death.

Jesus says death is the central dream from which all illusions stem, AND that the last illusion to be overcome - really the ENTIRE illusion, is death.

Jesus clearly says that all things which seem like "life forms" in this world only have an appearance of life at best, and death at worst.

Jesus clearly says that there is no life outside of heaven, so anything outside of heaven is technically "death".

Jesus also clearly says that without the idea of death, there is no world.

It goes on and on. So what must be happening here is, Jesus is using the word "death" to refer to things that ACTUALLY ARE death, in that they are opposite to or opposed to what is ACTUALLY life. But WE did not previously understand these things to BE death.

So it's like, we do not RECOGNIZE what death IS, or the various states and forms that death takes. We haven't recognized that even a slight grievance is an idea of murder ("what is not love is murder".). We haven't recognized that sickness is death, or that the world is death, or that without death there is no planet Earth, or that this world is entirely MADE OF the idea of death, without which there is no world here at all.

So Jesus doesn't so much use meanings and terms with the definition we're familiar with. Nor does he necessarily use dictionary definitions. He basically teaches us WHAT HIS definition is, and his definition is in line with what is ACTUALLY TRUE, rather than what we've THOUGHT was true. e.g. Death is not just "what happens when a body dies."

So that means we have to UN-LEARN what we've taught ourselves and open ourselves up to learning what Jesus is teaching us is the "correct recognition" of what something is. If we don't do that, and we maintain EGO definitions for things, such as that death is only a body in the ground, and that a pre-death state of sickness and suffering "has no death in it", then we are now mistaken and deceived by appearances.

Jesus does the same thing with various other terms as well, because what He's trying to teach us is the TRUTH rather than our strange twisted and distorted interpretations. We have a big problem with not RECOGNIZING the truth, OR recognizing illusions, OR recognizing this world for what it is. We don't even recognize that we're dreaming and that everything we see here is an illusion.

So we have to go through a process of learning and redefining and letting go and opening up and allowing ourselves to receive a new outlook on life, a new way of regarding what's going on here, and learn to see it all from Holy Spirit's perspective. And that's going to have to entail realizing that we've been mistaken, illusions we thought were real are not real, and the truth about this world is not what we thought it was.

To deny God, in attempting to stop Creation/Life, you are choosing death. You want God's Life to die. To deny God is to deny what God IS, which is Life, so is an assertion that God is death.

But God Created YOU as Life, so to deny Creation/Life MUST entail you bringing an end to YOUR life as well. You cannot deny God without denying yourself. Therefore, denial of God is SUICIDE.

Since all choices to end Life are a choice for death, and since you ARE Life, and since death can only happen if you CHOOSE to deny Life, ALL DEATH IS DELIBERATE SUICIDE.

There is no such thing as people dying from 'accidents', or people dying from 'sickness', or people dying from 'attack by others', or people dying from 'acts of nature' or 'old age' or 'time', or people dying from 'unknown causes', or people dying from 'it was their time'. These are just the WAY you chose to die - the FORM of death - it has nothing to do with WHETHER you have to die.

You can ONLY die by committing suicide, which you bring about by REFUSING TO CHOOSE LIFE - which literally means, by CHOOSING DEATH. You refuse to choose Life when you refuse to accept God, and denial of God brings death because God is Life.

Death is never brought about by any other means or for any other reason than to deny God/Life.

Since YOU are the one choosing to deny God, all death is a CHOICE.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

Death is NOT inevitable.

ACIM lesson 152 - the power of decision is my own - "No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. AND NO ONE DIES WITHOUT HIS OWN CONSENT." - Jesus

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

You can choose God. God is Life. You are Life. It is only when you deny your Eternal Self that you experience an ILLUSION of death, and it is NEVER more than an illusion. Death only appears to happen in a DREAM of death, which is a dream of 'what would be like if God could be denied?' - an impossible fiction.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

YOU CAN CHOOSE TO LIVE.

Denial of Life is NOT its removal - it is a refusal to ACCEPT that LIFE IS THERE. This does not change Life or stop it, but merely HIDES it from you. Thus death is HIDING from Life, and it has no power to STOP Life.

Since you can deny Creation but cannot REMOVE Creation, and since YOU are Creation, YOU *CANNOT* DIE! You can deny yourself but you cannot die. "Death" as we are familiar with it, in the world, is nothing other than a state of denial. It is UNTRUE. It is covering up life, NOT getting rid of it.

YOU CANNOT DIE!

YOU CANNOT DIE!

YOU CANNOT DIE!

God ALREADY chose for you to live forever. All you have to do is fully accept this and remove absolutely all efforts to prevent it. Thus you will return/resurrect to ABSOLUTE LIFE and PERMANENT EXISTENCE, which cannot BE prevented no matter how much you try to deny it. "You can deny reality, but you cannot change it." - Jesus

YOU ARE IMMORTAL SPIRIT, you will live forever.

My note: I love it when everything becomes totally clear and logically consistent and can't be denied

This section from "the healing of the dream", Chapter 27, is radical, awesome and mind bending all at once.

It speaks of how forgiveness, which you apply, should not simply forgive, but must also heal YOUR BODY, in order to demonstrate to your brother that HE is forgiven also. That unless forgiveness does this, forgiveness is not COMPLETE.

Some may think this is ridiculous, incorrect, or meaningless. Why show your brother a healed imaginary body? Why bother to heal the body at all? Yet Jesus is VERY clear, that until our forgiveness produces healing of BOTH YOU AND YOUR BROTHER, through a miracle, it is not done.

He goes even further to say that PROVING through DEMONSTRATION that your body is HEALTHY, by healing it along with your mind, speaks far more powerfully to your brother’s sinlessness than anything else you could do.

This is why Jesus also says elsewhere, "the mind AND BODY need atonement", "the mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle DEMONSTRATES this", and "A guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it HEALS THE BODY."

Open your mind. Take a deep breathe. This speaks to the real power of miracle working even at the PHYSICAL level.

"Forgiveness is not real unless it brings a healing to your brother and yourself. You must attest his sins have no effect on you to demonstrate they are not real. How else could he be guiltless? And how could his innocence be justified unless his sins have no effect to warrant guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just because they would entail effects that cannot be undone and overlooked entirely. In their undoing lies the proof that they are merely errors. Let yourself be healed that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother and yourself.

5 A broken body shows the mind has not been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is without effect. What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness comes from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony of his innocence. It is this testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness proved to him.

6 A miracle can offer nothing less to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did not do. And so is he convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you. Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never be undone. And hopelessness and death must disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power far beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. The ancient calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto His Own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear. Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. Yet it is given you to show him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream.

7 How just are miracles! For they bestow an equal gift of full deliverance from guilt upon your brother and yourself. Your healing saves him pain as well as you, and you are healed because you wished him well. This is the law the miracle obeys; that healing sees no specialness at all. It does not come from pity but from love. And love would prove all suffering is but a vain imagining, a foolish wish with no effects. Your health is a result of your desire to see your brother with no blood upon his hands, nor guilt upon his heart made heavy with the proof of sin. And what you wish is given you to see."

It is not possible to PERCEIVE **within** reality, because there is no perception WITHIN reality. Perception is an interpretative process based on judgement. You can evaluate reality and PERCEIVE it, but this isn't the SAME as knowing it or DIRECTLY experiencing it.

"Only your vision can convey to you what YOU can see. It reaches you directly, without a need to be interpreted to you."

Perception ends before you enter the Kingdom, this does not mean that you cannot SEE in some manner WITHIN the Kingdom.

"Only the mind CAN SEE."

In fact, after an extensive search, I found a great deal of evidence in ACIM that mind in fact DOES have a permanent ability to see. And that even God can see. This seeing does not use PERCEPTION, however. It uses cognition, recognition, and knowledge.

It is possible to KNOW reality, and to RE-COGNIZE God and your brothers. This knowing is a DIRECT experience of what IS THERE. You KNOW it, in awareness. This may well not entail BODIES, but you are SPIRIT, and spirit can be known and SEEN. The son of God can also be seen. YOU are a perfect shaft of light, which can be seen. The great rays can also be seen and they stretch to infinity.

Perception is a way of seeing based on JUDGING or EVALUATING what is there. It is interpretative. Beyond perception, WITHOUT judgement or interpretation, you can directly KNOW what is there. This knowing isn't just some fact or piece of information of non-visual experience. You can SEE GOD and His Creation - the universe of love. Knowing is UNDERNEATH perception and provides direct awareness of reality.

I will present below only a small segment of all the quotes I found. These ones speak more directly to seeing in God, seeing God, seeing His Son, God's ability to see, beyond perception, and beyond vision.

"Perception can reach everywhere under His guidance."

"Perception changes, made to take the place of changeless knowledge. Yet is truth unchanged. It cannot be perceived, but only known." (does not mean it cannot be SEEN!)

"To perceive the truth is not the same as knowing it."

"The innocence of God is the true state of ***the mind of His Son.*** ***In this state, man's mind DOES see God***, and because ***he sees Him as he Is***"

"God knows His Children with perfect certainty. He Created them by knowing them. ***He recognizes them*** perfectly."

"Blessed are the pure in heart for ***they shall see God***" is another way of saying the same thing. Only ***the innocent CAN see God.***"

"The soul never leaves ***the sight of God***"

"ONLY what God creates, or what man creates with the same will, ***has any real existence***. ***This, then, is all that the innocent can see.***"

"The wish to see calls down the grace of God upon your eyes, and brings the gift of light that makes sight possible. ***Will you behold your brother? God is glad to have you look on him.***"

"***See His creations as His Son***, for yours were created in honor of Him. The universe of love does not stop because you do not see it, nor have your closed eyes lost the ability to see. ***Look upon the glory of His creation***, and you will learn what God has kept for you."

"***You will see that God Himself*** is where his body is. Before this light the body disappears"

"***God is in everything I see*** because God is in my mind."

"***God is the light in which I see.***"

"***You cannot see apart from God*** because you cannot be apart from God."

"When you ***look upon knowledge***, all judgment is automatically suspended, and this is the process that enables ***recognition to REPLACE perception.***"

"Judgment is the process on which perception but not ***cognition*** rests." ... "It is ***perfectly possible to look on reality without judgment***, and merely ***KNOW it is there*** By knowing this, you are not doubting its reality at all."

"The innocent see safety, and ***the pure see God within His Son***, and look unto the Son to lead them to the Father."

I asked Jesus some questions about "the script", what it is, how it works, what freedom we have, etc.

He pulled together information from all over the Course in ways I would have never imagined. Here are the key points.

1) Scripts, as sequences of events or arrangements to meet, set up in what seems to be "before" incarnation but which is somewhat in parallel to it, are better described as "templates". They are frameworks which present lessons which you may, or may not, learn from.

2) You ALWAYS have the freedom to choose WHEN you will take the curriculum. You can deny it, you can avoid it, you can prolong suffering, you can fail temporarily to learn a lesson, and then it will be presented at a later date. That means you are not 100% "locked in" to being "forced to wake up" against your will just because it's written into some kind of premeditated sequence of events.

3) YOUR MIND has to choose when it will awaken. Awakening cannot be forced upon it, and the script cannot MAKE the awakening happen, because you have to wake up FROM scripts. The scripts can only contain an exit point, a doorway, through which you must still willingly walk by free will.

4) The Holy Spirit's script is also referred to as the curriculum, and it is considered Holy. The curriculum means that the truth is OFFERED, just as love is always offered, but it is up to you when you will accept it. You can choose to delay accepting it. But sooner or later you will accept it, depending on how much tolerance for pain you have or how much willingness to elect to give.

5) In the Holy Spirit's curriculum, all events are planned by Him in general. This is also referred to as the "plan of atonement", which Jesus is in charge of, and which you are to become a PART of. This is reflected upon here: "What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? 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."

6) The Holy Spirit came into the dream in a sense, with us, "this world has two makers" and reorganized what we made in order to GUARANTEE that we would eventually return to God. Thus events and life situations and people you meet ("those who are to meet will meet"), and the general themes of your life, and certain things you have chosen to "work on" in this life, are presented at the appropriate time when learning is optimally possible.

7) Challenges and what seems at first to be difficult situations or lessons, are only difficult due to what has NOT been learned yet, and present an opportunity to change what you believe, when seen correctly and accepted as helpful. When the lesson is not accepted or learned but resisted, now you are into the ego's script. What that means is, you are now choosing to interpret the world using the ego and plan or enforce selective attitudes about the world which influence your perception and adjust your experiences in isolated ways. Since the ego thought system generally leads towards death, participating in this way of being puts you "under tyrannical rule" and you now become sort of "subject to" the consequences of that decision. Not because you are forced to, but because you choose to.

8) Because those who are to meet will meet, the manual for teachers talks about 3 types of relationships, short term, mid-term, and long-term, depending on how much learning is possible, whereby the long-term ones are the ideal balance of teaching and learning for both involved, such that a great deal of progress can be made over a long time period without destroying each other.

9) Within the scope of the "template" of your life, there is room to maneuver. Because you have free will and can choose whether to learn or not, there MUST be some degree of freedom of mind not just to manipulate your perceptions or thoughts but also your actions, because your actions stem from your thoughts and beliefs. While "people who meet" may be scripted, and while certain properties of those people or why those people were chosen is scripted, to present an "opportunity", the fine details of how you interact and physically move and what you do in situations or whether you are willing to change, is up to you.

10) You are not locked into a rollercoaster ride which forces awakening upon you or enforces that you will learn a lesson or implements experience into your mind. Lessons are PRESENTED, but it is up to you how you USE them. We should not concern ourselves with being so locked into some kind of pre-recorded "movie of time" as to think there is no flexibility of outcome or that you "must succeed" in that sense. What makes you succeed is the Holy Spirit's infinite patience in presenting further lifetimes as needed until you are finished resisting the truth, by your free will.

11) You decide on what your script for your lifetime will be before you incarnate into it. You decide which family to choose, the type of body, your name, your astrological background, how your brain will function, any special bodily conditions you might be "born with" or manifest early, any scenarios which will arise, who you will meet and when, what lessons/trials you will be exposed to, and so on. Sometimes people's life lessons turn out to be too strong and the person is allowed to "die early" in order to "rest" between lifetimes. Love is compassionate not cruel. It's like we're all people with mental illness who are gradually going through a healing process and there is give and take and always a gentleness in terms of "mercy" from God about what you can tolerate.

12) There is some truth to the idea that God only gives you lessons you can handle, although this speaks more to the script you chose knowing what it would likely entail and also knowing the long-term outcome if you were to be successful at learning from it. Since you know, when not incarnate, the long-term goal of being with God, and can see sense in "whatever it takes to get there", you are WILLING to expose yourself to all manner of positive and negative situations AS NEEDED in order to awaken. What seems like short-term suffering can ultimately be a blessing in the long-term plan.

13) In the biggest possible picture, there never was a real separation or any real time. However our belief in it made it seem real to us, which is why we "need" these "scripts" to help us learn that it is not so. We wrote the need for the scripts, the Holy Spirit provided the curriculum for the correction. That means we wrote a script with the ego for what we wanted to be true, and Holy Spirit wrote a counter-script of lessons and learning which would lead us back to what is really true. The time you elect to LEARN His curriculum is up to you. No-one is forcing you to be awake and no-one is keeping you asleep.

14) Ultimately free will is only free when it is embracing freedom which means embracing God's Will. It is free in Heaven. It is free to willingly choose to agree with God's will and to extend it in joy and love. That is why it was given you, that you would share and increase it. When you will against yourself/God, you are trying to NOT will, which renders your will ineffectual, and stops your will. Thus your will seems to become powerless and you turn to wishful thinking which produces no effects. As you regain your power and your will becomes more whole, you become stronger in the truth and more miraculous, and more able to consciously will whatever you want to happen. Ultimately you can master this to the point where EVEN in this world, what you desire happens and what you do not desire does not happen. At that point, you do not need corrective scripts because you are not writing ego scripts.

15) While from a high vantage point it seems all of time was "written" at once, or all possible moments of time were expressed simultaneously, they were organized by the Holy Spirit into a linear sequence NOT as an ego creation but as part of His plan of atonement, in order to USE TIME for the purpose of learning, and when time's usefulness for leaning is done, it will be UNMADE. Our ego self perceives time as linear in an attempt to believe in appearances, but time is not inherently linear.

16) From a high vantage point, the time that you began dreaming and the time that time began and the time that you stop dreaming and the time that time ends, are all essentially seen as happening at once. Dreaming began and God answered it with the Holy Spirit who has already succeeded in undoing it all. We are guaranteed to return to God because God's Answer is perfect and cannot fail. That doesn't mean that "in time" our experience will be as if all of time's events or sequence is pre-written. There is some flexibility built-in. There are multiple "dimensions" to time, parallel timelines, and you can skip between slices of time depending on your willingness to awaken. Nor does it mean that within each slice of time there are only certain pre-scripted actions you can make. YOUR MIND HAS FREE WILL and it can choose to ignore the script if it wants to. That's why the time you take Holy Spirit's curriculum is voluntary. Ultimately, one way or another, from the highest perspective, "all paths lead to God", and Holy Spirit has ensured that they will.

17) Miracles are the only means at your disposal for controlling time. Also miracles entail a shift into vertical perception which positions you and the person you heal further along in time than you were, having skipped an interval. This tells you that since miracles happen within the world `in time`, that they are capable of manipulating time and thus essentially take you out of the script. Ultimately they lead to revelation and atonement, because they are the means of the atonement, and so miracles must be performed in order to receive and give and share the truth, to have it.

That's all for now.

"The world IS perception." "The world you made."

Some people believe that they are just a little mind inside a little body. And based on this premise, they think they peer out onto an outside world, and "perceive it" or interpret it. They think perception is entirely this act of looking out upon the world that's there. As if false perception is a misinterpretation of what's there and true perception regards it as "God intended", all seen from "within" a body.

But this position is entirely fictional, because in truth your mind contains the world ("heaven and earth are both in you rmind") and you are therefore "bigger than" the universe. Even the "physical planet" Earth, the solar system,and the galaxy, are inside your mind.

Therefore the self that seems to be solely "inside a body and not outside it" is an illusion of playing small. And therefore perception is not merely your peering out through the body, perception is a universe-sized mind dreaming of a PLANET, including the making of countless bodies. You are dreaming of an entire world. ALL of it is your perceiving from that unlimited vantage point. You thinking of yourself as just "little and in a body" is a decoy, a piece of a dream inside a larger dream. You are making the entire environment from the outside in.

This is why the world, Earth, the planet, is itself your mechanism of perceiving, a visualization and hallucination of a world. "The world is false perception." Earth is your misperceiving, from a universe-sized mind. It is a dream you are having, as a universe-sized dreamer. Correcting perception and shifting from false perception to true, does not entail seeing the world's truth, but recognizing the world is always false perception and that you must OVERLOOK IT in order to see the truth BEYOND it, beyond this universe, shining from God's world - Heaven - which is another universe entirely.

"Your mind has the power to create worlds."

When you dream at night, you invent not only a body, but an entire environment. You make building and streets and trees and people and various happenings. Sometimes entire landscapes. And within this dream, which you are making ALL of in fine detail, you make a body which you place a portion of your awareness into, and peer out through, upon this dream world that YOU ARE MAKING, pretending to see it AS IF it is just "there on its own" and has nothing to do with your dreaming it. That you don't believe you are putting it there AT ALL. And so you think "I am only this body, in this objective world." This is entirely an illusion, because your mind is literally MAKING THE WHOLE WORLD that you are roaming around in, and that makes you are PRETENDING not to be its maker by hiding in a body.

The same is true of this world, Earth, this universe, this realm. It is an entire landscape you are MAKING WITH YOUR MIND. It is a dream, that your mind is actually literally putting there, on a MASSIVE SCALE. Your mind is MAKING PLANETS. This is "the world you made." And in this world, like in your night dreams, you are putting yourself inside a tiny body and pretending to be so small and insignificant and powerless and mindless that you couldn't possibly be making the planet, or even making your own body. You then think someone else more powerful must make it and it's not you, ie it's God. Not true. YOUR MIND IS MAKING THE ENTIRE ENVIRONMENT. And is then hiding in a body to pretend to disown the entire making of it, so that you can pretend you did not make the world, and rather that IT MAKES YOU, and thus you suffer by its hand.

This is all self deception. The ENTIRE WORLD IS YOUR PERCEPTION. Your mind is larger than the universe. Its PERCEPTION makes PLANETS. And so the correction of illusions in your mind, and the end of false perception (the world is false perception), literally means, the end of the world. The disappearance of the universe. You have to think really, really, really big to get this.

Forgetting for a moment the bigger picture context, which the ego always ignores, it can seem like this world makes sense.

The body seems to be able to see the world. Becoming sick seems to be something unwanted and an attack on us. The body seems to have senses of the environment and tells us what's there. The world seems real and outside of us.

But when you reintroduce the big-picture context of what happened before this world as made, it puts everything into a completely different perspective. It give you something to contrast again, to compare, is this true, or is it an illusion?

Before this world, you had vision, the ability to see in the light. There were no obstacles. When you made the world and the body, you created a kind of bubble, populated it with objects, painted the interior walls to shut out sight of God, and then fixated on the forms.

You made a body which was designed specifically to not see God, to focus only on form, to obsess over appearances and to be completely distracted by images seeming real. You made this world and the body to BURY YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND and NOT SEE. The whole purpose of the world is to DENY GOD.

The body was given so-called sensory organs, allegedly permitting you to see and sense the world. It was given eyes to be able to seeming have sight.

But all of this is completely inside out. And the reason and purpose of it is completely backwards.

The body's sight is made to make you BLIND. It is made to PREVENT VISION, so that you will be fixated on appearances, illusions, distractions, so that you DO NOT see. The more that you gain sight of form and bodies, the more blind you become. You SEEM to be seeing "more", but you are seeing LESS.

Similarly, it seems as though sickness is something we don't want and is attacking us against our will. We seem to "not want it". But the Course tells us that in the big picture, we put sickness in place on purpose to DEFEND ourselves against life, We actually think we are defending our SELF because we have identified with a fake ego self, and that self seems vulnerable (because it is an illusion) and needs defenses. So we defend the body in order to try to SAVE OUR LIFE from the attack of truth, which attacks the body and MAKES IT SICK. So now, in the big picture context, sickness is self-attack and a WANTED attempt to die, in the name of preserving your life!

We came into the world not to experience something real, but to get away from reality. We gave our body sensory abilities so as to NOT to sense what exists, but to confuse and block the ability to sense. We created eyesight to SUBSTITUTE for being able to see. The body can't see shit.

In this world, vision is blindness, sickness is self defense, life is death, death is life, what seems it will save you destroys you, defenses are attacks, everything is backwards and inside out and upside down. Nothing is as it appears. Even "nature" is unnatural. Everything about the ego's laws are unnatural. What is "supernatural" is actually natural. Miracles are natural. When they are not happening, something has gone wrong. They are supposed to be happening ALL THE TIME.

To be free of this must entail the undoing and letting go of, dissolving of, disappearing of, all of these illusory forms and things that we MADE UP solely for the PURPOSE of avoiding God. We can repurpose them temporarily and learn from them and use them for awakening, but they are only useful teaching devices for as long as we NEED to be taught, or rather to unlearn. Then we will let them go. Who would want to keep a body which sees only an inversion of reality, blocks vision and defends against God? It is unnatural. It is not needed.

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK"

"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."

"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"

"A forgiven world cannot last."

"He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive."

The function of forgiveness, is to look beyond error from the start, as pro-active "fore-giving", a giving of love which recognizes innocence and does not allow the mind to MAKE an error. Forgiveness is the perception in which errors are not seen at all, because the mind is not making or projecting errors itself, and so this "pro-active" attitude sustains a state where there is no error, ie there is no sin, and so long as you stay focused on this you will not produce any.

If you slip up and fail to forgive, you will make an error. You will go into the belief in "sin is real". And by going into it, you will use judgement to try to explain (justify) why you couldn't be forgiving. e.g. that someone "really did this or that", calling for you to "have to" be justified in judging due to what you think happened. But what you think "happened" is an error in judgement, an error in your own perception. An error that your own mind made-up, as a result of leaving the state of forgiveness.

The Holy Spirit therefore does not MAKE errors, or produce perception of sin, and so perceives only that there is no sin. He looks past errors to the truth, using reason. This form of sight literally "overlooks", as in, DOES NOT SEE, errors anywhere, as if the errors (if they were to exist) have become totally transparent and have disappeared. He looks only to the face of Christ and innocence and recognizes that there literally IS no ego, because there IS no error or sin, and the "forms of error" which the body's eyes look at and can't see past (physical objects) are overlooked entirely.

The world, as referred to in "the forgiven world", that being simply Earth and the rest of this universe, IS AN ILLUSION, and it is the form of error. To look at it is to be blinded by perception of form. To look past it is to overlook it and see beyond it. In this way, forgiveness literally overlooks the world entirely, forgets the world, ignores physical objects, and looks past it to the face of Christ. This is "forgiving the world" doesn't entail keeping it and looking AT it in a forgiving way, it entails OVERLOOKING it, recognizing it is NOT THERE, and realizing that it - being made of the idea of sin - DOES NOT EXIST AND HAS NOT HAPPENED. In this way forgiveness overlooks the world itself, not just misperceptions of it, and looks beyond this world to another - Heaven.

As such, "a forgiven world cannot last" because if it IS forgiven, it WAS an illusion, and IS NOT real, and therefore CAN be overlooked, not seen, regarded as nothing, and forgotten entirely. A "forgiven world" is an OVERLOOKED world, a world NOT SEEN, and NOT THERE. A world that never existed in the first place. And so forgiveness recognizes the world is an illusion, not a reality. A forgiven world is an undone world, and it disappears. This is why it cannot last. If you forgive it, you will make it disappear, because there is no sin and the world is the idea of sin. "Without the idea of death there is no world." "The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came."

I think I made a major mistake when starting out with the course. It was fuelled by a rather "negative" view of the world, which was part mine, and part that of certain teachers I listened to. In that view, I thought that references to a meaningless world, were references to a the world being inherently bleak and dark and depressing. I also combined various aspects of ego and false perception with the world, binding them together, and then sought to get rid of the whole thing.

This was based largely on teachings by well-meaning people that the world has no redeeming qualities, that it is inherently somewhat negative and pointless, and that the only thing to do is leave it behind. While there is some basis for this, in that the world is nothing, it kind of skipped over the forgiven world/real world and didn't put enough attention on how to reinterpret or repurpose it. And it definitely didn't make much mention of doing anything to improve or heal or save it.

This was an incorrect framing of the world, because I realize now that the world itself has NO meaning, not a negative meaning. Its meaningless is simply a lack of ANY meaning, positive OR negative, and is not inherently anything. And my egoic association of the world with my ego's negativity didn't allow me to "separate out" the world from my projections onto it.

But the course isn't asking us to condemn the world and run away from it. It's asking us to realize the world is nothing at all, but that we've projected false meanings onto it. And when these false meanings are lifted off from it, the world resumes being meaningless. Not negative, or positive. And then we are free to project positive meaning onto it, in which we now see the reflection of God.

This obviously makes far more sense, interpreting the world as a neutral mirror with no meaning of its own. It also changes my focus, from one where I just wanted to escape from "the negative world" and throw it in the trash, to where I can now look at the very same world - its guts, recognizing it as nothing, but project love onto it. That's a profoundly different relationship to it, properly regarding it as nothing but a mirror with no meaning of its own, rather than as bound to ideas of hell.

It changes quite a lot of my perspectives about the course and what it's saying. It also relieves pressure and resistance and negative connotations to things which didn't seem to fit. I can accept then that I can see this world through forgiving eyes because of itself it is nothing. And it also makes it easier to accept that it can be used differently, and can reflect heaven. Obviously keeping it around long enough to allow it to do that can't entail attacking it with misinterpretations of the course.

Eventually when seen as the nothingness it is, with the reflection of God seen upon it, its re-purposing is complete and it is no longer needed as a device to bring us home. We can now wave farewell to the forgiven world and thank it for its temporary usefulness, as we watch it disappear and give way to the gates of heaven.

The key part I think is that a lot of people have completely missed the somewhat subtle teaching in the course that the world ITSELF has no meaning. That it was a projection out, from an idea of nothingness, BEFORE we projected onto it. The whole "projection makes perception" thing came later.

And the world doesn't have to be objectively real or a creation of God for it to act like a neutral mirror and still be a world of illusions. This two-layered projection is completely missed by a lot of people. And some interpret the world as having to be God's creation in order for the "project onto" part to make sense. Which is yet another mistake. So many of us are so confused about this whole thing. But I'm glad now it's becoming ever clearer.

Miracles assert only life. That there is nothing wrong. There is only innocence and wholeness.

"The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness."

Basically, the only way there can be a healing of any real kind, is if something which is NOT sick, is applied to that which is.

That which is not sick, is a mind which does not give any power or credit or reality to sickness. A mind that does not believe sickness is even real, or that a person can have something truly wrong with them.

Only an outlook rooted in holiness, looking out from that holiness, to see the holiness of others, can bestow holiness upon others. This supplies to them the holiness they were lacking.

"Miracles supply a lack."

"There are given by those who temporarily have more, to those who temporarily have less."

You have more life, love, wholeness to give, when you yourself are these things. Which means you have to purify yourself enough to be free from ego and separation and sickness/death beliefs. Once you are purified enough, you become miraculous.

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

"I can only give the miracles I have received."

"Miracles are everyone's right but purification is necessary first."

"Those who are healed become instruments of healing."

So if you want to be a miracle worker, a healer, you have to get yourself healed, and then you will have healing to give.

Healing occurs when one who has more wholeness, life, innocence, bestows that upon another mind and shares it with them, raising them up. All healing is resurrection. It is life-giving.

You cannot give life if you believe in death. You cannot give life if you believe sickness is real, or that the forms physical sickness takes is true, or that it's even possible for something to be wrong with a person.

The idea that something is wrong with someone, even in terms of it being a sickness they didn't seem to ask for, is no different than saying they are guilty of something. That they are less than perfect.

You must assert perfection and equality and light and love if you want to be truly helpful in undoing sickness and death.

This is why you are to become the light of the world. And everyone who becomes the light becomes a healer.

"To heal, or to make joyous, is therefore the same as to integrate and MAKE ONE."

"ACCEPT the miracle of healing, and it WILL go forth, because of what it IS. It is its NATURE to extend itself the instant it is born. And it is born the instant it is offered and RECEIVED. No-one can ask ANOTHER to be healed. But he can let HIMSELF be healed, and thus offer the other what he has received. Who can bestow upon another what he does not HAVE? And who can SHARE what he denies HIMSELF?"

"The ONLY thing that is required for a healing is a lack of fear."

"Healing is a sign that HE WANTS TO MAKE WHOLE."

"Healing must occur in exact proportion in which the valuelessness of sickness is recognized."

"Healing is holy. Nothing in the world is holier than helping one who asks for help."

"The new emphasis will now be on healing. The miracle is the means, the Atonement the principle, and the healing is the result."

"By accepting healing he can give it."

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

"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."

Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, isn't really optional. It's not something you can choose not to do, and it isn't something to aspire to. But that's how it's often viewed.

There is a metaphysical truth that, at the very least, other people ARE you, so how you are treating them you are treating yourself directly. But I think this leaves open room for error because there are some other parts to this that you may not realize.

First of all, you can only share love. Love IS sharing. It means joining and communing and being equal and being ONE. This is the underlying truth on which this idea is based. You CAN only share love. So this really means, you CAN only "do love" to others, you cannot actually really do anything else to others.

So when it comes to "how should I treat other people", the ONLY option that you can REALLY pursue is to love them. Love will be extended and shared to and with them. If your attitude is NOT love, IT WILL NOT BE SHARED.

So that means you CANNOT do unto others anything other than love.

There is also more to this.

Your mind, when you are believing that YOU are sinful, will become a split mind. It's a mind that believes separation has really happened. And this separation has happened INSIDE YOURSELF. Your own mind has become split. Part of this split will entail that a portion of mind remain in your awareness - conscious awareness - and a portion will be sectioned off and repressed as a place to shove your unconscious guilt. But the splitting off of that second part of mind (which produces a shadow, at war with your conscious persona), is now experienced as "not myself"

And so then you are in a state of disassociation from your whole self. The part of YOU that you think is not you, which you are trying to get rid of like crazy, you will believe you are separate from it - that it's not you. And so when some person comes along you will see them as "not you" also, and will then see IN them your own "not you" part of your own mind. You will relate to your own "not you" mind as though it belongs them them, since it doesn't belong to you. And you will attack that part.

So now you think you are "doing ego" to someone else. That you are treating them with less than love. And that means it now seems optional as to how you treat others. But really you are not even doing anything to them at all. If they were awake they'd know this. You are just attacking your own self indirectly. So you're not ACTUALLY doing anything to others, if it's coming from your ego. You literally ARE only attacking yourself.

So now we have this situation.... either you love both yourself and others, or you go into a private world where you are attacking yourself, but believing everyone else is involved. Nobody else is involved AT ALL.

Thus it's not really a case of having to then figure out how to "do unto others" in a better way. You're NOT doing unto others. The only thing you CAN share with them is LOVE. If you are not in love with yourself, you will do nothing "to" them at all, because unlove is a WITHDRAWAL from sharing.

So now we shift from trying to "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you", to something more like "do unto YOURSELF as you would have YOUR TRUE SELF do unto YOU."

Translated, that means learning to undo your own belief that YOU are sinful, which will result in you becoming aware that you LOVE yourself. You WILL then be able to extend this love to others. So learn to do unto yourself what GOD would do unto you, which is to recognize you are worthy, forgiven and innocent forever. That should be your aim, and don't be so concerned that you even CAN do anything to anyone else.

It's not because of some kind of guilt-ridden ambition to be nice to other people that you're doing this. Since you can't do unto others unless it IS love, you can forget about believing that you're mistreating people. You are only capable of mistreating yourself.

The body was made to separate you out from the whole and make you seem like you are DIFFERENT to "others".

If you believe that this "difference" represents your IDENTITY, you are confining yourself to a physical object.

If you also believe that the different appearances of others is "their identity", that it is true of them, and who they are, you are NOT seeing the whole of them. Especially if, having made their APPEARANCE OF DIFFERENCES real, you HAVE attacked them, and yourself.

This does not mean, that you look at a person's body and try to overlook it to some kind of small little self that's hiding inside of it. You are too accustomed to seeing littleness.

You have to realize that you are THE SIZE OF THE UNIVERSE, and so is your brother.

This also means then that if you're not identifying with YOUR body, it's because you recognize that any of the "differences" or "forms" of the body, how it's showing up, MUST be illusions.

Forgiveness, literally does entail, the OVERLOOKING of differences. Overlooking ALL FORMS and bodies and believing that God's Children ARE bodies.

So that means, while you are doing your "forgiveness processes", you need to ultimately get to a mindset that literally is able to in a sense, "ignore" the body or at least not FIXATE on it, but rather look PAST it and not be BLOCKED by it. And the same is true for how you view your brothers.

That means, literally, that since you are an expansive being of light who is larger than this entire universe, which cannot POSSIBLY be housed by a finite form, in order to RECOGNIZE YOURSELF you have to STOP seeing yourself AS being this physical object you call a body.

Seeing your BODY and thinking it is YOUR SELF and that you *recognize yourself* when you see it, or that you shape in and change it and dress it up in order to change YOURSELF or your self image, you are FAILING to recognize yourself and are actually replacing yourself with an illusion.

"The body is NOT attacked, but merely PROPERLY PERCEIVED. It does not limit you, merely because YOU would not have it so. You are not really "lifted out" of it; it cannot CONTAIN you. You go where you would be; GAINING, NOT losing, a sense of self. In these instants of release from physical restrictions, you experience much of what happens in the holy instant; the lifting of the barriers of time and space, the sudden experience of peace and joy, and, above all, the LACK of awareness of the body, and of the questioning WHETHER OR NOT ALL THIS IS POSSIBLE. It IS possible, BECAUSE YOU WANT IT."

The picture I get coming to me is of Jesus who completely, totally, did not believe He was his body. He knew he was PROJECTING IT, but he did not regard it as HIMSELF, nor did He see it as limiting who He is, or SEPARATING HIM OFF from others. This really means that in order not to identify with YOUR body, you have to also not identify OTHER bodies as capable of "confining identity" either. That means not believing in ANY bodies, and therefore reclaiming a sense of the expansiveness of what you really are.

The more that you identify AS or with the body, you are confining yourself to it. When you create sickness, you do so in order TO BIND yourself to the body even more, to make you dwell on it, focus on it, pay attention to it, and escape from THE MIND, so that you can think of yourself as intensely experiencing or being SUBJECT TO *this* form. Doing this is nothing short of attempting to kill the Son of God, by associating his SELF with a physical object, and thus BINDING him to it, and therefore making it possible that through attacking IT, HE is attacked and killed. EVERY DEATH DEMONSTRATES THIS BELIEF.

You are WHOLE, not some little form of a human. You are not little, you are magnificent. When you RESTRICT yourself to "one body", you are trying to kill yourself AND you are trying to separate yourself off from being joined to OTHER MINDS. This act INDUCES sickness and is the sole cause of all sickness, suffering and death. Death doesn't happen "because you are a body". Death happens because you BELIEVE you are a body.

Time to get your mind out of the gutter?

"Eternity is an idea of God, so the soul understands it perfectly. Time is a belief of the ego, so the lower mind, which IS the ego's domain, accepts it without question."

Jesus refers to you having a lower mind and a higher mind. The lower mind, or the place where you have a "thought system" of spacetime and ego, arose in the separation from God.

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity."

"Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

The lower mind, or egoic false perception, tends to look at things in a narrow, hateful, judgemental way. It's kind of like the mind is coming at the things it seems from a "lower" vantage point, down on the landscape or battlefield. What we need is a "higher" vantage point which "overlooks" ("To forgive is to overlook") and sees with love.

Forgiveness, or being forgiving, is a gift given by the Holy Spirit. It's a true-perception viewpoint that looks from a high vantage point of holiness, harmlessness, innocence and love. The Holy Spirit sees with Christ Vision, and looks upon everything correctly, ie based on God's truth and love.

We might spend a lot of time trying to figure out "how to forgive", which is really the lower mind trying to stay in control. Instead, consider that we simply need to join with the Holy Spirit. We need to not simply ask for his help, but invite him in. We need to allow him to operate on us, and to help us to share in how he is seeing things.

That means getting your mind to see what and how he is seeing. Your mind has to experientially, not in theory, actually "shift" or move into a higher position, in which you receive the Holy Spirit's healing vision. In which you allow yourself to BE forgiven and to see with HIS forgiveness. A forgiveness that is GIVEN you, rather than one you keep trying to make yourself.

"Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function. Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven."

Notice how it says that overlooking guilt - in which to forgive is to overlook - means that forgiving must entail letting HIM forgive, and simply trying to line your mind up with his to be open to entering into, joining with, and experiencing, his sight. A little willingness is all that is needed to invite him to help, and to ask for his viewpoint, not to merely hand it down to you but to actually orient yourself so that you let his perspective become your own. Such that God's will becomes your own.

Also, although this is not stated often, forgiveness is the same thing as love. A forgiving perspective is a loving perspective. The mind has to be willing to want a HIGHER way to look at things.

"Forgiveness is an earthly form of love which as it is in Heaven has no form. Yet what is needed here is given here as it is needed. In this form you can fulfill your function even here, although what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still."

Part of our challenge is we often do not recognize that we're in need of moving into a higher perspective. We are stuck and lost in our lower ego mind having false perceptions, which act like prisons and traps, and may not even realize that we're doing it. We think it's normal and don't question it. But we need to try to be vigilant and notice what we're doing, when we're being unforgiving, when we're going it alone, and when we need to ask for help.

The holy spirit is there to help you. God created him entirely TO help you, to heal you, to guide you, and to love and support you. You can't very well move closer to God without sharing in his mindset, his viewpoint, and his higher perception. But to move into it you have to be willing to let go of attack and sin and guilt and death. To be wiling to admit, you might be mistaken, you might've made a wrong choice, and you want something better. The only thing that is ever better is something closer to God.

"While I am not attacking your egos, I AM working with your higher mind whether you are asleep or awake, (just as your ego does with your lower mind.)"

I have a number of reactions regarding those who are sick.

All of these reactions entail me feeling sorry for the person, or wishing they were well, or being sad that this has happened to them.

I have reactions of guilt that somehow I caused it, and reactions of fear that somehow it will worsen.

And I also have reactions of compassion and understanding.

But all of these reactions are actually responses to perceptions which are not true.

Ego reactions always occur after having perceived something wrongly, and unless you are coming from love your reaction is founded in victimhood.

It can seem like I am caring or wanting a person to be healed, because I am upset about them being sick. It can seem like I am wishing for their best. It can seem as though I want the sickness to go away and that this is a good attitude to have, or shows a sign of caring or compassion.

But the truth is, these reactions are all founded on DOING NOTHING ABOUT IT.

They are not attitudes of correction, or healing, or forgiveness, or undoing. They are responses founded on the belief that the sickness is real, that it is happening, that the person is suffering, that "someone" needs to swoop in and save the person - anyone other than me.

If you really look at this in yourself, you may well be a very sympathetic, empathetic, compassionate, caring-seeming person, but the fact is that a lot of these responses are born in a state of inability to help. A state of disempowerment. A state of passivity. A state where you believe that there is nothing you can actually DO to correct it, even though you may be filled with wishful thinking about how you would do something if you could.

YOU CAN!

These attitudes are actually a cover-up for miracle mindedness and an excuse for not forgiving. They are an ego response that looks as though you are deeply concerned about someone, while at the same time strongly believing that they really do have a problem.

What we have to come to learn is the art of correction, which is more to do with an active undoing of the problem rather than an agreement that it exists. Corrective measures. And we DO have the ability to do this, not alone but as a result of our union wth Holy Spirit and God.

I've been in states of sorrow and despair plenty of times in which I've "begged" God to help and sometimes there is some help and sometimes not, but in general each time that I find myself thinking of asking someone ELSE to help, someone who "has the power", I am either nudged or have an innate knowing that doing so is basically shirking an obligation.

God has empowered us to extend His love and healing, and to do so through the mechanism of forgiveness, in which we cancel out, undo, correct and make vanish, all signs and symptoms of artificial causes, demonstrating that separation has not occurred, that problems are not real, that sickness is an illusion and that even death can be reversed.

It is one thing to be terribly upset and guilt-ridden. You feel guilty and responsible for causing someone's suffering, even if you did not appear to directly cause it, because you feel as though you are supposed to be able to take it away but are failing to do so. So in a sense, your mind knows this and actually will experience guilt when you are not performing miracles. When you are in support of sickness and are believing in problems and are making it real instead of correcting it actively, your mind will know that you're actually using this as a way to avoid your ROLE as "the light of the world", and this produces guilt.

So you will feel guilty when you are not helping others to heal, and you will feel guilty when you are failing to forgive. It's not your fault, but either you are choosing health as truth or you are choosing sickness as truth. Being upset that someone is sick does not mean that you are a believer in health and wellbeing. It means you believe sickness cannot be undone, which is a strong belief that sickness is the truth.

This we have to become honest about and weed out of ourselves, to become the miracle workers that we are meant to be. Forgiveness is the way to bring about miracles, through the correction and undoing of what is false. Not through the ego's victimy reactions of guilt, powerlessness, well-wishes and the like. Those are like saying, sorry you are sick, but I believe in sickness and therefore I think you should be sick.

We need to learn to make the universe disappear and all sickness along with it. The end of death, sickness, the body, and the world.

ACIM suggests something far more radical than we might fully realise: absolutely everything you experience is chosen, and you can choose what happens and not just your reaction to what happens.

If you start to tell yourself, I am choosing this... I must have chosen this... I wanted this. ... you will step out of the fog of unconsciousness and start to get a sense of the kind of power that this must entail. You'll start to realise how much you DO NOT BELIEVE IT, and how much of your time is spent in a victimhood state of "this is happening to me against my will."

In fact, I think most of us are living in a state somewhere in between total empowerment and total victimhood. We make some decisions and have some influence, but we also tolerate a whole lot of "stuff happening on its own", "happening to me", "didn't choose this", "don't want that".

It especially can take the form of suffering and victimhood which seems like something totally unwanted. Pains, sickness, fear, loss, stress, anger, etc... all suggest "I didn't choose this." As if you not only have no say, but there is NO WAY OUT.

Putting up with shit, tolerating difficulties, going along with sickness like you have no choice in the matter, it's all part of this general trend we have of NOT believing that we CHOOSE everything we experience. And therefore, we can CHOOSE AGAIN.

"I AM responsible for what I see. I CHOSE the feelings I experience, and I DECIDED ON the goal I would achieve. And everything that SEEMS to happen TO me, I ASKED FOR and received as I had asked."

"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."

Now that might sound interesting to read, but if you consider that it is giving NO EXCEPTIONS, and it really does mean ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING, then you'll start to resize the sheer extent to which we are supposed to own this responsibility.

We are being asked to literally reach a state in which everything we experience is a DELIBERATE CHOICE, where there is absolutely no victimhood or sense of tolerating or reacting, and where you literally stop making yourself suffer permanently. Where you take total ownership of your life and, with the Holy Spirit deciding for you, wield the unlimited power of God.

In general, we actually are living in a very disempowered state, where we have given away power, causation, will, identity, and responsibility. And in this state we really don't think that we could even conceive of having as much "say" in what happens as what the course is suggesting. Maybe some influence yes, but not TOTAL ABSOLUTE POWER.

What do you mean we can choose not to be sick, or choose not to die, or chose to stop having a pain, or choose not to experience loss, or choose not to having a problem today? What do you mean we are so powerful and capable that literally everything that happens every day is BECAUSE OF OUR CHOICE?

But that's what Jesus is claiming. And it's all over the course. The power of decision to choose absolutely everything we experience, reclaiming that power, using that power intentionally, and therefore choosing never again to make any kind of suffering for ourselves. To literally choose never to be sick, nor to die.

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

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

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

"The ego equates:

Not agreeing with me = denial.

But correction is not denial.

It’s reinterpretation."

(ChatGPT)

"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it."

I wonder if, as egos, we are not really very accustomed to looking for a different interpretation. The ego's main and really only device is separation. We are very very conditioned to USE separation to make things go away.

The ego operates on a horizontal axis of go towards, or go away from (desire/fear, gain/loss etc). It does not know anything about staying where you are and going upwards, or finding a higher ground, or a broader perspective.

This movement of forgiveness which looks for another way to look at things, is not 'natural' in the egos functioning. Perhaps thats why we all get a bit lost in using spiritual things to bypass, because we tend to "shut things out" as a problem solving method - ie separate from it, deny it, hide it, attack it, to solve it.

We're not being asked to separate from the world and problems as such, we're being asked to reconsider what they mean, to realize that we've added meaning and judgement on top of them, and that this layer of meaning and judgement can be changed independently of the thing they're projected onto.

This really entails breaking out of the idea of sin. Because sin, as false perception, associates guilt with form, with objects, with bodies and places and things. It locks it in. And once it's locked in we are not accustomed to breaking out of that, we just think a given person is guilty or that the sinfulness is inherent to what happened. We don't realize there's two parts to it - the thing and the interpretation of the thing.

"What the world is, is but a fact. You cannot choose what this should be. But you can choose how you would see it. Indeed, you must choose this."

To forgive we do have to recognize there are two parts, the "what seemed to happen" and the "what I made of it". And then to realize we can in fact change the "what I make of it" and see it differently. And this doesn't necessarily have to entail a bypass, a denial, an ignoring or a shutting out, of the thing being reinterpreted.

I think perhaps we tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater, because having attached meaning to form we want to avoid or throw away the form in order to be relieved of its meaning. This is our mistake. This is how we bypass. We want to just get rid of the thing that we think is evil, instead of separating out the judgement of evil from the neutral thing.

The path of forgiving is a bit more subtle than our kneejerk reaction or out typical 'goto' for problem solving. It's a bit of a "twist" psychologically... to in a way 'keep and acknowledge' the feelings, the situation, the happenings, but alter the internal vantage point. We're not used to that "shifting" of perception. We tend to think perception if fixed (this is the idea of sin).

So the formula ends up being more like, keep looking at this but look at it differently ... rather than, don't look at this at all in order to pretend it's not there anymore.

It's not about attacking, denying, hurling quotes at, separating from, one-upping, or any other type of way that you'd treat a 'singular thing' in order to make it go away. Instead it's about changing how you see it, what you make of it, what meaning you give it, how you use it. And that means the thing doesn't necessarily go away, and isn't denied, but your experience of it is changed.

Trying to make the thing go away entirely becomes a murderous attack upon the body and the feeling and the world. This is driven by a perception that "it is one thing", ie a sinful thing. And if this were true, the only way to get rid of a wicked thing is to destroy it. But we're not asked to do this. We're asked to change how we look at it - who we look with, so that we see something different in how it strikes us and how we use it. The purpose that we see it for.

We end up with a re-interpretation, not a blanket of denial or an intellectual escape or a denial of feelings or a sweeping wave of destruction.

Everything about this world points in the direction of death. "All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death." It was designed to do so. Our job as beings from another world, is to demonstrate that we are not under any of these laws, all of them can be broken, and that it is possible to reconfigure the body to symbolize eternal life here in the dream. A body that shows health and vitality and life, has no scars, has no damage, is perfectly functioning, rejuvenated by the Holy Spirit, and filled with what we'll call "life". Its condition must be completely under the "control" of the mind, requiring not a single belief that there are any other external separate causes of sickness or death.

To overcome death, death MUST be a choice. And the only way to surmount death must entail the ability to choose not to produce death. To choose not to die physically. It has to be possible for the mind to have power over and be stronger than not only the body but all supposed external worldly causes, otherwise the belief remains that something "out there" can come along with an alien will and decide for you against your will that the body should die. The secret of salvation tells us we do EVERYTHING to ourselves, and therefore have the power, should we so choose, to simply choose NOT TO "do death".

The body has to respond, it has no will of its own, no decision of its own, and is ONLY an effect of the mind, not the world. It must line up and obey and correspond to mental health. The belief that the body has its own choice/mind/power to make itself sick or well, or that the world can do the same, IS the belief in death ie the belief in an external separate power that can choose FOR you (the dream choosing for you) that you shall be affected and powerless to stop it. A child of God could never be in a position to be powerless to stop such an attempted attack. God does not will that we be in a position where something can ever happen that we do not ask for. "My self is ruler of the universe" ... "nothing comes to me unbidden by myself" .... "what I want to happen I receive" .... "what I do not want does not occur" etc.

It's a position of tremendous empowerment and causality. Mastery over the world, the body, sickness and death. A living demonstration of life and holiness - wholeness, which is health. Taking a hold of a body of this world, from a vantage point of another world, with a power not of this world, and using it as a tool, a window, through which the light of heaven can extend and shine with healing and love into this world, causing this bodily figure to be animated like a puppet via supernatural power that breaks and defies all the laws of the world. Spirit is in charge, not the dream world. The primary laws of the Kingdom overthrow the secondary laws of spacetime. All laws of physics can be broken by the Spirit. "There is nothing my holiness cannot do." "What the holy spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."

Death ultimately is learned to be not even a threat, not even a thing, not even a possibility, to one who recognizes that the only way to die is to choose to do so. "You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No one dies without their own consent" "You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself." Ultimately the teaching is that we are IMMORTAL, invulnerable, unassailable, invincible, unlimited beings. Any testifying of any other kind can only result when we, ourselves, consent to misuse our free will to weave what must be lies and illusions and fictions, trying to prove that we are not immortal. "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt." You cannot be hurt if you are immortal.

The body is used by a twisted mind to pretend it is not immortal, to put on a show and to try to convince itself and others that it can die. It cannot. "You are immortal and you cannot die." When we recognize the futility and pointlessness of trying to die when we never can, we'll stop MAKING it happen, and will simply choose to live eternally. The supernatural power of God will protect us and make sickness and death impossible. Nothing can happen against our will. Not even death. There are no "accidents" or "environmental influences" or "acts of nature" or "just old age" creeping in like some kind of unwanted invader. There is only our own mind and what it is doing to itself. When it chooses never again to die, it will make death impossible and raise the dead. "Swear not to die you holy son of God, you've made a bargain that you cannot keep" .... you cannot die, you cannot succeed at it, it does not work, you carry on. You already have eternal life.

This goes way beyond "just healing yourself."

"To heal, then, is to correct perception in your brother AND yourself by sharing the Holy Spirit with him. This places you both WITHIN the Kingdom and restores ITS wholeness in your minds."

Note that such healing REQUIRES that you ***SHARE THE HOLY SPIRIT*** with others. He cannot be left out of the equation.

"***Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself.*** YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, ***offering salvation to your brother AND yourself***. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect. "

Note that "the world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible" and that the physical world is "the granite block of sin", tells us that when sins are forgiven, BODY-LEVEL healing should occur to undo the presence of "physical" sin.

It's saying that unless your mind AND BODY are healed, and unless your brother's mind AND BODY are healed, forgiveness is not real or complete. Essentially, all trace of occurances, sins, events, attacks, must be ERASED from showing up anywhere at all, in yourself AND in your brother. And it must leave no trace behind.

"Idols MUST disappear, and leave no trace behind their going."

It also suggests that as you forgive, it SHOULD also induce healing in OTHERS simultaneous to your own.

This is very different to the idea that you just "do forgivenesses" for yourself in isolation, or with no effect on others. Jesus is saying that your joined minds should produce healing effects in BOTH of you.

"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts." tells you something very similar.

"My forgiveness is the means by which the world is healed, together with myself. Let me, then, forgive the world, that it may be healed along with me."

"How just are miracles! For they bestow an equal gift of full deliverance from guilt upon your brother AND yourself. YOUR healing saves HIM pain, as well as you. And YOU are healed BECAUSE you wished him well. This is the law the miracle obeys: That healing sees no specialness at all."

"So does your healing (physically) show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, ***and healed along with you.***"

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

"And thus is healing given BOTH of you."

"Show THIS (healed body) unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And ***he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes*** will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you. Here is the proof that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind. That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. ***YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health***. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

"When I am healed I am not healed alone.

Today's idea remains the central thought on which salvation rests. For healing is the opposite of all the world's ideas which dwell on sickness and on separate states."

"It is impossible that anyone be healed alone. In sickness must he be apart and separate. But healing is his own decision to be one again, and to accept his Self with all Its parts intact and unassailed."

"Healing might thus be called a counter-dream, ***which cancels out the dream of sickness*** in the name of truth, but not in truth itself. Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins that never were accomplished, healing but removes illusions that have not occurred."

"Healing is shared."

"And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you."

"But you are never healed alone. And legions upon legions will receive the gift that you receive when you are healed."

"Those who are healed become the instruments of healing."

"When I am healed I am not healed alone. And I would share my healing with the world, that sickness may be banished from the mind of God's one Son, Who is my only Self."

"When I am healed I am not healed alone. And I would bless my brothers, for I would be healed with them, as they are healed with me."

"I will heal as I let him teach me to heal."

One of the ways the ego deceives you is to make it seem like you are not yourself. It wants to suggest that something has changed about you, since God created you whole, and that you are now missing something.

The only way it can make it seem like you are missing something is to HIDE it or conceal it. It's not actually capable of getting rid of your real self, because God made you PERMANENT. There is no real way the ego can stop you from existing or take away your reality.

The ONLY trick the ego has is to pretend that there is something about you that is missing, by trying to BLOCK YOUR AWARENESS from being aware that it exists. It does this by applying distortions to your perception which seem to make it hard to SEE what is really right in front of you and obvious.

These blocks to the AWARENESS of God's presence are the only problem. They need to be removed, in order for you to become AWARE again that you DO still have everything that God gave you, you ARE still immortal, you HAVE NOT been changed and NOTHING is missing.

So what the ego does, is it covers you up a little bit, maybe with a lie or a deception or some darkness or a temptation or some other mechanism of illusion. It makes an illusion that makes it seem like something's gone wrong, something's happening, there's been a loss, or an emptiness, or a hole has been made in the Son of God, or something's been taken away, or whatever.

So this ego PRANKSTER tries to TRICK you into believing that it's actually TRUE that something about you is missing. It tries to get you to believe that it's true you've lost your love, or your power, or your strength, or your sanity, or your connection to God, or your peace, or your identity, or whatever. As soon as you believe it's lie and fall for its trick, you are now in a state of confusion.

Confused, and convinced that you actually HAVE lost some part of yourself, and that this part of yourself IS NOT where it should be - ie within you - where God placed it - what do you do now? Perceiving a lack, you feel a need, and that need automatically asks to be fulfilled because it's a magnetic belief in 'not having' which draws itself in the direction of 'getting' - ie re-acquiring.

So now you go off, distracted, looking everywhere you can possibly look, EXCEPT for where this missing thing IS, which is in you, because its' not really missing AT ALL it's just being covered up, and what results will you encounter? You'll look high and low and everywhere in-between, everywhere EXCEPT underneath the blanket that hides it. And it won't be there. And you will not find it, because it's not anywhere that you're looking.

This is how the ego has you "seek and do not find".

It's also how the ego has you "seek for salvation" (a solution to the problem of something having gone wrong), outside of yourself, in places where you will never find it, even though you have this big HOPE of finding it there. The ego would want you to keep DOING stuff to trying to REPLACE what you think you lost, even though it's not reall lost. And all this doing will entail 'trying' really hard to accomplish what you ultimately cannot accomplish. And the more effort you put into 'finding' what you think you do not have, the less it will work and the more frustrated you'll be.

So all you need really to do is to LOOK AT the ego's smokescreen, QUESTION the ego's bullshit deception that says you are lacking something, figure out that what it says you're lacking is just HIDDEN, look at what is hiding it and how it is functioning, STOP DOING IT - ie UN-DO the action of hiding it, and lo and behold.. abracadabra.... IT IS REVEALED TO YOU!

Eureka! You found it. It is already in you. It always was. It was never lost. It wasn't removed. It wasn't really damaged. Nothing really happened to it. This LOVE that you are, is still perfectly intact, perfectly whole, perfectly at peace, perfectly happy, perfectly powerful and immortal and innocent. It has never changed. And so as you remove this BLOCK to awareness, instead of trying to REPLACE what the block says is missing, you simply uncover the truth of what is, what always was and what always will be.

There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing lacking in you. There is nothing missing from you. You have not been hurt. You have not been damaged. You have not sinned. You are not guilty. AAAAAAALL this other stuff that says otherwise is just a COVER for your immaculate divine innocence and invulnerability. And all your worries about all this other bullshit is all because you think it's telling you the truth. None of it is true. The only truth is that you are STILL as God created you, even if you've been hiding it underneath layer upon layer of illusions.

It's going to be a wonderful day when you finally realize that you are still as God created you and nothing has happened.

Every person is an equal member of the Sonship, meaning that everyone is your brother or sister. Everyone exists on an equal playing field, and the one "parent" is God.

This means that whether you are a parent or a child, and no matter the nature of the relationship between the two, everyone involved is still a brother or sister in the Sonship.

In order for this to express itself fully, it means that all relationships must end up where everyone is equal, no-one has power over anyone else, no-one is anyone else's property, no-one is controlling towards anyone else, no-one blames anyone else, no-one depends on anyone else, no-one expects anyone else to provide for them or decide for them, and no-one is more or less than anyone else.

This is the natural order of the family of God. We are all equals and all have the same inheritance. We all have the same parent and we're all identical in our true nature.

Typical chlidhood and parenting tends to lean much more towards inequality, control, protection, dependence, blame, manipulation and ownership. Those are not modes of relationship that are natural, and are rooted in the ego thought system.

When a child is born and begins to grow, they see themselves as completely dependent on the external world and on parents to supply their every need. And indeed the ego has set up this world so that it's practically impossible for a child to exist independently without starving to death. They have apparent "needs" and need help to survive. This doesn't mean the parents need necessarily own or control or be attached to them, but that's usually what happens.

Later, the child still believes they are dependent on the parent and that it is the parent's fault that so many things are the way they are. They will blame the parent, seeing them as causal, while at the same time attempting to break away from being under their thumb. "The thumb" is usually maintained far too long because the parents tend to form an identity around their role and don't want to let it go. They want to keep having the same relationship of parent to child, ie based in ownership, protection, control and so on. This generally works against the child becoming "independent" and an equal.

Often the case is that the child never really becomes an equal to the parent and there is a constant umbrella of control, dominance, shame and guilt under which the child remains, never breaking through to the light. The parent may not want to let go of the identity they've formed and it can be extremely painful to do so, especially if the raising of children has been the intense focus of their lives for many years and has entailed a great degree of self-sacrifice, leaving a gaping hole in their lives if the role were to end.

The child also will continue to blame the parents well into adulthood, because this is all part of the child's perception that they are a victim at the effect of the external world. They cannot really be independent until they have severed ties with their own ego identity, which means uncovering the true nature of themselves, healing all past hurts resulting from the dysfunctional relationships, and becoming aware of their true relationship to God.

It is, however, possible for the child to eventually stop projecting onto the parent and for the parent to stop projecting onto the child, and for both to give up on "specialness" which has kept the relationship strangled and suffocated in layers of denial and resistance and judgement. Special relationships can turn to holy relationship when forgiveness is used to undo the illusions of the relationship, which are many.

At some point it's possible for the child to become equal with the parent, which must also entail the recognition that the parent is a "temporary guide" who was there to help with lessons and adaptation to being in the world, but who ultimately is an equal brother/sister. Both child and parent are children of God, on exactly the same footing and terms. If the relationship between them can reflect holiness and forgiveness and equality then it has "matured" all the way that it can. If this doesn't happen, the fictional roles and dynamics of parent-child domination and submission will continue, and there will be further tension and conflict.

Acknowledging our equality in the Sonship requires acknowledging that God is the Creator/Father/Mother, and that what applies to oneself applies to all other people including our parents and children. When we go before God, we all go together and our relationship to God is direct, one to one for each of us, with no go-between.

We must learn to undo all of the illusions of the typical parent-child relationship, the entire social structure based on it, and learn that we are all equal under God. This could eventually result in a radically different kind of society, if this were understood and practiced on a mass scale. It need not be that children are property or that they are forced incessantly against their will to comply and obey, rather than being empowered and set free. It need not be that only two people are burdened with the entire upbringing of the children. We are all in this together.

LISTENING TO GUIDANCE - DOING GOD'S WILL

At times, I ask for guidance. And I get the guidance. But then I go into a mode of trying to decide whether to follow the guidance, or not, which means I am not really listening to the guidance.

I've noticed that this indicates a state of uncertainty, which is fear, an indecision, in which I am trying to decide on my own, or need to come to some kind of "agreement", or to figure it out "the same way", to come to the same conclusion, before I will accept the guidance.

And what this then really boils down to is, that I am still trying to run the show, trying to be the one who relies on his own strength, his own abilities, to direct the cart and determine where it will go. This basically means my ego is active and I'm interfering with God's will. God's saying hey, I recommend you do this, and then I'm like, well, why?

This constant doubting, questioning, asking why, wanting to know, wanting to understand, wanting to have fact and evidence and information as to explain the guidance, is really a matter of not trusting. I've come to see this more clearly recently. It means I'm not willing to trust and follow or be led, but that instead I am trusting in my own ego.

This is part of being a gatekeeper. The ego in us wants to run everything by it, will not approve of anything that it hasn't decided is acceptable, and will not get out of the way.

I have found this to be extraordinarily frustrating within my experience because there'll be something I'm "trying to decide" about, and will ask for guidance, and will get it, but then will go right back into thoughts of "what's the reasoning behind it".

And as soon as I'm in that mode, I literally am in a mode of "can't decide". It's a mode of indecision. It means that I'm in fear, and it means that I now see two potential choices to select between, one which offers something the other does not, and vice versa. And that also means the two options are incomplete options. Neither of them is whole, because they're both lacking. Which makes it impossible to arrive at certainty and commit to a decision one way or another.

You try to go one way and the other option nags at you for what it offers, making you anxiously aware of what will be a shortcoming of whichever choice you are leaning towards. And then you cannot decide anything, because you know nothing you choose will be perfect. I shift back and forth between the options but can't settle on either one of them.

The solution then is to get OUT of this mode. To get out of thinking, get out of questioning, deciding on my own, trying to control, trying to be the one who figures it out, trying to be the gatekeeper who has to understand and approve everything. To move upwards, towards trusting the guidance, towards trusting Holy Spirit to know better, to listen, and to be willing to follow. And that's not something that the ego wants to do. It has no intention of giving up its position of "decision making".

But I've found this is really the only solution to the dilemma. There is no other way out. Any choice made with the ego is a failure and can't be trusted. There isn't any trust possible because the way forward is split. Only the Holy Spirit knows what's in my best interests so when He guides me, I need to get out of the "why" mode and go into the "I trust this and accept it and will do God's will" mode.

It relates also to not wanting to do God's will. This has been showing up for me a few times lately. We think that God's will is not the same as our own. When we split off from His will we tried to will something different, something incompatible. And that means we now fear that doing God's will means "not doing what I want" or "being forced against my will" or coerced or becoming a slave. If we are not willing to do what God wills, then we'll resist the guidance and get "in the way" of the flow.

We need to learn to be willing to trust that God knows us better and knows what is needed and what will work. And then trust that guidance when we receive it, and be willing to follow it knowing that God knows what he's doing. If we start sitting on the fence, trying to choose for ourselves, trying to choose alone, we're going to go into fear and indecision and fail are choosing. Choices made without God automatically entail fear, unavoidably so. We can't choose without Him and expect to experience certainty, wholeness, a lack of fear, or clarity.

I still struggle to have the willingness needed to always follow the guidance instantly. I don't usually do that. I usually get similar guidance over and over again and can be quite stubborn about following it until I can kind of talk myself around and convince myself of "why". Or, become so exasperated with the frustration of figuring it out myself that I surrender enough to admit the truth that His solution is the best. I hope this will improve, to where I can get a single word and act on it right away. This takes time, and development of trust. Which means learning NOT to trust in your own strength.

There is a common trend towards trying to accept everything in the world. To allow it. To give it permission. To let it be whatever way it is.

There is one part of this which is beneficial. If you resist things, you make them real. If you control things, you make them real. If you judge and attack things, you make them real. It would imply that if you accept them "as they are", you can find some kind of peace, where you're not really attached to outcomes or conditions or situations or people. As if the world will just fluidly flow over your experience without triggering anything or upsetting you. Because you accept it. But this also can be a trap, and a massive justification for keeping suffering and death.

Because the fact is that this world is not real. It's an illusion, and everything in it is a lie. It's not supposed to be happening. It's not natural. Whatever you accept into your mind you make real to you. If you accept the world into your mind, you make it real. If you are in a position of "allowing" it, you are handing over causality and permission and power to it. If you are trying to simply be at peace with whatever happens, you are not owning the fact that you are making everything happen. If you focus on trying to transcend whatever's going on, which can bring a sense of peace, it does not necessarily bring into question whether things are happening or not.

The task at hand is more to do with learning to recognize that this world is NOT happening. There is not anything to really ACCEPT about it because it isn't really doing anything. You don't have to ADJUST TO conditions, or try to persuade yourself to be okay with suffering, sickness, unhappiness and death. You're not supposed to be having any of these things.

The only true acceptance, the only thing you should ever accept, and thus believe in fully, is THE ATONEMENT. God's truth. Reality. This world is not reality. In accepting the atonement you are accepting something that should be accepted. Something which will bring a cure. Something which will instill miracle mindedness and the ability to be invulnerable. Something which puts you in touch with the power of God, to have dominion over this fake world.

There is merit in not being in such a 'fight' with the world, not resisting it or taking sides against it or having this whole ego un-peaceful counter-attack scenario in your mind. Yes, so it's good to accept things on that basis, because it at least includes less conflict mentally. BUT, this also should not be on a basis that "the world is real" and "things are really happening" and "bodies are really sick" and so on. You should not be accepting that these things are true. You should not be "allowing" them as such. Otherwise you become a passive, miracle-less fence sitter with no power to do anything.

Detaching from the world is great. But it must include the *recognition* that the world is not real, it is entirely illusory, you should be not "agreeing with" it, you should not be justifying it, and you should not be confusing acceptance with authorizing death. It may seem paradoxical but accepting the TRUTH should entail the DENIAL OF the world, the rejection of death, and a demonstration of symbolic immortality in the body.

You are not supposed to just find a way to "let the world happen", you're supposed to become aware you are DREAMING IT and MAKING IT happen, and thus regain power OVER it to change it at will. That's a massively different position than merely trying to get comfortable with "real suffering" or "whatever happens that I did not cause." There is no causality in that kind of acceptance, it's a total passivity. Yes you can try to accept that you feel unhappy but you shouldn't be feeling unhappy. You can try to accept your body is sick but it is not supposed to be sick. Are you going to accept your death?

You might think well, if I am so at peace and accepting of what's SEEMING to happen in this illusory world, why would I bother changing it? Because if the body is sick, the mind is STILL sick. The body can't get healthy unless the mind is healthy. And the mind cannot get healthy while the body is being constantly bombarded with mind attack. "A broken body IS PROOF the MIND HAS NOT BEEN HEALED." So the body DOES have to get healed as well, which means the reversal of sickness and death. Death has to get UNDONE, not accepted. Otherwise there is no true resurrection of mind OR body.

ACIM does not teach to "accept everything that happens in a dream world". It teaches there IS no dream world and YOU are the dreamer who makes it be whatever you decide it is. And if you change your mind, THE WHOLE WORLD MUST CHANGE. This is a course in CAUSE, not being passive. "Members of my party are ACTIVE workers." Will you lay down and let death happen against your will, and try to "accept it"? You cannot be at peace with death. Death can only "happen" if you CONSENT to it, which means you CAUSE it, because you have an attacking unhealed mind that's not at peace.

If you want people, you must learn to undo the world and stop dreaming of nightmares. Not because otherwise you'd be at the effect of external causes of un-peace but because being at peace goes hand in hand with HAVING POWER AND BEING THE CAUSE.

I see now that forgiveness of another must entail an appreciation of how we are joined in oneness, sharing everything. We have to realize that we ARE each other, and that we are included in everything. There has to be awareness of the golden rule and the fact that giving and receiving are one. Whatever applies to me must be seen to apply to the other. And there must be shared interests. Without this there is not forgiveness.

It used to seem as though forgiveness was some act performed by one separate person towards or with regard to another separate person. There was something that the separate person did to the the other separate person, and now the separate person had to do something to forgive them. This is clearly not in accord with ACIM’s teaching on forgiveness because forgiveness requires the two minds to be one. You have to love your brother as yourself.

When your brother is seen from the perspective that they are included in who and what you are, and are thus part of you, sharing everything with you, everything now applies to both of you equally and simultaneously. You ARE each other. In that light, any unforgiveness is an attempt to separate from one another, while forgiveness is a reunion. The two become one in forgiveness.

The same applies to atonement, true perception, salvation, and miracle mindedness. It is not just some separated-off state, it’s an entirely shared state. It’s just a tiny bit short of total oneness. Communication means immersion and union and sharing everything as one, and miracles raise the level of communication and sharing. Miracles make minds one in God. Miracles unite you with your brother. Being IN the miracle is to be IN a united shared state.

More and more now it is becoming extremely clear that, very simply, “being separate” is the entire problem, and “being joined” is the entire solution. There is nothing else. Either you’re separating off of you are one with each other. Oneness isn’t two separate people bumping bodies. It’s literally a fusing, melding, merging, unifying, sharing of everything. True connection. True opening and trust. True communion.

You can’t see forgivingly without that shared union because it is literally the light in which you see. It is the way to recognize your brother’s attempts to separate as untrue and as a call for love. It the proper framing of your holy relationship. Without the union there is a breakdown in forgiveness. To be completely forgiving is to recognize that everything applies to both of you equally at once, as one, together, as the whole. Wholeness is inclusive, and wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles.

Either you live in such a way as to always regard your brothers as a fundamental part of your own self, in which you are literally one and two, sharing the same spark of life, in the same light, or you are moving into separation and grievance and war. It’s very simple. Separate or join, fear or love, die or live forever. Atonement is a lesson in sharing, because we’re forgotten how to do it.

All miracle mindedness requires a shared state of mind and identity. You have to BE the other person to join with their mind and share light with them. We can’t do any of this correctly if we remain separate. There is no miracle without sharing, there is no love without sharing. There is no atonement without sharing, there is no salvation without sharing. Your brother is your savior because he is your self.

“Your Father is as close to you as is your brother. Yet what is there that could be nearer you, than is your Self?” “This state, and only this, must YOU attain with God beside you. For until you do, you will still think that you are separate FROM Him. You can feel His Presence NEXT TO you, but CANNOT know that you are one with Him.”

“And He will speak to you, reminding you that you are Spirit, one with Him and God, your brothers and your Self.”

“He must see someone ELSE as NOT a body, one with him, without the wall the world has built to keep apart all living things who know not that they live.”

“Forgive him now his sins, and you will see that you are one with him.”

“Every altar to God is part of your Soul, because the Light He created is One with Him. Would you cut a brother off from the Light that is yours?”

“Your brother's holiness shows you that God is One with him AND you; that what he has is yours BECAUSE you are not separate from him OR from his Father.”

“No-one unites with enemies, nor is at one with them in purpose.”

“Then let him offer you the light you see in him, and let your "enemy" and Friend unite in blessing you with what you gave. Now are you one with them, and they with you. Now have you been forgiven by yourself.”

“I trust my brothers, who are one with me.”

If you are going to pray for someone, you’ll need to first discern what the problem really is.

The problem is NOT what is happening to the person, what they perceive as happening to them, or what your own ego says is the problem.

This means you need to forgive first, come to your senses, and *recognize* what the illusions are.

It’s actually always an ILLUSION that anyone is under attack by anyone other than themselves!

So in this sense, it is then pointless to pray e.g. that someone receives money, or that someone stop being hurt by someone, or someone gets along with their boss, or whatever.

The only meaningful prayer, perhaps, is one which aligns itself with God’s Will. That means, the prayer ACKNOWLEDGES the TRUTH about the person, not what is FALSE about them!

Just as forgiveness does not "make errors real" and THEN attempts to undo them, which cannot work, our prayers should also be forgiving. They should not fall for the ego’s tricks or make us believe the victim’s own interpretation of what is happening.

If someone asks you to pray for them, and then gives the reasons "why", which will entail all the perceived justifications for why they are in danger or under attack or suffering "against their will", take their prayer request and by all means pray, but do not pray for what the person believes is the problem.

Just as when you forgive, you need to learn to UNDO the belief that problems are real at all, withdraw belief that sin is real, and NOT believe that sickness and suffering are real, so too this needs to be incorporated into praying.

If you pray "with forgiveness", then you are praying with the power of God, and this CAN produce results because you’re now speaking God’s language of TRUTH. But if you fall for the ego traps and dramas and then use that as the reason to pray, praying for those "real" dramas to stop, it will not work.

Your prayers must ASCEND above the battlefield, above the ego’s lies, above even the illusion that someone is being attacked by a will OTHER than their own.

All attack is SELF ATTACK. The person needing praying for needs to stop attacking themselves! The prayer then should be in support of what is TRUE about the person, acknowledging and being thankful for that, as a way to diffuse the ego’s bullshit about the situation, and then to pray that the person themselves are lifted up into TRUTH, to join in truth, so that THEY stop attacking themselves.

It is therefore helpful to pray that a person stop believing they are vulnerable, to help them to recognize how loved they are, to ask that their mind be clarified, to ask for healing and to remind the person how loved and safe they are. It is helpful to ask for the person to be uplifted and awakened and made conscious and come back to their senses - to truth. It is helpful to send them love. And it is helpful to ask that they be helped by God to RECOGNIZE their own invulnerability, strength, power, certainty and fearlessness.

It is really self-attack that people need prayers about. Their failure to recognize the truth about themselves IS causing them to make theirown life a mess. Their unconsciousness is producing projected attacks. Their resistance against truth is causing problems and dramas.

No-one especially needs to be "saved" from apparently completely separate unfair attackers who come out of the blue for no reason. No one dies without their own consent! The problem is that a person has CONSENTED TO SUFFERING. THEY need help with learning to STOP ATTACKING THEMSELVES. TO stop believing things are true of them which are not true. To remember who they really are.

WE as "prayers" must learn not to be deceived by the ego’s illusions first, including those presented by "those in need". The reason for the prayer must not be an ego reason OR a reaction to an ego way of looking at a situation. If we’re making the problem real, but are saying "prayer words", WE now have a "split mind" and a "split will" and a "split allegiance", and that means we are not going to actually WILL anything with God.

I’ve been trying to remember this myself and to practice it by praying only for the person’s awakening to truth, the recognition of their perfection as Christ, and for them to be healed of the NEED to be prayed for for illusory reasons.

Instead, our prayer is not so much a request about something which needs changing, but moreso an EXTENSION OF GOD, an affirmation of recognition of what is already true, a denial of what is false, and to simply ask that God’s Will (the way that things should be if people weren’t interfering) be expressed. That’s not so much a "new request" as it is a CONTINUATION OF THE TRUTH.

Think about how the person’s HIGHER SELF is. What is true of their higher self, in the highest possible reality of God, THAT is the truth about the person and NOT how they appear. Their body symtoms, their life dramas, etc, are NOT true of them. Affirming what IS true of them, "speaking truth into the situation", is powerful and miraculous. Spoken prayers only posess POWER if they are speaking of what is TRUE IN GOD.

Speak about how God sees the person. Speak about what is only true of them in the most loving way - total innocence, perfect awareness, fearlessness, trust, confidence, happiness, joy, love, worthiness, etc... expressing that is an extension of love, and love heals. You don’t even really need to address the ego junk that is currently showing up. God’s Will is all that needs to be done, ie, you only need affirm and recognize and express what God has already created as TRUTH about the person.

Prayer and forgiveness go hand in hand. To pray with love must be to pray forgivingly. To pray WITH GOD, instead of "to God", is far more powerful than reacting pleadingly to illusions of suffering. Seeing and acknowledging the highest reality of a person is very uplifting.

I found myself in a conversation with Jesus last night about whether or not it's okay to pray for someone if they have not 'given permission'. I wanted to pray for someone to attempt to help them and heal them, but I wondered, what if they did not want this?

I thought about how we're not meant to violate someone's free will and how maybe it would incur some kind of 'karma' if we try to do this. I also thought about ethics and about how everyone has 'rights' and that we're supposed to be respectful and all that.

I seemed to be getting hints from Jesus that it was still okay to pray, and in fact it had been Jesus who initially had suggested to me "pray". Jesus has been trying to get me to experiment more with 'true prayer', since prayer is the medium of miracles, and to learn more how to extend God's miracles to people. But I felt a bit awkward about 'doing a prayer to someone'.

I wondered if it was some kind of manipulation. But somehow it seemed plausible that maybe it was helpful, that maybe anything that truly comes from God is perhaps useful and uplifting and a blessing of some kind.

So then I started wondering about whether in the higher realms there might be some kind of special 'rules' or 'laws' in place which govern this kind of thing, whether I should ask Jesus or God or someone not only IF it's okay to pray for someone, but also what to pray for. It seems at least to make sense to ask for guidance as to what will be helpful, rather than just launch into an ego 'I think this should happen' sort of thing.

Then it started to occur to me that perhaps there is a difference between horizontal and vertical thinking, ie that most of our worries about violating someone's free will are to do with things we would 'do to someone' in a horizontal, ego-logical way, on the level of form and separation... and that perhaps when you go into 'vertical' mode (which is conducive to miracles), you are perhaps transcending that entire scenario... it occurred me to also that everything in this world is basically illusion and part of ego-world laws, and yet in truth, "I am under no laws but God's".

Having spun my wheels around all of this I then turned to Jesus and just asked, why or how is it okay to pray for someone when they haven't asked for it and maybe don't even want it?

In his becoming-increasingly-common fashion, he replied with a single short sentence which cut through absolutely all of the bullshit and confusion like a knife.

"Since when was it a crime to love someone?"

:-)

Praying with God and receiving God's love and extending God's love, which is the 'mechanics' of miracle working, is entirely within the realm of loving people. It's not really 'about' the miracle as such, or the outcome, but really just about loving people. The love that inspires the miracle is important, more than the miracle itself. The miracle is almost a side-effect of love. So with a focus on simply praying as a form of a) thanking God for love, b) receiving love, c) extending love to others, where's the possible harm in that? And if a miracle comes of it, that's fine too... because "miracles are natural expressions of love, when they aren't happening something has gone wrong".

So I focused on love. And I prayed for the person. And I even prayed for the person to receive healing, which may even entail changes in their body. But rather than it seem like an act of control, manipulation, non-acceptance or overstepping boundaries, it simply became an affirmation of truth, an exclamation of the lovability of the person, and a restoration of how God would have things be. In this sense it can only be a blessing. And this made me think of...

"Miracles are the maximal service you can render to another". So if a miracle is the absolute BEST that I can possibly offer to someone, as a natural component of love through prayer, than where is there room in there for doubt or ideas of 'not supposed to' or 'respecting separate will' or whatever. And I guess it boils down to this..... miracles from God's love are ALWAYS a blessing, are ALWAYS welcome, are ALWAYS justified, are ALWAYS allowed (per God's will), and are a kind of 'right' that we each have to bestow upon each other.

We are, in our miracle working, extending God's authority and using that authority to have authority over ILLUSIONS, not so much over the person. The person is NOT the illusion of sickness, the person is NOT the life challenge, the person is NOT what their ego is up to or the lessons they have. So we cannot really do anything TO the person anyway, because they already ARE perfect love in truth. And we are not really in fact healing the real person because the real person needs no healing. All we are doing is calling for love to come in and set a person free from illusions, which is a divine blessing.

Okay so I realize this may sound like potentially a lot of rationalization or justification... but really just clarity. Coming into awareness that we ARE extensions of God's authority, we DO have the ability to give love, Jesus DOES perform miracles as "intercessions for your holiness", and doing this IS allowed and normal and loving, regardless of whether someone asks to be helped or not. Divine help is TRULY HELPFUL. Ego help is the kind of help that has side-effects and boundary-violating properties. There is a difference. Provided we are putting God/Love first, all is well.

It's okay to work miracles for those who are not able to help themselves, and for those who are temporarily weaker, and for those who are temporarily more resistant to love. But you should probably still seek Spiritual guidance as to whether this is in accord with the Plan of Atonement. As Jesus says, indiscriminate miracles are not always helpful, and that you should consult with Him first. I guess that's as good a basis for 'what to do' as any.

It all comes back to that funny old adage ... "what would Jesus do?"

"Miracles are teaching devices." And "to teach is to demonstrate". And "The mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this."

There can't be demonstration, unless something VISIBLE happens. A body gets cured, a lump disappears, a wound is healed, damage is corrected, etc. These are demonstrations. And miracles can produce these demonstrations. And they do almost all the time. Which is why it says miracles may not always have observable effects - which really means, almost always they do. OBSERVABLE - something changing which people can SEE with their eyes.

Similarly "You cannot see the holy spirit but you can see his manifestations" - he "manifests" as things changing at a physical level, which you can SEE, such as the body shaking or going through a change in appearance of form. And it is by these VISIBLE demonstrations that you can learn that HE DOES EXIST. I experience these manifestations EVERY DAY and I have shown it live on camera in my videos. The Holy Spirit can do stuff to the body.

The people who think you should never be trying to heal the body or move objects in the world with the mind etc (moving mountains) are level confused. They want to be in the world, with suffering, while pretending to be on a higher level where there is no world. Here, in this world, miracles are used to heal minds AND bodies. And unless the body is healed, forgiveness is not complete. "Forgiveness is not complete unless it brings healing to both yourself and your brother." "A miracle of healing proves separation is without effect."

So long as there are symptoms, signs, damages, breaks, hurts, bruises, wounds, growths, distortions, malfunctions, showing in the body, these act as PROOF that there has BEEN ATTACK. In other words, they act as proof of sin. AND they testify and assert that because these are *effects*, something external must have caused them, ie your brother. And so "sick bodies are accusers". The only way not to accuse, project, or blame your brother of sin, is to not show him a picture of crucifixion, ie an image of a broken body. Which means the body must be restored to health in order to teach "with a power greater than a thousand tongues" that he is exonerated. In the world. With the body. "The miracle would leave NO proof of guilt to bring you witness to what never WAS."

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

***Show THIS (body) unto your brother***, who will see that ***every scar is healed***, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you. ***Here is the (physical) proof that he has NEVER sinned***; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind. That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

and

"To witness sin and yet forgive it is a paradox which reason cannot see. For it maintains what has been done to you DESERVES no pardon. And, by GIVING it, you grant your brother mercy, but ***retain the proof*** (bodily damage he caused) he is not REALLY innocent. The sick remain accusers. They cannot forgive their brothers AND themselves as well. For no-one in whom true forgiveness reigns CAN suffer. ***He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes.*** And thus he MUST have overlooked it, and removed it from his own. Forgiveness CANNOT be for one, and not the other. Who forgives IS healed. And in his healing lies the PROOF that he has truly pardoned, and ***retains no trace of condemnation*** (physically) that he still would hold against himself or any living thing.

Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to **demonstrate** they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins ***have no effect*** to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which **CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely.*** *** In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors.**** LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. ******A broken body***** shows the ***mind has NOT*** been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

When Jesus performed demonstrations, such as raising the dead, or calming a storm, or converting a tree into a snake and back, or multiplying food etc, these demonstrations were teaching devices. If you see (witness) this occurring, your whole view of what you think constitutes "a tree" or "a snake" is seriously brought into question, if you can see them being as Jesus says "so easily changed". The mind is intensely educated by such a demonstration because everything it ever experienced before as "limitation" and "solid matter" and "things that are impossible" (orders of difficulty) are blown out the window, making you question your whole reality. This is the power of demonstration. Miracles show that BECAUSE physical objects etc can be CHANGED, they MUST be illusions, and this weakens the mind's belief in them.

And no this is not a spectacle. The statement actually says that if you THINK that a miracle IS a spectacle, YOU ARE MISTAKEN. And that trying to USE miracles to INDUCE belief, is a misunderstanding of their purpose, because they are for believers by believers.

It's surprising how many course students either don't see this teaching, have not recognized it's even saying this, or don't want to accept it. "Miracles break all the laws of this world." "The mind, being sane, heals the body".

"Only the mind AND body need atonement."

So long as the effects of sin remain, there is evidence which proves and teaches that your brother DID COMMIT A SIN, and therefore is NOT exonerated. Only by healing your body and removing the consequences of attack can he be innocent. Your healed body teaches him HIS innocence AND heals HIS body, and thus he is healed along with you. Miracles heal your body AND your brother's body.

Healthy mind, healthy body. Sick mind, sick body. There are no exceptions.

If your brother attacks you, you MUST heal your body and demonstrate HE DID NOT SIN, and is therefore innocent.

**THIS IS REAL FORGIVENESS**

Here are excerpts from the section of A Course in Miracles titled "The Fear of Healing."

"For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies ARE accusers."

"Who has been injured BY his brother, and could love and trust him still? He HAS attacked, and will attack again. Protect him not, because your damaged body shows that you must be protected FROM him."

"He may be PITIED for his guilt, but NOT exonerated."

"The unhealed CANNOT pardon. For they are the witnesses that pardon is unfair. They would retain the CONSEQUENCES of the guilt they overlook. Yet no-one CAN forgive a sin which he believes is real. And what has consequences MUST be real, because what it has DONE is there to see."

"forgiveness does not first ESTABLISH sin, and THEN forgive it. Who can say and MEAN, "My brother, you have injured me, and yet, because I am the BETTER of the two, I pardon you my hurt."

"To witness sin and yet forgive it is a paradox which reason cannot see."

"you grant your brother mercy, but retain the proof he is not REALLY innocent. The sick remain accusers."

"For no-one in whom true forgiveness reigns CAN suffer. He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes. And thus he MUST have overlooked it, and removed it from his own."

"Who forgives IS healed. And in his healing lies the PROOF that he has truly pardoned, and retains no trace of condemnation that he still would hold against himself or any living thing."

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt?"

"Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors."

"LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

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

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

"So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

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

"And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

"How just are miracles! For they bestow an equal gift of full deliverance from guilt upon your brother AND yourself. YOUR healing saves HIM pain, as well as you. And YOU are healed BECAUSE you wished him well."

"And love would prove ALL suffering is but a vain imagining, a foolish wish, with NO effects. Your health is a result of your desire to see your brother with no blood upon his hands, nor guilt upon his heart made heavy with the proof of sin."

"The Holy Spirit knows YOUR healing is the witness UNTO his, and CANNOT be apart from him at all. As long as he consents to suffer, YOU will be unhealed."

"But you can show him his suffering is purposeless and wholly without cause. Show him YOUR healing, and he will consent no more to suffer. For his innocence HAS BEEN established in your sight AND his. And laughter will REPLACE your sighs BECAUSE God's Son remembered that he IS God's Son."

-- See also this passage from "The Picture of Crucifixion" which precedes "the fear of healing"...

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

Show THIS unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you. Here is the proof that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind. That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

-- Also

"Now is the body healed by miracles."

"The mind must be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this."

I would like to propose that TRUE miracle working entails the USE OF the POWER OF GOD. And nothing less than total absolute unlimited power!!!!!!!!!!

A miracle is thus not a mere small shift in a perception, or a slight change of mind. True miracle working is GOD'S POWER working through you.

God's power is unlimited. It is an absolutely massive strength so strong and so intense that it can EASILY do anything at all - even move a mountain, part an ocean, calm a storm, create a world.

Intense absolute unlimited infinite power ENGENDERS miracles.

If you read carefully you will find the course is very obvious about this. Quotes are below. Miracles entail the use of the power of God. The power of God and not of you engenders them. There is nothing your holiness cannot do. NOTHING. Because the power of God is in it, and his power is UNLIMITED POWER.

This is something SORELY missing from so much ACIM teaching and teachers and views of the course and interpretations of what a miracle is. True undiluted miracles wield the absolutely unlimited and unstoppable POWER OF GOD.

This power can heal the sick, it can reverse death, it can move mountains, it can convert objects into other objects, it can multiply food, it can calm storms, it can create entire worlds. It its the true power of your mind which can DO ANYTHING.

We are SO used to seeing ourselves as small little tiny little humans, powerless little victim humans, weak and afraid and vulnerable little specks of nothing. Such that we are extremely OUT OF TOUCH with the power of God. But A Course in Miracles is actually teaching us to get back in touch with that power and to facilitate the power of God to move through you.

I have experienced once, so far, the immense enormity of this power, and it DID produce an instantaneous healing miracle including a total reversal of all symptoms in the body and a healing of the mind so strong that the person forgot they were ever even in pain. This power is immense, and you COULD be intimidated by it. We ARE afraid of it. It is the power of God. And until we can stop being afraid that God is so incredible powerful, we will not be able to work with this power or do the holy spirit's works.

Miracles VIOLATE THE LAWS OF SPACE AND TIME and break ALL THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. This is not just about your mind or you waking up or you shifting perception. There is nothing your holiness cannot **DO**. There is nothing the POWER OF GOD cannot **DO**!!!!!!!!!

We must stop talking about miracles like they are these powerless little shifts and changes in the mind. There is a reason that Jesus talks over and over again about how they use the POWER OF GOD. There is no "power" in changing your mind a bit or being a bit more loving. You have to think more in terms of an absolute infinite immoveable force SO strong that nothing in all the universe can move against it. That is God's power.

"Miracle-working entails a full realization of the ***power of thought***, and real avoidance of miscreation." UrT2E18

""It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains. It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not the real reason why you don't believe it. People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them." UrT2E10

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

"The ***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." UrT1B23K

"***Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest.*** Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is ***nothing the power of God cannot do.***" UrW38L1

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do because ***the power of God lies in it.***" URW38L5

"It is therefore ***in my power to change every mind*** along with mine, for ***mine is the power of God***." UrW54L4

"Then ***let the power of God work in you and through you***, that His Will and yours may be done." URW69L7

"It is only your weakness that will depart from you in this practice, for it is ***the practice of the power of God in you.***" UrT15C7

"There is now ***no limit on his power***, because it is the Power of God." UrM24A2

"***The power of God***, from which they both arise, is yours as surely as it is His." UrT14G15

"Behind the dark doors which you have closed lies nothing, BECAUSE nothing CAN obscure ***the gift of God***. It is the CLOSING of the doors, that interferes with recognition of the ***power of God*** that shines in you." UrT14D10

"Who can limit the power of God Himself? Who then can say ***who can be healed of what***, and what must remain beyond ***God's power to forgive***?" UrM23A7

"***The power of God***, and all His Love, without limit, will support you, as you seek only your place in the plan of Atonement arising from His Love." UrT16H10

"***The power of God* will support every effort you make on behalf of the magnitude of His dear Son." UrT15D5

"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." UrT11H3

When we typically experience the world from an ego viewpoint, we might encounter lessons and people and problems. And then we attempt to forgive these things. And we think we are then done with forgiveness. And then another one comes along. And then we do another forgiveness. And this gives you the impression that you are doing forgiveness.

But over time, you are really moving horizontally through the world, encountering obstacles, one at a time, and these obstacles always seem specific. The form of the obstacle is what deceives you. The problem with your mother, the problem with the plumbing, the problem with the sick brother, the problem with your boss. Each one seems specifically different and unrelated to the rest. And so you perform a string of seeming forgivenesses through time.

But as you perform each forgiveness and move towards truth, you are in fact moving UPWARDS, towards the light. And this upwards movement may seem to be more subtle and gradual, such that it isn't even specific and it may be difficult to realize whether you are making upwards progress. But over time, it will start to occur to you that each of the seemingly different "forms" that problems take, is itself an illusion.

You will start to see that each of these forgiveness opportunities have something in common. Common characteristics. There's always some problem with your belief in who is causing who. And there's always some issue of authority and power. And there's always fear and reaction involved. And there's always the same stresses. And as you progress you start to generalize the learning and start to transcend the forms and differences. And then it starts to occur to you that these are not all different situations.

What forgiveness reveals to you, is that you aren't really in fact having to deal with a multitude of totally different problems, but that in fact the whole world, ALL of the problems, are doing the same thing. And ALL of the problems have the same characteristics. And ALL of them are forgiven in the same way. And this starts to show you that it's not really a specific problem with specific people, or specific groups, or specific situations, it's a problem with THE WHOLE WORLD.

And then you start to question the nature of the whole world. Maybe the WHOLE world is a collection of attacks. Maybe all of it, regardless of the form it takes, is ONE problem. And now you are starting to not fall for the illusion of form or the shape that a problem takes. You are realizing that either you move downwards into the darkness of hell, or upwards into the light of heaven. And either you are lost in the battlefield of stress and misery, or you are above the WHOLE battlefield in light and happiness.

Forgiveness starts to now take on a different direction. Its not so much to do with having a DIFFERENT way of handling each situation, but of developing a SINGLE "way" of dealing with them all. And you start to see through the deception or form that each one presents. And you stop falling for the obvious temptations. And now forgiveness is seen as vertical, in which either you are moving into hell or out of it, as a whole. And the qualities of the whole WORLD are now being brought into question.

You are now asking yourself, whether ANY of the things that happen are real. Whether ANY problem is really happening. Whether ANY person's attack has anything to do with you. Whether there even IS anything specific or different about any of it. And as you broaden your horizons to learn very large abstract truths such as that there is no world, this is just a dream, NONE of it is happening to you, loving everyone equally is the way to holy relationship, unity is the truth, sharing with everyone is unconditional love, etc... you move away from the specific towards the abstract.

And now it boils down the real "root cause" of the WHOLE of suffering, the reason for EVERY reaction, the purpose behind EVERY sickness. And you discover there not only really is only one problem, there is also only one solution. One solution to rule them all. And only one lesson that the Holy Spirit is teaching. Either the world is real or its not. And if it is real, you will suffer. And if it's not, you are free. If it's a dream, you have no basis for reactions or fear. If it's not a dream, you cannot help but react in fear. This is a fundamental lesson in the generalization of the teaching. That every form the illusion takes is just as DECOY to distract you from realizing that it's ALL the same.

This causes you to also start realizing that the hierarchy of illusions is a lie. Some things are NOT harder or more difficult than another. The form of a problem lies about its severity. You start to question whether a giant cancer is really any more threatening than a headache. You see how the ego tries to correlate the seriousness of a cause with the appropriate level of reaction, and you stop falling for this lie. The hierarchy starts to flatten, and all of the deceptions that make it seem like a world-sized maze of confusing corridors and disjointed pieces, simply start to fuse into each other as they're all seen as ONE DREAM. One problem, one solution.

"Miracles entail a sudden shift into vertical perception".

"Yet they are all the same and must be recognized as one if the one solution which solves them all is to be accepted."

"Without the values from the past you WOULD see them all the same"

"We will try to realize that we have only one problem, which we have failed to recognize. We will ask what it is, and wait for the answer. We will be told."

"Today I would remember the simplicity of salvation by reinforcing the lesson that there is one problem and one solution."

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

The idea that the world is just a dream, may sound very simple. But to fully and completely embrace it is a very tall order. If the world is just a dream, it changes your ENTIRE relationship to everything, to all people and object and events and places. Every single happening is framed differently, every interaction has a different meaning, and every piece of physical matter is up for question.

To accept this idea intellectually is very easy. It makes a lot of sense. If you can see the logic behind it, that we made this world as an opposite to God, and is therefore not real, you can accept that as making sense.

But to live it, to deep dive into it, to apply it everywhere and at all times, to remember it in the midsts of all happenings, to use it in all relationships, and to completely uproot all previous beliefs is long term challenge.

For me, the seemingly logical and clear conclusion that the world is not real, has become so refined and polished that I can see nothing to contradict it. Like, it makes total sense on paper. However, I still have a vast repository of "other beliefs" which have been convinced otherwise over time.

Beliefs in bodies being real. Beliefs in being a body. Beliefs in other people being bodies. Beliefs in events happening. Beliefs in seriousness and importance. Beliefs in value and priorities and hierarchies of difficulty. Beliefs in justified reactions and ego emotions and normality and human nature. All of those things scream that the world is real.

So what I find is that although I understand it in theory, my mind and beliefs still are quite uncertain about this idea. I go towards it a little more only to find other beliefs springing up into awareness saying, "but what about....". And every SINGLE one of those beliefs is rooted in the belief that the world is reality. The basic opposite premise of the dream. Each one of them signals and testifies that this is not just a dream.

So the mind then finds itself pulled in two directions. One direction pulls toward the seemingly glowing new "idea" or light, that it's true the world is just a dream and nothing is happening and no-one has ever sinned. And the other direction pulls towards the old worn out darkness of nightmares and hell, that there is sin everywhere and no hope for salvation.

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

"If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind. I can teach you, but only you can choose to listen to my teaching."

I will go towards the light of the truth, and the ego mind will go into doubt, which is fear. It will say, but what about this, and what about that.... there will be an uncertainty and a "not sure about this" and a "can this really be true?". There is a DIS-BELIEF.

"Ultimately, space is as meaningless as time. Both are merely beliefs. The real purpose of this world is to use it to correct your unbelief."

And the fact is that EVERY single opposition to the truth has to be uprooted and corrected and dispelled in order to have NO OBJECTIONS to accepting the atonement. If there is even a slight reason why you might not trust the truth, or suspect that it is false, or have a slight confusion about whether it is true or false, then you will not whole-heartedly accept the salvation it offers. Atonement can only be fully accepted through TOTAL willingness and certainty.

So I keep "naturally" checking and re-checking, looking at what the course says, reminding myself of its facts, re-considering the possibility that I might be mistaken about this new idea. I can't help but be "open minded" about the possibility that it is WRONG, because my ego already believes it is wrong and this pulls me into entertaining its possibility. And until I am wholly certain of its truth, which has to run VERY deeply and fully, this will keep happening.

"Until this distinction is made, however, the vacillations between free and imprisoned will cannot but continue."

These vacillations are to be expected for anyone who is attempting to awaken from the dream. If the world IS a dream and we have been believing it is NOT a dream, but a reality, then our entire way of believing and thinking and perceiving is going to have to go through a 180-degree transformation. Or as Jesus puts it, the upside-down thought system has to be turned right-side up, and that means nothing short of a complete reversal of your thought system and "world view".

Reversing your thought system WILL entail nothing less than realizing that everything you thought was what you did NOT want, you want. Everything you thought was evil, is good. Everything you thought was good, is evil. And all ego beliefs which claim a lie are actually claiming something else. It requires a tremendous sorting out of what is TRUE and what is FALSE, and in this endeavor you WILL be mistaken throughout the process. Which is why it requires a little willingness to consider the possibility that something else might be true, beyond what you currently believe.

I approach and I retreat. I get closer to accepting and then the ego fear pops up. I use the confusion as an opportunity to find more clarity, and then advance forward again. Each time becoming a little and more convinced, not just in theory but in practice, in direct experience, of the world's unreality. Because if what ACIM says is true, then "awareness of dreaming" and "the body is a dream" must become my new reality, before I can go home to God.

One thing is for sure, the road home to God is winding with spluttering false starts and lurches and gradual progress."I can but choose to wander off a while, and then return. Your loving Voice will always call me back, and guide my feet aright.""He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again."

"Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream"

"The Second Coming is merely the return of sense."

There is a sequence of cause and effect, in which a higher level causes a lower level.

God causes the Son of God. The Son of God causes his dream of separation. God is cause, the son is effect. The son shares the father's ability to cause, and causes his dream, which is an effect.

Everything in the dream is an effect of the Son's dreaming. Even the things which appear to be causes cannot be causes, they are illusions of causes. The Son of God implemented both the "things that cause" and "the effects of those causes" simultaneously, both as effects.

If he were writing a movie and filming it, it would mean setting up the car to come into the scene at just the right time, and setting up the conditions for the crash, and setting up that which it crashes into, and setting up the way that the crashed-into thing is changed by the crash. All at once. There is no cause or effect on the level of the movie, it's an illusion.

This is perhaps even more easily understood in the behind-the-scenes creation of digital movies where there isn't any cause-and-effect laws of physics to comply with, so if you want there to appear to be "an effect" of something happening, you have to actually literally manually make that effect, ie cause it, otherwise the car will pass right through the wall and everyone would be like "that's not real".

When we mistake the ORDER in which the levels are thus arranged, mistaking an effect for a cause, we're believing a lower order level has power/will/mind/control over a higher order level. This confusion of the levels, or attributing some properties to some levels which they do not have, based on what is true for another level, is level confusion. "All sickness comes from confusing the levels".

Examples:

Believing the world (an effect) is a cause and it's causing you.

Believing you are at the effect of the world or a victim.

Believing something in the world has an alien will with a power to change you against your will.

Believing in death happening to you against your will.

Believing you are sick "because of" something outside of you.

Believing the world has a "magical ability" to make things happen (magic).

Believing God's will is not your will - the authority problem.

Believing your body has power over your mind, and a mind of its own.

Believing your body is coming from the world, not from your mind.

Believing there are causes in the world which produce effects, and effects which can become causes in their own right, which can in turn transform causes into effects.

Believing that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Believing the ego's laws of physics, biology, chemistry, etc.

Believing there are life forms in the world which are actually alive and animated by nature.

Believing the world is natural and God's creation.

Believing in an alien will separate from your own which therefore terrifies you because there is nothing you can do to stop it from affecting you.

Believing you are sick or broken or hurt or upset or afraid or sad because of something that happened in the world or in other people.

Believing that salvation, truth, love, safety, peace, and innocence all exist external from yourself and that you need to seek out there to find it, and that you will find it if you try hard enough.

Believing you are unlovable because love is not in you already where God put it.

Believing God is not your father and that you are the cause of him.

Believing in real sin, with the ability to create real effects in God, to change God, to change reality, to redefine the truth and to make permanent irreversible changes which can never be healed.

Believing in judgement and unforgiveness and anger as being justified due to what happened to you from an external cause against your will.

All of these are level confusion. THE ENTIRE EGO THOUGHT SYSTEM IS LEVEL CONFUSION!

They all entail believing there is a cause within a level of effect. That the "lower" order level of illusions have "become alive" or gained a mind or will of their own. Whatever it was that, in truth, came FROM the causality of your mind, has suddenly because a cause OF your mind. That's confusion!

Miracles place the levels in their correct order. Miracles are expressions of the fact that only mind, TRUE CAUSE, can cause, and everything else is in this world is an EFFECT, including the world (earth) itself. The world does nothing at all, it is only an effect. It has NO CAUSES in it. Nothing is happening to you. No-one is victimizing you. You are not at the effect of the world you see.

Correcting level confusion is the only correction needed to reach the atonement. When everything is seen in its correct sequence, you will have mind over matter, power over all illusions, and nothing in the world will be able to withstand the causal Power of God that flows through you. Miracles are supernatural BECAUSE they come from a higher level of causality, demonstrating that the lower level IS an effect and its illusions of cause-effect do not really apply. They come from above the "nature" of the world and PROVE that no cause in the world has any power whatsoever, and therefore its "effects" are easily changed.

"A sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct. This sense of separation would never have arisen if you had not distorted your perception of truth, and had thus perceived yourself as lacking."

Before the separation there were no problems. There was no sickness. No death. No war. No lack or suffering. No pain or fear. No guilt. No sin. Nothing. There was only joy and love and creation and peace and light and truth and celebration.

Recognize this then. ABSOLUTELY EVERY problem or difficulty in this world is symptomatic of what happens when you leave God. EVERYTHING.

Everything in this world is MADE OF "God’s absence". MADE OF IT. ***It IS the separation***. It is not something that was "tacked on" after separation, it is the separation ITSELF. The direct and unavoidable RESULT of trying to exist without love.

All sickness and all death are nothing more than an aspect of you being separate from God. These things did not happen for any other reason. There was NO CAUSE whatsoever other than the causality in Heaven, prior to the separation.

Problems, sickness, death, suffering, it is all a manifestation of "being without God". All needs that have arisen are there ONLY because we are LACKING GOD. Every form of sickness is the absence of God. All forms of death are the absence of Life, and God is life. Every war and every conflict is arising because of the absence of God.

To in any way suggest that your return to God/truth will entail the retention of ANY PROBLEM, any form of sickness, suffering, lack or death, or even this world itself, is absolute bullshit. ALL of this "stuff" IS THE SEPARATION. When there is no separation, there IS NONE OF THIS.

There is NO PROBLEM other than the separation from God. There IS nothing happening in this world that isn’t symptomatic of trying to be away from Him. EVERYTHING here is the RESULT, of pushing God away.

You do not have a problem paying bills. You do not have unfair sicknesses caused by improper diet. You do not have struggles with coworkers which is their fault. You do not have issues with people on facebook groups. The separation from God IS THE ONLY LACK YOU NEED CORRECT. You have a problem with GOD, not with this world. This world is the FORM of your problem with God. And there is **no problem** love cannot solve.

"Let me recognize my problems have been solved. If you are willing to recognize your problems, you will recognize that you have no problems. Your one central problem has been answered, and you have no other."

Every question that you have, every fear, every doubt, every problem, when you are EXPOSED to God, if you try to commune with God, none of those questions become answered. What happens instead, is all your questions DISAPPEAR. They simply vanish. Every question was a form of fear arising from the ABSENCE of God. When He shows up, the entire foundation for those questions no longer exists.

When you go to God, you are SOLVING every problem you have. When you join with God, His MERE PRESENCE is the SOLUTION to every issue in your life. Because every single issue in your life, no matter how it APPEARS, or how specific it seems to be, or how confined it seems to be, or how much it seems to be about specific people and not others, IT IS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY OF THAT.

Pushing God away introduces lack. Pushing God away introduces fear. Pushing God away makes you feel guilty and want to die. Pushing God away is the source of ALL ILLNESS. Pushing God away is the source of every war and every single death that has even taken place in this dream.

Every aspect of every nightmare is the result of the "darkness" that seems to come about when light is absent.

All financial problems are a lack of God. Every argument arises from a lack of God. All injuries are a lack of God. Every disease is a lack of God. All problems in your job are the lack of God. Everything you attack or judge is the result of the lack of God. There is not a single problem in this world that is anything other than a symptom of God being absent. Upon his "return" to your life, it simply all will disappear because it was all made of his absence. This is a metaphysical fact.

Loving with God = eternal life. Trying to exist without God = suffering and death.

You do not have any other problem other than not being with God. All you have done is you have pushed away the provision of every need you could possible have. You have rejected life. You’ve separated yourself from effortlessness and from being natural. You’ve tried to deny eternal life and immortality. You’ve attempted to suppress all power and creative potential. You ONLY have a shit life because you’ve shut God out.

There is no other problem to solve. And this problem ONLY HAS ONE SOLUTION. The ONLY solution to EVERY problem in the world, is love. God Himself. The restoration of your willingness and awareness of the presence of God in your life, in your mind, in your heart, in your being. LOVE SOLVES EVERYTHING. Not only does it solve everything, it is THE ONLY WAY to solve ANYTHING. There is NO OTHER ANSWER.

You cannot be happy without God. You cannot live without God. And in truth, you cannot be separate from God either. So all of these problems you have, cannot be real problems. They must be illusions of "being separate from God". A dream of "what might it be like without love". This dream fortunately is NOT THE SAME THING as "separation really happening". It’s just a great big IDEA. Wake up. God still loves you and that’s forever. And that’s all you need.

DAMAGED BODIES ARE ACCUSERS!

IF YOUR BODY STILL HAS SICKNESS, IT IS STILL ACCUSING AND FORGIVENESS IS NOT COMPLETE UNTIL IT HAS BROUGHT HEALING TO THE BODY AS WELL

Here is the passage which definitively explains that if you show a damaged, broken, sick, defective, disabled, ill, corrupt, dead, or in any way unhealthy body to your brother, YOU HAVE NOT FORGIVEN HIM. "A miracle of healing proves separation is without effect". The EFFECTS have to be CANCELLED, otherwise you are STILL condemning. This literally means that you MUST HEAL YOUR BODY in order to prove to your brother that you have forgiven him. It's not enough to just "do it in your head." You are to DEMONSTRATE a picture of immortality, not a picture of crucifixion.

From "The fear of healing"... (shitloads of fear around this for most people)

"Is healing frightening? To many, yes. For accusation is a bar to love, and DAMAGED BODIES ARE ACCUSERS. They stand firmly in the way of trust and peace, PROCLAIMING that the frail can HAVE no trust, and that the damaged HAVE no grounds for peace. Who has been injured BY his brother, and could love and trust him still? He HAS attacked, and will attack again. Protect him not, because YOUR DAMAGED BODY SHOWS THAT YOU MUST BE PROTECTED FROM HIM. To forgive may be an act of charity, but NOT his due. He may be PITIED for his guilt, but NOT exonerated. And if you forgive him his transgressions, you but ADD to all the guilt that he has really earned.

The unhealed CANNOT pardon. For they are the WITNESSES that pardon is unfair. THEY WOULD RETAIN THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE GUILT THEY OVERLOOK. Yet no-one CAN forgive a sin which he believes is real. And WHAT HAS CONSEQUENCES MUST BE REAL, because WHAT IT HAS DONE IS THERE TO SEE. Forgiveness is NOT pity, which but seeks to pardon what it knows to be the truth. Good cannot BE returned for evil, for forgiveness does not first ESTABLISH sin, and THEN forgive it. Who can say and MEAN, "My brother, you have injured me, and yet, because I am the BETTER of the two, I pardon you my hurt." HIS pardon and YOUR hurt can NOT exist together. One DENIES the other, and MUST make it false.

To witness sin and yet forgive it is a paradox which reason cannot see. For it maintains what has been done to you DESERVES no pardon. And, by GIVING it, you grant your brother mercy, but retain THE PROOF HE IS NOT **REALLY** INNOCENT. THE SICK REMAIN ACCUSERS. They cannot forgive their brothers AND themselves as well. For no-one in whom true forgiveness reigns CAN suffer. HE HOLDS NOT THE PROOF OF SIN BEFORE HIS BROTHERS EYES. And thus he MUST have overlooked it, and removed it from his own. Forgiveness CANNOT be for one, and not the other. Who forgives IS HEALED. And IN HIS HEALING LIES THE PROOF that he has TRULY pardoned, and RETAINS NO TRACE OF CONDEMNATION THAT HE STILL WOULD HOLD AGAINST HIMSELF OR ANY LIVING THING.

FORGIVENESS IS NOT REAL UNLESS IT BRINGS A HEALING TO BOTH YOUR BROTHER AND YOURSELF. YOU must attest his sins HAD NO EFFECT on YOU, to DEMONSTRATE they were not real. HOW ELSE COULD HE BE GUILTLESS? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING LIES THE PROOF that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A BROKEN BODY SHOWS THE MIND HAS **NOT** BEEN HEALED. A miracle of healing PROVES that separation is WITHOUT effect.

WHAT YOU WOULD PROVE TO HIM YOU WILL BELIEVE. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And EVERYTHING YOU SAY OR DO or think but testifies to what you teach to him. YOUR BODY CAN BE MEANS TO TEACH THAT IT HAS NEVER SUFFERED PAIN BECAUSE OF HIM. And IN ITS HEALING can it offer him MUTE TESTIMONY TO HIS INNOCENCE. IT IS THIS TESTIMONY THAT CAN SPEAK WITH POWER GREATER THAN A THOUSAND TONGUES. FOR HERE HIS FORGIVENESS IS **PROVED** TO HIM. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does YOUR HEALING (mind AND body) SHOW your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE CONVINCED his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you.

Thus does the miracle undo all things THE WORLD ATTESTS CANNOT BE UNDONE. AND HOPELESSNESS AND DEATH MUST DISAPPEAR before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has POWER FAR BEYOND the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. The ancient Calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto his own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear. Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to SHOW YOU BROTHER that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing (physically), that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream.

How just are miracles! For they bestow an equal gift of FULL DELIVERANCE from guilt upon your brother AND yourself. YOUR healing saves HIM pain, as well as you. And YOU are healed BECAUSE you wished him well. This is the law the miracle obeys: That healing sees no specialness at all. It does NOT come from pity, but from love. And love would prove ALL suffering is but a vain imagining, a foolish wish, ***WITH NO EFFECTS***. YOUR HEALTH is a result of your desire to see your brother with no blood upon his hands, nor guilt upon his heart made heavy with the PROOF of sin. And what you wish is GIVEN you to see."

(See also "Only the mind AND BODY need atonement.")

There are some basic facts in the course. These facts are completely clear cut, black and white. They do not have any exceptions. There is no "maybe" to them. They are so perfectly defined and clear that all you can do is either accept them or deny them. Such is the truth.

e.g. The fact is, God is eternal.

So if you can start by accepting this fact, we can move on to another fact. But if you cannot accept this fact, or think there are exceptions to it, or don’t understand what eternal means, we can’t make any other sensible conclusions.

Eternal - lasting forever, always the same, permanent, unwavering, lacking all change or difference, never ending or beginning, constant and unfaltering. Yes?

If you can accept this, you can accept this is God’s nature. And under NO circumstances is this ever opposed, or untrue. If God is eternal, the truth about God must also be eternal. It is fixed. It’s a fact.

Upon accepting this premise, we can move on to say, clearly, if God is a creator, and because God is eternal, God creates in an eternal way. What he creates MUST BE eternal also, as an EXTENSION of His own nature.

Would it make sense to say that an eternal creator would create anything less than something eternal? Think about what that would entail. It means God has a VARIETY of kinds of creations which are different and contradict each other, and so is confused. It means God does not always think eternal thoughts, and so thinks of death. It means God changes his mind. It means therefore that sometimes God is not God. In fact, it means sometimes God stops being eternal also, and dies. Do we really want THAT to be the truth?? Does that make ANY sense? Not at all. Do not accept this nonsense.

So to make sense here, we have to accept, admit, the fact is, when God EXTENDS HIMSELF, when God expresses eternity, when God GIVES HIMSELF to His creations, He MUST produce ONLY eternal life. He can only give what he has. He cannot create UNLIKE Himself. This should make perfect sense because it is impeccably logical. Creation is the extension of God’s own eternal nature. And this simply leads to the fact that God CANNOT create anything that lacks eternal life.

So now you might be thinking about things you know of in this world, wondering if or HOW they might have eternal life. You might now enter into wishful thinking, even strong resistance, or unwillingness to realize that they may not HAVE eternal life. You might want to blur the definition of what eternal means. You may not want this "cold hard fact" to be true. It might imply some things you do not want, or incite ego reactions and upset. And these are poor quality ego thoughts. The mind is slipping out of impeccable logic and reason and going into denial.

Facts can be accepted or denied, but they cannot be changed. You have to have a CLEAR grasp of what ETERNAL means. And you can’t be wishywashy about it. It is black and white. Something lives forever or it does not. Something is permanent and unchanging OR it is temporary and changes. Which is it? You have to be honest here. Denial does not bring the truth.

There is no OPINON involved here. There are no "multiple possible interpretations". The facts are rock solid. Impeccable. Clear. Perfect. So true that they are not OPEN to interpretation. You either accept them as a result of RECOGNIZING the sense they make, or reject them. The great thing about dealing with impeccably logical facts is that the ego cannot have a say, opinions do not matter, and there is no way to be incorrect UNLESS you fail to reason correctly. Your role of "decider of what is true" goes bye bye. Facts are the end of the ego. The truth sets you free.

Fact is, a world that changes is not eternal. How could it be, when eternal means NEVER ENDS and NEVER CHANGES? If God is eternal, he CANNOT create a changing world. This is a raw fact. Beginnings and ends are not of Him. This is why the world - Earth - which ONLY changes, and has no permanent identity, cannot have come from Him. And therefore, it cannot be eternal reality, or His creation. This is why ACIM refers to it as the world YOU made. And it OPPOSES His because it opposes eternal life.

It is an impeccable fact that this world is not God’s Kingdom. It is not real. And it does not really exist. This is why there is no world. This can be accepted, or denied, but the fact cannot be changed. Your only freedom is in whether you are WILLING to ACCEPT that it is a fact, or deny it. And denial of facts brings illusions of suffering. If you want the truth, you have to be WILLING to let go of anything which goes against the facts.

A Course in Miracles is BASED ON these facts. It’s metaphysics lines up with it perfectly. And it is these facts which lay the foundation for the Holy Spirit’s thought system. Accepting there is no world is accepting the facts. And accepting the facts results in accepting eternal life. The truth of God is not yours to define. And only His eternal truth is true.

"The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit."

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death."

"follow the simple logic, by which the Holy Spirit teaches you the simple conclusions that speak for truth, and ONLY truth."

Here's another angle on the problem of regarding ACIM as "non-duality."

In ACIM we're told that God is a creator, and has created sons. You are one of those sons, which means you are a child of God. It means God is your parent. God is the CAUSE of you, and you are an EFFECT. In the separation from God, or "fall of man", there was a rebellion against God being your parent. The sons of God rejected God's causation of them and wanted to reinvent/create themselves.

They developed a problem with God's authority. The wanted to have power over God and to be his equal, instead of being his child. They did not want to be secondary creations, they wanted to be primary. They did not want to be an effect of him, they wanted to be "free from his influence".

This then led to the making of a world of bodies and egos where we would try to reinvent ourselves and deifne what we are, without God. But this means that in order to wake up to reality, to become "one with God", to experience oneness and truth, you have to actually return to a role and function where you are SECOND to God.

It is not about returning to being first, or primary, or God's equal, or having the same function as God. It is not about you going to the top of the mountain and having nothing above you.

In order to get out of hell you have to undo your problem with authority. You can only have a problem with authority if in truth you actually are BELOW God and God is GREATER than you, so that there might be grounds for wanting to overthrow his authority over you.

"recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER."

If you subscribe to a non-duality idea of reality, where you claim to return to oneness, where you claim to be God, where you see yourself as not a fully-created separate being or a "child of God", and where you do not acknowledge God as your father, you are missing a HUGE portion of ACIM's teaching.

ACIM doesn't teach that you are going to just become the oneness and be God and rule reality. It says that you need to accept God as your source, receive your inheritance from him, that you are only what HE has created you to be, that your only function is to EXTEND him, and that you will forever be an EFFECT of him.

This idea of being an effect of God, second to God, is absolutely core in ACIM's metaphysics. There MUST BE a created second being, a child of God, a son of God, in order for there to have ever been a separation ie authority problem in the first place. There could be no rebellion without you being LESS than God, in a sense.

So non-duality doesn't usually accomodate this. Nor does traditional ideas of "its all oneness". It doesn't usually acknowledge that God has created anything, that he has children, that YOU have a parent, or that there is something BIGGER AND GREATER THAN YOU.

But ACIM is telling you that the only way for you to find salvation and return to reality is to accept that God is your father, NOT your equal. You cannot regain your inheritance without accepting that you inherited it FROM God BECAUSE he is your parent. And you cannot resume your role and function in reality as co-creator without acknowledging that God is the FIRST CAUSE and you are SECOND. You are a CO-CREATOR not the PRIMARY creator. God came first.

"Think not HE wills to bind you, Who has made you co-creator of the universe along with Him."

Since for example in Adviata non-duality usually means "there is no second", it is TOTALLY incompatible with ACIM's teaching. It does not acknowledge God having a child, or of you BEING a child. OR that your ultimate role and maximal experience of reality is going to entail you being what SOMEONE ELSE wants you to be. That you are AS GOD created you to be, not what "you chose".

It thus requires humility to accept that God is greater than you and that in ultimate reality you are going to return to a position in which you are NOT FIRST, you are not the prime creator, you are not the all-encompassing source of reality, and you DO NOT MAKE THE RULES.

Non-duality rarely suggests any compatibility with this idea of being a CHILD of God, or of there being any grounds for an authority problem, or a necessity for its undoing. Usually it points to the dissolution of your self, the erasing of God's CHILD, and some kind of lofty return to you being "only God". As if you are the oneness and you are the ultimate. YOU ARE NOT!!!!

God is first, you are second. That is what acceptance of the atonement means. God is your father and he is greater than you, and you're going to have to "suck it up" and accept it instead of wanting to be the central figure and star of the show. You are a secondary being. Not less than God but also not greater, and not equal. You are not equal to ultimate reality. You are a part within it.

To recognize this is to recognize that ACIM cannot be non-duality because it has to accommodate SONS OF GOD in order to accommodate the authority problem AND its proper undoing. You cannot wake up to reality without accepting that you are AN EFFECT of a creator other than yourself, that you did not create yourself, that you are not "God" in this sense, and that your function is to PASS ON what you have RECEIVED from him.

"The extension of God's Being is the Soul's only function."

What you are is given by God and decided by God. You will have to be willing to accept there is a creator GREATER THAN YOU if you want to experience the truth. As such non-duality is generally speaking a problem with the authority of God, because it positions you AS God or AS his equal, and this is inappropriate. It suggests even in some cases that God is dreaming and making death. To say "I am God" is the arrogance of the ego.

Unless you can accept that reality contains you as a second-level creation, you are not listening to what A Course in Miracles is saying. And you are then missing out on the beautiful relaltionship which comes from the recognition that you HAVE A REAL PARENT. Someone who is in fact literally protecting you always, is maintaining you forever, and is making sure that your innocence is permanently guaranteed FOR you. This is not all about "me me me" self-centered non-dualtiy "I will be God" garbage.

The ego only comes about when there is an emphasis of DIFFERENCES between any two things.

If two holy beings are relating to each other, recognizing their equality, there is no egotism involved. Their equality makes it impossible for them to be different or to have different interests or for different rules to apply to each.

Without differences there cannot be a difference of opinion, therefore there cannot be conflict. Without conflict there is no ego. The ego is made of illusory differences or the idea of inequality. When there is equality there is no ego.

Therefore, recognize that "having an ego" does NOT necessarily equate with "having a self", nor does it equate with "being an individual".

The only way in which a self could turn into an ego is if that self is DIFFERENT to other selves in some way - a different appearance, a different opinion, a different form, a different nature, a different interest etc.

The only way that individuality turns into ego is when a person attempts to DIFFERENTIATE their individuality from others by trying to make their self SPECIAL. Jesus says that the separation (creation of ego) occurred only when we sought "special favor". We already had our own self and individuality BEFORE we tried to be "better than" or "different to" others. Before that, we were equals with all of God’s Children - our "brothers" in Heaven.

Ego is NOT the idea of "being separate", as in, there being many individuals. The only way that individuals become separate in an egotistical way, is when they aim to be SPECIAL and thus in COMPETITION with others. That is egocentric, because the individual is then seeking special exclusive treatment that they would deny to others.

This also ties into "what is not love is murder", in which when one thing applies to one person that does not apply to another, cause and effect are separate and it seems you can escape the consequences of trying to attack a brother - thus getting away with murder. What is the opposite? The opposite is not to have NO brothers, it is to treat your brother as an EQUAL. LOVE, therefore, recognizes EQUALITY. Love does not have to mean "one self", when those selves are cooperating lovingly.

The same is true of free will, which each Child of God is granted. You would think that if everyone had free will there would be ego chaos. Not necessarily. If everyone wills IN THE SAME WAY or with the same GOAL, there is no disagreement and therefore no ego. When all wills are "united" or "in accord" with God’s Will, there is HARMONY.

Harmonious, ego-free relationships arise from mutual recognition of holiness and equality. Therefore every child can have their own free will and be co-creators, provided they are always desiring to share joy and love. When their interests are not different, there is no war, and thus no ego.

We need to be careful to recognize then that EGOTISM means SELFISHNESS, and being selfish isn’t inherent to you having a SELF - it’s just a bad attitude. Selfishness means self-interest or in some way believing that something applies to you which others should not be a part of. It is a lack of SHARING or willingness to be equal and share everything with others. When there IS a willingness to share everything equally, there can STILL be selves, but now these selves are holy and innocent.

The idea therefore that ego means "any kind of separation" is not true! It’s okay for MANY BEINGS to be LOVING. For brothers to be loving, equal, identical and to share everything. The fact that brothers are getting along in a NOT-SELFISH way, lacking ego, does not mean they have to stop being separate beings. You getting along with your neighbor doesn’t entail you having to destroy them.

Jesus says that the ego entails selfishness, while the SOUL entails SELF-FULLNESS. If you think about it, when you are being selfish you actually WITHDRAW part of yourself from sharing with your brothers. Therefore you are no longer being the fullness of yourself. To be ego is to be NOT YOURSELF. It is a withdrawal of yourself from your brother and an attempt ISOLATE so that you stop SHARING. Egotism is simply lack of sharing, not being a "separate being". When you isolate yourself you become UNNATURALLY SEPARATE, but your inherent "self" which is "separate" from other selves is NOT unnatural.

Although it looks like being self-oriented, ego is actually the ABSENCE OF SELF, because self is naturally open and sharing. Ego is confinement, imprisonment, limitation, lack and a loss of identity. This is why being in the ego ends in death of the self. Self denial, self attack, self abuse and self sabotage are attempts to UNDO the Holy Self that God created you as. Death is a denial that you are a free-willed individual who lives forever.

Becoming "more ego" does not make you MORE SELF, it makes you less self. And the more you TRY to emphasize your "self" the more you LOSE IT. This is also why waking up means returning TO BEING YOURSELF, and is NOT a loss of self but a GAINING of self. It is only the LACK of yourself that disappears!

Being FULL of self is the opposite of being "full of yourself". Being full of yourself really means PRETENDING to be someone you are not. It is a lack of authenticity. Being your authentic SELF means being the Child of God that God created. "I am still as God created ME" means you are still the holy child which God created as ONE of his holy children.

Egotism or having an ego does not mean having a self or being an individual. It means HIDING YOUR SELF behind a facade of lies. You DO exist. You have a Holy Self with your own Holy Mind. There is nothing WRONG with that. It is not ego to say that God created many children. Ego does not equate with all forms of separation! It’s OKAY for God to have created "separate beings", provided those beings are loving, equal, and have no egotism or specialness. It’s only when they COMPETE that there is a separation problem.

"God, who encompasses all being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share tit to increase their joy."

That is a recipe for harmony, happiness, joy and peace. There is no ego in that. God creating a Kingdom with many things in it, doesn’t mean there is any EGO in it. It’s okay for WHAT IS REAL to be a living world filled with light beings who love each other equally. Being one of many children of God does not man that you are fundamentally in competition with or attacking other children of God. Love brings order to God’s divine creaion.

If you're going through a loss, it can be hard to deal with the feelings.

At first I felt that the feelings were just overpowering and I was a victim of them, unable to control or stop them, albeit that I tried.

Gradually over time and after a lot of crying, I've somehow become more honest about it and more acknowledging of the feelings.

Or I should reword that, I've been pushed by the feelings so much to have to feel them no matter whether I want to or not, that I've had to surrender to it and go with it.

More recently that seems to be turning more into a kind of willingness to grieve. I think I had a lot of spiritual bypass crap from ACIM that was getting in the way of just being human about it.

I've been starting to see that there are places in me where I simply, ego or not, "want" something. At the core of loss there is always a sense of love or identification or some kind of valuing.

Within me, there is a place, it's even in the heart, that simply says, "I want to be with my wife." And there is another part that says "I want to go home".

This is because I lived in America and have let there now to live in the UK and have a lot of loss around the end of that entire chapter of life.

What I've been seeing lately is that although it sounds like some kind of backwards step, or going in the wrong direction, I have to be willing to acknowledge much more fully that I DO WANT these things.

It's as though up till now everything was sort of circling around it like a cloud of emotion and I just couldn't see clearly. As I home in on the "core" of this "suffering", its like it's coming into focus more, and revealing that at the centre there is this human bonding and love and caring and so on, which drives the loss.

It's not in my opinion "worse" or a regression to just own and admit and feel the "I want". Even if it's ego. Even if it's bullshit or not in line with God's truth. The wanting is there. Nor can I try to force myself to just "not want it", because that's brutal and not healing.

I'm making it okay to acknowledge how I feel and okay to feel it and to even throw myself into feeling it. Being more open and honest with the feeling rather than avoiding it, judging it, trying to get rid of it.

What I am finding is that, when I am willing to admit that I just want to be with her, or that I want to go home, it doesn't entail any denial. And this reveals something, it sheds a light on it.

Only by admitting that I want it and letting myself feel the wanting, does it make room for some "reality" to come in. The reality says, well.... even though you want this, the truth is, in practical terms, you can't actually have this. This thing that you want, isn't available any more.

It's a bit of a harsh truth, but if there FIRST isn't the willingness to admit to having the wanting - the yearning, the expectation - you can't get to the point where you can face reality.

You have to face the suffering head-on first before any light can be shed on it. And that means absolutely no spiritual bypasses, no denial, no avoidance, no judging, no defences, no making it wrong.

Upon looking more squarely and being "in" the wanting, it has made me realize that all the clouds of loss and confusion were disguising a rather simple AND limited thing - that this is about one person, and about a home that is gone.

It's not about the whole world, or my whole life. By bringing it into focus it's narrowed it down and now it seems perhaps more manageable. It's not the end of the whole world. It's just specifically about these two areas, two things that I want to be with. Regardless of whether that seems popular with other people or socially normal or anything else.

Once it's admitted that I really want these things, the situational truth starts to enter - it's not possible to have these things. This fact, this truth, starts to shed a light on the wanting, and reframes it. That, yes, I want something I can't have, but perhaps I should let go of that wanting because it's not a possibility. The reality of the "it's not possible" starts to come in, and in a way that starts to counteract and act upon the wanting.

Ultimately it's a sort of recognition or realisation, that I might as well let go, because what I want just isn't realistic or feasible. It's not like a defeat or some kind of horrible disappointment, it's just sort of facing facts, and as the course says "no one can argue with a fact." And "the truth shall set you free."

I'm still sort of. . squirming a bit about this insight, and with trying to acknowledge this "fact" of the impossibility of what I want, and thus the need to let it go due to it being "pointless". But as a step forward at least it's providing some sense of an ending being in sight, or a sort of "solution" to the problem.

I want to be with my wife, but I can't. It's okay to acknowledge that. I want to go home to America and be with what's been familiar for 25 years, but I can't. My ego cries out with "it's all gone" and "I want it" but that will change. Somehow at least admitting to the wanting of it is bringing it into the light to see it clearly, and to thus shed light upon it, and it is that light which perhaps is the source of liberation.

There is a fundamental split in the mind, which has produced essentially two systems of thought at once. There is heaven and there is earth, and there seems to be a separation between them. Jesus doesn't say that your whole mind has gone into the separation, or all of yourself. He says a PART of your mind has split off. Or rather, your whole mind sees itself as split into two parts. One of those parts is still in touch with knowledge and reality while the other part seems to see itself as separated off.

"But you have split your mind into what knows (level 1) and does not know (level 2) the truth."

"Your mind IS one with God's. Denying this and thinking otherwise has held your ego together, but has literally split your mind."

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought"

Mind doesn't leave heaven just because it believes in hell. There is still "the rest of you" awaiting for this "part of you" which you think is "all of you" to reintegrate with it. There is more to you than just the little self that you think is in a body.

"Every symptom which the ego has made involves a contradiction in terms. This is because the mind is split between the ego and the Soul, so that WHATEVER the ego makes is incomplete and contradictory."

So in truth you have a mind which is partly committed to God and partly not. This contradiction "is the ego", or takes the form of a separation or split, in which you seem to be in two minds or having two goals. One part of you knows, the other part is uncertain.

It's not just that there is one mind with a division in it, in which both sides of the division are equal. It's that there is mind being natural and mind be unnatural, or reality and its opposite being upheld in a single mind. So there are two sort of compartments where one part is unified with the soul and the other is in support of the ego, resulting in two systems of thought at once which are incompatible.

Typically while identified with the ego and body, you are aware only of the part of mind which is uncertain and does not know. But this is not the whole of your mind.

"Ego-illusions are QUITE specific, although they frequently change, and although the mind is naturally abstract, it became concrete voluntarily as soon as it split. However, only PART of it split, so only PART of it is concrete."

"The concrete part is the same part that believes in the ego, because the ego DEPENDS on the specific. It is the part that believes your existence means you are SEPARATE. Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply BEING."

Notice how Jesus says only part of the mind became concrete/specific, while the rest of the mind remained abstract. In effect, the split is not just a division between levels it's also a movement into the idea of "split-ness" or separateness. Within the split off part of mind, that part of mind believes in an entire system of separations and limitations, while the "higher mind" does not.

"The higher mind thinks according to the laws which the Soul obeys, and therefore honors only the laws of God."

"Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

So Jesus is saying that actually we have a higher part of mind, and a lower part of mind. The part of mind that is lower is only temporarily lower because it believes in something opposite to the higher. That lower part of mind is the part where "ego" seems to live, and where you are identifying as being ONLY the lower mind, out of touch with the soul. The little part of mind that seems to be in a body, which you THINK is all of you, is only a part of you. There is also a higher part which your blocks to awareness hide from you.

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that, within it, is YOUR Kingdom, where God can enter not. Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe."

"This little self is NOT your kingdom. Arched high above it, and surrounding it, with love, is the glorious whole, which offers all its happiness and deep content to EVERY part."

In order to undo the split in the mind, the lower mind has to reintegrate with the higher mind, which is achieved by transcending the separation-based ego thought system and thinking like the higher mind. ie Mind needs to re-adopt a single functioning and be undivided in its will.

The lower part of mind needs to align with God's will and accept the rest of mind as part of itself, to reunite with the sonship, so that it can be whole. This will entail a kind of "expansion" of identity to include more than you thought you were before.

"The sudden EXPANSION of the self that takes place with your DESIRE for it, is the irresistible appeal the holy instant holds."

"The part of mind where reason lies was dedicated, by your will in union with your Father's, to the UNDOING of insanity. Here was the Holy Spirit's purpose accepted and accomplished, both at once."

"While you believe that two totally contradictory thought systems SHARE truth, your need for vigilance is apparent. Your minds ARE dividing their allegiance between two kingdoms, and YOU are totally committed to neither."

I love learning about miracles.

There are kind of two levels or layers of mind. The higher level is filled with love. It is a mind at-one with others and filled with God’s Will. It has no ego, has let go of its separate will (the authority problem), and is free to perform miracles. This mind is naturally miraculous. It shares the Power of God, which is unlimited. This mind is so holy and so powerful, there is literally nothing it cannot do.

The second layer is accessed via a kind of "descent into hell", aka the separation from God. This lower level is like going into darkness, into separation, into isolation and suffering, into sickness and death. It is here that all of the beliefs in sin, guilt and fear seem to exist. It is here that people choose to die. It is here that all suffering seems to occur.

A miracle, is a HEALING ACT, where a higher-level mind "lifts away" (undoes) the darkness. It’s like the hand of God reaching down into the darkness and lifting up the souls who find themselves trapped there. It brings them back towards God. It restores and heightens communication, because communication means sharing the mind of oneness - the undoing of separation and darkness.

A miracle is an EXPRESSION OF LOVE, which shines with a healing power onto the "starved and thirsty creatures", blessing them with beautiful healing softness and restoration, undoing all signs and symptoms of separation. These signs include all sickness, suffering, pain and death, as well as all emotional states and states of mental illness. All of these are healed because the mind is LIFTED UP towards the light, which dissolves the darkness and causes the symptoms/expressions of a lack of love to disappear.

The miracle lifts away layers of separation which have come between the Son of God and God. All forms of sickness are symptomatic of this belief in separation, and therefore all forms of sickness can be healed by the miracle.

The higher-level loving mind is able to lift away layer upon layer of separation and denial. The result is a *supernatural*, ego-law-defying, sin-reversing, death-reversing, separation-reversing, uplifting demonstration that the mind of love has power over all forms of separation.

The miracle heals from the top down. It is a light which shines upon the darkness and dispels it. This doesn’t just mean, but does include, the healing of the mind, the removal of blocks to awareness, the undoing of false beliefs, and the correction of perception. Yet since all suffering stems from false perception, and all forms of sickness and death stem from it also, all such things are simultaneously dissolved (undone).

"The miracle does nothing - all it does is undo." This doesn’t really mean that miracles have no power and do not cause anything to change. What it really means is, because the ego is entirely a state of "doing stuff", and all illusions take effort to maintain, and all sickness is an act of force, the CESSATION of that effort which comes about through "doing nothing" actually COLLAPSES AND UNDOES what the ego WAS doing, including all of its illusory symptoms and signs and effects. They simply vanish. That vanishing is perceivable and tangible!

The ultimate aim of miracles is therefore the lifting up of the mind to wholeness, the restoration of communication and union, and the healing of all separation. That IS going to entail the un-doing of all the things the ego is doing, and therefore WILL INCLUDE the reversal of all forms of death.

If death means separation or distance from God, as a descent into darkness and hellish nightmares, then the UNDOING of death results in RESURRECTION. This resurrection is not just going to take place "in the mind" and not the body and not the world. ALL of these things are equally parts of the ego thought yssystem. Mental death, emotional death, physical death, all of them can be lifted away and reversed by the miracle worker.

This does also mean that miracles therefore can literally reverse physical death, can literally undo all sickness such as cancer, blindness, damaged or missing limbs, mental disorders, etc. There is NOTHING your holiness cannot do.

Your holiness is also able to do things which you might think do not appear to be useful miracles. IF it were beneficial in raising awareness and increasing knowledge of the fact that the ego’s dream is a LIE, ie would be useful to *literally* move a mountain. If it taught a lesson, showed that the ego’s laws are false, or healed false perceptions in some way, it would be valuable.

When Jesus walked on water, it was not to show off. It was an act to demonstrate, and prove, that the laws of physics have no bearing on the miracle worker. It was a teaching act. When Jesus multiplied food for thousands of hungry people, it wasn’t to show off. It was to demonstrate and use the miracle-working power of the mind, to manifest food out of nowhere, to prove that hunger is unnecessary and people need not suffer. It was educational. Miracles are teaching devices.

Wherever there is suffering, there is bondage to the ego. This means the person is attempting to be far from God. All sickness is a defense against the truth. Everything about the ego and suffering and death is about trying to put more distance between yourself and God. The miracle CLOSES THE GAP and heals the separation, causing miraculous results.

This is also a maximal service that you can render to another person, giving them the love they are lacking, supplying a need from above, from those who temporarily have more to those who temporarily have less. Think of this as all happening on a VERTICAL axis. This is why the course says that miracles are a shift in perception from horizontal to vertical perception. A movement UPWARDS towards God heals and undoes the manifestations of the ego.

Miracles lift you and your brothers up towards Heaven. They loosen the chains, release you of the darkness, and allow you to express and shine a light. That light is a Life Giving force. It has the power to REVERSE DEATH. And it is only by this power that YOU can resurrect back to life, away from the lower state of death in which you find yourself.

Miracles lift you UP from a lower level, at first by having faith in a higher level power (Holy Spirit). Later, you will be up AT the higher level, more able to then RAISE OTHERS UP out of their darkness. Your expressions of love toward them can heal them, undo all of their suffering, reverse all states of suffering and even bring them back from the dead.

Love heals. Love is powerful. Love is ALIVE and gives Life, even to the dead. There is nothing that love cannot do, and there is nothing that cannot be undone. If love could not reverse death, it would be powerless and unmiraculous, and have no ability to return you to Heaven. A belief in death is a belief in the end of miracles. A belief in Life is a belief and a trust in UNLIMITED RESURRECTION and Eternal Life.

I think we all realize we are supposed to get rid of the ego. This is agreed to by almost all ACIM students, shockingly enough. But how do we do that? And can we do it without losing ourselves entirely?

We do have a real self. "I am as God created me." There is at least one son of God which is you, and me, and everyone. So we don't want to be getting rid of what God has created.

"God who encompasses all being nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy."

Gods mind functions based on the holographic principle, in which the whole (God) is in every part (Sons), and every part is whole and contains the whole. That means each son shares the same whole and is the same whole, and each son is every other son as well.

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you."

In the separation, we drew a little circle around our individual selves and decided to stop sharing. We wanted to separate off and go our own separate ways. We became exclusive, and selfish, and thinking of ourselves as not having what others have. It was an attempt to put a stop to the oneness, while keeping the individuality.

If we were to now say we should get rid of individuality, we are trying to destroy what God created. Individuality was never the problem. The problem was the desire not to share anything. It was the opposition to the oneness and produced the ego. The ego then is simply "selfishness", or unwillingness to share.

"Selfishness is of the ego but self-fullness is of the Soul because that is how He created it."

So in fact we are supposed to be full of self. But self is shared. Self is Christ - a shared identification as the one son. We are each the whole. When you are full of the whole, you are full of self. And that also means the entire Kingdom of God is you.

"The Kingdom CANNOT be found alone, and you who ARE the Kingdom cannot find YOURSELVES alone."

"You ARE the Kingdom of Heaven, but you have let the belief in darkness enter your minds, and so you need a new light."

"We are Creation; we the Sons of God."

So we don't want to be getting rid of anything God created. We don't want to be undoing individuality - provided it's an individuality that is also shared with others. We don't want to be destroying all identity or eradicating self - provided the self also includes other selves.

It's also worth nothing that we do not want to be getting rid of mind. There is no such thing as an ego mind or a wrong mind. There is only mind as God created it. And sometimes mind is sane and sometimes mind is insane. When it is insane it is being egotistical. The egotism needs correction so that that same mind can return to sanity. We do not destroy minds, we heal them.

What we DO want to be rid of is the sense of separation. Separation isn't what gave us individuality, nor led to many beings. Separation is what happens when you take the holographic system of heaven and you draw a little fence around the part that you regard as your self or soul, and you "separate it off" as though it is exclusive and isolated and alone.

This later leads to the physical fence around the mind that we call the body. It's kind of like a little prison. So one thing we do want to get rid of is the sense of imprisonment in a body, which we do by not identifying with it and not believing it. But more broadly we want to be getting rid of any sense of exclusiveness.

In God, everything belongs to everyone, and you DO own what you've been given, but you do not own it EXCLUSIVELY. You have to share it. It's like a communal property. Even your SELF is shared and not exclusively yours. When you develop a sense of owning something that ONLY you have, or lacking something that others have, that's ego.

This becomes a little tricky then because we have to let go of the idea of exclusively owning anything, which to the ego implies we own nothing (wrongly), while still keeping ownership of everything. We are not being asked to get rid of everything, we're being asked to stop trying to posses it like it's only ours or only for ourself, as if it has only your name on it and no-one else can have it.

You could say, well, let's get rid of anything personal. Because "personal", similar to "private", tends to be an idea of something that is exclusively yours, or a form of exclusion. But you have to be careful here because personal becomes bound to "the person" and getting rid of anything personal can imply (to wrong thinking) that you have to get rid of your self. You want to incorporate the oneness of the whole but without denying yourself.

What we do want to be free from is exclusivity, selfishness, possession, exclusive ownership, hoarding, lack and poverty, not sharing, a desire not to include others in one's sense of identity, being separated off by a wall of flesh, seeing ourselves as having anything at all that others don't have, any sense of inequality, any isolation or aloneness or sense that you exist inside a body prison, any notion that what's best for others has nothing to do with what's best for you, and any sense of pride or specialness as if you are better or worse than another.

Any kind of "wall" has to go, and as the walls go the separations go. And this does NOT mean (wrong thinking again) that this leads to a oneness in which you stop existing as a self. It does lead to oneness, but oneness means SHARING and relationship and community and being God's family. All that should happen to your self is it should EXPAND TO INCLUDE the whole and all others, while still being a self. It sounds like a paradox to the ego but it's how things are set up in creation.

None of this has anything to do with getting rid of yourself or your sense of being an individual, but it does entail weeding out the aspects of individuality that hint at "I'm different to you". The elements of "self" that have become infected with "mine alone" and "not yours" and "you not me" and the various other forms of exclusivity.

The sense of self has to be PURIFIED of the egoic elements, so that you end up with a PURE SELF, a whole self, which contains the whole, is identified with the shared Christ identity, contains all brothers and the entire Kingdom and all of creation, and is one with God as well. That means recognizing that the entirety of heaven is in you, God is in you, all brothers are in you, and you are everyone and everything, including yourself.

I've seen recently a new perspective on the healing of self and others.

I noticed that as I was helping a person to realise that they had been hurting themselves, that they were making themselves guilty, and that they deserved love, I also felt a greater love within myself. I was becoming healed as I conveyed to the other person how much they deserved to be healed.

I hadn't experienced this much before, probably because I hadn't focused on how someone else needed help with their own self-attack. The more it became clear to me that they were hurting themselves, and that they deserved better, I felt better myself.

This kind of turned a key in my mind and is now causing me to see people differently. I recognise now that we are all created equal and perfect in Christ, we have temporarily fallen into self destruction, and now we are attempting to return. This means that it can appear someone is evil, sinful, guilty, wrong etc, but this is only a kind of self-denial, a sickness they have in which they are attacking themselves. And it has nothing to do with anyone else, or the world.

I think that to see this clearly you have to not be confused about who is attacking who. When we're in ego and filled with our own guilt, an unhealed healer, we keep getting lost in the projections of others, taking things personally, and don't perceive that they're doing something to themselves. It takes the removal of enough self destruction within oneself, to be able to then recognise that someone else deserves what you've given to yourself. As the course says, you can only give the miracles you have received.

Once we take responsibility for what we're doing to ourselves, as in the secret of salvation, and cease to project guilt, and cease to make ourselves guilty in the first place, it becomes a lot clearer that other people's attacks are not against you but against themselves. Everyone's trying to destroy themselves, and only attack others in an attempt to shift the guilt and pain away from themselves. People can't stand the agony of their self inflicted wounds, so they try to give them to others as a coping strategy.

When you can see that someone's main problem isn't other people, being a victim, or anything outside of them - just as it isn't for you, it becomes more obvious that their whole problem is their own self-attitude. They are crucifying and condemning themselves, making themselves out to be sinful and guilty, believing they deserve punishment, fearing that punishment, and trying to kill themselves off.

The key though is the fact that they don't deserve this guilt anymore than you do. The fact that they are christ, temporarily at war with themselves, and are actually in need of healing. To recognise that their true nature is the healed son of God, an immortal being, correctly frames their suffering or projections as self inflicted lies. They've done this to themselves, they don't love themselves, they want to die.

As a healer, who might be perhaps more healed than the patient, you are then in a position to help them. This has to entail not regarding the surface appearance of their projected guilt as true, looking past it to finding an innocent person inside, a person who deserves love, a person who is their own worst enemy. If you are more healed, you are able to look past the appearance and illusion of their ego and see them as in need of healing. The course calls it "calling out for love". Certainly they are in need of love because they don't love themselves.

Helping someone to recognise that they are doing this to themselves, that they are making themselves guilty, that they are accusing themselves of things they have not done, and assisting them to learn to recognise their innocence and worth, is an act of healing. It moves your mind closer to the lovable being that is inside of them, a lovable being who temporarily denies its value. And as you help point them toward their lovability, you can't help but find that you are pointing yourself toward your own. As such the healing of your brother becomes the healing of yourself, and both of you are healed at the same time.

I think the main difference or shift for me has been to not see people as their surface appearance, their ego, their body, their sickness, and instead to regard them as immortal christ beings who are not loving themselves enough. Their mind is split because they are denying the truth about themselves. They project because they've put themselves into pain. They need to be resurrected and restored to their natural condition of wholeness.

A person's ego condition is nothing more than self attack, and all attack is self attack. The only remedy needed is to stop them from attacking themselves. Helping them to love themselves helps you to love yourself. Shining a light of love into their minds heals your own.

This enlightens me to realise also that people who might on the surface appear to have ego, be evil, sinful, criminal, hateful, murderous etc, are just as much victims of themselves and in need of love. It doesn't even matter how far gone someone is, how twisted and aggressive, how abusive and dark, everyone is deserving of God's love and is in need of healing. Everyone has the potential to transform into a fully integrated christ being, fully loving and fully loved, fully alive and never again to die.

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver AND the receiver."

"Miracles are a form of healing. They supply a lack, and are performed by those who have more for those who have less."

"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth. If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES. If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick. The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH. The sick must heal THEMSELVES, for the truth is IN them. But, having OBSCURED it, the light in ANOTHER mind must shine into theirs, because that light IS theirs."

"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."

There are a lot of ACIM students believing that they are working miracles. There's often talk of shifting perception, changing beliefs and so on.

But when you look deeply at what ACIM says, not only does it rarely mention shifts in perception etc it tells you that you aren't even the one who performs miracles.

"The holy spirit is the mechanism of miracles."

"Concern yourself not with the extension of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do not understand. ***Nor do you do them.*** It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that demonstrates you do not do them."

What the Holy Spirit can do is not of this world, and His power is unlimited.

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

"All power in Heaven and earth is therefore given him and he will share it with you when you have completed yours."

Sometimes I feel like I'm going out on a limb and saying something which most ACIM people don't believe.... in that, it is really the Holy Spirit who performs miracles. Yes he needs you and performs them with and though you, but Jesus is repeatedly telling us we don't even understand miracles, and although we inherit God's power it is really the Holy Spirit who knows what to do AND does 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."

"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.

... Trust Him, for help is His function, and He is of God."

"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."

"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."

It is the Holy Spirit who performs miracles. And the miracles he performs are not mere shifts of perception or adjustments to your beliefs. And while His Help can benefit YOU, and heal YOU, it is also there to help OTHERS.

I think at times that a lot of ACIM people do not get this. They are not in touch with the Holy Spirit, do not work with Him, do not talk to Him, do not trust Him, do not heal with Him, maybe don't even believe He is a Spirit with POWER. The power to heal. It is the Holy Spirit who raises the dead and heals the sick.

YOU are needed in order to fulfill a functional role of being a conduit for Him, a point of prayer and request, a servant, and what ACIM refers to as a "physician of the Lord". But your function does not entail knowing what the heck a miracle IS, yet alone knowing how it WORKS, or what it DOES. Do you really honestly know how the human body functions such that you can repair it supernaturally? No you don't. But the Holy Spirit does. And it therefore requires trust in Him to do so.

"The miracle is taken first on faith, because to ask for it implies the mind has been made ready to conceive of what it cannot see and does not understand. Yet faith will bring its witnesses to show that what it rested on is really there. And thus the miracle will justify your faith in it, and show it rested on a world more real than what you saw before; a world redeemed from what you thought was there."You can also see that YOU are not the SOURCE of miracles, though you may be a relay-station for them.

"Miracles are a universal blessing FROM GOD, through me (or you), to all my brothers."

"Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life."

God provides the miracles. Not you. But you perform them. He does them through you, with you. You are asked to be in an open minded state of trust in which there is love present, SO THAT you are a facilitator of HIS WORK, through you. So that you can "do his works."

"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."

There is nowhere near enough openness to the Holy Spirit in the ACIM community. In fact it seems at times that hardly anyone ever mentions Him. A lot of people are doing the course "on their own" as a "self study", which strips it of all power and completely avoids the Holy Spirit. If it's some book you can tinker with on the toilet without ever having to develop trust in a supernatural entity, then.... it's more like school homework than a way to become empowered with the SPIRIT of God.

We are supposed to be developing trust in HIM, and allowing HIM to heal through us, and to USE our bodies, and to SPEAK through our mouths, and to WRITE with our fingertips, and to express love with others. He wants to use our bodies as a communication device. This does not exalt the body, it makes the body nothing OTHER than a tool through which HIS importance shines and extends. HE is the one that we are supposed to be working with.

Where is the Holy Spirit in all this? Where is the supernatural?

Where is the revival and the miracles?

Where is the Holy Spirit in the activities of those who claim to be awake already?

The metaphysics of ACIM is not something that someone made up, it is not an interpretation, it is not subject to someone's opinion, and there is no room for questioning it. It is not one of many possible definitions of the truth. It is THE truth. Either you understand it as it is and accept it as logically true, or you are in denial and confusion.

Metaphysics are FACTS. The thought system of the Holy Spirit is completely logically consistent, as is the thought system of the ego. There is absolutely no room for interpretation. What is "true" can easily be determined by looking at the logical structure of what has happened and where things fit. If you master the metaphysics, you will be able to extrapolate the logical thought system to explain absolutely anything in its correct perspective.

What happens after the separation from God is completely 100% logical. Everything that happens after separation MUST happen, and it MUST happen in a very specific way. The effects of separation are not varied or one possibility among many. There is only one way to separate, there is only one scenario which comes about when separation seems to have happened, and there is only one outcome.

If you can learn the fundamental, completely logically consistent metaphysical structure of the separation, it gives you a framework in which everything else fits into place. A Course in Miracles is teaching this metaphysical structure, but it is not always very obvious. Its obscure nature tends to lead people to not even realize there is a solid "core" to the Course or that you can use this structure to perfectly explain everything the ego does, the meaning of death, and what MUST be true based on it.

For example, separation from God is not possible, because you cannot be somewhere that God is absent. God is everywhere. This immediately tells us that, logically, to believe that this IS possible is insanity. It also must tell us that to believe in such a separation is to believe in a DREAM, a fiction, something which is false or not true and not real. This is already the beginning of some very solid metaphysics, and many people grasp this basic starting point.

But then there is a progression, because as soon as there is a belief in separation, the ENTIRE ego thought system can be logically described and predicted for how it will operate, what it will perceive and believe, what it will value, and everything else about it. Even such things as special relationships, special hate, unconscious guilt and so on, are not just things that happen to be a part of the situation we're in, they MUST ABSOLUTELY FEATURE in an experience of being separate from God. There is a completely LOGICAL progression of thought and circumstance which HAS to come about when there is separation, which leads to all of these things.

Jesus describes some of this in the Laws of Chaos, where he says that first there are separations into individuals/bodies, then this MUST give rise to the perception that each individual is different and therefore lacking, and this MUST then give rise to a sense of competition because others have something you lack, and this MUST mean every individual is sinful for the attack that their "independence" inflicts on each other, and you then end up trying to "get" from others what you lack, by valuing what they lack and trying to possess it - which is the purpose of "specialness" and leads to all special relationships. All of this is a completely logical progression. It's simply what must happen and must unfold based on the separation having taken place.

Another example is what happens right after separation in terms of the split mind and how it becomes at war with itself. If the mind believes in separation, in order to be separate from God, it MUST have separation within itself. There is nowhere else for the separation to be. So the mind becomes divided, believing in "self and other". This MUST mean that WILL is also split, and this MUST mean that both of those parts are in conflict. There are two wills operating seemingly separately or with separate goals, since they logically cannot be the same or in agreement otherwise they could not BE separate. They MUST be at war with each other. They MUST be in a state of conflict. This conflict leads to ALL expressions of war and attack and vengeance and eventual death. It all progresses completely logically.

The metaphysics also shows that what once was a single whole mind, or whole self (Christ), must have become divided and split apart following separation. This mind that believes in separation thus gave rise to multiple illusions of individuals. The illusion of these individuals BEING individual is completely dependent on a strong illusion of the ways they are different, and as this illusion of difference becomes stronger and more established, it turns into what we call "form", which is what the BODY is. So a body is actually a logical progression of the thought system of separation and MUST come about if the separation has happened. Bodies are just very strongly-believed-in fragments of mind appearing separate and unique in order to maintain the ongoing breakdown of wholeness. This is also why bodies are a "picture" of the destruction of Christ, made as separation devices to keep individuals apart and therefore keep Christ from being whole.

There is no guesswork here. There are no opinions. There is no interpretation. This is simply a completely logical, consistent development which takes place. If there is a separation, it has "features" which come from it quite "naturally" and which are completely unavoidable. They are not optional. Bodies, worlds, special relationships, death, sickness, it is ALL a "natural" part of a thought system of separation. The metaphysics recognizes this and gives a perfectly consistent structure to it. The metaphysics can explain WHY all of these things come about.

As you learn the metaphysics, which is somewhat deeper than just "the words" of the Course, you will acquire a kind of template or set of simple laws which you understand to make perfect sense. These can be somewhat abstract so it can require some learning to "generalize" the learning and realize that it's all based on a simple set of logic. But once you then "get" the simple logic, you can now USE that simple logic to examine absolutely any aspect of life, any activity or purpose or way that something happens, and describe it in terms of what the METAPHYSICS says about it, which will be the truth. Irrefutable truth. Provided your grasp of the metaphysics is clear and consistent and you're not making subtle logical errors, the metaphysics gives you VISION to be able to see the truth of what's happening or where things fit together.

For example, recently there have been discussions about whether you can be at peace with death. There were many opinions given. None of the opinions were relevant. The only truth is in what the metaphysics says. In the metaphysical truth, the body is a separation device, it is an illusion, and it is within the mind of Christ. It blocks and hides what is behind it and its only function and purpose is to maintain the illusion of the mind being separate. The metaphysics also tells us that since God is life, and being opposite to God is the separation, separation MUST be death. It also must be a fiction of death - a dream of death. It HAS to be. It also tells us that therefore when the body is "alive", the body is still inside a dream of death. This also tells us that the death which occurs at the end of "life" is just a symbol for death, because what happens before it is also death. This is why Jesus says "death is not an end, it is a continuation."

Also since the metaphysics teaches that death is the opposite of life, and life and peace are one, and therefore death is not peace, we VERY SIMPLY can conclude that it is IMPOSSIBLE for there to be death and peace at the same time. This is irrefutable, perfect logic. This is the truth that the metaphysics tells us. It has nothing to do with anyone's opinion, anyone's lack of understanding, anyone's version of what they think is true based on their so-called experiences, or anything else. It CANNOT be true that death and peace are the same thing or that they truly can be 100% experienced at the same time. Yet many people have tried to justify that they are at peace with death or have come to accept it. They MUST be in denial. The metaphysics makes this clear.

Another simple truth which you can conclude based on the simple metaphysics of separation, is that the split mind is in a state of war BUT it also simultaneously NEEDS that war to continue, in order to maintain a sense of being less than whole and of having an opposite. If truly the opposition were completely wiped out of existence, there would be no more possibility of being at war, and war is entirely founded on being separate and having a split will. So on the one hand, the ego now is constantly trying to attack and be opposed to the "other", but at the same time, it MUST KEEP the other as an enemy for as long as possible. It does not want war to actually SUCCEED, it wants war to be CONTINUOUS.

This is a simple logical conclusion based on the metaphysics of separation. It's not my opinion or someone's interpretation. Therefore all states of conflict and war entail people choosing to suffer for as long as possible. It also means that if one group of people wins the war and totally wipes out the opposition, there would have to be PEACE, because without an opponent there is no basis for fighting. To end the war would thus truly undo the separation, it would be the undoing of those who tried to wage war, and this is not what the ego thought system wants. This is all simple logic. So if someone comes along and has a discussion about war or conflict or attack, if you grasp the metaphysics you can use it to explain what MUST be true about war and conflict.

The separation from God is an entirely CLOSED SYSTEM. There is no room for accidents, there is no room for multiple opinions or interpretations. There is only the FACT of what has happened. You can accept it or you can deny it. If you have a solid grasp of the metaphysics you can DEPEND on it so much that you can TRUST it and you can use it to discern whether people are saying bullshit or whether they are aware of the truth. It also however requires that YOU not be in denial and you not be making logical errors. And the fact is there are a lot of people making a lot of logical errors. Sometimes they are quite subtle. But when someone thinks they know what the truth is but have not quite got it, they will defend it to the death and it must produce war.

Metaphysics reveals that there is only one truth. There is no room for error. There are facts, and that's it. You don't get an opinion. You don't get to interpret it to fit what you want it to be. You don't get to change it. In fact, this extends to your relationship with God and the fact that you keep trying to believe that God has changed His mind about you, or that you can change God. Both must be logically false. But that doesn't stop us believing otherwise, because we are insane. To not get the metaphysics is insanity, and the ego will use it to confuse you and delude you.

There is so much "insight" which can flow out about all kinds of topics if you will just learn the fundamental basic structure of separation. It also reveals to you that there really is only one problem, one dream, one solution. Illusions of how certain things seem different or unique or unlike each other, calling for a special explanation, can be "seen through" if you have the metaphysics right. You will know what to trust, and how to discern. You will be clear about what is true and what is false. You will also be amazed at how you're able to use the metaphysics as a powerful TOOL to give you the truth - what MUST be true - based on what you have learned is logically consistent, EVEN IF you have never thought about the particular topic before. The metaphysics will tell you WHAT IS the truth of the situation, and MUST be true about it, regardless of whether you even believe it yourself.

This logical consistency also builds upon itself. It's like, if you have this blueprint and you use it to place the first few pieces exactly where they belong, then you start being able to draw further logically consistent conclusions from it. It's like a jigsaw puzzle, where if you start out with the correct corners and the correct edge pieces, all of the other pieces can be correctly positioned and discerned, leading to a completely consistent whole picture. It's almost like effortless learning. You don't need to keep learning lots of individual separate modalities or pieces of information. You just get this one 'guidance system' which is the light of truth, the thought system of the Holy Spirit, which puts into perspective absolutely everything else. You switch on this one light and ask IT what is the truth, instead of being in the business of MAKING UP what you want the truth to be all the time, and it will very obviously and clearly tell you exactly what the truth is, from a clear and consistent perspective.

This is also why it is imperative to surrender your egoic attempt to always be the one who decides everything, to always be the one who decides what things mean, to always have your own opinion, to always be running "your own life" which you see as a possession of your own separate from God's will. Trusting Holy Spirit/God is trusting the metaphysics of the truth. The metaphysics completely correlates to the Holy Spirit's thought system. As you trust IT, you are trusting HIM. And as you begin to THINK WITH it, you are thinking WITH HIM, and you will start to have thoughts which are in line with, compatible with, and consistent with, HIS way of thinking, which is perfectly supportive of the metaphysics. The metaphysics of truth IS the way that the mind functions from a true perspective.

So our opinions mean absolutely nothing. Our separate viewpoints are an act of war. Thinking we know that our interpretation of the Course is right, unless it actually IS in line with Holy Spirit's thought system, MUST be a state of denial and MUST entail the authority problem - the ego trying to be the one who determines what is true or not. Only the truth is true. We can accept it, or we can be in denial. If we are in denial, believing we know the truth, we are mistaken. You can accept God's love, or you can reject it, but you cannot change it. You can deny that God is real but that won't change the metaphysics of reality whatsoever. You can pretend all you want, but ultimately, all of reality is a CLOSED SYSTEM with no options and no alternatives. It is what it is. Trying to make it be something it is not, is ego, and WILL produce the illusion of death.

"This is the world of time, where all things end."

This should be fairly easy to understand. Time is the idea that what seems to be here now, cannot remain. It must change. It must stop being what it is.

This leads to realizing that time does not allow anything to be permanent. Everything becomes temporary. That means everything is forced to come to an end. Which means everything dies. And both birth and "death" are now part of a whole system of death, in which everything has the mark of death upon it, even from the outset of "new life".

Time is the very thing which seems to produce growth and change. It is the seeming driving force behind the beautiful flowers that grow from seed and bloom and share their fragrance for a little while, before time just as easily forces them to stop being this way, enforcing death and decay.

Time does not allow anything to remain as it is. It is an attack upon the idea of eternal life. It is a notion that what has always existed no longer exists, being the destruction of God himself. It essentially places God into the past and kills him off and converts him into some other mangled form. And even if it reflects glimpses of God it will only offer them temporarily.

The world, by which I mean planet Earth, but also the solar system, the galaxy and all the galaxies/interstellar objects, are all governed by time. Every particle of matter is governed by time. This means that everything in this system HAS to change, which produces a constant state of movement and the impossibility of perfect stillness. Nothing is ever allowed to rest and be truly at peace. Even the rocks sitting there for many years are gradually being changed and converted against their will. Nothing in the world or this "universe" can escape this.

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

Since time enforces change, it enforces ends, which means it enforces death. Don't be deceived in thinking there are exceptions to this. Absolutely everything in the world has the mark of death upon it and will die, unless perhaps there is an interventional miracle from another world beyond the laws of time and space.

Time wants you dead. The very thing which seems to allow your body to move and change is also the very thing which is seeking its destruction. Time is the very thing which permits birth but also death. It is not picky about what state anything is in. Jesus is telling me to use the word "unscrupulous" here.

In a world of time, all things end. There can at best be seeming periods in which things seem to be fairly consistent, fairly constant, or even long-lasting, but they are never endless, and a time will come when they will end. These temporary illusions of almost-permanence mask the fact that the whole system is still gradually destroying itself. And if you fall for the illusion of believing that its presentation of "life" is at its maximum, you are blind to the fact that even the living are partly dead.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, their life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning."

Since there is no real eternal life outside of heaven, and Earth is a realm technically "outside" of heaven, or at least believed to be, it is not a world where there is real life, or maximum life. It is a world of death. This is because separation from heaven means the inducing of time and space, which is delay or avoidance or denial of reality.

So this whole system is set up for death. All the time it is devouring itself. All the time it is working on destroying itself. Sometimes it presents illusions of birth and newness and growth and prosperity, only to GUARANTEE that at some point it will just as easily take it all away without blinking an eyelid. And to some that may come as a shock or surprise, or something long put-off and avoided, as if it is not going to happen. But look at how everything you ever had in the world came to an end.

Essentially change is death. Although of course in this world it seems that you must change in order to "live", because the whole system is backwards. But change does not allow the immortal to remain immortal, and the eternal are brought into question by it. Without time you would live forever, but with time you are destined to be destroyed.

Jesus suggests that there is no hope of escape from death IN the world. You cannot stay IN time, and have there be no death. Time and space are both attacks on reality's nature. They cannot be combined or coexist. You cannot keep time, along with bodies moving and growing and so on, and still expect there to be no death. "Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

Read it carefully because it's telling you that there is NO WAY EVER to escape from problems WITHIN the world. The only way ultimately is to transcend it, rise above it, and eventually leave it. The whole system of spacetime will always entail death and destruction. It will not ever be heaven or offer eternal life. It cannot therefore save you and cannot save you from itself.

You HAVE to find a better way - another world, not of you, which God created perfect. The ONLY HOPE that you truly have is that this world is not real and is thankfully NOT doing what it appears to be doing. Do not be deceived into thinking that this world can ever be dressed up as a living world or a permanent world or a world of hope or a world of salvation and happiness. It is nothing and will never be true. All you really want is God.

"It might be worth a little time to think once more about the value of this world. Perhaps you will concede there is no loss in letting go all thought of value here. The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

If there is a pain in my hand, and if I believe there is a pain in my hand, I will begin to experience reactions about the pain.

This is simply because I see there being some kind of causality coming from the pain. I think it has a power over me. I see it as happening to me. I seem to be experiencing it as though it has happened without me asking for it. And so it seems unfair, malicious, unwanted, unwelcome, as though these sentiments are somehow justified expressions of me being holier or more innocent than this.

And if this pain in the hand continues or increases, then I will likely increase in my perception of victim hood, and simply by the reversal of cause and effect, seeing cause as outside of myself, I am actively creating responsive conditions inside of myself which show up as reactions, having threatened my own self with my own mistaken perception of this pain.

I myself am creating my own reactions, including fear which begins to mount in response, as though the pain is causing me to be afraid - what does it mean, what is it leading to, why is it happening, but simply also the sheer apparent fact (albeit unreal) that it is even happening at all, is enough to provide an upset.

"I am upset because I see something that is not there." - ACIM

And so as my fearful reaction increases, so too does my conviction that this is a more serious problem than before, that it calls for magical curative measures which will attack it and manipulate it and try to make it go away. And the more strongly I feel passionate about the need to be rid of it, the more I will actually add empowerment to it, seeing it as being so strong and mighty as to deserve serious counter-measures.

These perceptions of the need for a counter measure, a retaliation, a reaction of any justified kind, a fear, or any sense of taking this seriously or treating it as real, simply shows the extent of my mistakedness and the fact that what I am ACTUALLY doing is CREATING THIS. I create it with my fear of it, I create it with my rejection of it, I create it with my desire to be rid of it, and I create it with my attempt to fix it.

And the more real of a problem it seems to become, the more certain I will be that I really need to get something done about this because it's very very serious indeed. And yet in perceiving it, describing it, envisioning it, interacting with it and making it be serious as such - believing in its appearance - I am merely choosing to manifest it, to give energy to it, to feed it.

The reason that we do this is because when we are using the mind incorrectly and are entering into illusions, false perceptions and errors, we start to experience the opposite of what we attempt to achieve. We think that we do not want pain in the hand, but this means that we will put it there. We think the pain in the hand should not be happening, and such intensify its happening. We think that it is making us very afraid, and as such we literally are causing it to become more monstrous.

We do not realize that as soon as we have stepped away from real truth and have entered into mistaken truth, we've lost our mind and our way, have become deceived, and are now operating our mental powers 'inversed' or back to front.

The ego is an entire thought system based on this back-to-front inversion of truth, and when we are in this mind, we quite literally ask for what we do not want, attract what we are trying to get away from, try to fix what is not even a problem, and generally compound the very issues that we suffer from, not realizing all along that we are inadvertently causing ourselves to prolong the suffering, simply because we're applying ourselves through an inverting filter, a reality flip, which gives us back the exact opposite of what we think we are asking for. And this is simply because once in the ego perception, we are in opposition to the real truth, and therefore are bringing about opposite effects.

Indeed the incorrect form of forgiveness correlates to the ego activities and behaviors of believing that you are sincerely attempting to rid the world of that which is wrong with it, by taking a purer or more innocent standpoint, all the while actually reinforcing, manifesting, increasing and generally adding to the conditions of sinfulness. Such forgiveness then becomes an attack rather than a correction of error, a judgement instead of a miracle.

True forgiveness therefore must entail the cessation of all of the above egoic behaviors, reactions, self-caused chaos, and general inversion of truth and opposition to it. All of these symptoms are expressing merely because you are using the mind backwards, expressing opposition and resistance instead of unity, order and health.

True forgiveness entails the complete UN-doing of all of these egoic thought patterns, attitudes that reinforce the reality of the monster, reactions to it founded in fear which really are created by your own self as part of your psychological reversal and belief in threat, and the cessation of "making real" this problem. To lend reality to it, to believe in it, dwell upon it, give it credit, think of it seriously, forget to laugh at it, mistake it for real danger (which does not exist), and to generally actually side with it while claiming and portraying yourself as doing the exact opposite, is simply to keep the problem and make it worse.

We need to learn to forget this world. As Jesus says, forget this world and come with wholly empty hands unto your God. To forget is to literally pay no further attention, knowing that the thing was unreal, and requires no upkeep to defend against it.

We need to learn to stop learning the wrong things. We keep teaching ourselves with the ego, we keep learning that sickness is real, that sin is irreversible, and that death is inevitable. This must all be corrected and undone and vanquished from the mind, replaced with the Holy Light of the Truth, which comes to set you free.

The truth does set you free, literally, actually, and in reality. Because the Truth is God and only Love is Real.

This is a radical teaching in A Course in Miracles which is often denied or distorted, simply because it seems too radical to be true. The BODY must be healed otherwise the mind IS NOT HEALED. "Only the mind AND body need atonement." "Damaged bodies are accusers." "A damaged body is PROOF the mind ***has not been healed***."

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing (OF THE BODY AND MIND) to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU (no evidence of physical attack), to **demonstrate** (physically!) they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS ***his sins have no effect*** (no damage to show for it) to WARRANT guilt? Sins (physical attacks) are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail ***effects which CANNOT be undone*** (physical damage) and overlooked entirely (because if you can still SEE IT there is proof of sin). ***In their UNDOING lies the proof*** that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed (mind AND body), that you may be forgiving, offering (in person, physically) salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body (YES, mind AND BODY must be healed) shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing (physically) ***proves*** that separation is WITHOUT effect.

What you would prove to him you will believe (!! if you SHOW him a sick body, YOU **MUST** BELIEVE IN SICKNESS!). The power of ***witness*** (seen visually, physical healing) COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. Your ****body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain**** because of him. And *!*!*!>>> in its healing <<< *!*!*! can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony (A PHYSICALLY HEALED BODY DEVOICE OF ANY SIGNS OF ATTACK!!!) that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle (producing PHYSICAL healing!) can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing (OF THE BODY!!!) show your mind is healed (as well), ***and has forgiven what he did NOT do***. And so is HE ***convinced*** (by PHYSICAL PROOF) his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you.

Thus does the miracle undo ***all things the world attests can never BE undone*** (all physical damage/effects, all sickness, all hurt, all wounds). And hopelessness ***and death*** (physical death!) ***MUST disappear*** before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. The ancient Calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto his own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear. Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to ***show your brother that you had no hurt of him.*** (REQUIRES that the physical body be fully RESTORED TO HEALTH AND WHOLENESS SO THAT YOU CAN *SHOW HIM*) He thinks ***your blood*** (literally, physical blood) is on his hands, and so he stands condemned (by your physical sickness - "damaged bodies are accusers"). But it is given you to ***SHOW him, by your healing (OF THE BODY!!!), that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

YES, IT DOES MEAN THIS FOLKS!!!!!!!!!!

Here is Jesus backing it up further in another part of the course.

"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.**** (a perfectly healed, whole, unharmed body with no signs of sin or attack or sickness!) IT (this "picture of health body") witnesses to the eternal truth that **you can not BE hurt**, and ***points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS.*** (indicates, teaches, demonstrates, SHOWS, symbolized, your brother's innocence).

Show THIS unto your brother (a healed body!), who will ****see that every scar is healed**** (literally all physical scarring is gone), and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And ***he will look on his forgiveness there*** (sees he is forgiven because there are NO EFFECTS OF SIN), and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it (because it's a symbol pointing to the mind's healing), to the innocence that he beholds in you (in your healed mind). Here is the proof (PHYSICAL!!!) that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do (attack you, damage your body, harm your body, make you sick, wound you etc) was ever done, ****or ever had effects of any kind**** (ALL PHYSICAL EFFECTS ARE HEALED!!!!!). That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified (no reason for guilt cus the body is not hurt), and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear (the healed body proves he cannot have really attacked). Attest his innocence (physically) and NOT his guilt. YOUR (body and mind) healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true." (the health of himself AND HIS BODY are now restored as a result of his exoneration by YOUR healed mind and body!)

Also

"The body can become a sign of life (symbol of eternal life and invulnerability), a promise of redemption, and a ***breath of immortality*** to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death (literal physical stinky death). Let it have healing as its PURPOSE (use by the holy spirit for healing). Then will it send forth (communicate VISUALLY through PHYSICAL PROOF) the message it received, and by its (physical) health and loveliness (!! Yes the body's loveliness and health) proclaim (communicate, teach!) the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent (symbolize, to be a symbol of immortality) an endless life, forever unattacked. (the body shows up AS IF it is immortal!) And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live."" (because the body now PROVES that as a consequence of your brother's INNOCENCE, YOUR BODY IS NOT ATTACKED, proving HE is forgiven.)

Reference "the fear of healing" and "the picture of crucifixion" sections for more information.

As a child of God, God has placed himself in you, as an extension of his mind, will and power. You don't really "have" anything "of your own", or exclusive to you, because everything God gives is given to everyone equally. But you do nevertheless have everything that God has given to you, just as everyone does. Which mean that you have inherited from him his mind, will and power.

"To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. As God created you, you have all power."

When this power is interpreted as belonging ONLY to you, then you are trying to have it for your own, excluding others, which cuts you off from God, and disables the power. When it is interpreted as belonging to everyone, and being FROM God, FOR you, and FOR everyone, it is regained and you become all powerful.

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

"The miracle-worker begins by PERCEIVING light, and translates HIS perception into sureness by continually extending it, and ACCEPTING ITS ACKNOWLEDGMENT. Its EFFECTS assure him IT IS THERE. 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."

What this means is that in the "arrangement" of how you are "set up" in terms of relationship to God, function, and what you must give, God has placed himself in you, and now you have everything that is OF or from God, as yours, but only so long as you share it. And in order to have it you have to give it, and to share it it must be extended. And so now the love that is given to you from God, is given through you, by YOU participating in its extension, by expressing the love that is yours - which is also his.

So it's kind of like a "pay it forward" kind of thing, where God gives love and power and will and miracles to you, then you in turn pass on and give and share the love and power and miracles to others.

"Miracles are a universal blessing (for all) from God, through me (christ, sonship) to all my brothers."

God loves you. You love your brothers and your creations. Similarly...

"Through prayer love is received. Through miracles love is expressed."

This means fairly simply that you need to "express God" ie to express love. Which is why "Miracles are expressions of love." Or as Jesus often says to me, "shine". Shine the light that is in you, give it, share it, express it, pass it on, so that you acknowlege that you have it. And thus by expressing it, it flows into you.

If you think you don't have love to express, because you don't love enough, or feel lacking or deprived, there is a simple fix. Start loving anyway, try to push the love out, feel it coming out of you, send it to someone, even if it's just a little bit.

You'll find that this "unclogs the pipes" and gets the juices flowing. As you do this, you actually start to RECEIVE more love, heaven comes to help you, and you start to get healed as well. As you give healing you are healed.

"I will heal as I let him teach me to heal."

So in a sense, we are sort of "channels" for God. But being a channel for God doesn't entail strange trance states or going unconscious or having your body be possessed. You can remain fully aware and participatory, shining a light, joined with God, in which both of you shine together. This is part of the arrangement of you being a co-creator with God. You create in parallel, you love in parallel, you heal in parallel.

What is your function? Your function on earth is healing, and in heaven it's creating, and both are very similar. The healing function lines up and mirrors the creative function. You extend God's love and shine your light, a the light of the world, and your mind extends out and unites with other minds to bring about miracles. You share this function with the Holy Spirit while you're on earth, and you hare it with God when you're in heaven.

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

"The 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."

"Yet here is also a great channel of hope and healing in the Holy Spirit's service."

"Whenever a teacher of God has tried to be a channel for healing he has succeeded."

"About His yearning for His only Son, created as His channel for creation"

"Let us today open God's channels to Him, and let His Will extend through us to Him."

"God created every mind by communicating His Mind to it, thus establishing it forever as a channel for the reception of His Mind and Will. Since only beings of a like order can truly communicate, His Creations naturally communicate WITH Him and communicate LIKE Him."

"The constant GOING OUT of His love is blocked when His Channels are closed, and He IS lonely when the minds He created do not communicate fully with Him."

"And so He has kept this Channel open to receive His communication to you, AND YOURS TO HIM."

"Your minds are not separate, and God has only one channel for healing, because He has but one Son. His remaining communication link with all His Children joins them together, and them to Him. To be aware of this is to heal them, because it is the awareness that no one is separate, and so no one is sick."

"I repeat that I do not choose God's channels wrongly. The Holy One shares my trust and always approves my Atonement decisions, because my will is never out of accord with His."

"I have told you several times that I am in charge of the whole Atonement. This is ONLY because I completed my part in it as a man, and can now complete it through other men. My chosen receiving and sending channels cannot fail, because I will lend them MY strength as long as theirs is wanting."

"Only God's own holy children are worthy to be channels of his beautiful joy, because only they are beautiful enough to hold it by sharing it. It is impossible for a Child of God to love his neighbor EXCEPT as himself. That is why the healer's prayer is, "let me know this brother as I know myself.""

"What God DOES know is that His communication channels are not open to Him, so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His Children are wholly joyous."

"While he is IN the body, however, man can choose between loveless and miraculous channels of creativity. He can create an empty shell (see previous reference), but he DOES NOT create nothing at all. He can wait, delay, paralyze himself, reduce his creativity almost to nothing, and even introduce a real developmental arrest or regression. But he CANNOT abolish his creativity. He CAN destroy his medium of communication, but NOT his potential."

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.

Now, pause a moment, and watch out for an ego reaction of guilt. My intention is not to make anyone feel guilty. Nor is it Jesus' intention. But he is trying to educate us with deep honesty about what sickness is and is not so that we can be more easily freed from using it to hurt ourselves. We need to be willing to look at this, it's part of the course. We are adults here, right? We can handle it.

Jesus's statements simply tell us that all forms of sickness are part of an attempts to make our body sick, in order that we can hold it up as proof that our brother is a sinner, accusing him of having caused the effects/symptoms. We show him sickness, evidence of attack and sin, to imply that we have been affected against our will, thus able to scapegoat him and accuse him of sin. Scapegoating isn't just psychological, it is physical.

And furthermore, Jesus is clearly teaching that the body, as a symbol, CAN symbolize innocence and forgiveness, through its physical healing. A healed body teaches and demonstrates and proves that there has not been sin, it exonerates your brother, AND it helps to heal his mind. Your physical health, stemming from your psychological health, becomes your brother's health. When the body is sick, it accuses your brother "Brother, at your hand I die". This happens are psychological, physical, and metaphysical levels.

If you want to love yourself and your brother, the body MUST depict only a symbol of heath and wholeness. Otherwise it is serving the ego's purpose of making sin real. "The mind, being sane, heals the body."

*** Physical sickness is a symptom of an unholy relationship with your brothers! ***

Jesus demonstrated this principle through the resurrection. Here's what he says in passages from "The picture of crucifixion" and "The fear of healing." These are POTENT teachings not often accepted in ACIM circles.

"A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape."

"The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

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

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

"The unhealed CANNOT pardon. For they are the witnesses that pardon is unfair. They would retain the CONSEQUENCES of the guilt they overlook. Yet no-one CAN forgive a sin which he believes is real. And what has consequences MUST be real, because what it has DONE is there to see."

"To witness sin and yet forgive it is a paradox which reason cannot see. For it maintains what has been done to you DESERVES no pardon. And, by GIVING it, you grant your brother mercy, but retain the proof he is not REALLY innocent. The sick remain accusers. They cannot forgive their brothers AND themselves as well. For no-one in whom true forgiveness reigns CAN suffer. He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes."

"Who forgives IS healed. And in his healing lies the PROOF that he has truly pardoned, and retains no trace of condemnation that he still would hold against himself or any living thing."

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

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

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

Show THIS unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you. Here is the proof that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind. That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

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

To transmit large amounts of love to someone, supplies a lack and heals them. All suffering is simply the illusion of a lack of love, ie belief in sin and fear.

But the ego will believe that this undertaking of exprsesion will exhaust you, threaten you, deplete you and will take a great effort to push this love outward. It believes that all expression is a SACRIFICE AND A LOSS. That you will have to burn yourself out to help anyone, expending great effort above and beyond what you are capable of. And that you will have to do all of this yourself without divine help.

The solution to this is the recognition that your proper function in the machinery of love, is in its EXTENSION, not its sourcing. All love is of God. You should ALLOW HIM to extend love through you, and your "effort" should mainly be in stepping back, opening the door to the light, and being a CONDUIT, THROUGH which the love expresses. This requires your own mind to be open to love.

If you think that you are the one giving this, you will become an unhealed healer and deplete yourself, because you are really trying to force there to be a power. And you who see yourself as finite and limited will see this power as limited, requriing you to force it more The power has to be acknoweldged as being OF GOD, and via the Holy Spirit, so that you ALLOW HIM to be the therapist.

"To acknowledge that all power is of God is to gain all power."

"The thereapist merely lets healing be." "The Holy Spirit is the only therapist."

Our healing function is therefore to act as a PORTAL, open and free from fear or restriction or limit, which acts as a LENS, to allow the light of God to shine THROUGH. To broadcast and transmit to and be shared with another. To be this portal YOU DO have to be in a loving, spiritual, purified state yourself, not simply so that you do not interfere but so that you can reflect and RELAY what is being given TO and THROUGH you.

If you repeat something along the lines of "I extend God's love to you", this is a good place to start. You reach within or above, find the light, love and power of God, tune into the Holy Spirit, and with great willingness act as a RELAY STATION to extend HIS love to the patient. "I give God's love to you" would be another way to look at this. "I extend God's love to you".

"Through prayer love is received. Through miracles love is expressed." You receive the love by giving it and through your own healing. You express the love by extending it in which giving and receiving are one.

It is also true that if you believe you are currently lacking in love, which is highly likely if you are still working on your own atonement, you will recognize yourself as NOT having what it takes to heal anyone. You will fear healing. You will feel inadequate and weak and incapable. And you will try to depend on your own knowledge to make something happen, even though you have NO CLUE how to heal anything. This will make you feel TENTATIVE and HESITANT about even trying to heal.

But what you will find is that, as you step aside and plug yourself into the power source, and start to "get the ball rolling" by STIMULATING the flow of love through you, simultaneously your openness to the love will increase. As will its effectiveness.

The ego would say, if you start out with hardly any love, you have nothing to give. And it would say that because you lack love, there is no way to increase the love, and so giving it risks your own depravation. But you will in fact find that if you simply TRY, and start from wherever you are AT, and you start to "talk yourself into it", by at least efforting to extend God's love, you will find that your rusty pipes will open up, the flow of love will increase, it will BENEFIT YOU as it increases, and this benefit to you will also raise your own light and increase your ability to flow it.

"I will heal (myself) as I let Him teach me to heal (others)."From a stationary starting point, you can simply assert, "I love you [person]" or "I feel and extend God's love to you" or whatever. And as you repeat this over and over, you WILL start to tune into love, and feel it, and this will begin to heal you, and raise you up, and plug you in even more strongly. "Miracles benefit both the giver and the receiver".

By giving, you affirm that you have it. By giving, you open up to receive even more. The more you give, the more it FLOWS abundantly. Giving even when you believe you have nothing TO give, starts the process and gets things moving. Your natural function here is to SHINE BRIGHTLY, to emit a large amount of intense light. And you can only do this by EXTENDING the power of God through the Holy Spirit. Not by "burning out" of your own resources.

Ultimately when your mind is very loving and giving and receptive to love, it shines brightly and the light shining THROUGH you from God shines INTO the other person's mind and energy field. This lifts them up as well as you. You will feel not only lighter but stronger, your energy will feel more intense, and you will feel more powerful. And you will feel noticeably happier. And if you had stuff to be healed as well, you will find YOU receive a healing as you attempt to heal others.

We fear to begin this process only on a basis of the apparent LACK of love that we currently experience. We think we are are just too WEAK to even get off the starting blocks. That we don't have enough to give. Or just feel too unloving, honestly, to really want to help anyone, because we sense that giving a lot of love to someone is going to bring healing to ourselves also, and that is going to entail a challenge to our ego and our own suffering. We literally stand in the way of healing until we have some willingness to TRUST and to OPEN UP and at least TRY, from whatever our starting point is. And to do what we have to be willing to BE healed as well.

This is why it is vital to be willing to at least ATTEMPT to perform miracles, to express love, even if you yourself are lacking, and even if you are not enlightened yet, because it is this OFFERING of love that UNLOCKS your own receipt of help and healing. And it is through this GIVING that you accelerate your own RECEIVING of illumination.

You can of course take your sweet time and simply wait until you are "naturally" expressing love consistently all the time, but being willing to EXPERIMENT with this and TRY to heal, even as an unhealed healer, will help you to move forward on your own path faster, AND begin to show you RESULTS through your efforts with others. And by these results you will see PROOF that you have the power of God in you.

Miracle working is an ABILITY to be practiced. "Doing them brings conviction in the ability". You are not yet convinced that they can even be done, because you doubt your natural function as light of the world and as co-healer with the Holy Spirit. But by ATTEMPTING to perform them you will learn and hone the ability, learn from your egoic interference and failure, and move more rapidly towards consistent miracle working.

On the level of the physical world, all objects and forms can never be perfect. This is sobering to recognize. It's actually because of the nature of spacetime.

In order to have space, or locations, it's necessary that something is in one location and NOT another. It's also therefore necessary that any given object LACKS what any other given object has. There is no real sharing, whereby two objects are literally one object. Everything is separated out, exclusive, unique, different and unequal.

This applies throughout this universe. It sets up a scenario where, in terms of a physical object, which includes planets and human bodies and toys and cars and houses and food, it is literally impossible to find perfection.

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

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

"All its roads lead to death"

So now, as we enter this physical world, seen through false perception of the body's eyes, blinded by sight of form, we now seek to try to find "the perfect thing".

The ego presents objects as options, choices, and then asks you to choose between them. It does not ask whether you believe in the objects existing at all, it simply assumes they do exist and leaves you with the only remaining "choice" of choosing A OR B. This "either or" scenario is built into the whole ego thought system of spacetime. "Do you want to die this way, or that way?"

But the problem is, you are now left with two inferior, partial, temporary, incomplete, unwhole options. Neither of them ca be perfect because they both are lacking something. They both entail compromise. None of them truly mirror any kind of divine nature. They are all flawed.

So now the best you can do is choose between two flawed possibilities, where you know that to choose one you will lack the other. And committing to any of them is not fully possible with full satisfaction or certainty because to choose one is to reject something else, leaving you empty handed.

If you choose object A, you lack what object B has to offer. It drives you nuts trying to settle on what you want. You try to look more closely for signs that one thing is "better" than the other, to judge and evaluate its worth or value, as if its even possible for one of them to BE perfect.

Then after a lot of frustration and fear and uncertainty and lack of commitment and inability to trust, you "settle" for what you think is the lesser of two evils. It seems to be the best choice only because you're willing to accept its limitations and what it cannot offer you, which seems less of a sacrifice than the other choice. And so you "commit", reluctantly and in fear, crossing your fingers that it will be the right one.

The ego is playing this game all the time. It is literally impossible to be 100% satisfied with ANY choice the ego offers, because they are limited and lacking. And it would simply have you choose between two forms of death. And you think that by choosing the better of the two, you will defer death a little longer.

As you look at this, you'll find yourself trying to seek for this "perfection in the world". The perfect choice. The perfect option. The perfect car, perfect house, perfect body, perfect diet, perfect tv show, perfect city, perfect president, perfect whatever. Trying to find that one something that is completely whole and lacking nothing and utterly fulfilling and flawless. And there is NO SUCH THING in this world.

Anywhere.

I stumbled on this many times, particularly in terms of artistic projects and trying to come up with something that was perfect. My mistake was not recognizing the ways in which limitation are inherent to this world. I thought in terms of ideas, that some kind of perfection was POSSIBLE among the physical objects or physical choices or things I could create physically.

This would lead to tremendous frustration and blown-out expectations and procrastination and low self worth and being afraid of the judgement of others when they would find out how flawed and imperfect my creations were, implying my own imperfection. And this would just snowball into a huge amount of avoidance and shame and dysfunction trying to deal with this whole mess of "how will I achieve perfection". And this search for physicalized perfection is the spiritual ego, with its mantra, "seek and do not find."

It is much better to recognize when I am seeming to seek perfection at a FORM level, and to recognize the truth that ALL form is INCAPABLE of perfection. So for example if I am trying to create a piece of art, or some project, I have to realize there are built in limits as to what is possible. It cannot BE perfect, ever.

Limits have to be realistically set, there is only so much time and energy, there are only so many features, there are only so many design decisions, the object cannot ever be some kind of "miracle" that pleases everyone infinitely.

For example maybe I'm writing a book and getting hung up on how this book will "cover everything", how it will "talk to everyone", how it will be everything to all people. And then this becomes paralyzing, because as soon as you try to appease the myriad "forms" the ego presents, such as billions of disagreeing egos, it is now literally impossible to please them.

In any creative endeavor, any form of shopping, any kind of selection process, any decision making about your life or your time or where you will go or what you will do, if it entails the physical level at all it is far more productive and sane to "accept" that there are these limitations on this level. And to then simply work within those limitations, removing the sense of expectation or "wishful thinking" that form CAN BE anything other than it can be.

This means accepting that the world of limits IS fundamentally limited and limiting. And by that I don't mean to just settle for imprisonment, because of course we are meant to rise above these limits, break all the laws of physics, go beyond all boundaries and demonstrate "the impossible is possible." But in terms of the form level, it JUST IS a world of limitation and pretending it isn't really gets us in trouble.

There is one passage in ACIM where it touches on this with regards to why Jesus was not able to "perfectly" save or teach the whole world during his lifetime. The nature of the beast is simply that operating IN TIME AND SPACE, there were limits, and he had to be selective, and there was a plan and a goal and various things to be done and not others.

A physical life cannot truly embody unlimited infinity, nor can divinity be fully expressed at the level of the world. This is a world of partiality and lack and temporary differences, inequalities and flaws. It can never be immortal or perfect or holy or innocent or have eternal life or be whole. It lacks, because it is a picture of lack. We can work with it, or we can break its rules with miracles. But even miracles can't keep death while expressing life.

The world can only do what it can do. It's in its nature. It's a world of limits. It won't ever give you heaven or salvation or the attributes of God's perfection. Through true perception it can be seen as a reflection of God's perfection, but it cannot be it.

"Is he the Christ? O yes, along with you. His little life on earth was not enough to teach the mighty lesson that he learned for all of you. He will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God. And when you join your will with his, your sight will be his vision, for the eyes of Christ are shared. Walking with him is just as natural as walking with a brother whom you knew since you were born, for such indeed he is. Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world. Forgive him your illusions, and behold how dear a brother he would be to you. For he will set your mind at rest at last and carry it with you unto your God."

God's will isn't really a matter of "whether" you do God's will or not. If God wills something, it is done. But that doesn't mean you have no freedom.

ACIM teaches that "God does not coerce" and "even God would not oppose your will". Since your will is really one with God's will, or the same as, to in any way require you to will with Him or like Him would be like Him trying to force Himself against His own will.

God is not sitting there trying to "decide for you" the question of whether or not you'll will with Him or like Him. When you ask for guidance as to whether or not to do something, with the typical "should I do this?" kind of question, you'll probably be told that "you are free", instead of yes or no. In fact I get this response so often it's somewhat annoying, because I keep asking "should I" questions.

So God isn't trying to force you into anything or to choose for you whether you will with Him. Yet He does have a will, and He also wills something "for" you.

For example "God's will for me is perfect happiness". God does will or "want" that you be happy. In truth, God creates you happy, by His Will, and in your acceptance that you are as He created you, you automatically are happy. In effect, you are doing God's will by accepting your true nature.

But that doesn't mean God is pushing you into happiness, or requiring it, or forcing it, or demanding it. He loves you, and "love does not enter where it is not welcome". "Love waits on welcome, not on time".

So there is a component to your free will, that you yourself have to freely willingly will or "want" or elect to will with and like God. To be happy, God can't just force happiness on you. Anymore than he forcefully rips you of the world and puts you back in heaven, or anymore than he stops you from trying to hurt yourself against your will.

You have to be willing to be happy. And in your willingness, which is of your own free will, and yours to decide whether or not you will do so, you either choose to will what God wills for you, or you will something else. God does will that you be happy, but your refusal is up to you.

You can ask questions of guidance which may give yes or no answers, in terms of information, learning about a situation, asking whether something might be in someone's best interest etc. You can even ask for advice such as whether to buy the computer, or whether to stay at a job etc. This is part of trust. And the advice can come across as clear and wise and true, but it is still devoid of the component of force or demand.

When you move into believing that God is demanding, you are really becoming an idol worshipper. That means you see yourself as under tyrannical rulership by God, really the false ego God that you invented, and believe that God has cruel power over you to dictate what you must do. It's like cave dwellers worshipping a God in fear of retribution that, if you don't, there will be punishment. And then the admiration of God is more like trying to love something that's forcing you to do so.

"No one comes to the atonement except willingly" and "heaven is a choice I must make" means that you still, at all times, have the freedom to choose. Similarly ACIM says of angels that "they are free to establish their kingdom wherever they see fit", in reference to them setting trying to create a Kingdom on Earth. God would "prefer" that they establish their Kingdom in Heaven but he does not force them there.

Let's be clear that God very powerfully and strongly and certainly does have a will for you, a desire, an expression or broadcast of what He "himself" wants. What he supports. What he is in favor of. What he provides and gives and sees you as deserving. And whatever He wills, is DONE. But at the same time he cannot force it down your throat. If you don't want it, he waits patiently until you do. Just as if you do not want Jesus's help, he will wait patiently until you do.

Becoming one, or sharing interests, does not entail the giving up of your freedom. It really entails the reclaiming of your freedom, and freely electing to serve God. Freely assuming the function He has offered to you. Freely wanting to create with and like Him, together, as a team. Freely accepting God's harmlessness and desire that you be happy forever. Freely allowing God to give you everything, in acknowledging that He already did share everything with you in your creation. And at no point does it entail God ever "taking over" or going into a mode of demand.

God does not demand that you accept Him. You cannot really leave Him, because of His will that you be together forever. But you are free to block awareness of His will and pretend that He does not will what He does. You can deny His will just as you can deny your own will. Which has no effect on His will. And as you enter into unwillingness to will with God you enter into unwillingness to will freely, placing your will in a state of imprisonment. And then you will your own imprisonment by a tyrannical God that is really you playing the part of prison guard.

What God wills, truly, already is. And that includes the creation of you, the defining of what you are, what you are capable of, what you really have. It also includes your true nature, your innate built-in desire or character or "what you want". In a sense you could say that God "forced" you to "naturally" want to will with and like Him. To create loving living beings joyfully. To create the beautiful and divine. But at the same time, God "forced" you to also have total unconditional freedom. It sounds like a paradox but God permanently guaranteed that you can never "escape" being free.

You are a co-creator with God, as established in your creation by the fact that God DID grant you total freedom. Because in sharing all His nature and attributes and desire with you, He established you as similarly creative, powerful, unrestrained, unlimited, and completely free. And so God did bless you with the freedom to choose "whether to" will or not. Whether to will with or like God or not. But he did not grant you the freedom to throw away that freedom in any permanent way.

You can hide from what He has willed, but what He wills cannot be opposed, or undone, or attacked. His will is insurmountable and infinite and all powerful. But so is yours. As Jesus says, "Your will is as strong as mine", and He cannot oppose it anymore than God can. In fact God is incapable of opposing your freedom, because to do so would be to revoke the fact that He willed that you BE free.

God just wants you home, wants to love you, wants you to acknowledge what you are, wants you to remember your safety and certainty, wants you to be happy, wants you to feel free and unrestrained and unlimited, wants you to be willing to will with Him and like Him, and to create with Him. But it is by invitation only, and never by force or dominance. God even gives you all of His power.

"To acknowledge that all power is of (from) God is to gain all power."

So now, if you accept it freely, you are now as powerful as God, and God cannot oppose this. You have the power of God in you. You share His power and express and extend it. This makes you all powerful. As ACIM says, "I am not afraid but all powerful."

In some ways, in terms of the causation between God and His creative act of creating what you are and what you in-built nature is, and therefore what you are "likely" to want and desire when you are being true to yourself, God DOES have total power and authority and His will HAS fully "restricted" or "defined" the rules and scope of your freedom. Your function. Your ability. What you can and cannot do. That is not open for question and your rebelling against that is the authority problem and the separation.

But in other ways, when it comes to what happens AFTER your creation, how you USE your existence, how you express your nature, what you want to choose, what you are capable of creating, that is all entirely within the scope of your freedom. That is where you have absolute authority over whether you will or whether you are unwilling, whether you want to acknowledge God or not, whether you want to admit to co-creating with Him or not.

You can't stop your function and you can't change the rules and you can't make yourself be what you're not, which thankfully provides a guarantee that even in ego and dreaming you cannot actually change what you really are, and this therefore guarantees your place in Heaven forever, you DO have the freedom to deny it and pretend otherwise, to seem to want something else, and to reject your own freedom. What God wills is permanent, but since He willed your freedom you are free to deny it, but not change it.

It is in fact your freedom, within the scope of what you are, but not freedom or power OVER God, that has guaranteed that God did not enter into the insanity of separation with you. Because your will is free to block itself, but not to undo itself, you were able to "will" (un-will) to make a dream world unlike and without God. But because you were free to do this, God was not pulled into the separation or the insanity with you. In this respect you are not "one" with Him, ie you do not cause God or overpower His will, even if you dream of doing so. You can bring an illusion of suffering into your own mind, within your own self, but you cannot bring it into God.

"Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain and wholly without suffering of any kind. 10 If you deny Him you bring sin, pain and suffering into your own mind because of the power He gave it. 11 Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also deny what it creates because it is free.

You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His Love, would not have it so. 2 Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he were not free. 3 To interfere with you would be to attack Himself, and God is not insane. 4 When you deny Him you are insane. 5 Would you have Him share your insanity? 6 God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. 7 That was the condition of His Son's creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. 8 To know that is sanity. 9 To deny it is insanity. 10 God gave Himself to you in your creation, and His gifts are eternal. 11 Would you deny yourself to Him?"

You are free to imprison yourself. And untimately it IS only you that can seem imprison your own will. No one else can imprison you, not even God. And you can also set yourself free, per the secret of salvation, that you and you alone are doing this to yourself. But in order to become free, you do have to accept the "ground rules of the house of God", the nature that you have, the function He assigned to you, to serve WITH Him and accept that you are still as He created you.

It still requires you to want to accept that you can only be as God chose you to be, which the ego interprets to be a limitation, a requirement or restriction, a demand, and a lack of freedom. The ego sees it as you "having to" comply by certain rules and be a certain way in order to be in God's world. Which is true, in a sense, because the Kingdom does have conditions for entry, for acceptance, for being in it and of it. You cannot experience it without "complying" with its nature. And wanting to be of a different nature exiles you from it. You cannot hate and attack and expect to be aware of divinity.

It's the desire to be something else, something unlike God, something unhappy, something lacking freedom, something limited and less, something broken and breakable, something that God would not will, that is the ego. When you want to suffer, when you want to die, when you want to hurt, abuse and attack and murder, that is all a desire not to will like God would have you will. It's an unnatural will. It also isn't really free will, because its a way of making your will imprisoned and being unwilling. And the more unwilling you are to will with and like God, the less you acknowledge your freedom. And thereby your will SEEMS to become imprisoned, weak, diminished and hidden. Not free at all.

The ego's version of free will is really an imprisoned will which does not want to will anything. It opposes will and rebels against God. It sees itself as having a "separate will" or a will which has separated itself off from being anything like God's will, and this poses as "free will". Defiance. But it is not free will, really, it is is an illusion of freedom. It is really imprisonment, masquerading as freedom, which is why it is an illusion. And giving this up is not really a loss of anything, because the ego's version of free will is really a desire to have no freedom at all, or to have an illusion of freedom. And death is an illusion of freedom from God, who is life.

In death you attempt to assert that you have no will, no choice, no power, no desire to will anything that God wills. And this is considered "free will". It's a statement of defiance, an expression of a total unwillingness to do anything. To will anything. It's a refusal to live, because life is what God wills for you. It's a desire to not exist, because God wills that you exist. It's an expression of attack and revenge and hatred and hurt and abandonment, having done these things to yourself instead of God, knowing that God would never do these things. Death is an attempt to end your freedom and to stop God's will.

But it is in life, in resurrection, in choosing, willing, opening, trusting, having faith, uniting, sharing, loving, that you regain access to not only your own freedom and true nature, but also to God. And this flowering, blossoming, returning to how you were designed to be, does require your "little willingness". And that means a little bit willing to be like God, to acknowledge truth, to be like your true self, which is forgiving and loving and whole and healed. Which is happy and healthy and immortal. Which is joyful and peaceful and unconditionally loving.

And so you return to what you always were given, to what God willed for you already. And you open to what you have no say in, freely and gladly, knowing that it guarantees your happiness and peace and freedom. And you are restored to heaven and to the full inheritance of everything God has given you without limit. And thus your freedom leads to the restoration fo your awareness that you are the will of God and always have been. And simply by being what you really are, unlimited, you are simultaneously free. Free of coercion and demand and sacrifice and force. Free in God, because God decided you be so.

And then you resume your function, the extension of God's spirit, the joyful co-creatorship and authorship with God, and the celebration of your total freedom and unity, one with all of Creation forever.

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

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

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

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

"Illusions are always illusions of differences."

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

"The belief in order of difficulties is the basis for the world's perception. It rests on differences; on uneven background and shifting foreground, on unequal heights and diverse sizes, on varying degrees of darkness and light, and thousands of contrasts in which each thing seen competes with every other in order to be recognized. A larger object overshadows a smaller one. A brighter thing draws the attention from another with less intensity of appeal. And a more threatening idea, or one conceived of as more desirable by the world's standards, completely upsets the mental balance. What the body's eyes behold is only conflict. Look not to them for peace and understanding."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"there is no order of difficulty in healing."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's very simple. God is the ONLY cause of you. God is the ONLY cause of anyone. Everyone who exists is solely caused by God and NOTHING else. Whatever God wills that we all be, we are that, and even we have no say in this.

We are all totally EQUAL and next to each other, and God is above. God creates me fully and creates you fully. I do not create you, and you do not create me. It is nonsense to suggest that I am your creator or that you have caused me to exist.

This means that your brothers are NOT the cause of you. Nor is the world. Nor is the body. NOTHING ELSE can EVER cause you. Not one single person in the world is causing you right now, nor who has ever caused you, nor have you ever caused anyone.

When you believe someone is at fault or doing something to you, you MUST be confused about who your creator is. Whoever creates you causes you. No-one else has any input to this or any power over you. To believe someone is causing you is to believe you are NOT caused by God. To blame someone is to reject God as your creator.

Forgiveness then can very simply entail deprogramming yourself from ANY belief that ANYTHING other than God has power over you. This is the same as saying you should use the power of denial to deny anything NOT of God ANY POWER over you. That includes denying that your brother has any power over you, or that you have power over anyone.

The EGO is the confusion about cause and effect, about who your creator is, and therefore where CAUSE is coming from. If you assign cause to your brothers, or to the world, or to the body, then you are confused. They are NOT the cause of you in any way. When you believe cause is outside of you making you its effect, or you are at the effect of the world, you are claiming that the world is your creator.

You DO actually have creations which YOU HAVE caused, which are the living beings in heaven that you co-created with God and your brothers. These are not the people of the world. You DO have power over these beings because you are the CO-CREATOR of them. But you have created them by giving them freedom, just as God has with you.

If in any way right now you think that some person is doing something to you, or some company, or some group, or something in the body, or some aspect of the world, or anything at all in this dream, then you ARE MISTAKEN.

The ego will then form notions of a kind of cord or connection or chain or cause and effect, between you and others, between you and the body, or you and the world. It will suggest there is a tie or bridge across which stuff from another person "comes into you" and "does things to you" or "makes you" or changes your emotions or induces reactions in you. The belief in these artificial cause-effect relationships have to be SEVERED.

Whenever you are mistaken about causality you will find a belief in your mind that someone or something has kind of latched onto you, is outside you, causing you from the outside in, and now you are at its effect. This is NOT true. This belief has to be undone.

You can simply do this by just looking at the beliefs you DO have about these horizontal cause-effect relationships, and UNDOING your belief in them.

I am not being caused by that person. That person is not doing anything to me. I am not at the effect of them. They are not responsible for how I feel. They are not making me upset. They are not doing anything to me. They are not the cause of my feelings. They have not attacked me. They are doing NOTHING to me.

You can see then that this leads to the fact that your brother is innocent, because if they truly are NOT CAUSING you at all, then you cannot claim that they are in ANY WAY sinful, guilty, wrong, bad, evil or attacking. So they must be innocent. Sorting out the fact that they are NOT the ones doing anything to you, helps you to see their innocence and yours, and places responsibility for sight back your own court.

It is also important to affirm that you are not doing anything to anyone else. I am not attacking them. I am not hurting them. I am not abusing anyone. I am not causing anyone to feel anything. I am not making anyone upset. I am not responsible for anyone feels. I am not making anyone sick or afraid. I am not attacking anyone. This is simply because YOU are innocent. You CANNOT DO ANYTHING TO ANYONE.

God himself PROTECTS everyone by his will. No-one but him can touch his children. His children CANNOT hurt each other in reality. This is the simplicity of forgiveness and atonement. Simply putting cause and effect back into their proper place, being willing to be forever an effect of God, and realizing that LOVE is all that you can actually share with anyone.

"It is God's Will that nothing touch His Son except Himself, and nothing else comes nigh unto him. He is as safe from pain as God Himself, Who watches over him in everything" "I am forever an Effect of God."

"Father, I was created in Your Mind, a holy Thought that never left its home. I am forever Your Effect, and You forever and forever are my Cause. As You created me I have remained. Where You established me I still abide, and all Your attributes abide in me because it is Your Will to have a Son so like his Cause that Cause and Its Effect are indistinguishable. Let me know that I am an Effect of God, and so I have the power to create like You. And as it is in Heaven, so on earth. Your plan I follow here, and at the end I know that You will gather Your Effects into the tranquil Heaven of Your Love, where earth will disappear, and separate things unite in glory as the Son of God."

"I am not the victim of the world I see."

"How can I be the victim of a world which can be completely undone if I so choose? My chains are loosened. I can drop them off merely by desiring to do so. The prison door is open. I can leave it simply by walking out. Nothing holds me in this world. Only my wish to stay keeps me a prisoner. I would give up insane wishes, and walk into the sunlight at last."

"Here is the perfect statement of my freedom. I am under no laws but God's. I am constantly tempted to make up other laws, and give them power over me. I suffer only because of my belief in them. They have no real effect on me at all. I am perfectly free of the effects of all laws save God's. And His are the laws of freedom."

"The body is a dream". "The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream"

The dream is coming from the mind of a dreamer. The dreamer is dreaming of a world, and a body within that world. The dreamer puts the body there and puts the environment there and moves it all around, making it seem alive.

If the dreamer forgets that they are dreaming it, they will lose the perspective of who and what they are. They will cease to know themselves as the dreamer of the dream. And now they will forget that they are the one dreaming it.

"Thus are you NOT the dreamer, but the DREAM. And so you wander idly in and out of places and events that IT contrives.""Like to a dream of punishment, in which the dreamer is unconscious of what brought on the attack against himself, he sees himself attacked unjustly, and by something NOT himself."

And now the world will seem to be being dreamed by someone else, happening by some other will, and doing things to the dream body against its will. And now instead of believing you are the dreamer you will believe your are the dream, at its effect.

"He CANNOT doubt his dreams' reality BECAUSE he does not see the part he plays in MAKING them, and MAKING them seem real. No-one can waken from a dream the world is dreaming FOR him. He becomes a part of someone ELSE'S dream. He CANNOT choose to waken from a dream he did not make."

This identifies you with being the very dream body which you are dreaming of. And now you think that you are not dreaming of a body, but that the body is real. And that it is your self. And now you seem to walk around within the dream as if the body is your mind.And then things in the dream seem to happen to the dream body and this seems to threat you, as a dream body. And now you seek escape from these threats, and ways to adjust to the dream. And you live in fear and are in states of unconsciousness, ending in sickness and death.

All of this suffering seems to befall you not because it is happening against your will, but because you have forgotten that you are the dreamer of the dream. You have lost sight of the fact the entire dream environment is happening inside your mind. And you have forgotten that you cannot possible be a mere tiny part of the dream, or any of it.

Your sense of identity has to shift back to the recognition of the reality of yourself, as the dreamer, in order to acknowledge your freedom from the dream itself. This must entail you dis-identifying from the dream body, not mistaking it for your self, not believing anything it seems to experience, and not losing track of your true nature as spirit.

"Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as SEPARATE from himself, and done to HIM.""You share NO evil dreams, if you forgive the dreamer, and perceive that he is NOT the dream he made. And so he CANNOT be a part of YOURS, from which you BOTH are free. Forgiveness SEPARATES the dreamer from the evil dream, and thus releases him."

By lifting yourself above the battlefield and outside of the context of the dream contents, you can now see that it really is just a dream, in your mind, and not really a world. And anything happening in the dream is merely part of what you decide must happen. Because you are the ruler of the dream universe.

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

"For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes.

A world forgiven is a world recognized as not being responsible for what it seems to do. Because the world is merely the effect of your causality, your mind's dreaming. You are the one putting it there and making it move. Your mind makes the world turn. You make the bodies move. You make bad things happen. And both sickness and death are simply of your making.

"Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead." "You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

You are the maker of the world. The dreamer of the dream. The causer of its events. The source of its illusions. The reason why it acts as it acts. The beginning of its nature. And the end of its suffering.

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs.""I am not at the effect of the world I see."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No-one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

"Nothing more fearful than an idle dream has terrified God's Son, and made him think that he has lost his innocence, denied his Father, and made war upon himself. So fearful is the dream, so seeming real, he could not waken to reality without the sweat of terror and a scream of mortal fear, unless a gentler dream preceded his awaking, and allowed his calmer mind to welcome, NOT to fear, the Voice that called with love to waken him."

"The happy dreams the Holy Spirit brings are different from the dreams of the world, where one can merely dream he is awake. The dreams forgiveness lets the mind perceive do not induce another form of sleep, so that the dreamer dreams another dream. His happy dreams are heralds of the dawn of truth upon the mind. They lead from sleep to gentle waking, so that dreams are gone. And thus they cure for all eternity."

To put your money where your mouth is, requires that you step up and DEMONSTRATE the truth, by showing in PHYSICAL FORM, PROOF AND EVIDENCE, that what you believe you REALLY believe, it cannot be refuted, and no-one can deny it. We have to learn to SHOW what we have learned.

I love this list of demonstration-related quotes, because it really speaks to how we are to SHOW people that the truth is true through PHYSICAL manifestations of miracles. Jesus providing there is no death by resurrecting the body, is the ultimate example.

ACIM:

"The resurrection of the world awaits your healing and your happiness, that you may DEMONSTRATE the healing of the world."

"Pain is a sign illusions reign in place of truth. It DEMONSTRATES God is denied, confused with fear, perceived as mad and seen as traitor to Himself."

"The world recedes as we light up our minds, and realize these holy words are true. They are the message sent to us today from our Creator. Now we DEMONSTRATE how they have changed our minds about ourselves and what our function is. For as we prove that we accept no will we do not share, our many gifts from our Creator will spring to our sight and leap into our hands, and we recognize what we received."

"This does Atonement teach, and DEMONSTRATES the oneness of God’s Son is unassailed by his belief he knows not what he is."

"Sickness would prove that lies must be the truth. But healing DEMONSTRATES that truth is true."

"So healing, never needed by the truth, must DEMONSTRATE that sickness is not real."

"Healing is freedom. For it DEMONSTRATES that dreams will not prevail against the truth. Healing is shared. And by this attribute it proves that laws unlike the ones which hold that sickness is inevitable are more potent than their sickly opposites."

"It is this fact which DEMONSTRATES that time is an illusion."

"Concepts maintain the world. But they can not be used to DEMONSTRATE the world is real. For all of them are made within the world, born in its shadow, growing in its ways, and finally "maturing" in its thought."

"The miracle is means to DEMONSTRATE that all appearances can change because they are appearances, and cannot have the changelessness reality entails. The miracle attests salvation from appearances by SHOWING they can change."

"The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form, because it can so easily be CHANGED. This DEMONSTRATES that it was never real, and could not stem from his reality. For that is changeless, and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

"Like EVERY lesson that the Holy Spirit requests you learn, the miracle is clear. It DEMONSTRATES what He would have you learn, and SHOWS you its effects are what you WANT. In its forgiving dream, are the EFFECTS of yours undone, and hated enemies perceived as friends, with merciful intent."

"Pain DEMONSTRATES the body must be real. It is a loud, obscuring voice, whose shrieks would silence what the Holy Spirit says, and keep His words from your awareness. Pain compels attention, drawing it away from Him, and focusing upon itself. Its purpose is the same as pleasure, for they both are means TO MAKE THE BODY REAL."

"Health is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it remains without conviction. Only when DEMONSTRATED has it BEEN proved, and MUST compel belief. No-one is healed through double messages. If you wish ONLY to be healed, you heal. Your single PURPOSE makes this possible. But if you are AFRAID of healing, then it cannot come through you. The ONLY thing that is required for a healing is a lack of fear. The fearful are NOT healed, and cannot heal. This does NOT mean the conflict must be gone forever from your mind. For if it were, there were no NEED for healing anymore. But it DOES mean, if only for an instant, you love without attack. An instant is sufficient. Miracles wait not on time."

"The holy instant is the miracle’s abiding-place. From there, each one is born into this world, as witness to a state of mind which has TRANSCENDED conflict, and has reached to peace. It carries comfort from the place of peace into the battle-ground, and DEMONSTRATES that war has no effects. For all the hurt that war has sought to bring; the broken bodies and the shattered limbs, the screaming dying and the silent dead, are gently lifted up and comforted. There IS no sadness, where a miracle has come to heal. And nothing more than just ONE instant of your love WITHOUT attack is necessary, that all this occur."

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to DEMONSTRATE they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt?

Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the PROOF that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

"God gives no special favors, and no one has any powers that are not available to everyone. Only by tricks of magic are special powers "demonstrated."" (talking about psychic powers/magic vs miracles)

"Healing is always certain. It is impossible to let illusions be brought to truth and keep the illusions. Truth DEMONSTRATES illusions have no value."

"When this occurs, the body becomes its weapon, used AGAINST this Purpose to DEMONSTRATE the "fact" that separation HAS occurred."

"The holy instant is the shining example, the clear and unequivocal DEMONSTRATION of the meaning of EVERY relationship, and EVERY situation SEEN AS A WHOLE."

"This power INSTANTLY transforms ALL situations into one sure and continuous means for ESTABLISHING His purpose, and DEMONSTRATING its reality. What has been DEMONSTRATED has called for faith, and has been GIVEN it. Now it becomes a fact, from which faith can no longer BE withheld."

"Concern yourselves not with the EXTENSION of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do NOT understand. Nor do you DO them. It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that DEMONSTRATES you did not do them."

"Miracles demonstrate that learning has occurred under the right guidance, for learning is invisible, and what has been learned can be recognized only by its RESULTS. Its GENERALIZATION is DEMONSTRATED as you use it in more and more situations."

"That is why the recognition of your OWN invulnerability is so important in the restoration of your sanity. For if you accept your invulnerability, you are recognizing that attack HAS no effect. Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally, you will DEMONSTRATE that NOTHING HAPPENED. Therefore, by attacking, you have NOT DONE ANYTHING."

" Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist IN YOU, for you have in YOURSELF, the means for removing it, and have DEMONSTRATED this by GIVING it."

"To teach the WHOLE Sonship WITHOUT EXCEPTION DEMONSTRATES that you PERCEIVE ITS WHOLENESS and have learned that it IS One."

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

"That is because the Holy Spirit IS one, and anyone who listens is inevitably led to DEMONSTRATE His way for ALL."

"The ego cannot withstand the conditioning process, because the process itself DEMONSTRATES that there is another way."

"My trust in you is greater than yours in me at the moment, but it will not always be that way. Your mission is very simple. You have been chosen to live so as to DEMONSTRATE that You are NOT an ego."

"We said before that the purpose of the Resurrection was to "DEMONSTRATE that no amount of misperception has any influence at all on a Son of God." This DEMONSTRATION EXONERATES those who misperceive, by establishing beyond doubt that they have NOT hurt anyone. "

"The Resurrection DEMONSTRATED that NOTHING can destroy truth. Good can withstand ANY form of evil, because light abolishes ALL forms of darkness. The Atonement is thus the perfect lesson. It is the final demonstration that all of the other lessons which I taught are true."

"Death is a human affirmation of a belief in hate. That is why the Bible says "There is no death," and that is why I DEMONSTRATED that death does not exist."

The thing about the body is that it's a limitation. You as a spirit are unlimited, infinite, everywhere. You are omnipresent like God. To seemingly "enter" a body you have to massively confine yourself to one location, separated off from the rest. It's like having your hands tied. Huge amounts of awareness have to be shut out. Not to mention that your intimate expansive unified relationships with the entire Sonship are shut out.

You are squeezed into this tiny little space that you then seem to inhabit. The body forms this fence around a part of the mind and seems to keep it inside, protected and separate from the rest of the mind which is outside. Large distances are placed between bodies to ensure they are kept separate. This is all the ego's design for isolating and imprisoning God's children.

Then the ego goes one step further and says, ok, now that you are in this body, wouldn't it be great if you could connect with other people? How about we bring your body closer to other bodies? How about we have your bodies try to join with other bodies? Maybe you'll feel wonderful things as you merge and feel close to others. And the usual response to this temptation is that is sounds great, it seems like an improvement, we don't have to be so alone and isolated.

The problem here is that we're accepting a massive artificial limitation as though it can never be changed, we're deliberately confining ourselves to being trapped in a little body, acting from littleness. We're handicapping ourselves, and then pretending that to bring bodies together is going to somehow "undo" this. But so long as the handicapping nature of the body is maintained, so long as we are isolated in space and time, anything the ego offers as a special relationship is a ridiculous substitute for true joining.

Two spirits should share, join, merge, connect, be one, and access each other fully and completely and in a truly unlimited way. You are in your brother's minds. You share everything with them. To do that, you need to not be restricted and limited. Trying to first accept massive limitation and to then try to continue to join, is like two people with a ball and chain around their ankles, chained up to separate prison cells, trying to reach out to be closer to each other. They can't leave the prisons or get past the bars.

It's also a simple fact that nothing in spacetime can truly join. Quantum particles are designed to be separated off. If atoms were to truly occupy the same space they would annihilate each other in a nuclear explosion. Forces repel the particles and keep them separated. Even what seems to be a physical collision or sensation of touch is really what it feels like to bump up against these force fields. Atoms don't ever really touch each other at all. So right off the bat the ego has made this scenario where even if it looks as though you are as physically close to something as possible, you still aren't actually making real contact. All sensations of touch are sensations of two forcefields repelling each other.

To try to join with another spirit while having a body is next to impossible. Someone who knows they are spirit would also find it pointless and very limiting to try to make this connection via the body. Why, when you can experience direct mind-to-mind communication ("minds need not bodies to communicate"), would you first filter all communication through your body, then through another body, in attempting to share something? Why not just go mind-to-mind?

When two bodies attempt to join in sexual acts it also really is an attempt to identify with your own body, to identify the other person with their body, to bring the two bodies together in an attempt to believe that the two persons/spirits are actually joining. This is a body delusion. The physical bodies are all that are coming together, and even their sensations of contact are illusions. Forms, matter, energy, keep individuals separated off at all levels and at all times.

Trying to relate to another brother, a spirit, by trying to relate TO or WITH the body, is almost like you're having a relationship with someone's clothing. If you were to fall in love with someone's jacket and trousers and completely ignore the person wearing them, this would indeed be very strange and somewhat insane. But this is what we do when we relate to people as bodies, completely failing to overlook the illusion of the body, failing to see the real person beyond it.

The ego first established a state of massive lack and deprivation. Its isolating of us made us lonely and in need. It built compulsions to try to join physically, not in an effort to bring us closer together, but in an effort to reinforce and emphasize the reality of the body. Pleasure and pain accomplish the same goal of making the body and illusions of sensations the primary focus. "To sense is not to know", and by focusing on sensations we become blinded by perception of form.

In efforts to bring two bodies together in a special, body-worshipping relationship, we actually necessarily exclude vast quantities of individuals. More is left out than is taken in. Due to the separating and localizing nature of spacetime, bringing 2 bodies together must entail excluding billions. The attempt to make two bodies extra special, psychologically, requires the downplaying and attack upon other bodies. A special body cannot be elevated and idol worshipped without condemning all the rest.

"On this side of the bridge, you see the world of separate bodies, seeking to join each other in SEPARATE UNIONS, and to become one BY LOSING. When two INDIVIDUALS seek to become ONE, they are trying to DECREASE their magnitude. Each would DENY his power, for the SEPARATE union EXCLUDES THE UNIVERSE. Far more is LEFT OUTSIDE than would be taken in. For God is left WITHOUT, and NOTHING taken in."

What appears on the surface to be an attempt to join, is ACTUALLY an attempt to separate. And so the ego's promise of body union in fact leads to an increase in separation, unconsciousness, loss, lack, loneliness, isolation and imprisonment. The supposed freedom produced by sexual union actually produces an increased state of exclusion and illness. With the body as the main focus, the mind is shut out and true joining based in real love becomes impossible.

You could say, in fact, that the attempt of two bodies to come together to join to make a baby, is actual a death ritual. The bodies celebrate their triumph over all other bodies, they worship the idol of death, separation ensues and now there are three bodies. Illusions have given birth to illusions. And while this is much celebrated in the world, the ego does have these underpinnings in its mechanics of what is actually happening.

It's possible, for a time, to still use the body for a holier purpose. Love can be extended through it to others, it can be used to teach, to make the body less real, and to overlook form. To the Holy Spirit, the body actually is seen as having NO function.

"It is still true that the body has no function of itself."

"When it is used only as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function."

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

"Healing IS the Holy Spirit's form of communication, and the ONLY one He knows."

Trying to make bodies real, to use them as exclusion devices, emphasizing and believing in and falling into the temptation of the flesh, being deceived by physical sensations not recognized as illusions, believing your brother is a body, etc are all ways that the ego uses the body to keep you from what it promises will be the outcome. The ego guarantees separation, while the Holy Spirit guarantees union.

For a time we can use the body with the Holy Spirit, but not to emphasize bodies. Not to use it as a way to focus on the body or believe it can give us anything. Not to use it to get from others. And not to use it as a symbolic act of exclusion. We are to love everyone equally, and this is impossible at the physical level.

"You cannot enter into REAL relationship with any of God's Sons unless you are willing to love them all AND equally."

"Think not that we can relate in peace to God or our brothers with ANYTHING external."

The entire world of bodies has to be more or less "overlooked". "To forgive is to OVERLOOK." To overlook means to "bypass seeing", to see past and beyond. If we stop to dwell on the physical, our sight is blinded. If we stop to focus on the body, the mind stops extending past it. This produces various forms of illness. If we truly want to have a real relationship with anyone, it has to be a real relationship with everyone, at the level of unconditional love, through mind and spirit.

"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the FEAR OF AWAKENING. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS."

The entire problem of the people of the world is that we're very confused about what is true. God, who is truth, has been deeply misunderstood. We've tried to replace God with a false God of vengeance, which we want to have nothing to do with.

"You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor, and God did not give it. For the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father who truly loved His Son. Therefore, you made of Him an UNloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father COULD give. And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his REAL Father, having attacked his glorious equality WITH Him."

God has been framed as a murderous evil tyrant that wants us dead. We've associated him with all the properties of that which is not true, including darkness, evil, enemy, hateful, destructive, murderous, vengeful, sick, and death itself. We've even tried to make out that God is non-existence.

This "anti-christ" attitude is part of the separation idea of being opposite to God. In order to be opposite to God, we've made God out to be opposite to himself. We now believe God is nothing like he really is. We've turned him into a false God of war.

At the same time, we've mistakenly misbelieved and misunderstood and failed to recognize all false things for what they are. We think that non-existence is existence, that death is life, that hell is heaven, that suffering is atonement, that murder is justified, that fear is safety, that sickness is saving your life.

So now we have this worldwide problem that we're trying to move away from God, on the basis that we believe God is what we do NOT want. And we try to move toward the world of illusions, on the basis that we believe it IS what we want.

To put it another way, we now see God as an evil enemy to be feared, we want nothing to do with him, we do not want his affections or help, and we do not want to wake up to exposure to the fact of his existence. We are running away from him. We think that God is death and that we're running towards life. But we are confused, and we are actually running away from life towards death.

So now we have a state where we're all choosing to suffer on purpose because we are afraid of God. We're afraid of what we've made of him, what we think he is like. We don't want to go toward him because we think we'll stop existing. Even though moving away from him was an attempt to stop existing.

When we move away from God we are moving away from happiness and wholeness and love and peace and health and sanity. We'd rather choose suffering and unhappiness and despair and pain and sickness and death. We then want to keep our suffering and NOT let it be healed, because we literally believe it is defending us from God. We'd rather die than let him heal us with his poisonous offering.

This is the state of the world. A hugely common belief that we want the opposite of what God is offering. Even if that means we actually end up choosing to make, and maintain, even more suffering. Because we do not recognize it AS suffering, and do not think it's an insane thing to tolerate pain, and are quite content to put up with all manner of misery for as long as possible.

Not to mention the guilt, which we adore and cherish and want more of, and will preserve in an attempt to keep us and others stuck in bodies and suffering in order to protect us from God. The world actually believes that people leaving their bodies means they've move into the forbidden realm to be swallowed up by death. Something to be avoided at all costs.

The world is incredibly backwards. It has become acceptably normal to not question death, to put up with pain, to reject help, to not want healing, to fear questioning the reality of the world, on the basis that these are all threats to the protection it offers. The only reason we think the world is saving us is because we a very very mistaken about it and do not recognize it as a picture of crucifixion, with nothing to offer and no power to do anything.

It all boils down to this one simple thing. We're afraid of God and we don't want to go home. We think God will never forgive us, and we would rather die and be weak and helpless than admit to being mistaken. We are most afraid of the very thing we mistakenly believe is true, because it is false. And the very things we think are false, are actually true, and yet we hate them and want nothing to do with them.

Our minds have been reversed, our entire reality has been opposed, our sanity has been turned upside down, and our whole sense of what we want has done a 180-degree flip. Trying to convince the world to let God help is quite a challenge. The insane and fearful are heavily suspicious and mistrusting. The sick want to die. The lost want to stay lost and rely on their confusion for navigation.

But there is hope and a light because the reality of God's loving truth in heaven has sent its witnesses and its teachers and its healers and its power to resurrect the dead and lift us into the light. A light which at first we do not want and fear and dread, but which later we might come to trust as our salvation. It is only a false fear, which is a lie about God, that keeps us from happiness and health.

"For anti-Christ becomes more powerful than Christ to those who dream the world is real."

"And you ask help of Christ or anti-Christ, and which you choose WILL join with you, and tell you what to do."

"This is the anti-Christ; the strange idea there is a power PAST omnipotence, a place BEYOND the infinite, a time transcending the eternal. Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

"It is extremely hard for those who still believe sin meaningful to understand the Holy Spirit's justice. They believe He shares their OWN confusion, and can NOT avoid the vengeance that their own belief in justice MUST entail. And so they fear the Holy Spirit, and perceive the wrath of God in Him."

"Who sees a brother as a body sees him as fear's symbol. And he will attack because what he beholds is his own fear external to himself, poised to attack, and howling to unite with him again. Mistake not the intensity of rage projected fear must spawn. It shrieks in wrath, and claws the air in frantic hope it can reach to its maker and devour him."

"Miracles violate every law of reality as this world judges it."

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

"The world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all."

"The world is but an effect and not a cause at all."

"The mind must be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this."

"It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen."

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

----- There are two levels -----

1. Higher mind, which is causal and causes everything. It causes the EFFECT of a lower level 3D world, which is entirely governed by what this mind decides to make happen. This is the level of "the dreamer."

2. The world, a 3D projected image which is entirely an EFFECT of the higher level. This level has NO causality and cannot make anything happen on its own. No part of it causes any other part of it to do anything. This is the level of "the dream."

The higher level CAUSES the lower level effects. That means causality is "vertical". It proceeds from above to below.

The lower level of the world itself, has NO CAUSALITY in it. It is 100% pure effect. It is not alive, it has no will, it has no mind, there are no forces or powers, no reactions, no chain of events, nothing. It's like a movie that's been projected onto a screen. The movie cannot DO anything outside of the content that the PROJECTOR has put onto the screen.

However, the higher level mind is capable of creating ILLUSIONS of lower-level causality. For example, it can place an apple in the world, next to an orange. It can then make the orange move (which cannot move by itself). The orange can move towards the apple. However, there are NO lower-level laws that DO anything, not even laws of physics. So the orange moves THROUGH the apple, having no effect on it. It's like it's not even there. It's just an IMAGE. Two images overlapping.

In order to make the orange "collide with" the apple, the higher level mind of causality has to make the apple move, at just the right moment as the orange SEEMS to touch it, so that there is an ILLUSION of a reaction, which makes it look AS IF the orange collided with the apple. There were NO laws on the level of the world causing this reaction. It's entirely fictional, decided upon by the higher level mind.

To an observer who has "bought into the illusion", it SEEMS as if there is some kind of "law" on the lower level, governing what will happen when the orange hits the apple. And the these are described as laws of physics. These laws are based on the idea that stuff on the lower level is capable of CAUSING EFFECTS on the SAME lower level. This is the idea of "horizontal causality". ACIM refers to the illusion of this as "horizontal perception."

The illusion is so convincing that it seems there is a "law" in effect, some kind of universal rule, that ensures the apple and the orange will act AS IF they are colliding. These are then thought to be natural laws or laws of nature. THEY ARE NOT. THEY DO NOT EXIST! The orange NEVER causes anything to happen. The apple NEVER is affected by the orange. BOTH OF THEM are being simultaneously moved and animated BY the higher level mind.

So in the world, it SEEMS as though there are laws of physics which govern how everything interacts, but it's 100% once removed from what ACTUALLY causes everything to occur. The world ITSELF is once removed from reality/causality, which is why it is an EFFECT or illusion and DOES NOT EXIST!

The things in the world that you THINK are "causes" or "causing something", are NOT THE CAUSE. Cause is always in the mind! They are ILLUSIONS of causes, pretending to be causes. Both causes AND effects on the level of the world are BOTH EFFECTS. This is why Jesus says "the world you see DOES NOTHING. It has no effects at all" (it has no causal power at all).

So while there is this horizontal illusion of cause and effect, which is of the ego, since these so-called "laws" are actually fictional and not the REAL cause, when the mind decides to make a change in what it PROJECTS, it is capable of BREAKING THE LAWS. If the mind decides suddenly, that the apple and the orange will combine together to produce a banana, THEN SO BE IT.

Vertical mind will CAUSE a banana to be projected INTO the world as a banana showing up. This will VIOLATE every conceivable "horizontal law" that you can imagine. And THIS IS MIRACULOUS! "Miracles violate every law of reality as the world judges it." The mind has simply decided to CHANGE ITS DREAM, and this breaks all of the FICTIONAL horizontal laws that APPEAR to explain why things are the way they are, or what limits they are restricted by. Mind OVERRIDES the law!

Miracles are also demonstrations. And miracles are also teaching devices. When the higher mind expresses its power OVER the lower level, and shows that it is the AUTHOR of the "fake laws" by breaking those laws, it demonstrates that those laws ARE ILLUSIONS. "Appearances can be changed." And by changing those appearances, it is PROVEN that those appearances MUST have been illusions. This is educational.

Additionally, the "nature" or "natural law" of the horizontal level, which is fake, is BELOW the TRUE NATURE of the higher level mind that causes it all. That means that which CAUSES the lower level effects is ABOVE the NATURE of the lower level. Another word for that is SUPER (above) NATURAL. Supernatural. Miracles are supernatural! They transcend the "nature" of the "ego", which is the illusion that horizontal causality is real. Also the idea that horizontal causality is real, is really the ego idea that there is no God! That there is no HIGHER CAUSE.

This is why it was possible for Jesus to do things like walking on water to defy gravity, multiplying food to defy ideas of limited materials, changing a tree branch into a snake and back again, raising a body from seeming death, etc.

These are all POSSIBLE because the mind that MAKES all this worldly content show up has POWER OVER IT from a higher level. When a person's mind has become VERTICALLY ORIENTED, which relates to "miracles entail a sudden shift from horizontal to vertical perception", the mind aligned with CAUSALITY can make ANY changes you can possibly conceive of, OUTSIDE of the illusion of "laws that can't be broken." And this is what MIRACLE WORKERS demonstrate. The idea of irreversibility is SIN. Miracles prove sin is not real by CHANGING what the world says cannot be changed.

The distinction between what is CAUSE, and what is its EFFECT, perfectly explains the structure of cause and effect and WHY supernatural miracles are possible and HOW they operate. They are acts of MIND and WILL firmly rooted in causal power, simply electing to produce a different EFFECT. Since "the world is but an effect and not a cause at all", there is nothing in the world or OF the world that cannot be changed, healed, undone, reversed or manipulated by the power of the Mind. This includes bodily sickness and death. "The mind (cause) must be stronger than the body (effect), every miracle demonstrates this!"

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given unto you in Earth and Heaven. There is nothing you cannot do."

In A Course in Miracles, Jesus gives a new definition for what is life, and what is death. He does not mean that life is "the stuff in this world" and that death is "when bodies are totally dead and lie on the ground decaying." He has a totally different view of life and death because he recognizes what things ARE, not what we think they are.

"Life" is equated ONLY with eternal life. That which lives forever, cannot be attacked, never becomes sick, does not age or grow old and cannot die. Life which extends forever and produces more life through miraculous creation in the extension of God's being, which is the ONLY function of Spirit. That is real life. And such a life is only possible in what Jesus refers to as HEAVEN. And Heaven is considered to be completely OPPOSITE to Earth and a totally different place to exist. "Heaven is the dwelling place of the Son of God." "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

"Death" is equated with anything that is NOT that or which opposes it in any way, which includes dreams, and includes this world (Earth). It includes any state of separation, any dream world, any dream body, any thought of attack, any even minor upset, even a slight grievance, all forms of sickness ("all sickness is but a little death"), all levels of suffering, and the "final" death itself. In other words, everything in this world and universe is considered to be DEATH. It is a dream of death. The entire thing is made of death. "Without the idea of death there is no world."

This is why "there is no life outside of Heaven". There is nothing ETERNAL in this world, because all things visible will end and all things that perish are illusions. "The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for everything He creates MUST be eternal as Himself." And let's face it, without denial, nothing in this world lasts forever. This world is the idea of being outside of Heaven, it is founded on separation, and it is founded on denial of life. Which is death.

Jesus states, this world is "at best an ILLUSION OF LIFE, at worst, death". Even if this world is seen with forgiving eyes, even if it is seen through true perception, even if it is supposedly loved, it is STILL an illusion of an opposite to Heaven and it STILL entails the idea of death, without which it CANNOT seem to exist at all.

This is what Jesus means by life and death. Life is Heaven, Earth is death. Life is eternal. Anything limited is an illusion of life and is made of the idea of death. Anyone who has perception still needs healing because they're still inside a separated state and are inside the idea of death. Anyone who is a teacher of God, using the body for a holy purpose, is still inside a dream of death.

Until you GO HOME TO HEAVEN, you do not have access to eternal life. Even though it is permanent, and hiding behind this world's illusions. Until you are IN HEAVEN, and have forgotten this world Earth, you have not CLAIMED eternal life or gone beyond that which perishes and ends. Earth IS NOT HEAVEN. It cannot be heaven. Its laws and the spacetime belief that it is based on a TOTALLY OPPOSED TO LIFE. The things you see in this world which you THINK are life, are NOT. They are illusions of life.

Even the "real world" is an ILLUSION OF LIFE. It may reflect or seem SIMILAR to or like Heaven but it is NOT the same thing. And nor is LOVE, in this world, the same thing as LOVE in Heaven. Because love means LIFE and CREATION and that is ONLY POSSIBLE in Eternity. Outside of Heaven, LOVE IS AN ILLUSION OF LOVE, a REFLECTION, which appears like a picture, an image, symbolizing love. It falls short of the full love of God which can ONLY be experienced beyond this universe, beyond the world, beyond the body, beyond ALL illusions of life.

This is why RESURRECTION HAS MEANING. When you get to the end of the curriculum, it ENDS IN THE RESURRECTION. It ends there because resurrection means LIFE. And that means, that every state you were in BEFORE the resurrection, WAS NOT LIFE. Resurrection is the RETURN TO eternal life. Before that, you did not have awareness of eternal life. You only had awareness of dreams of life. The body has absolutely nothing to do with LIFE.

"The body does not live or die, it is nothing at all." To think that EVEN the human body is alive, is a mistake. It does not live, because if it lived it would have a mind and a will and a soul and THAT is the level confusion that produces sickness. The body does not CREATE. Believing it creates is SICKNESS. It does not CAUSE anything. It has no ability to EXTEND LIFE. Its production of other bodies is an ILLUSION of the extension of life. Baby bodies are no more "life" than adult bodies. They are all illusions in a dream world.

"The body is the central figure in dreaming." It depends on the dream, without the dream it does not exist, and the dream cannot happen without it. Dreams are not REALITY. They are not REAL LIFE. If you endow the body with the properties of Christ, ie eternal life, mind, spirit, extension, etc.... you are making an illusion real and you have false perception. It IS FALSE PERCEPTION to believe that this world is ALIVE. It is false perception to believe that physical objects EXIST. It is false perception to SEE BODIES. It is false perception to look with the body's eyes and senses and believe that what they show you EXISTS AT ALL OR IS EVEN HAPPENING. These are illusions. "To sense is not to know."

This is an imaginary universe designed to block your awareness of LIFE. It is a dream state. And ALL dreams are based on the one central dream from which all illusions stem - death. It may seem to entail a spectrum, ranging from what what seems like life, to what seems like death, and it may seem to you that a living body is "more alive" than a dead one, but they are ALL THE SAME ILLUSION. NONE of them have eternal life, and they are all ILLUSIONS of life and death. They are not real. They do not exist.

ONLY the creations of light are real. ONLY the extension of God's spirit/being is real. ONLY unlimited infinite love is really love. ONLY Heaven is ALIVE. It is the LIVING WORLD OF LIGHT. It is absolutely nothing like this illusory world of darkness and death. And if you think that death is ONLY the state where things are do decayed that they are laying on the ground "lifeless", think again. That is merely the extreme end of a spectrum ranging from death to death.

You, RIGHT NOW, in your body, imagining you are living, are NOT REALLY ALIVE. You are NOT RESURRECTED. You are half dead. Asleep. That is what UNCONSCIOUSNESS means. Until you are FULLY CONSCIOUS, fully awake and aware of Heaven, you are unconscious and asleep and dreaming, and in your dream you imagine a world that you think is alive, even though it is being manufactured by a mind that is RESISTING LIFE and AVOIDING BEING ALIVE. We are all just zombies, "the living dead", walking around a world made of death, without which there is no world.

Heaven is life. Earth is death. Heaven is heaven. Earth is hell. Heaven is eternal. Earth will end. Heaven is reality. Earth is a dream. Heaven is immortality. Earth is mortality. Illusions of life do not turn into life. They disappear and reveal the life that they were trying to hide. Heaven on Earth is "heaven on an illusion". Not going to happen. Illusions recognized disappear. "A forgiven world cannot last." You will not find even ONE example of eternal life IN THIS WORLD, YET ALONE being able to say that ALL THINGS in this world have eternal life. Not even ONE LITTLE THING lives forever here, and anyone who thinks that's not true, is clearly in denial.

"Where God created life, there life must be". IN Heaven.

There is a divine order to your creation.

God is the primary source and creator. Without him nothing exists, not even you.

God created you. Just to be clear, that means everything that you are, everything that you have, everything you are capable of, came solely from God.

You did not receive any attributes from the environment, from food, from upbringing, from self-taught ideas. Nothing.

You have absolutely only what God decided that you have.

Your joy, your love, your life, your power, your creativity, your expression, your freedom, your peace, your unity, your sharing, your relationship, your being, was all given to you by God.

You did not put it there. You did not create it. You did not invent it. You have no ability to change it. You cannot control it. You cannot make it go away. It is rock-solid permanent and utterly beyond you.

Here is the second facet of this interesting scenario.

Since you only have what God wills that you have, and are only what he wills that you be, you have nothing else and can be nothing else.

And this means that you cannot obtain any other qualities, characteristics, abilities, skills, talents, natures, conditions, or anything else that did not come from God.

"When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while."

You essentially were created with a full plate. Fully complete. Lacking nothing. Completely perfect in all ways. So finished and so fully divine, that you were not created in a position of having to go out and hunt or find or assemble or build or do anything at all to become whole.

You therefore cannot add to yourself. Just as you cannot remove from yourself. What you are is a permanent light in heaven sustained by the thought of God forever. Fixed and absolute. Unchanging, unwavering, eternal.

This means that any belief you have that you have added to yourself, redefined yourself, invented yourself, have something not of God, have something you gave yourself, something you found on your own, something you are capable of that is "new", something you've changed about yourself, etc... these MUST all be illusions.

As you move into the separation idea, into ego, it is these "alterations", "adjustments", that you begin to believe in. It is accompanied by a sense of lack, or being incomplete from the outset. That somehow God did not give you *everything* already, and so there is something to add or find or collect or establish. Some progress to make.

And this will include the belief that you have something of your own, which God did NOT give you, which you think is yours and that you can have. You cannot truly have anything that God did not give you, however. So when you believe that you have something not of God, you have nothing. And when you reject what God has given you, you have nothing.

God gave you all of his love, mind, will, power, joy, peace, beauty, freedom, life, etc. When you believe that you have something that did not come from God, you are rejecting what He gave you, which is your natural inheritance. As host to God, you inherit all of God. If you throw it away, you have nothing. And there is nothing else.

So now if you think you have power, but it's not God's power, you are mistaken. You cannot have any power at all if you do not have God's power. Yet, if you accept what God has given you, you have all power. The power is yours, but it is not sourced by you. The power you have IS God himself, in you, since you host him.

"To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. As God created you, you have all power."

What you are, is more like a host or medium or relay-station or conduit or channel or re-expresser of God. You literally have nothing OTHER than what God has given and put into you. It is yours, truly, because it is fully given to you. And yet, at the same time, it is not an exclusive property of yours, nor did you make it, nor can you remove it.

Ego is the idea that you are or have something not of God. Something exclusive, special, unique, isolated, which is not shared with God. And typically not shared with anyone else. It's a possessive, selfish attitude. An attempt to hoard a piece of heaven for yourself alone. And this makes you alone. It's what makes you a "separated one".

If you try to own, grasp, possess, grab or steal away something shared, in an attempt to put a label on it and say it is yours ONLY, you lose it. Attachment is loss. Possession is emptiness. Try to own a piece of God and you lose everything. But share in it, and it is fully yours and fully everyone's.

Jesus says:

"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. ***I have nothing that does not come from God.*** The main difference between us as yet is that I have NOTHING ELSE. This leaves me in a state of true holiness, which is only a POTENTIAL in you."

The problem then is only that you think you have something OTHER than or in addition to what God gave. And this must entail the belief that you DO NOT have what God gave. And its the belief in lacking what God gave, which causes you to be compelled to replace it with something else. Which will never work. You can only have what God gave you and the rest must be let go.

"I am still as God created me" also means "I am not what I made of myself."

You who are host to God, inherit everything real from God. And this is whole and complete and perfect. All of Him is in you forever. What seems to be "your" anything, is simultaneously HIS. "God is my strength". Your strength, which truly is yours, IS GOD. God, in you, is the sense of strength that you feel. It's literally like it is YOUR strength, to use, but it is ALSO His.

It's a very interesting relationship. God causes you. You are his effect. God being cause forces you to be also a cause. Now you are a co-creator. Not just a creator but a collaborator, because you can only create WITH him, using HIS power, which is shared with you.

It's like God has fully given all of himself to you, in your creation, establishing you as completely "having" everything, as if were fully yours, and yet at the same time, all that you have, is STILL HIS, and is still shared with him. That is your oneness. You are united with Him. You are a team.

You have nothing of your own. Yet you have everything, because God gave it to you. It's kind of like if it were "on loan". You have the use of it, but it's not yours exclusively. It still belongs to God. You're kind of renting it, permanently. And so you enjoy the benefit of it forever, but it's still technically His.

Thus you have the power of God in you. You are strong. You are immortal. Because God is in you. Because you are His extension. And you are free, yet you are joined. You are nothing without Him, but can share everything with Him. Either you share or you have nothing. But never can you have it all just for yourself. Nor do you source anything without Him.

When I think of it, it makes me think of the angels. They operate in service to God. They go where they are directed. They do what he wills them to do, in agreement with Him. They fulfill a function. They are joyfully glad to be what they are. They have no desire to improve themselves, nor do they need to. They give thanks to God for what they are in celebration and worship. And everyone's happy.

You can share the power of God, if you know how to pray. "Prayer (asking) is the medium of miracles". - ACIM

How do you ask? How do you pray? How do you accurately communicate with God as to what you want? How do you cause to happen what you want to happen, instead of what your unconscious chooses against you?

One part of miracles is believing you have received what it is you want, or in other words, acceptance of its "reality". But the receiving is only part of it. There is also the asking. "Ask and you shall receive". So how do you ask?

Asking isn't done by there being a sense of separation between you and what you want to happen. It isn't done in a typical asking fashion, where you say, "I do not have this yet, but I want it". That simply affirms and states that you do not have it, and that's going to remain the case. You think this is asking, but this is how a victim asks.

In victim consciousness, where you see yourself as powerless, where there are causes outside of you working against you, and where you are afraid, you tend to withdraw and stay frozen, acting as if you are choosing or wanting, but basically remaining paralyzed. There is no power in it.

This lack of power, or empowerment, literally means that the Holy Spirit - who is the expression of God's Power, has been blocked. Or basically, you are choosing not to USE His Power. His Power is shared with Christ, who you are, but if you are in a victim consciousness you have disowned yourself, and therefore disowned this power.

To ask correctly must entail the presence of POWER, because it is that power which actually gives you power OVER illusions, and actually is like a "force" which can make actual changes. If you are not empowered, then you are cut off from the power you share with God, and therefore do not have the power to do anything. So when you ask, in a disempowered state, you really strongly believe that there is no power that can actually act, and therefore the power does not do anything.

So you could be in a victim mindset and be very very strongly "asking" for help or change, pleading with God, begging for someone to be healed, and nothing is happening. Because even though you're making a lot of noise, most of which is a reaction to perceiving that there's a "really big real problem", it's all ego expressions, not expressions of empowerment.

You can also be in wishful thinking. You could be saying "I wish I wasn't sick". There is no power in that whatsoever. So it's a wish, but it doesn't do anything. So it's not really a request. You're not really asking for the sickness to be healed even if you're wishing very hard. You can really really strongly feel that you really really "want" a person to be not sick, because you think the sickness is real and want to help, but this "wanting" is not asking. It is just making the problem real and reacting to that delusional perception, taking the form of "looking like" you're asking, but really doing absolutely nothing.

God has the power to do anything. And the Holy Spirit can express that power with no limits. This power comes because God EXTENDS. And you are meant to be sharing in that power, causing you to be ABLE to actually CAUSE ANYTHING to happen. But you're not going to be able to wield that power if you are not in alignment with "being empowered". So victimhood has to go. You have to become responsible for being what you really are. You have to claim the truth and own up to your causality, which you share with God.

When you are in the victim mindset, you have disempowered yourself, and you are used to having no power. You think that if you do spiritual practices and "wake up" then you will still be a disempowered being, perhaps more responsible and aware but you don't realize it means you will have ACCESS TO REAL POWER. The power that creates worlds. There is a line in ACIM urtext which says "your mind has the power to create planets". No joke.

So if you want to get access to the power, first and foremost, you need to get out of the victim mind, which is your long-term goal of becoming closer to God's truth. As you approach that truth and align yourself with it, you are opting to become an extender of God's power (love). Meanwhile, you need to learn how to ask.

Asking is more of an act of stating that something is already manifest. It is a command. It isn't really a question. It's like writing reality. You don't ask by begging or traditional ego asking. You state what you believe in. There is, however, a caveat to this.

Such power can only be used for the highest good of all. You cannot be a "power ego" that gets access to God's power but uses it for all kinds of ego whims and purposes. The power only works through ego relinquishment, which automatically means it cannot be even accessed for malevolent purposes. It can only be accessed and used for loving purposes. This is why you need to be clear about what God's will is, because you can only use His Power if it is God's will that you do so.

if you want, lovingly, for a person's sickness to be healed, you do not say, "I'd like that healed please". You also do not ask God "are you going to heal this" or "can you heal this please?". You instead state a "new reality". You command the old reality to go, by cancelling the illusions psychologically, then you state what you want to change. You tell it to change, using that power. Your word becomes powerful.

"All your sins are forgiven, get up and walk" - Jesus' example.

Jesus isn't wishy washy in his asking. He is commanding. Authoritative. That's the key to asking. He doesn't ask God to maybe do something. He joined WITH God, BECOMES the power, SHARES the power, and EXPRESSES the power. THAT is correct prayer. That is the highest level of prayer. When there is a separation in the prayer where you think there is some obstacle to overcome, some time delay, some real problem, or some doubt as to whether it's going to transfer, that's basically ego and it will rob you of your power.

True prayer, the highest song, ACTS, as if it is real already. Jesus says his "workers are ACTIVE workers". It's not a form of asking that the ego is used to. It's counter to the ego's intuition. It's almost like, looking into the future and visualizing what it's going to be like, believing it is true, and pulling the future state into the present by receiving the truth that it WILL happen and already has. This is totally the opposite of the ego's form of asking, which focuses on the PAST and the reality of existing problems, causing there to be no power in the present and no ability to affect the future.

Thus, since asking is prayer, prayer must mean commanding results, ie expressing LOVE from love's perspective, as a representative of love, and it means that whatever song you are singing, whatever truth you are radiating, whatever you are ASSERTING, that is what you are giving, and that is what you are asking for. So asking in a way is backwards, you do not ask, you command. You receive.

You believe God's truth and make it a reality, regardless of what form looks like currently. How can a new form be expressed (e.g. a healed body) if you are dwelling on what the existing form looks like, or if you keep looking to the existing form to see if it has changed? Instead you focus squarely on the reality in the mind - what you are CAUSING TO HAPPEN. You do have a right to this power and you can access this power. It is your inheritance. But you need to unlearn the ego's ways of causing stuff to not happen, in order to reawaken the proper FUNCTIONING of the Son of God.

Lately I feel like I have found a whole new sense of identity, and that I've discovered God.

I have been dwelling on two workbook lessons, 91 and 92. They talk about how I am not a body, and asks therefore, what am I? The focus is put on discovering who I really am if I am a not a limited, separated self, and begins to reinforce the various attributes of what must be my real self.

Then in 92 it builds on this by suggesting that all the attributes of my real self are actually shared with God. That for example God's light is my strength, that I see in God's light, that I share God's mind, that my strength is actually God in me etc.

These to me seem to be a kind of two step leap in identity - 1) That I am not a body and am something above and beyond this level and world, and 2) That all my real attributes are actually PART OF GOD. That my actual self is SHARED with him and everything true of my real self is INHERITED and simultaneously one with him.

That means that to claim my real self, to be not a body or an ego, I actually have to realize that I am part of God himself, that everything I have comes from him, that there is a strength and a power IN me which is actually HIM. That I am host to him, that he is in fact the life and the light in me, and that I can kind of step back into him and merge with him. Even my self, my soul, is actually an extended part of God himself which HE DWELLS IN.

I cannot really explain it but there has been a strange leap in confidence, sense of outward expression, of certainty and fearlessness, which has suddenly erupted as a result of this. It seems like a major shift in who and what I AM, away from "I'll do this all by myself" to "God and I will do this together." A leap from exclusion to inclusion, and from selfishness to sharing.

I've been having some .. bright and clear views of the world, in which it looks quite beautiful, which seems to effortlessly come by affirming that all MY attributes are actually God in me. That I see in his light, think with his mind, that my strength is his, that I forgive with his love, that I SHARE with him. And through this acknowledgement of him in my mind, I leap further to seeing God in everything. And this is also about TRUST.

I have to say that the degree of seeming 'light' that these visions entail is far beyond anything that any other course practice has ever revealed. And it seems so simply accessed through the acknowledgement of God in me, and that my SELF is embedded in him and a part of him. I am an extension of God. Everything I am comes from him and IS HIM!

By opening up to that, which is WITHIN myself, kind of behind myself, all of the sense of happiness and love and power and light and so on just seems to switch on like a lightbulb and flood my perception with 'forgiveness'. This isn't an intellectual exercise or a concept or theory. It's an immersive experience. I am putting myself into God's hands and am seeing myself as united with his attributes. That anything I have is OF him and not of me.

What I am is not just myself. What I am isn't an isolated, fenced-off me. The walls are dropping. What I am is shared with the whole. What I am is given to me by something much larger. And it seems the blessings and gifts of God are FAR FAR FAR in advance of any sense of "me and mine" that I could possibly come up with as a body-identified ego.

It also seems so very simple. Just stepping back and sinking into a sense of self that is made of God himself. Allowing myself to host him. Accepting that I am what he has created me to be. Recognizing not simply that I am some kind of spiritual self, but that I ONLY have what God has PUT in me, and what he has put in me is HIMSELF!

This also leads to the recognition that everyone else, all other children of God, also have God in them. And I am seeing this in the course more and more. To attack another is to attack God because they are host to God. To recognize that they are HOST to God, is to recognize their sacredness and to honor the power of God in them.

I cannot join with another WITHOUT joining with God and the Holy Spirit in them, because all must be included! I can't exclusively join with just one person, to the exclusion of God. God has to be part of the joining because he is the love. And his entire Kingdom must be there as well. To love unconditionally is to love the whole sonship at once.

To be an isolated, separated, exclusive, body-identified self, is to be HOSTAGE to the ego. You can be hostage to the ego or host to God. This is our choice. To host God is to have him be in you and through you, in which all he shares with and gives to you, is given FOR you and FOR others. And thus does it extend beyond yourself alone, because nothing is for yourself alone.

"Would you be hostage to the ego or host to God? You will accept only whom YOU invite. You are free to determine who shall be your guest, and how long he shall remain with you." "I who am host to God AM worthy of Him.

He Who ESTABLISHED His dwelling-place in me created it as He would have it be.

It is not needful that I make it ready for Him, but only that I DO NOT INTERFERE with His plan to RESTORE to me my own AWARENESS of my readiness, which is eternal.

I need ADD nothing to His plan,

But to RECEIVE it, I must be willing NOT to substitute my own IN PLACE of it.""

"You who are host to God, are also host to THEM."

"Thus will He make you ready to acknowledge that you ARE host to God, and hostage to no-one and to nothing."

"For He is Host to God. And you need but invite Him in Who is there ALREADY, by recognizing that His Host is One."

"We asked you once before, "Would you be hostage to the ego or host to God?" Let this question be asked you by the Holy Spirit in you, EVERY time you make a decision. For every decision you make DOES answer this, and invites sorrow or joy, accordingly."

"It is not true that you can make decisions BY yourself, or FOR yourself alone."

"Do not forget you do not answer for yourself alone." "Remember that you learn not for yourself alone, no more than I did."

"The Holy Spirit enables you to PERCEIVE THIS WHOLENESS NOW. You can no more pray for yourselves alone than you can find joy for yourself alone."

"And sight of bodies becomes the sign that sacrifice IS limited, and something still remains for you alone."

"The gifts you have are not for you alone. What He has come to offer you, you now must learn to give."

"It will NOT be for you alone, for therein lay its misery. As its UNholiness kept it as a thing apart, its HOLINESS will become an offering to everyone."

"Atonement is for all, because it is the way to UNDO the belief that ANYTHING is for you ALONE."

"Salvation IS His Will BECAUSE you share it. NOT for you alone, but for the Self which IS the Son of God."

While your physical body is clearly anchored in THIS world, your true self is clearly anchored in ANOTHER world. Your soul, your holy self, is entirely LOCATED in God's Kingdom.

"The soul never leaves the sight of God."

The only transition you make is between being BODY (physical) identified, which is the same as believing "I am in the physical realm", or being spirit (soul) identified, which is the same as "I am in God's Kingdom now".

But you cannot think of yourself as a soul if you think of yourself as anchored at the physical level. If YOU are IN THIS WORLD, you cannot be in the Kingdom. Your body is here, but your SELF is not.

The course becomes more clear and obviously telling us this, if you notice how it asks us to BE the way that God created us.

We're not asked to merely stay entirely OUTSIDE of the Kingdom until the last second where we pass through the pearly gates. We're asked to APPROACH the Kingdom, while in a body, and to RELOCATE our mind INSIDE the Kingdom as far as possible, PRIOR to the final awakening.

"You are safe in God, dreaming of exile" tells you that you ARE IN GOD, and being in God is your safety. The course also tells you the Son of God cannot be happy anywhere in the world UNLESS he knows he is with God. To be WITH God is really to be located IN HEAVEN.

If you think of Heaven as a place beyond this world, which it is, or if you think in terms of "two levels" where Heaven is above and Earth is below, which is accurate, there is temptation to TRAP yourself in this world. You think your body is here, and therefore your self is here. This is body identification.

What we're asked to really do is to lift our mind/self up out of the body, identify with our spirit/soul which is not even in a body, shift our mind into the service of the soul, LOCATE ourselves in God, EXPERIENCE intimacy and love with God, return to ONENESS with Creation, and to do all this as far as possible WHILE we're still having a body.

It's easy to think of Heaven as on the other side of a dimensional division, or a boundary of separation, the gap, which holds heaven and earth apart. But this tempts us to believe we are not IN heaven UNTIL God takes the last step. This is inappropriate. In order to BECOME more loving, at peace, happy, joyful, powerful, under no laws but God's, returning to your true nature, etc you HAVE to start moving INTO heaven, into your spiritual identity, right from the start.

In fact, the only way to lift up OUT of false perception ("the world is false perception") is to move back towards God, re-enter the truth, position yourself IN the light, CENTER yourself in God, locate yourself IN heaven, be surrounded with divinity, and therefore be practically 100% aware of Heaven's presence, even if you are temporarily still in a body.

You are an immortal being, and you cannot die. But this does not mean you're going to be mortal UNTIL God takes you home. Instead, the course is asking you to RECLAIM YOUR IMMORTAL NATURE NOW, live out from that nature while you're here, demonstrate you are under God's laws only while you're here, BE the miraculousness of the soul HERE, and therefore heal the body and repurpose it into a symbol of eternal life.

He's asking us to return to our HEAVENLY NATURE, as fully as possible, in order to become "ready" to take that final 1% step to undo the last threads of the illusion of death and accept the atonement. The atonement is love and light, so to approach it you have to enter into the realm of love and light almost fully immersed. But you WILL NOT BE WILLING to accept the atonement without a HUGE amount of PREPARTION before hand, leading up to it. "Miracles are everyone's right, but purification is necessary first."

We cannot even be loving, in this world, unless we are willing to be closer to God while we're here. We can't be the light of the world unless our mind is plugged into spirit and we are literally radiating holiness and light into the world. We cannot perform miracles unless we're going to tap into the unlimited miraculous power of God WHILE we're here. To be miracle minded is to be aligned with and IN the mindset and thought system of heaven itself.

Perhaps we can frame it this way. The physical world is false perception, the lower battlefield of unconsciousness and death. ANY attempt to even START to awaken, to become more spiritual rather than unconscious, requires us to begin re-identifying with spirit. This is why Jesus says:

"Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight."

In pain, we are in the darkness of making the world real and experiencing it as a living hell. If we want to be happier and so on, we're going to have to APPROACH THE LIGHT. This will entail shifting your sense of WHERE you are, from hell to heaven.

The journey begins as you emerge from the painful state and START to move towards God. And this means you are slightly releasing your identification with the body and physicality, and are beginning to open up a spiritual sight which is the eyes of Christ - and Christ is IN heaven.

So even if our body is here in this world, our mind/self/identity must go through a journey BACK to heaven, even from the beginning of the awakening process, such that we should be thinking of ourselves AS WE ARE IN HEAVEN, in order to live out from that truth.

We can't BE loving people if we are not coming FROM LOVE. Love IS GOD. And in this way we are bringing the laws and the love of ANOTHER world TO THIS WORLD. And in order to have a holier relationship with others, while here, we must start relating HOW WE RELATE IN HEAVEN. Holy Relationship mirrors heaven's relationships. Or in other words, we must relate here how we would treat each other IN GOD, as if we ARE in God right now.

We then shine the light of heaven THROUGH the body. We extend love from ANOTHER world through the body. We bring the Holy Spirit's healing TO the world. We atune to our IMMORTAL NATURE while still in a body, thus forcing the body to DEPICT a symbolic representation of eternal life WHILE HERE. You cannot do that if you think of yourself as IN or OF this world.

You must BRING another world TO this world. You must BE AS YOU ARE IN HEAVEN, while visiting hell. You then operate under MIRACULOUS laws, which break the laws of this world while you're here.

This is why it's important to start now to identify yourself AS your soul, to begin operating AS IMMORTAL, to extend God's love here, to shine Heaven's light into the darkness, and to be as close as possible to how God created you BEFORE you get to heaven.

"But the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT. And what you call with love WILL come to you."

"The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one."

"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."

If you perceive that you have lost something, then your logical response is despair. You are not grateful because you have not received. Something has been taken away instead, and it inspires ingratitude. You also can feel the same way if you think you are getting something you do not want - you resent it, judge it and reject it instead of being grateful for it.

You will then feel that you do not want what has happened. You will fight with it, resist it, hate it, and wish it was the way it used to be. Whatever has been lost, you want it back. And you feel justified in feeling loss so long as it remains absent.

At the same time, the ego wants what has been lost to stay lost, because it really believes in loss as death. Loss is the gap of spacetime. Loss is the absence of love. Loss is the suggestion that something of God is missing from reality. It is a rejection of life and love and happiness. It is an attempt to die.

Such a state of mind does not inspire gratitude because it feels more like a treachery, a theft, a taking away, a diminishment, in which you now don't have what you should have. And then there will be hate and anger and resentment and a sense of not wanting whatever else someone or some place is offering, because it's not the thing you're missing.

In loss, you will then reject everything, not acknowledge what you have, not appreciate or even recognise what is present, and will just wish that you had the thing that is absent. But wanting what is not there can only produce what we call grief, which is the unhappy despair and sadness and sense of horror that everything of value has gone away.

But what can this be other than a denial of God, a rejection of love, an unwillingness to live, an insistence that death is true, and a failure to recognise what has been given. There is no gratitude because there is no acknowledgement of what you are receiving.

In fact, loss can be a lesson in which you have to learn to become grateful, and to receive. It is a state in which you are are trying to do the opposite of receive, as if you gave and didn't receive in return.

It's based on the ego's breakdown of the golden rule, in which it insists that giving and receiving are not one, and therefore you have not received what you have given. This is a state of sacrifice, as if something has been sacrificed.

But such a state of mind, which is really the rejection of love and God and receiving, can only produce feelings of loss and despair. It can only incite an attachment to what is gone, a wish it be present, and yet a firm belief that it must not be. It is a way of pushing love away, pushing the valued thing away, while at the same time wishing it was here.

This can only produce a kind of "split" in the mind which produces insanity and intensifies the ego. The ego loves to be in this contradictory state of wanting and not wanting at the same time. It wants what it does not have, and it does not want what it has. This is completely backwards, of course.

The remedy requires the recognition and acknowledgement that you are NOT at a loss, and in fact the total opposite is true. It must entail realising that God has given you everything, and therefore you lack nothing at all, loss is impossible, and everything you could ever really want has been given you.

This requires you to be willing to receive. It requites a willingness to want what you have, and to no longer want what you don't have. But the ego will say, it's impossible not to want the thing that's missing because you love it so much. You want it badly. And the idea of not wanting it seems like a betrayal.

Yet badly wanting something is a state of lack and need, and the more you believe in this lack the more you will want it. So you aren't really wanting it based on love, but based on not getting what you want. The loss is therefore selfish, as part of the ego.

It is in fact by wanting what you don't have instead of what you do have, that you produce a rejection of what is here right now, and therefore a denial and unwillingness to be grateful for what has been given you in the present. It is a rejection of the acknowledgement of gain, and a dwelling on absence and death. But in fact, a willingness to want what you have, not what you don't have, is the only sane approach.

In truth, if you move into a space of being willing to receive, acknowledging that everything has been given you, and that you have everything from God, you will suddenly find that in fact that means that you have love. And the only way to really acknowledge that you have the love you thought you lost, is to acknowledge that it is still being given to you right now. In fact, God has eternally given you love, and the only problem in you seeming to "lack it" and being at a loss, is an unwillingness to receive it. You might complain by feeling it is lost, but this is really an attempt NOT to have it.

By moving into a willingness to RECEIVE, you therefore admit that God has GIVEN everything, and fully, and so completely, that in fact you have been gifted, blessed, honoured and completely recognised. In fact you have not been left out at all, you have been utterly showered with everything you could ever really want. And in that recognition that it is coming TO you, and you HAVE it, you immediately move into a natural response of gratitude. Gratitude opens your awareness to RECEIVE and to WANT what you are receiving, instead of wanting what you are not receiving.

Gratitude is therefore the antidote to loss, because it recognises gain and completely ignores the ego's insistence that death is possible. Loss is really ingratitude for what is. In fact, gratitude to God for life is the way to receive life, and is the rejection of death and the belief in death. And without a lack of God, there can be no sense of loss at all. And then suddenly you will find that everything you thought you did not want is suddenly something you can embrace and accept and want. And then you open up to a whole new life that was in front of your face all along, even while you were unwilling to acknowledge it.

And the good part is, that the love you thought you lost, is not only still with you, it is in you, as you, given to you, shared with you, and had never really left. And thank God for that. How could you actually experience that you had the love you thought was lost, if you weren't willing to gratefully receive it?! This is simply a lesson in becoming grateful to God for what he has guaranteed to be yours forever. A simple movement out of loss and despair and disaster and failure, into total happiness and gladness that everything is present and accounted for.

"Love is the way I walk in gratitude."

"And gratitude can only be sincere if it is joined to love."

"Walk, then, in gratitude the way of love."

"Today we learn to think of gratitude in place of anger, malice and revenge. We have been given everything. If we refuse to recognize it, we are now entitled therefore to our bitterness, and to a self-perception which regards us in a place of merciless pursuit, where we are badgered ceaselessly and pushed about without a thought or care for us or for our future."

"Our gratitude will pave the way to Him, and shorten our learning time by more than you could ever dream of."

"For gratitude is but an aspect of the love which is the Source of all creation."

"For love can walk no road except the way of gratitude, and thus we go who walk the way to God."

"A day devoted now to gratitude will add the benefit of some insight into the real extent of all the gains which you have made; the gifts you have received."

"Today in gratitude we lift our hearts above despair, and raise our thankful eyes, no longer looking downward to the dust. We sing the song of thankfulness today in honor of the Self Which God has willed to be our true identity in Him. Today we smile on everyone we see, and walk with lightened footsteps as we go to do what is appointed us to do."

"In gratitude and thankfulness we come, with empty hands and open hearts and minds, asking but what You give."

"My gratitude permits my love to be accepted without fear. And thus am I restored to my Reality at last."

"What IS Heaven, but a song of gratitude and love and praise, by everything created, to the Source of its creation?"

"YOU are being blessed by every beneficent thought of any of your brothers anywhere. You should want to bless them in return, out of gratitude."

"And with My gratitude will come the gift first of forgiveness, then eternal peace."

"What is your life but gratitude to Him Who loves you with an everlasting Love?"

"The unhealed healer wants gratitude FROM his brothers, but he is NOT grateful to them. This is because he thinks he is giving something TO them, and is NOT receiving something equally desirable in return. His TEACHING is limited because he is LEARNING so little. His HEALING lesson is limited by his own ingratitude, which is a lesson in sickness."

"Your gratitude to each OTHER is the only gift I want."

"Let our gratitude unto our Teacher fill our hearts as we are free to choose our joy instead of pain, our holiness in place of sin, the peace of God instead of conflict, and the light of Heaven for the darkness of the world."

"God's justice warrants gratitude, NOT fear."

"And by this LACK of thanks and gratitude, you make YOURSELVES unable to EXPRESS the holy instant, and thus you lose sight of it." "Miracles should inspire gratitude, not awe. Man should thank God for what he really is. The Children of God are very holy. The miracle honors their holiness."

In terms of the truth, these are our only two options: either accept it as it is, or deny it. Denying it is an attempt to reject what the truth is, and to replace it with something else.

Jesus says denial is an act of 'positive creation' not just an attempt to negate the truth. By denying, we substitute the truth for something else, and invent or make some other illusion to take its place, to try to prove that something else is true. We actively erect barricades and something else to fixate on and believe in.

In the Atonement, we accept the truth as it is, as God has established it, without any desire or need to change it.

The opposite of Atonement or resurrection, is death, in which there is an attempt to reject all truth (life) and prove that something opposite is true (death).

Denial produced the physical universe. Denial implements all forms of sickness. Denial is death. Denial is also fear. "All forms of sickness even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening." Or to put it another way, when you do not want to accept the truth, you invent fear to try to explain "why" you cannot accept it. The fear is fake, just as death is fake. Death does not END real life, it DENIES IT and paints a picture which PRETENDS the immortal son of God has been killed. ("You have made a bargain you cannot keep.")

Denial was the attempt to reject the fact that you cannot sin, by trying to replace it with an attempt to prove that sin can and has been accomplished. Even in that attempt, it is a state of denial. It hasn't changed the truth. Denial has no power to actually alter what the truth is. But, being denial, denial is "in denial" of this fact, and so attempts to change the truth anyway, believing that it is possible. Such is denial.

Denial also represents unwillingness. When we attempted to deny God's will, or to deny that we are as God created us, we moved into unwillingness. This was an attempt to suppress our own will. We became unwilling rather than willing, or imprisoned rather than free. Death is a state of unwillingness, as are punishment, suffering, fear, guilt and sin. This is why it takes "a little willingness" in order to move towards acceptance of the Atonement (truth) because denial has to be undone.

Blocks to awareness are denial. Since the truth cannot be changed (it's established by God's will permanently), denial cannot actually change the truth into something else. And the only way to "believe in" something else being true, is to block out awareness of the fact that the truth is true. While you are still aware that only the truth is true, you cannot bring yourself to believe or be convinced by an alternative. So you have to "block awareness".

Denial does this by putting up an illusory psychological barrier, comprised of a "will to reject", which makes the truth go unconscious. Conscious awareness is cut off from accessing the truth, hidden behind this wall of denial, and so now all that you are consciously aware of is "whats left" that hasn't yet been denied. The stuff that has been denied now forms the unconscious mind, hidden from awareness and kept in the dark. Consciously, since you are no longer aware that it is present, or still true, or an unchangeable fact, and you cannot "find it" when you search around with your awareness, it SEEMS not to exist.

Many false conclusions are made based on this unawareness - based on incomplete information. For example if you are not aware that you yourself chose to believe in sin, you made the sin unconscious by implementing denial and inventing fake guilt to cover it up, you will now be unable/unwilling to see that you are the one who made you guilty. Instead you will now search elsewhere for a "cause" of the upset, and inevitably blame it on someone else, because that seems to make sense given that you are not aware of the hidden key fact of what you did to yourself. This is why Jesus said "Forgive them father for they know not what they do" - as soon as you go into denial, you do NOT KNOW what you are doing, because you don't have all the facts in awareness.

The secret of salvation lies in your willingness to remove the block to awareness, so that you can become able to SEE the chain of causality coming from yourself, the choices you made, and thereby realize that none of your conditions are caused by anyone else. Your mind is the sole cause of your experience. But this block to awareness, in order to remove it, MUST entail the willingness to remove denial. The layer of denial which literally blocks awareness - blocks the ability to SEE, must be undone. And that will only be undone through honesty and willingness.

Denial takes on many forms, and indeed all forms. It includes the belief that you are already innocent even if you have unconscious hidden hates, secret sins, unhealed wounds and layers of self-repression that you don't want to admit to. This can produce a state of "fake innocence" in which you don't SEE that you are the cause of something and so become justified in blaming it on someone else - scapegoating, accusing your brother of your own sin. It also then justifies anger, and this is why anger is never justified - to become angry is ALWAYS based on denial and unawareness of the facts. If you knew the facts, the truth, you would have NO reason to conclude that you should be upset.

Denial also accounts for this world - Earth - this universe. Jesus says in reference to it, "a world that denies itself cannot exist." The world denies itself, because it is made OF denial of God's Kingdom. All denial is self denial, and so this world is made of denial. That is why it is a BLOCK to awareness. "Nothing so blinding as sight of form." This is also why, when denial is lifted, and we are willing to see the whole truth, this world must disappear because, being made from denial AS a block, it is merely an illusion preventing us from seeing, and once you see PAST it and become AWARE that you are the cause/dreamer of it, you will stop USING IT to make God's Kingdom unconscious.

Another expression or use of denial is in the ego's motto of "seek and do not find". By denying that you already are perfect, you don't SEE the perfection in yourself so you think it is not there, and so are now empty, and are in need, and this need compels you to search for a solution to the emptiness somewhere ELSE, outside of yourself. This sets you on a "spiritual path" - ultimately the journey without distance. Here you will pursue FAKE SPIRITAULITY, fake peace, produce a spiritualized ego, spiritualize the world, spiritualize the body, and seem to side with one half of duality (ultra positive or ultra negative).

This also produces the PERSONA, which is a fake identity or fake mask which forms this idea of who you think you are, which is made of the denial of yourself. Even your physical body is a fake image, designed to make people believe that they are seeing YOU when they see IT, when in fact it is made to HIDE YOU. The body and persona then become filled with fakery, lies, self deception and dishonesty, resulting in a veneer of "looking spiritual" or "acting spiritual", decorated with spiritual clothing and performing fake rituals, which are all really designed to maintain the denial and block you from being AUTHENTICALLY YOURSELF.

The facade of innocence hides unconscious guilt, and makes a person seem holier than they really are. The main problem is the person themselves is unwilling to admit to why they are overcompensating for a deep belief in unholiness, by pretending to be holy and trying to convince everyone that they themselves are convinced of it. This "spiritual seeker" has to be undone just as much as any other denial, because it takes you away from yourself. You do not need to seek. You need to *acknowledge* what is already TRUE about you, and be grateful that God's creation has not changed.

Denial also plays out in the unwillingness to accept what is happening in your life. I spent many many years in denial that I was unhappy, afraid, angry, and it wasn't until my mid-20's when I started to admit that the way I was feeling was even those things. I did not recognize the mountain of upset in me AS fear or AS anger, and didn't even know that I was afraid and angry. Such was the denial. Denial obscures, making reality seem twisted and not what it is, so that you do not *recognize* it, and so remain in a state where you think it IS something ELSE. This failure to recognize the truth is what keeps us in the dark. Yet "illusions recognized must disappear". They can only be recognized by not being in denial.

Denial also produces various kinds of blindness. The unwillingness to see the truth. Even though people may be walking around in bodies talking and performing activities, they can be in various states of awareness ie various states of denial, thus various states of unconsciousness. Just because someone is working in a job and playing on the internet and chatting to their friends, does not mean they are aware or awake. Denial indeed is sleep. It is a suppression of awareness.

Since denial is unwillingness, it also produces justification for fear whenever the truth comes along to challenge the denial. If you are in denial and you are believing that the truth is not the truth, you've made it out to be evil, and have replaced it with a lie that you believe is your salvation. When the truth comes along, you see it as an attacker, a threat, and thus USE denial once again as the ego's only tool to reject, shut out, or put distance between, you and that truth. You bury your head in the sand to avoid it and to pretend it is not there. This induces all forms of sickness, because sickness is a defense against the truth. So yes, sickness is denial of life, as is death.

The funny thing about denial is that instead of being able to actually change the truth at all, you instead hide from the truth and block your awareness of it, reasoning that if you are not AWARE of it, it must not BE there. This is clearly denial because you are simply hiding your vision. Pretending that something is not there, does not make it go away. But in the ego, we become convinced by this delusion and think "out of sight, out of mind"... that if we can't SEE something, or cannot be AWARE of it, then it must not exist.

This way, we've told ourselves that we actually UNDID God, reversed creation, cancelled Heaven, and erased our true self. By believing that our denial of truth CAN change the truth (that darkness can hide the light), it's very easy to make the tiny shift from "I'm in denial of it" to "It's actually gone." Therefore we have come to believe, in ego denial, that we ACTUALLY HAVE changed the truth because our awareness does not show it to us and it seems not to exist any more. This way we came to believe that sin is real and has had real consequences. We think that we actually HAVE hurt God, produced a new truth, got away with murder, and destroyed ourself and our inheritance.

This belief then leads to the distorted perception that we stopped being innocent, CHANGED into a different state, our innocence went away, and now all that we're left with is guilt. And in that view it seems as though we have become unworthy, have transformed from sinless to sinful, or from innocent to guilty. The blocked awareness viewed from inside denial, makes it SEEM as if this is true. And so in denial, we automatically come to believe that our denying is actually WORKING, and is CAUSAL, and has power OVER the truth to change it. And so we think we have sinned, are really a sinner, deserve to be guilty, should be punished for it, and are worthy only of death. Denial produces the death wish.

From this side of denial, not seeing that our denial HAS NOT changed reality, we're quite convinced that we actually are guilty sinners who don't deserve love or forgiveness. And so we think we are working on or in or with this guilty "ego self", which has not only replaced our real self, but is the ONLY self left. In denial, we are not aware that our real self - our innocent self - still as God created it - is STILL THERE, still fully alive, still perfect, and has not changed whatsoever. That real self is right here with you now. That real self is already in heaven and never left, nor did it change anything in reality.

And so now we're in this strange position where we think we are only this evil self who can never go back to being holy, while all along our true self is perfectly undefiled and holy forever, existing in parallel to this false idea of ourselves. Your "higher self" therefore exists right NOW, even if your sense of identity is all caught up in denial and confusion and ego. This is why "enlightenment is but a recognition and no a change at all". It merely entails the willingness to be AWARE of what is ALREADY TRUE. And to reach that awareness, ALL layers of denial MUST be removed from the mind so that you CAN be aware of it.

To admit to being in denial, or even to admit to wanting to stay in denial - wanting to keep your denial - is still an admittance. It reveals a willingness to allow the truth to enter. Even if you say, "I admit I do not want to wake up", that is better than an unwillingness to even admit that. To admit, is to permit access. It means you are willing to let truth be said or expressed about whatever the situation is. And this truth then sets you free. Even if just a little bit. Even if you are just admitting to being in denial and that you don't want to do anything about it, admits more truth than to not even want to admit to that.

This therefore takes some willingness, and it takes honesty. It requires a willingness to be mistaken, without implying punishment. It requires you to get honest with yourself, to stop being in resistance or avoidance, and to LOOK AT what it is that you don't want to see. And looking at it with the truth, is looking at it with the Holy Spirit. He represents the state of mind in which there is no denial. Your willingness to dig out and offer up secret sins, hidden hates, grievances, and also ways that you don't want to admit or accept something, allows Him to shine away those lies and release you.

Now, in ACIM circles there are various forms of denial and blindspots and each person is different. I've seen the most denial circling around topics to do with the body not existing, and to do with the world not existing. These are two of the major sticking points because the ego denial has

built a fortress to protect belief in these two things, and believing you "are" a body or that there "is" a world are the two most fundamental "givens" in this world. The body is the hero of the dream, and the world is the dream itself. To question belief in either of these seriously pushes the ego buttons and seems to "threaten your establishments."

There is a lot of denial around these topics and a lot of refusal to accept them. Accepting that there is no world is one of the hardest things to do, because denial makes the world seem true, real, valuable and desirable. Denial that the world is a cruel place, for example, leads many to believe God created it. And with that kind of a conclusion, who would want to question God's reality? Yet we are still in denial until we are sure to have removed all denial. And we will be in denial that we are in denial, because we don't SEE that there is something unconscious to us that we believe does not even exist.

There are also good and bad forms of denial, or uses of denial. If denial is used to reject the real truth, that's not a good thing. If denial is used to reject lies, that IS a good thing. Or rather, if denial is used to reject the belief that denial is true, using the mind to ADMIT that the denial is there, or that it is FALSE, that is a worthy form of denial.

There are unworthy forms of denial, which usually entail either a direct 1st-hand rejection of what is real, OR a 2nd-hand rejection of the illusions that have arisen due to the first level of denial. For example it is denial to produce a body. The body was made to deny God and shut out sharing with the Sonship. This denial needs to be undone. But additionally, on a second level, while you are making a body, if you KEEP making it through denial, but then pretend in some way that it does not exist and try to "separate from" it, THAT is also an unworthy form of denial. Up to a point, "the body is merely a fact of human existence." But at some point, human existence (bodies) is also denial of Spirit. These denials are at different levels.

Jesus also tells us in ACIM that "the separation HAS happened." Many people DENY this, mainly due to confusion about "nothing happened" as the atonement principle. This is level confusion. We did have the tiny mad idea, and we did share it, and it did produce imaginary worlds of illusion. Jesus even says, that to deny this fact is an unworthy form of denial. But to "accept" that it has happened should only be done in order to quickly realize that atonement is the only meaningful "correction" for the separation, and that it should be done as soon as possible.

It is also possible to have denials on top of denials on top of denials. For example when you are in fear, you are pretending that you have good reason to be afraid of something outside you. But the fact is, the fear is a decoy to deny guilt. Fear is protecting you from guilt and deflecting attention away from it as the "reason" why you are afraid. Fear makes guilt unconscious and blocks the guilt. The only reason you are afraid is because you think you are guilty and want to punish yourself. But without awareness of that, in fear you'll look for causes of the fear externally. To undo fear you must remove the denial behind it, become MORE AWARE of what you denied, reveal the guilt, and fix the guilt. So you can see there are multiple layers of distortion surrounding the guilt, and even guilt itself is denial.

The ego only has one tool. "Deny what is." The one antidote is the atonement - "accept what is". But to accept what is, you have to first remove the denial, so that your awareness of "what is" increases. So this doesn't mean just accepting the world "as it is", because how you are perceiving it is NOT the fullness that's present. You are NOT seeing it for what's really there, and are not recognizing it as an illusion. Blocks have to be removed in your mind, so that you can SEE. By seeing accurately and fully, you have true perception, which shows you the truth about this world, that it is not real and doesn't exist. Without removal of denial you will try to accept it, but won't be able to recognize it or accept its unreality.

The ego used denial to hide God, by making sin. The ego used denial to hide and keep sin, by making fake guilt. The ego hid the guilt behind fake fear using more denial. The fear produces self punishment but by denying that you are doing so. And eventually death is denial even of punishment. At every step the ego is denying, denying, denying. Denying who you are, stripping away layers of what remains, until eventually there is nothing left to deny. In death there is TOTAL denial of the truth, and no-one who goes through death is in their right mind.

It all boils down to this simple dynamic. Either you accept the truth - God's truth as God established it, or you deny it. You have no other choice. And because denial does not change the truth, denial MUST be a lie, where you are PRETENDING that the truth is not true. So either you are pretending to be something you are not, or you are being your real authentic self - as created by God. It's your choice, whether to accept or deny. But no-one gets to define what the truth IS. Only God can do that. And being in denial DOES NOT redefine the truth, even though those in denial believe that this is precisely what they're achieving. This is the authority problem, which is nothing but denial and an unwillingness to be honest.

The freedom we have is one of accepting or rejecting, not establishing, but anyone in denial with an ego will be in the business of trying to establish what the truth IS, acting as a gatekeeper to have to "approve" or "disapprove" before anything is permitted into awareness. Only when we are willing to give up our attempt to be God, to make the truth, will we be willing to simply open up to ACCEPT and RECEIVE it. Accepting the atonement is like throwing up your hands and admitting, only the truth is true, and only God's will is possible, and only God's way will work. Nothing else works. The ego is a lie and death is failure. Nothing else is true. I might as well accept it and go with it. And this takes TOTAL SURRENDER.

Thankfully, the truth is on our side, and loves us and has created everything for us. A perfect home, the inheritance of eternity, immortality, absolute peace and total joy. Not too shabby an option to accept, when you realize you stand to gain everything and give up nothing by letting go of denial.

"No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth."

"Heaven is a choice I must make."

"A dream of death is not left by death but by truth."

"The truth shall set you free."

The aim of our purification, of sorting out the true from the false, is to become fully committed only to the truth. This means purifying or filtering out anything which is not of God, and accepting everything that is of God.

It's kind of like firmly taking sides. You are to fully and completely side with heaven, and completely refuse to accept anything illusory. To become completely 100% clear about what is true, totally distinct from what is false. Having absolutely no false mixed in with the true, and being entirely clear about the difference.

"For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM."

Being able to work miracles for example requires maximal love, which is a state in which there is no fear at all. When there is some fear mixed in, you're essentially an unhealed healer, and can only partly heal. You call forth two simultaneous opposing goals, and so you ask for healing and attack at the same time.

"The way out of conflict between two opposing thought systems is clearly TO CHOOSE ONE AND RELINQUISH THE OTHER"

So there is one goal of the Holy Spirit which is pure life, and the ego's goal is pure death. And we're talking here in the extreme of contrast. In accepting truth, we need to accept all of the truth and nothing but the truth. And we need to properly use denial to reject anything that is not true. And you can be sure that ALL illusions will tempt you toward the false.

"It is in the sorting out and categorizing activities of the mind that errors in perception enter. And it is here correction must be made."

"But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal. This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world."

"The first step toward freedom, then, MUST entail a sorting out of the false from the true."

Until we get there, to that place of certainty and doubtlessness, of acceptance and clarity, of clear recognition and the Holy Spirit's perfect judgement, we will find ourselves in a kind of muddy middle ground. We will in our minds have some commitment to some of the truth, and some to lies. We'll be partly convinced by the ego and the body and the world. We'll fall into temptation and be deceived.

"The reason this is upsetting you is because the Atonement is a TOTAL commitment."

"I have no function but the one God gave me. This recognition releases me from all conflict, because it means I cannot have conflicting goals." "Doubt is the result of conflicting wishes."

"You, then, have two conflicting evaluations of yourself in your minds, and they CANNOT BOTH BE TRUE."

When we are in this in-between state we are "in two minds", because it means the mind is split between two masters. It is trying to achieve two opposing goals at the same time, producing tension and thwarting and cancellation of power. In this "untrained" state we are ineffective and disempowered, we keep hurting ourselves by mistake, and we are frequently lost and confused.

"You cannot be faithful to two masters, who ask of you conflicting things."

"An untrained mind can accomplish nothing."

This middle-ground is where most of us find ourselves most of the time, perhaps sometimes moving closer to a clearer unequivocal immersion in reality, and at other times descending into the darkness of false perceptions. In this state we are not certain, which means we are afraid. We are not clear on what is what, so we are confused, and as a result are able to be deceived, and so fall for temptation only because we don't recognize what's happening.

"A mind and body cannot both exist."

"Time and Eternity cannot both be real, because they contradict each other."

"The power of decision is all that is yours. What you can decide BETWEEN is fixed, because there are no alternatives, EXCEPT truth and illusion. And there is no overlap between them, because they are opposites which CANNOT be reconciled, and CANNOT both be true. You are guilty OR guiltless, bound OR free, happy OR unhappy."

Without a clear full and firm commitment to truth and reality and the laws of God, our whole perception falls down into a fight with the world. We see bodies and suffering and enter into false empathy. We become forgetful of who we are. We buy into mortality and fear. And then we have reactions based on making illusions real, trying to solve unsolvable problems and trying to escape from hell.

"Both are not true, yet either one will seem as real to you as the amount to which you hold it dear. And yet their power is NOT the same, because their real attraction to you is unequal. You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began."

The only reason for this is because we have our feet in two canoes at once, and they're heading in different directions. We want the world and we want heaven. We want the mind and the body. We want bodies but without problems. We want worldly magical solutions to make bad stuff go away so that we can get what we want. And so we are torn and adrift and lost.

It is clear then that in order to really access the power of God, to work miracles, to have conviction and fearlessness, to be certain and empowered, to be not deceived or tempted, we have to more consistently side with God. We have to be more fully vigilant for the Kingdom as the only reality and the only truth. It's always when we're in this no-man's-land of in-between that we can't tell which way is up.

"If you believe in truth AND illusion you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

I find that when I am more firmly siding with the truth I can dispel illusions more easily. I can rise above the battlefield, pay less attention to bodies, be less deceived by what I see and assert more strength and light. When I become out of touch with heaven I sink into the darkness and lose sight of the truth, becoming confused and tempted, deceived and lost, and this arising of false perceptions always leads to suffering.

It's salvation that we really need, and salvation is true perception. It is also miracle mindedness. But we can only get into that state and stay there if we're really fully committed to the whole truth all the time. To get there and stay there will take a lot of purification because every attitude, every grievance, ever unforgiveness, has to be purified of its support for death, its siding with darkness, its choice for fear and for guilt.

"Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one."

We are moving into the light. When we are fully in the light there will be no more hesitation, no more guessing, no more uncertainty or temptation. Until we get there, we will continue to be thrown around on the rollercoaster. Tempted into the belief that the world is hell, and tempted away from the recognition that it is nothing. Only as we rise above and into the light do we regain our sanity.

"Miracles are seen in light, and light and strength are one."

So ideally, in the long run, we want to get into miracle-mindedness and stay there all the time. Into forgiveness, the state of christ vision. To stay above the battlefield, away from deception, identified with spirit, owning of our immortality and siding with God's laws only. That's how you are fully siding with reality and full against unreality. A clear distinction between what is true and what is false.

"The former needs YOUR careful protection, because it is a state of miracle-READINESS. This is what the Bible means in the many references to "Hold yourself ready" and other similar injunctions.

Readiness here means keep your perception right side up, (or valid), so you will ALWAYS be ready, willing, and able. These are the essentials for "listen, learn, and do."

"As long as perception lasts, prayer has a place. Since perception rests on lack, those who perceive have not totally accepted the Atonement and given over themselves to truth. Perception IS a separated state, and the perceiver DOES need healing. Communion, not prayer, is the natural state of those who know. God and HIS miracles are inseparable."

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

"Thus is the body healed by miracles BECAUSE they show the mind MADE sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or EFFECT of what it made."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. The body's health is fully guaranteed, because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible."

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

"Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

"Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival. But consider what this means to YOU. UNLESS you are sick you cannot keep the gods you made, for only in sickness could you possibly WANT them. Blasphemy, then, is SELF-destructive, not God destructive. It means that you are willing NOT to know yourself, IN ORDER to be sick."

"The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your (physical) healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

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

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

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body's condition. Yet the teacher of God does not make this decision alone. To do that would be to give the body another purpose from the one that keeps it holy. God's Voice will tell him when he has fulfilled his role, just as It tells him what his function is. He does not suffer either in going or remaining. Sickness is now impossible to him."

"If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgement or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES. If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick."

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

Your main problem is one of identity. You've attempted to change your identity from Christ, to take on a new identity as an ego.

Your sense of your "Self" has become associated with, attached to, and confused with, an alternative model of identity.

The ego is nothing but a device, a contraption you invented like a vehicle. It's something for you to cling to and to try to model yourself on. It does absolutely nothing on its own. It is lifeless.

It's not until you attempt to become joined with the ego, as though becoming one with it, that it becomes a problem.

If you think of it as a costume (like the body), it's not until you actually wear it that it seems to change how you express yourself.

Or, like a pair of goggles, it's not until you put the goggles over your eyes that your perception is changed. You can put them down again at any time and immediately resume normal vision.

You, as a Child of God, bring your sense of Self with you wherever you go. Your Self is your identity. The ego has no real self at all. However, if you bring your sense of Self to the ego and merge with it, you combine your sense of Self with its way of filtering reality. You then see "through" it, and see in the way that it would see if it had its own ability to see.

It is only your own ability to see - awareness - that you combine with the ego, that seems to give the ego perception. It is only your own ability to experience - being - that you combine with the ego, that seems to give the ego the ability to experience. It is only your own power which you share with the ego, which seems to give the ego power. It only shares any of this with you while you are joined with it, and as soon as you take it off, it would just drop to the floor lifelessly. Just like the body.

The problem is, when you've put your ability to experience and your sense of Self into the ego, trying to cling to it tightly as though making you become like it, you will now experience life through its eyes. Whatever it sees or how it looks at things or what it wants or how it values or what it believes, now becomes your experience. And you will see reality as very frightening when you look with the ego!

That's a problem because the ego's way of looking at reality is completely backwards. Seeing life through its eyes you will instantly reject God. God will suddenly seem to be an attacker, an enemy and a threat. The truth will suddenly seem like it is against you. The truth will come across as being the complete opposite of what you are, because it does not contain any separation, and the ego identifies with being made of separation. So the truth will then seem to be an affront, highly offensive, dangerous, hideous, and like some monster come to destroy the ego.

You, as immortal spirit, using and attached to the ego, ... if you attempt to become more spiritual while still wearing the ego identity, ie still joined with the ego mind and still looking through the ego goggles, will have a pretty interesting experience. You will not want to wake up. You will see any efforts to wake up as harmful and hurtful. You will interpret efforts to wake up as suicidal and sacrificial. And you will become afraid that the truth is coming along to destroy you. This can potentially provoke you to put up defenses against the truth, producing sickness and ultimately death.

This is precisely what you will experience each time you try to open up to more truth. Each time you let in some light. Each time you want to become closer to God. You, attached to the ego, inadvertently try to bring the ego into that light with you. It cannot go there and it won't go there. It will see it as you trying to destroy it. And it will put up a fight. Part of you which seems not to be in the ego gets closer to the light, and the part of you which does not want to let go of the ego - believing it is your Self - kicks and screams and resists and hates you for it.

This produces the ego rebound. Essentially, the ego rebound comes from trying to make the ego more spiritual, by attempting to bring it closer to its opponent. While you are identified with it, your attempt to go visit God without leaving the ego behind will create an elastic effect which will snap you back into the body and you will subsequently rage because of how you did such a horrible thing to your "self".

Waking up must entail the letting GO of the ego, recognizing that it is not your identity. Otherwise, each time you pull your "Self" into the light, and thus the ego with you, it's going to hurt. The ego cannot see the truth in any other way. It only sees the opposite of the truth as being true. It will never change. The ONLY way to be free of it is to let it go, to stop being it, stop wearing it, stop looking through it, and stop using it. We have to learn that the ego is NOT our "Self".

So this is purely a matter of identity. Are you made of ego? Is your Self really separate from God? Who are you? Are you Christ? Are you a body? Are you part of the ego thought system? Are you made of sin and guilt and fear? Do you believe in what the ego believes in? It's only because you have become CONFUSED about what really is YOU, and what is the ego, that you are having to go through this struggle of "awakening'. You literally believe, through the ego, that you are trying to destroy yourself by waking up.

Sometimes when you are exposing yourself to "too much truth" or "too much Course", you'll have these ego rebounds. You kind of can't help it. You are still holding on tightly to the very thing which is clouding your judgement, while simultaneously trying to be free of it. This makes you torn. Trying to be in two thought systems at once, or two canoes. There is part of you that sincerely believes you are the ego and you are the body. The suggestion that these things don't exist frightens you.

Letting go, letting go, letting go. Stopping being ego. Surrendering the false identity. Remembering who you really are. Accepting the truth that you are Christ. Relinquishing your belief in, trust in, faith in, confusion with, and reliance on a false self that isn't really a part of your identity. You literally believe the ego is who you are. It's not. Just some clarification needed. Some discernment. Is this really true about who I really am, or is this just a misperception caused by me using the ego goggles? Is this really who I am, or is this just a body I'm wearing temporarily?

Sorting out "who you are" is what this entire process is about. Each effort to "find out" will likely be partly fruitful and partly self destructive. Each time it will potentially offend you. Gradually you will inch towards awakening. Jesus says, "most of you will come in tears".

Each time you have a rebound, try to focus on LETTING GO. Just stop to recognize that you - part of your Self that's still identified with the ego or body, has become deeply hurt and offended by what the truth said about it. IT believes that the truth is vicious and mean and disrespectful. It is scared and freaking out because it doesn't understand what the truth really means or implies.

It, seeing through the ego, sees your efforts as blasphemous and an attack, and so it feels attacked and guilty. And that's what you'll feel like when you get a rebound - attacked and hurt and guilty. Recognize that in you and have compassion for that part of you. Try to get that part of you to let go of being ego.

Try to reassure your "self" that the truth doesn't mean YOU don't exist because YOU are not the ego. Be gentle with that part of you which is just like a confused wounded animal in the corner. Be kind to it. Don't push it too far too fast, that will just hurt more.

Likely you will have to feel the feelings of the hurt that was created by "its" mis-perception of what you did. Your attempt to wake up was like an abandonment of the ego self, like a self sacrifice. It doesn't have the ability to see any other way. So take your time and rest and recover and stop pushing yourself so hard.

Gradually and gently you need to learn to just LET GO of the ego because it is not who you really are. What you'll learn about your real identity is going to be quite a surprise!

This really makes no sense. If you are thinking the way most people think most of the time, it makes no sense.

If I give you all my money, I have no money left. If I give you my food, I cannot have the food. If I give you myself, I sacrifice myself. If I give you my time, my time is used up.

Surely this is the real truth? At least this is the truth of THIS WORLD. In this physical world, under the laws of physics, it appears to be true that everything is finite and limited. There is only so much of things.

This is because nothing in the world is whole. Everything in the world is lacking. An apple lacks the materials and properties of a banana. A car lacks the materials and properties of a newborn baby. One thing here is not another thing. What I have, you lack, and what you have, I lack. Therefore there is a finite limit on what there is to have, and who has it.

This is why the law of this world is "do not share anything." When you think you are sharing through the physical ownership transfer of objects, you are not really sharing. If I give you half of the pizza, believing I'm sharing it with you, I'm really not. I'm sacrificing and losing half the pizza and cannot have what you have.

The part you have is not the part I have. We do not really share the same part. We have separate and competing parts, and we are both losing and sacrificing in a "compromise" in order to have anything at all. Sharing in this world is based on loss and exclusion. The only way we can appear to share anything is to not share it, but instead to restrict what is shared. This is not true sharing.

A Course in Miracles makes a claim which many people might just accept as if it makes sense, but in terms of how this world functions and how people think, it makes no sense at all. It says that giving and receiving are one. It also says that what you give away you will receive. It also says that in order to have "all", ie everything, you must give everything to everyone. This makes NO sense. How can I still have everything if I've given everything away? And why, if I were to give nothing away, would I HAVE nothing? Surely I'd still have everything? It makes no sense.

You see, the people of the world have been so accustomed to living in spacetime, which is is a realm of illusions. It's a realm of laws which are OPPOSITE to the laws of God. Here it only seems to "make sense" to say that "If I give, I lose". If I give you something, I must lack it. If I give you everything, I will have nothing. And therefore giving is self-destructive and self-denial and not in my best interests. Which means that being selfish and hoarding and possessing exclusive ownership rights is entirely "natural" in this world. But that's not remotely spiritual.

If what Jesus says is true, that giving and receiving are one, and that I must give in order to receive, and that when I give I will receive, and that when I give I will RETAIN what I have - and yet the other person will have it AS WELL, he is teaching a principle which completely transcends the nature of this world. He is saying that when there is true giving, I will KEEP what I have, AND YET at the same time the other person will ALSO have it. Which means that we both now have the WHOLE of what has been given. Not that we compromise, not that we "share" by splitting it in half, not that we each can only have part of it.

He is saying that we can in fact BOTH have ALL of what there is, AT the same time, WITHOUT lack and without sacrifice and without limitation. That does NOT compute in terms of the physical laws. It is totally against the laws of this world. It does not make ANY sense at all in terms of how physical objects function and interact.

Jesus is not only suggesting that when you give, you will receive all of what you have given, and will still have all of it, and that the other person will ALSO have all of it, but he's even saying that therefore when you give to another, and you both share in it simultaneously and fully, there is now an INCREASE. How can anything which has been given away cause an increase in what you have? Yet this is heaven's law, that BECAUSE everything is given fully, it is received fully, and is shared fully, and now more people have it and there has been an increase in what is had.

He presents this also in terms of the idea that "ideas can be shared" and that "ideas increase by being shared". This is to clarify that physicality cannot be shared in this way, but mind-content can. When mind gives all, it still has all to give, and yet has shared all, and now all have all, and everything belongs to everyone all at once. Ideas increase by being "given away", because in truth, when you give something real away you still have it, because you also receive it. Because giving and receiving are the same thing.

So this teaching is really telling you something important. The LAWS of reality, of god, of the Kingdom of Heaven, ARE NOT the same as the laws of space or time or planet Earth. The functioning of reality does not correspond to how physical objects are "shared". The nature of God's mind does not operate according to finite laws of "either I have it or you do". And all real relationship operates on this basis that "everything is fully accessible to everyone always." Even YOU are shared with others, and everyone has full access to you as even part of themselves.

This is the nature of oneness, a system in which what belongs to one belong to another. What is mine is yours. What is me is you. And yet there IS sharing, because there ARE many to share WITH. Without there being ANOTHER, there cannot be anyone TO share with. This is why in reality in God's system of sharing, in which everything MUST be shared ("Nothing real can be increased except by sharing"), THERE MUST BE multiple recipients TO share in what exists. And this again further supports the fact that God has many sons.

So if you think that somehow ACIM is non-duality or that God only has one son or that God can't have many creations, etc, you should really take a good hard look at this idea of giving and receiving being one. Because it is clearly a law and a dynamic which utterly defies what you have come to expect of spacetime and its contents, it completely transcends all notions of things being "separated off" and compartmentalized, and really completely destroys the idea that in oneness there is nothing to share WITH.

You cannot accept the idea that giving and receiving are one, while simultaneously claiming that ACIM is a non-dualistic teaching, that there are no brothers to share with, or that reality is just one thing. If Jesus is correct in his teaching, then the oneness of giving and receiving automatically implies that God's Kingdom MUST entail the sharing, and the giving, and the receiving, of everything by everything, and thus the creation of many sharers who must share in everything together and in unison. Indeed this uni-son is the one son, who IN unison is the sharing by many sons, all of whom God created TO share in everything, together, forever.

"Here are both giving and receiving seen as different aspects of one Thought Whose truth does not depend on which is seen as first, nor which appears to be in second place. Here it is understood that both occur together, that the Thought remains complete. And in this understanding is the base on which all opposites are reconciled, because they are perceived from the same frame of reference which unifies this Thought."

"Father, I must return Your Love for me. For giving and receiving are the same, and You have given all Your Love to me."

"For giving and receiving ARE the same. And to ACCEPT the limits of a body is to IMPOSE these limits on each brother that you see. For you MUST see him as you see yourself."

"The unforgiving mind does not believe that giving and receiving are the same."

"The interval you think lies in between the giving and receiving of the gift SEEMS to be one in which you sacrifice, and suffer loss."

"It is this joining that we undertake to recognize today. We will not seek to keep our minds apart from Him Who speaks for us, for it is but our voice we hear as we attend Him. He alone can speak to us and for us, joining in One Voice the getting and the giving of God's Word; the giving and receiving of His Will."

"It IS awareness that giving and receiving ARE the same. BECAUSE it does not make the same unlike, it sees no differences where none exist. And thus it is the SAME for everyone, because it sees no differences in THEM. Its offering is universal, and it teaches but one message. What is God's BELONGS to everyone, and IS his due."

"If paying is associated with giving, IT CANNOT BE PERCEIVED AS LOSS, and the RECIPROCAL relationship of giving and RECEIVING will be recognized."

God's laws aren't the same as earthly laws. In God, there is a law that giving and receiving are one. This means that in order to have anything, ie to receive anything, you have to give it. And if don't give it, it obviously shows that you don't have it TO give. So if you don't give it, you cannot have it either. Anything you want to have, you must ensure everyone else has.

"To Have, Give All to All."

This means that God has to give what he has in order to have it. It means he has to SHARE in order to have what he has. It means that love can only be love if it is given and shared, and without this giving it is not really love. Similarly if God were not to give ie create sons, he would not be able to have anything at all and would not exist.

"The gift of life IS yours to give, because it was given YOU. You are unaware of YOUR gift BECAUSE you do not give it."

This relates also to how we relate to others, and how we accept atonement. If you want to accept atonement you CANNOT accept it only for yourself. The same dynamic applies. Whatever you want to have, you MUST to give to others. If you want to accept atonement, you have to be willing to GIVE atonement. If you want healing, you have to GIVE healing.

"I will be healed as I let him teach me to heal."

This is why we MUST recognize that atonement is not a STATIC STATE which just sits there and does nothing. God is not a static state that does nothing. Something MUST come OUT of this and be EXPRESSED. If it is not, then you cannot have this state. This is the law of God. If God would not give to ANOTHER, God would be dead.

"The Atonement is a lesson in sharing, which is given you because YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO DO IT."

The sole responsibility to accept atonement for yourself does NOT entail you simply moving into a state of peace or a state of awareness and acceptance. It's not a closed box or some kind of physical destination which, when you arrive at it, you are no longer anywhere else. It is not something you can put a fence around or separate off from everyone else. Instead it can ONLY be attained by the willingness to GIVE IT TO OTHERS.

Sometimes people, particularly those into the non-duality mindset, will say that all they have to do is accept atonement for themselves, as if this means - GET atonement ONLY for themselves WITHOUT giving anything to others. This is - as usual - only part of the truth. The truth is that you cannot have atonement for yourself UNLESS you literally give atonement to others.

Atonement is not some static state that just sits there, any more than forgiveness is just a static state that sits there observing passively. There is NO passivity in God's kingdom and laws. There is ONLY EXPRESSION, or in other words extension. You MUST be willing to extend and GIVE AWAY what it is that you want to have, otherwise you CANNOT have it.

"Atonement is for all, because it is the way to UNDO the belief that ANYTHING is for you ALONE."

Similarly we all have to learn something that seems very counter-intuitive, and is based on God's law of the golden rule. That is, that since you are one with your brother, you are in him and he is in you. Whatever you do to him you do to yourself. Therefore, if you want to receive, you must give to him.

This leads to the fact that whatever you want FOR YOURSELF, you must GIVE TO HIM. This means you GIVE FIRST (fore-giveness), in order to get what you want. This is the reverse of the ego's selfish law that you must FIRST GET in order to be able to give. God's law is opposite, and your mind is very conditioned to think this way and act this way. Learning to put the needs of another FIRST in order to receive SECOND is an OPPOSITE way for your mind to function, and at first it finds it very hard to go against its conditioning.

Everyone has to learn to function this way in order to operate under no laws but God's. Miracles are EXPRESSED FROM a state of miracle mindedness because a miracle isn't something that just SITS THERE passively doing nothing. A miracle is a window of the extension of God. YOU are a miracle, created to be a co-creator and extender of God. God is a miracle, who shines and gives and shares and create IN ORDER TO BE what he is.

You therefore cannot be a miracle worker performing miracles unless you are willing and active in GIVING MIRACLES TO OTHERS, such that you are EXPRESSING something FROM your miracle-minded state. A miracle is not merely some way to see, or some way to shift perceptions. It is something which also goes beyond itself and extends and is given and shared by all.

"The miracle is an ***expression*** of an inner awareness of Christ and acceptance of his Atonement. The mind is then in a state of Grace, and naturally becomes gracious, both to the Host within and the stranger without. By bringing in the stranger, he becomes your brother."

Therefore you cannot just accept atonement for yourself. You cannot just have a miracle just for yourself. You cannot have ANYTHING just for yourself. That is the ego's idea of exclusivity which is separation and is selfish. The ONLY way you can have atonement and peace and love and power and life and God and miracles, is to GIVE THEM AWAY. Which means blessing and healing and loving everyone else as a priority!!!!!

This is also why it is NOT true that you can just transcend sickness and death and observe them passively or try to be at peace with them still existing. And it is also why the sickness in the body CANNOT REMAIN if you are to be in a "state" of forgiveness and acceptance and peace. It is because something HAS TO ALWAYS extend out of those states and be GIVEN. Life has to be GIVEN otherwise it results in death for the one who refuses to give it - because they refuse to have it.

The body is healed because miracles express and extend. The mind has power over the world because power extends. Brothers are resurrected and healed by your mind because your mind JOINS and SHARES. Everything that is of God follows these laws and you must learn to also function according to these laws.

You cannot have anything exclusively just for yourself alone if you want to be free of the ego. And you cannot be passive, inactive, powerless, not causing, not doing, not healing, if you want the gifts of God. Far too many people are taking a somewhat selfish attitude that they can go into a state of peace and acceptance and awakening WITHOUT giving it to others, WITHOUT healing the body, WITHOUT causing the world to change. This is **IMPOSSIBLE**.

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself."

"And being ONE with It, it MUST be given you to give what IT has given, and gives still."

"You can no more pray for yourselves alone than you can find joy for yourself alone."

"And how could your request be limited to you alone? No gift of God can be unshared. It is this attribute which sets the gifts of God apart from every dream that ever seemed to take the place of truth."

"I, too, must give, and so all things are given unto me forever and forever."

"The peace of God can never be contained. Who recognizes it within himself must give it."

"To gain you must GIVE, not bargain."

"Where there is love, your brother MUST give it to you, because of what it IS. But where there is NEED for love, YOU must give it, because of what YOU are."

"And because He has been given you so freely by God, you must give Him as you received Him."

"Therefore, those who have been forgiven must devote themselves first to healing, because having RECEIVED the idea of healing they MUST give it to hold it. The full power of creation (creating) cannot be expressed as long as any of God's ideas are withholding it from the Kingdom."

"Do you not think the world needs peace as much as you do? Do you not want to give it to the world as much as you want to receive it? For unless you do, you will NOT receive it. If you will to have it of me, you MUST give it."

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver AND the receiver."

"You who share His Life must share it to KNOW it, for sharing IS knowing."

"As a man and as one of God's creations, my right thinking, which came from the Universal Inspiration which IS the Holy Spirit, taught me first and foremost that this Inspiration is for ALL. I could not have it myself without knowing that."

"YOU did not make this power any more than I did. It was created to BE shared, and therefore cannot be meaningfully perceived as BELONGING to anyone AT THE EXPENSE of another."

"Thoughts INCREASE by being given away."

"Therefore, it is strengthened by being given away. It increases in YOU as you give it to your brothers."

"The gifts you have are not for you alone. What He has come to offer you, you now must learn to give. This is the lesson that His giving holds, for He has saved you from the solitude you sought to make, in which to hide from God."

"It will NOT be for you alone, for therein lay its misery."

"Today the holy Word of God is kept through your receiving it to give away, so you can teach the world what giving means by listening and learning it of Him."

"Think what this means; he has the gifts of God Himself to give away. His patients are God's saints, who call upon his sanctity to make it theirs. And as he gives it to them, they behold Christ's shining face as it looks back at them."

"And so they gain by every message which they give away."

"The teacher of God does not want anything he cannot give away, because he realizes it would be valueless to him by definition."

"But he does want to keep for himself all things that are of God, and therefore for His Son. These are the things that belong to him. These he can give away in true generosity, protecting them forever for himself."

"No one can give what he has not received. To give a thing requires first you have it in your own possession. Here the laws of Heaven and the world agree. But here they also separate. The world believes that to possess a thing it must be kept. Salvation teaches otherwise. To give is how to recognize you have received. It is the proof that what you have is yours."

I've been finding an increasing awareness that there are some things we invented which are not God's way.

Sin. Guilt. Fear. Sickness. Suffering. Death.

Mentally I tend to arrange these things into levels, vertically. God is at the top (symbolically in the sky), then below is the separation and sin, then a layer of guilt, then fear, then suffering, then death at the bottom (symbolically buried in the ground).

But the fact is, that all of these layers except the top one, are actually not a part of the top layer at all. All of these other layers are fictional.

And yet the whole word is spinning based on belief in the normality or justifyability of these other ideas.

I used to think, well, I need to undo my guilt and heal my sense of having sinned. But it actually goes further than this.

It's not just about undoing my guilt. It's about undoing the belief that there is any truth to guilt AT ALL, anywhere, for anyone. The entire idea of guilt itself is fictional. It's not just "am I guilty or not?" or "is there guilt in me or not?"... it's more like... is guilt even real, EVER? is it even possible?

I guess in the past I thought, well, if I undo my guilt, then I will not have guilt, but there will still be such a thing as guilt, and other people might still have guilt. But this is not the case.

Instead, I'm bringing into question whether guilt is EVER justified, whether it EVER has a foundation or if it is even supported by God in any way whatsoever.

It's not just that there is such a thing as being guilty and we get to choose whether we are guilty or not. It's more like, God does not believe in guilt AT ALL and has absolutely no place for it, and so the entire fundamental concept is actually make-believe.

That means, I invented. Or, we invented it. We invented the entire concept of being sinful or guilty or afraid, and invented all suffering and sickness and death.

The stark contrast between what is of God, and what is not of God, reveals that if there is any guilt happening, we MUST be doing it to ourselves. If there is any sense of sin, WE must have invented sin in the first place and have now condemned ourselves and are pretending somehow that God shares the sentiment.

It seems actually a kind of blasphemy, in this world's thought system, to suggest that you should NEVER believe in sin or guilt. Society is steeped in it. Duality supports it. Illusions weave stories which justify who sinned and why and explains their worthiness of guilt and punishment.

It's as if we believe there is some universal standard "law" written into the fabric of the universe, that there is such a thing as real sin and guilt, established by God, and set in stone. And since sin and guilt seem real, and therefore are associated with permanence, it's as if to say, no-one in the entire universe can escape this "law". Either you obey the law and stop being sinful, or you are a sinner.

But the truth is, that this so-called law, this assumed "natural" framework for deciding whether you are "guilty or not", or "sinful or not", is not anything to do with God at all.

So now we're in a position where we have to actually withdraw our belief in the "option" of being guilty or not. It means we have to embrace an entirely new idea, a unified idea.

The idea is simply that God is not interested in guilt or sin whatsoever. He does not support it. And in contrast to that, this society is very very twisted and sick in its dedication to this doctrine. Even the idea that you can have a "guilty conscience" or that you are supposed to be well behaved or follow rules or not do bad stuff etc, is part of the story our egotism has invented.

So let's see. You make a mistake, you do something "wrong", and..... you're supposed to be guilty. Nope. You're innocent. Can you hear all of society's combined ego roaring with protest as you suggest that you are innocent when you make mistakes, that you do not deserve punishment, that guilt is never justified, that it is impossible to be condemned of sin, and that God STILL loves you fully and happily regardless of what you think you did?

Or how about, that the idea of it ever being even POSSIBLE to sin or be guilty, is a totally bullshit idea? This is not at all how the world thinks. And because the world has become embedded in my mindset as though "normal" and natural, I have to work to undo this.

I need to recognize that God is not the kind of God that this thought system made Him out to be. God is not a God of judgement or of condemnation, He is not the slightest bit interested in finding ANYONE guilty, He isn't even remotely interested in guilt or sin at ANY time, and to Him the entire idea of sin or guilt is a total joke. He laughs in the face of death, at its sheer ridiculousness, as if it could ever oppose eternal life.

So if God does not believe in sin or guilt or fear or suffering or death, why am I believing in it? It's not just a matter of me healing and removing these attitudes from myself. I must undo the very belief that there even is such a thing a sin or guilt or death. That it even exists. Or has any merit at all. Anywhere. At any time. In relation to anyone.

These are made-up fictional lies which have formed the foundation of a way of life riddled with attack and punishment and suffering. It is a LIE that anyone should ever be guilty.

The aim of guilt is not to establish that someone is guilty. The aim of guilt is to establish that guilt ITSELF is permanent law and is not to ever be questioned.

The aim of sin similarly is not so much to establish who is or who is not sinful. It's to establish that sinfulness ITSELF is supposedly reality and truth and a law by which all things are judged (by God), should never be questioned and is a valid way to evaluate what something is or isn't.

Fear does the same thing. It distracts all attention away from ITSELF, projecting attention outward and onto other things, so that you'll be in a mode where you're asking yourself, whether you are "afraid or not". It's not a question of whether you are afraid or not. It's a matter of fear being a lie in the first place, fear being impossible, and that buying into the belief that you even CAN or SHOULD be afraid is the real problem.

We're just accepted these things like permanent laws. Somewhere on a mountain sits the God of sin, the God of guilt, and the God of fear, all "real", all used as references to determine whether anyone is sinning or guilty or fearing or not. Woebetide anyone who might question whether any of these Gods are valid at all. Who would question their reality?

If sin is real, then all the others are real too. It's not a matter of... have I sinned or not. Once you're playing that game you've already assumed the fundamental error, that sin is even possible. And this is what has to be undone now. Not just whether you sinned, but whether sin is even possible in the first place. Whether you can even BE guilty in the eyes of truth.

And as it turns out, God has absolutely no interest in and nothing to do with sin or guilt or fear or suffering or sickness or death. Absolutely no interest at all. These things play NO PART in Heaven. They do not exist. So all these beliefs that we have about them existing or being the measure of character or something that keeps you in check or modifies your behavior or whatever. It's all bullshit.

We have to undo the belief that it's even possible to sin at all. Which means questioning this and giving up this belief, even if everyone else on the planet still insists on believing in it, and realizing that to be with God does NOT entail being "sinless". It entails accepting that you CANNOT sin, you have not sinned, and sin ITSELF is a lie.

Believing in sin and trying not to sin has made sin real which means YOU ARE a sinner regardless of how well behaved you are. It's not your guilt or guiltlessness that's a problem. It's that you believe in guilt AT ALL. God does not believe in guilt. God does not believe in sin. Even when we think that we are SUPPOSED to be guilty or that we HAVE sinned, we have to question THAT, because that is a lie, and it takes some undoing of this belief in our minds to let go ENTIRELY of what is merely a CONCEPT of sinfulness being possible.

Isn't it freeing to know that God does not include sin? That God sees you ONLY as holy and innocent? That all stories about real sin and justified guilt are part of the EGO, NOT part of the laws of reality? Isn't it good to know, that not only are you sinless, but that sin ITSELF is an impossible lie, that it applies to NO ONE and it is NEVER justified?

It literally means now that no matter what you are doing, if you are inclined to feel guilty about doing it, you are going to have to learn to question that. And you are going to resist that, and in fact you are going to feel like you're being even MORE sinful when you question the validity of being guilty for what you've done. It will seem to suggest that if you do this thing WITHOUT GUILT, that you are somehow MORE guilty and evil. That's how the ego thinks.

But the truth is, that your use of this thing to make you guilty was a lie in the first place. It does not prove you are guilty. It does not mean you are sinful. It does not justify condemnation. It calls for FORGIVENESS - the recognition that THERE IS NO SIN, and that you HAVE NOT sinned. To tell yourself and believe it, that you have not sinned, when you do something that you feel guilty or ashamed or sinful about, is quite challenging. Surely God finds this guilty? Surely God would say, you shouldn't be doing this you guilty little fucker? NO.

God finds you worthy of love and does not see sin or guilty in ANYTHING. We need to learn to see ourselves in the same light.

Only the truth is true. Only love is real.

We may not realize it, but from birth onward most of us came to believe that we are our body. That literally, this physical object with arms and legs is our own self. There's my toes, there's my fingers, there's my face, there's "me". Parents talked about "you" this way. You talked about you this way, asking yourself, what am I?

And we look upon this strange thing in the mirror and cannot quite fathom what it is why or how we came to be this strangely shaped creature of extraordinary complexity, the likes of which we have no idea how it functions.

What we have to realize is that this is the false starting point, and this is the state of imprisonment. Believing we are a body is completely a mistake. A total error in perception. And in fact the body was made with and in order to produce false perception.

The body's eyes cannot see, the ears cannot hear, all its senses are back to front and it reports on illusions as if they're real. The body is a lie machine. And yet there we are starting out by believing every word it says, everything it does, everything it seems to tell us, even to the extent of believing it is our own self. And we are CLOSE to it that we think everything it experiences WE are experiencing directly.

So invested is this belief that we are a body, that we have taken something which is utterly not a body whatsoever and have tried to smush it together and bind it and join it and strap them together into one lump, to call it myself. We may not realize, there is a YOU, and then there is a BODY, and the two are not the same

In fact, the you that you really are is SO UNLIKE the body in every single way that if you were to catch sight of it you'd be astonished that you ever thought you could be a lump of flesh and bones. But since the body itself was made to block awareness of this, to act as a temptation device and a way to deceive ourselves, we're quite lost in it.

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

We did a VERY good job of deceiving ourselves. To such an extent that almost all conscious recognition of not being a body is blotted out by the body. And so as we attempt to become more spiritual or to reawaken, we're going to run up against a very basic fact.

The body is NOT who you are at all, but you heavily believe IT IS YOU. And on the basis of believing it is you, and backed up by everyone else believing their body is their self also, you have spent years upon years of reinforcing this "uniting" of self and body, regarding it as yourself, talking about it as if it's your self, worshipping it, cleaning it, feeding it, sexing it, using it in various ways, all under the seemingly clever guise that this is YOU doing this stuff, it's YOU looking in the mirror, and it's YOU that's gorgeous today.

When you look at society, look at the news, look at how people talk about bodies. Almost every reference to a person is ACTUALLY a reference to their body. "Joe did this"... well no, joe's body did. Joe is not a body. This is pretty serious, how far reaching this is. We've gone really really far into this distortion. Every single way that we confuse ourselves with "our own body" - and by the way you don't really HAVE a body as a spirit - is a mistaken false perception of ourselves. It's delusional. It's like saying you are your jeans and t-shirt and shoes.

We've become lost in our bodies. Tangled up in form. Confused about who and what we are. Deceived by appearances. Tempted to regard this object in the mirror as though it is our self and to then preen it and decorate it and worship it and feel bad about it all based on the belief that it is you. This is the big problem that needs correction. This is body identification - whereby the Son of God is trying to prove he is NOT a spirit, NOT a mind, and ONLY a body. It's the complete opposite of awakening.

So if we're on a spiritual path to God, then we're going to have realize, that any progress towards that goal will have to entail learning that YOU ARE NOT A BODY. In fact, you're not even remotely a body, nor do you really have one. You are immortal spirit. "You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do."

By confusing your IDENTITY with the human body and thinking of it as "my self", you are confused, and confusion is fear. And this is also level confusion. And it is also sickness. And it is a way to defend against the truth. And it's a choice to suffer. It's a form of self attack, and an attack on others, to regard yourself as physical.

To emphasize the qualities, characteristics, gender, sexual persuasion, desirable or undesirable features, shape, size, color, ethic origin, hairstyle, musculature, skinniness, sexiness, attractiveness, ugliness, or any other attribute of the body as being something that determines or says ANYTHING about YOU, is delusional. It is confusion about who and what you are.

But we are addicted to using the body like some kind of idol worship figure that we hold in very high regard (or low) as a statement of "what I am like". Yet nothing about the body applies to you at all. We can get lost in how proud we are to be a woman or a man or gay or straight or white or black or pretty much anything else. NONE of it is true of you! You are made of light. You are a spirit being. You have immortality. Your body is an entire LAYER of illusions covering over your real self. It's just a picture that you show to the world to pretend you are not yourself.

"The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it"

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

"The body is the idea of who you are not."

"For what you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

"Can you who see yourselves WITHIN a body, know yourself AS AN IDEA?"

"Freedom must be impossible as long as you perceive a body as yourself."

"The ego regards the body as its home, and DOES try to satisfy itself through the body."

"The body is the symbol of the ego, as the ego is the symbol of separation. And both are nothing more than attempts to LIMIT communication, and thereby TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE."

"Only by assigning to the mind the properties OF THE BODY, does separation SEEM to be possible."

"A PERSON conceives of himself as separate, largely because he perceives OF himself as bounded by a body."

"The body IS separate, and therefore CANNOT be part of you."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible."

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"The man was an illusion, for he seemed to be a separate being, walking by himself, within a body that appeared to hold his self from Self, as all illusions do."

This means that all the ways that we believe and act as if we ARE the body, as though its prowess rubs off on us, as though we get credit or discredit for how the body looks, as though anything about it AT ALL says anything about you AT ALL, has to be undone. We have to be willing to let go of all the ways we have confused ourselves WITH it, so that we can come to the recognition that we are DISTINCT from it, and that it is NOT ourselves.

In a sense, we have to "separate out" what is REALLY YOU, your real self, and what is an illusion. "The body is a dream", so it is an illusion. IF you are confusing it with your sense of self, you are losing sight of your real self. Not being clear about WHAT you are - immortal spirit - you are unclear about what is real and what is an illusion. You cannot BE a body if you are to be real.

This means that your ENTIRE sense of identity - self - what you are - has to SHIFT away from the body, TOWARDS SPIRIT. To become spirit-identified. That is the goal. To let go of the body entirely. To be completely clear it is not you, and you do not need it, because it is not part of who and what you are. God did not create it, so it is not really part of your real self., and does not exist in reality or heaven.

The proper use of denial is to not BELIEVE that the body is real, and to therefore deny its existence, recognizing it is not yourself or anything real. The improper use of denial is to BELIEVE the body is real, while trying to deny it exists, which is actually a double denial. To believe bodies exists is a denial of your spirit. To then sacrifice the body is denial on top of denial. We have to carefully dismantle our belief that the body is real in the first place, shift our sense of identity back to its natural God-given state, and then accept the atonement truth that we are still THE SPIRIT that God created, NOT a body whatsoever.

Upon realizing you are spirit, clearly, and with no delusion about being a body, you may for a while be using the body. But now the body is merely a TOOL. Similar to how a carpenter would use a hammer to construct a chair, he would not for a moment become delusional and believe that he IS the hammer. It's just a device, an instrument, a piece of machinery. You can operate it and make it do stuff but at no time do you believe it is YOUR SELF.

And having recognized that your entire fulfillment comes from remembering who you ARE, you would no longer seek to use the body to GET anything, to "pleasure you", or to enter into illusions of joining at a physical level - knowing it is not possible, or necessary. "Minds need not bodies to communicate."

Full-on spirit-identification, christ-identification, son of God identification, sets you free from death, from the world, and from all bodies forever. You are not a body, you are free, because you are still as God created you. And those who know themselves are not confused about whether they are a walking flesh prison or not. Shifting to spirit means shifting away from EVERY sense of identity associated with the body form. Race, gender, sex, age, genetics, ancestry, shape, color, features, all of it.

You are only what God created. You are a shining star in heaven's womb. How could you be anything but God's divine creation.

Ok let's break down this passage and find out what it's saying.

"A miracle is a correction."

Before the correction, your mind is in a state of confusion, darkness ego. You are on a lower rung of the ladder. The correction corrects your mind and raises you up to a higher rung on the ladder. The false belief, mistaken perception, block to awareness, denial etc is "corrected" ie healed, and your mind opens up to some light. This alters your perception indirectly.

"It does not create, nor really change at all. It merely looks on devastation, and reminds the mind that what it sees is false."

Being "like drops of healing rain", miracles are a little bit like detergent or soap for your mind. The correction actually comes from a higher level, e.g. the eyes of christ or through Jesus or Holy Spirit. The miracle shines or blesses or soaks into the "corrupted thought", the illusion, the false belief, the darkness, and "fixes it". Cleans it up. Gets rid of the blockages and dirt in the mind. To remind your mind that illusions are false, it lifts your awareness up towards forgiveness, into the light, where you have the correct perspective ie the state of forgiveness. They heal you so that you can recognize what is true and false rather than being confused. It doesn't have to add anything to do this (other than love which was lacking - "miracles supply a lack" of love/life).

"It undoes error, but does not attempt to go beyond perception, nor exceed the function of forgiveness. Thus it stays within time's limits."

So this takes place in your mind within the range of perception between false and true perception. You start out perceiving and believing falsely and the miracle drips into your mind and heals the error, undoes the blockage or confused belief, and raises the mind up toward the atonement. It can't lift you up any higher than perception will go ie up towards atonement/forgiveness because all they do is essentially "remove ego."

"Yet it paves the way for the return of timelessness and love's awakening, for fear must slip away under the gentle remedy it gives."

Note that Jesus elsewhere states that "healing is NOT a miracle." Nor are shifts in perception, which are temporary effects. Miracles in fact are like nuggets of light, sparks, impulses, energy, love-power-bubbles, which come down from a higher level and heal the mind, lifting it up and returning it to life ie resurrection. Miracle are the REMEDY, which cause healing and shifting to occur, but miracles are independent of the healing or shifts. They are not the healing itself, they are the "healer" or healing agent. They prepare the mind for being in a state of salvation by gradually erasing all the ego junk and setting you free. They also can be transferred, given, sent, broadcast to others like a little package of life-force, causing resurrection.

"A miracle contains the gift of grace, for it is given and received as one. And thus it illustrates the law of truth the world does not obey, because it fails entirely to understand its ways."

For miracles to occur, or for you to "do them", you have to GIVE them ie to extend love. You cannot give miracles without receiving them also, and you cannot receive them unless you are willing to give them. Giving miracles to others, ie extending christ love, blesses both of you, and lifts you both up, and benefits both the giver and the receiver simultaneously. When you send love to someone, you will feel invigorated and lightened. You can't love without being loved. Nor can you perform miracles unless you are willing to also be healed. This is the opposite to the world's laws which say that you receive without giving or give without receiving, as in the unhealed healer.

"A miracle inverts perception which was upside-down before, and thus it ends the strange distortions that were manifest."

This is an important part about body healing. Perception is upside down or backwards, when what is true is mistaken for what is false and vice versa. Levels become confused, and e.g. the lower level is thought to cause the higher, or body causes mind, or world/dream causes the dreamer. This is corrected because the distorted beliefs are undone (victimhood etc) and the mind is healed, thus perception changes as a RESULT of mind healing. Note that what you perceive comes from what you project FIRST, which comes from what you believe and value as true FIRST. Perception has no causal power in it, it's passive, like reading a book. Note that "perception is a RESULT not a cause".

In addition, the "strange distortions that were manifest" includes THE BODY'S PHYSICAL SICKNESS, because an unforgiving mind FORCES the body into sickness and death. The body becomes "distorted" by the mind through kind of "mind-force fields", which act on the body when coming from unloving attitudes and "hurt" the body, distorting it into forms of sickness, away from the body's "natural" blueprint of healthy functioning. When the mind is having upside-down/backwards beliefs/perceptions, it is believing in sin and attack, is projecting onto the body, and is using the body as a weapon. Thus the body becomes sick. As mind is receiving/giving a miracle, mind is healed, the remedy is provided, perception auto-adjusts as a result, AND the "strange distortions that were MANIFEST (visible)" in the body are also corrected. They simply are reversed and disappear because the mind stops holding the body in a twisted formation and lifts away all attack from it, thus healing it and restoring it. "Now is the body healed by miracles."

So moving upwards towards forgiveness, receiving healing, being corrected, having false beliefs undone, moving into the light and love, heals the mind, fixes perception, and then ALWAYS results in the body being healed. Or rather, "un-attacked".

"For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain."

"It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible."

"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."

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

The miracles don't "do" something to the body so much as they CEASE the ego doings that were attacking it and which were BLOCKING love from shining on the body to heal it. And without constant ego distortion the body image "reverts" to its undistorted form. To me it's kind of like the body has a standard healthy form and then mind "twists, bends, distorts it" making it appear differently (as sickness), but if you remove the distorting/force-fields/mind-bending you're simply left with the healthy body showing up.

"Now is perception open to the truth. Now is forgiveness seen as justified."

Once the miracle has done its healing, mind is corrected so perception is in line with truth and forgiveness is seen as the only sane way to see things. Unforgiveness is what has been undone. Remember "the miracle does nothing. It merely takes away..." (which is kind of a doing) and it removes the distortions... it does appear thus to DO something, it does heal the body as well, it's just that it does it by UNDOING the ego influence and cancelling the evil distortions.

"Forgiveness is the home of miracles. The eyes of Christ deliver them to all they look upon in mercy and in love. "

Here Jesus is kind of shifting gears and is no longer talking about how miracles heal and move you up towards forgiveness, but is now talking about where miracle actually COME FROM - from the top down. e.g. "Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers." Being IN forgiveness, having RECEIVED a miracle, and your mind now being CORRECT, YOU now "deliver them" to all you look on and miracles become effortless EXPRESSIONS OF LOVE which have miracle-working capabilities, because love heals and undoes error. You can now bestow miracle onto others from a christ-minded state of love and GIVE the miracles you have received.

Note that this raises the question, who does or where does the miracle come from when you personally are in a state of hell? Apparently you are not able to DO them until you are loving enough and close enough to christ. "Miracles are everyone's right but purification is necessary first." WHO bestows miracles on you when YOU are in the dark? Is it a healing that comes from the Holy Spirit? Does Jesus inject healing into your mind, like he says he does? "I inspire all miracles" etc. Certainly your distorted ego is not a miracle worker, nor is any beginner to the course. Yet you are able to find healing through forgiveness and purification work, most of this purification work is I think NOT a miracle.

"Miracles ENTAIL (require, before beginning to do them), a sudden shift into vertical perception." Vertical perception is christ vision. You have to be pretty advanced in your own mentally healed state in order to be able to DO them. In order to receive them you have to be able to GIVE them. So somehow you have to get yourself "high enough" first, and that takes purification work.

... skipping a couple paragraphs...

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."

Miracles are resurrection devices. They heal the mind and lift it up towards atonement. They literally GIVE LIFE where it was lacking, reversing the signs of death. The natural side effect is the cessation of ego attack, which eliminates the present-moment projection of body distortions and thus immediately heals all sickness and raises the dead. Every miracle increases life. "Miracles mean life, and God is the giver of life". Every miracle is a resurrection. "Miracles raise the level of communication." "Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead". By giving/receiving loving healing through expression/extension of love, where "miracles are a spark of life", the SPARK or POWER inherent to love is given and blesses and CAN REVERSE DEATH.

The ultimate result of miracles naturally is that there is nothing left TO UNDO, because everything has been healed, and so their PURPOSE comes to an end as the world is undone and all sickness is eliminated and all death cancelled. Before this ending, bodies become healed and now symbolize ONLY LIFE and become incapable of death, because "the mind being sane heal the body." And now the body is used for Christ/Holy Spirit purposes, representing LIFE and HEALING, and is a walking demonstration of miracle mindedness, now able to give the same miracles to others.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began."

Let me first just say that I don't intend for this to be a "negative" post. Nor is it being pessimistic. But it's going to point out the inherent negativity of the world. Not to try to make it real or be drawn into despair over it, but to just recognize it for what it is. And there is no need to react to it with assertions of "happier interpretations."

There is a tremendous need for us to stop believing that the world is something we WANT. Or something that can offer us any redeeming qualities or content. Jesus actually wants us to learn to recognize that this world has nothing to offer, nothing to give, does nothing, means nothing, and is nothing.

Jesus frames the world - by which I mean EARTH and its physical neighbors regardless of your perceptions - as nothing. And that we are to recognize its nothingness in order to realize that giving it up is not a sacrifice. And that by giving it up, we stand to GAIN EVERYTHING by accepting the reality of the Kingdom that God created for us.

"The world I see has nothing that I want."

"But if I see no value in the world as I behold it, nothing that I want to keep as mine or search for as a goal, it will depart from me. For I have not sought for illusions to replace the truth."

"It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give. What can the sacrifice of nothing mean?"

ACIM is teaching that the world is nothing, it has no value, and everything in it is a pain. It says you do not want this world. That even though you made it you do not want it. And even that you made it BY not wanting it - by not wanting what was in your mind, which you projected outward as a world to try to get rid of it.

"the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made, but do not want."

We are confused and caught up in the world because we keep believing that it can offer us salvation, something of value, something beneficial, something we want. And before you start dreaming up denials via the repurposing of the body and world, let just just clarify that the purpose of the world does not change what it IS.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

Our problem is that we do believe the world has something to offer. That it is a great place to live forever, and never leave. That it has real pleasures and that its pleasures entail no pain. But Jesus also teaches that even the pleasures of the world are really pains in disguise, because the cost is that by indulging in temptation you are separating from God, and real pleasure only comes from doing God's will. Pleasure binds you to the body and takes you away from reality, just as pain does.

He wants us to recognize that pain IS pain, and pleasure IS pain, because truthfully we actually don't quite recognize what anything is. We think that pain is pleasure. We even think that sickness is saving us from life, and death is salvation. In our confusion we keep trying to dress up this world and frame it as somewhere that you can enjoy the full fruits of heaven. But as Jesus aptly explains, you CANNOT ESCAPE from the world's suffering by staying in it.

"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."

Much of our problem then is that we think there really is a way to be in the world that fixes it up and makes it great and provides room for an entire civilizations to emerge. A massive attempt to tame hell and "civilize" it. But this is really a form of DENIAL. The truth is that ALL of the world's roads lead to death, suffering, loss and disappointment. If you are willing to look at it you'll see this is true. And it will just keep on disappointing you until it disappears. That is its NATURE. It is a device for guaranteeing death.

"The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it"

"Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life."

These are the facts. Everything in spacetime is limited, it is not even really life (only eternal life is life), bodies are mostly destined to die, flowers can't bloom without dying off, entire planets cease to exist after a while, there is decay and destruction everywhere, sacrifice is built into spacetime itself, and there is scarcity everywhere. The world is TURD floating in cess-pool toilet-bowl of spacetime. Failure is inherent to the entire cosmos. This is not being negative about it either, it's being honest and truthful. This is a dream of mortality.

"Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

If we go into DENIAL that the world is basically a one-way trip to hell and death, we will start trying to find ways to PRETEND it's not true. We in fact have built up what we call a "civilized society" (a dysfunction), complete with the "comforts" that avoid as much pain as possible, the clever manipulations of matter that result in seeming "fixes" for problems, we've found all kinds of distractions and ways of making life seem "interesting", and have discovered every imaginable toy and play-thing to occupy our time. And yet all the while death can strike at any instant in any number of ways. And no-one knows what the heck they're doing.

"The intrusion of the ability to perceive, which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the Separation. No one has been sure of anything since then."

The world really, in truth, is fundamentally broken, and it was broken from the start. It was made from the idea of the malfunction of reality. It was an attack on order and peace and love and harmony. Its separations are constant and relentless. Its isolation and exclusion are rampant. And not one single particle in all of spacetime is without a form that symbolizes separation, repulsion and rejection. The world is made of denial, and it even denies its own existence.

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What ***denies its own existence and attacks itself*** is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and ***earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite*** in every way."

If you look, you'll notice that the world has a plentiful supply of problems lined up for you, and even if you seem to solve one using a highly specific customized solution made just to perfectly fix this one problem, it WILL NOT EVER stop the onslaught of all the other problems it has lined up for you. Not to mention death. The one problem that everyone seems to be in TOTAL denial about, as if it doesn't matter because it's off in the future. And so we pretend we won't die, while nevertheless rushing towards it and making sure it happens.

We have to be willing to put aside all of these adjustments, these wishful thinkings, these rose-tinted glasses, the ignorant bliss, the framing the world as heaven, the trying to make it be our home, our adjustments to it and our attempts to make it out to be a great place. It is nothing. It can be forgiven, like all illusions can, but its nothingness is what makes this possible.

"YOU make the world and THEN adjust to it."

Adjusting to the world, trying to cope with the world, trying to make it more palatable, trying to make it softer and safer and seem to be a place that's not all that bad, is all forms of denial. The desire for the nice materials, the riches, the shiny objects, the fancy cars and expensive buildings, it's all an attempt to pretend that the world is desirable and that it WON'T disappoint you, as you seem to enjoy SHORT LIVED temporary reprieves from its hell-bent destructiveness. And as you hide behind the next "new thing" which claims to offer escape from death.

It is an avoidance of the fact that the world is just fundamentally not EVER going to really work correctly. It cannot function correctly because it is based on an idea of death and destruction. It is fundamentally a world of suicide and self-attack. Everything in it will always go wrong sooner or later. Expecting it not to will make you suffer.

This isn't a pessimistic view, by the way. This is a truthful view. I am not saying that we should be sad and unhappy and despairing because of it. Or that there is no alternative. In fact, Jesus is trying to get us to look at this truth SO THAT we can be recognize it is something we DO NOT WANT, so that we will in turn change our minds and choose the one reality that God created for us. And in which we will be infinitely happy forever. We only keep choosing the world because we mistakenly think it is WORTH HAVING, but how can you want a world made of rejection?

The world is not supposed to be your home, the thing you are in love with, your special adored idol, or your salvation. If you watch honestly you'll see that everything just goes wrong, eventually. It happens, again and again. Stuff breaks. Things get lost. Objects fall off tabletops. Food splats on the floor. The clothes become worn. The beds become mis-shapen. The roofs leak and cave in. The cars break down. The rust creeps in. I like to say, "there goes the physics again". And the assault of time, which is the idea of change and therefore death, guarantees that everything comes to an end.

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

Shall we live in denial that this is true, that the world can NEVER BE HEAVEN? Shall we live in denial that everything in the worl WILL END? Or even that it has death built into it from the start? That it can never turn into a perfect society or an ideal civilization or even a safe place? We try to make it safer with our defenses and castles and our potions and rituals and our avoidance of dangers, but it remains an unsafe place. Can you escape a supernova?

"The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus."

The world cannot GIVE us what we want. It cannot make us happy. It cannot provide us with peace. It cannot satisfy us. It gives only to take away. It fails in order to disappoint. Every road, path, way, direction, goal, ambition and achievement in the world is pointless. Yet the world can present seeming illusions of "things going well", for a while, before it attacks and destroys what it has given. It can tempt you will fake happiness and fake values and fake salvation, only to fail you once again and deceive you in doing so.

"On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once."

"The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while."

Jesus is not being negative when he describes the world like this. The world IS like this, isn't it? It's not a matter of how you look at it. There is no real loss in admitting to this, nor is this an attack upon the world. It isn't an unforgiving accusation. It is just a simple clear look at the world we made, its inherent nature, and its limitations. It is a world of limits, not a world of freedom, which is why it is like a prison for everyone in it.

"Are you not weary of imprisonment? God did not choose this sorry path for you."

"If it (mind) does not freely elect to do so, it retains this creative ability, but places itself under tyrannous rather than authoritative control. As a result, what it creates is imprisonment, because such are the dictates of tyrants."

The world itself is tyrrannical. It is selfish and separate. Each part of it is separate and at war with every other. Even the forms of objects are in conflict, which is why they are different. Conflicting shapes, sizes, colors, textures, they are all forms of war. Everything the body sees is a form of conflict. Every atom is at war. You cannot turn something that is fundamentally conflicting into something that isn't, because this will erase all of its properties and it will cease to exist.

It is by recognizing the world as "the hell you made", that we might be willing to go the other way. It is when we sugarcoat it as "not hell" in a spiritualizing pretense to make it seem wanted and worthy, that we put ourselves to sleep. We are blinded by perception of form and tempted by its luster and flair. Its picture frame of jewel-encrusted death suggests it is not a world of death but our most cherished possession.

We are to correctly identify that the world IS meaningless and IS nothing and HAS nothing that we want and DOES nothing for or to us and ISN'T our inheritance from God and IS NOT real and HAS no power and is basically absolutely NOTHING. The recognition that "there is no world." How can a world which does not really exist appeal to us and be something we want INSTEAD OF God? At the cost of heaven? And in a bargain where we "gain the whole world and lose our soul"?

True escape from the battleground does not entail the faulty belief that the battleground can be made into a pleasant place. You can rise above it, and you can leave the desert, and you can see it in a better light. But you cannot change what it IS. And denying what it is merely keeps you in hell for longer. And that isn't going to make you very happy.

"The world you see must be denied."

"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see."

"A desert is a desert is a desert. You can do anything you want in it, but you CANNOT change it from what it IS. It still lacks water, which is why it IS a desert." ... "The thing to do with a deserve is to LEAVE."

"Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

"A Son of God is happy ONLY when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make."

"That is the only environment in which you can be happy. You cannot make it, any more than you can make yourselves. But it has been created for you, as you were created for it. God watches over His children and denies them nothing."

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

"God's teachers can have no regret on giving up the pleasures of the world. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Does an adult resent the giving up of children's toys? Does one whose vision has already glimpsed the Face of Christ look back with longing on a slaughter house? No-one who has escaped the world and all its ills looks back on it with condemnation. Yet he must rejoice that he is free of all the sacrifice which its values would demand of him. To them he sacrifices all his freedom. To them he sacrifices all his peace. And to possess them must he sacrifice his hope of Heaven and remembrance of his Father's Love. Who in his sane mind chooses nothing as a substitute for everything?"

"What is the real meaning of sacrifice? It is the cost of believing in illusions. It is the price that must be paid for the denial of truth. There is no pleasure of the world that does not demand this, for otherwise the pleasure would be seen as pain. And no-one asks for pain if he recognizes it. It is the idea of sacrifice that makes him blind. He does not see what he is asking for. And so he seeks it in a thousand ways and in a thousand places, each time believing it is there and each time disappointed in the end. "Seek but do not find" remains this world's stern decree, and no-one who pursues the world's goals can do otherwise."

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its powers decline if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD. The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it YOU look upon with love. This GIVES it the only reality it will ever have. ITS value is NOT in itself, but yours IS in you."

"What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy."

This is a conclusion I've come to over time, and I'll explain why it makes sense to me.

God is whole. Everything God does is whole. When God creates he fully creates. What he creates is fully created and is whole.

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in him."

God is a creator and has many thoughts. Each of those many thoughts are also whole thoughts, and thoughts of wholeness. Each of those thoughts contains the other thoughts, because there is one wholeness shared by all of them - that's oneness.

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they, were created neither partially nor in part."

God has created many children, each of which therefore must be whole, and they all share the whole of God.

Now, in terms of relationship, God can ONLY relate fully. With each of those thoughts or created beings, God must have a full-on complete relationship. It is a whole relationship, in which God shares the whole of Himself. And all of Himself is received by his creations.

If you take a definition of "personal", to mean that you get the fullest most undivided attention, where someone totally commits to you and gives to you without any lack or limitation, ie you're getting "fully personal service", then God IS giving fully personal service. He is giving you ALL of the attention and service possible for anyone to ever receive. The best personal service you ever had.

God gives his full total whole attention and being to one child. That child receives the whole of God. God does not lack or limit or hold back anything he is sharing with that one child. The relationship they have is totally whole. Therefore as far as that child is concerned, God is being fully attentive, fully relating, fully present, fully focused and fully giving to them.

That is the MAXIMUM amount of personal service possible in any scenario. It's not even possible for God to be MORE personal, because he is meeting ALL of the needs of that child. He is giving them absolutely everything. There is no definition of getting fully personal attention from God than this.

The truth also is that EACH of the children of God are being given the FULL attention of God. God is wholly fully giving all of himself to child A, and to child B, and to child C. This is where God's abilities transcend ordinary states of spatial relationship, limitations, compartments and categories.

God is omnipresent. This not only means that God is everywhere but it also means that all of God is in every part of God fully, simultaneously, and without restriction or limit. God is actually capable of giving FULL attention to any given part, while also giving FULL attention to any other part.

All the parts of God, all of his creations, therefore individually experience a full, whole, completely, total, unlimited relationship with their creator. EACH of them experiences God as fully and wholly relating with them personally. Not that God is distracted with other children, or only has a short amount of time to spare.

God is entirely 100% personally attending to each child individually. Every child of God has God's full attention at all times, in a maximally personal relationship. And every child of God is receiving all of God at all times, without there being conflict, because they all share God's omnipresent transcendental nature.

This means that God is fully personal in relationship with each child. But God is also fully giving the same fullness to each child. This means there is no difference between what God is giving to one child, or what God is giving to another child. God is giving the same total wholeness to child A, and child B, and child C. They are all treated equally and fully.

Therefore, this means that God is truly being "impersonal", in the sense that none of his children are receiving SPECIAL FAVOR, and every one of them is receiving the fullness of his attention. Each child has a fully total personal whole relationship with ALL of God. While from God's perspective, he is having this full total relationship with EACH child simultaneously, and fully, without limit.

God therefore is impersonal because every single creation is related to in the SAME way, with the same wholeness and fullness and love. Nothing is given to one which is not given to another. EACH child of God has the WHOLE of God. Every child of God has EVERYTHING. All the children of God share ALL of God, and the same one whole is shared by them all. That is their oneness in holographic relationship with the whole, as whole parts.

This means, in conclusion, that God is fully entirely personal in relationship with EACH of his creations, and yet simultaneously is fully entirely personal in relationship to EVERY creation, and is therefore ALSO fully impersonal. Impersonal does not mean remote and distant and cold. It means not differentiating between any two persons, and not giving something different to one and not another.

Being impersonal is inclusive, but many people think that being personal is exclusive. And this is why many people think God cannot be personal. It is also why many people think God is COMPLETELY impersonal, without ANY "personal" (ie not fully attentive) relationship at all, which portrays God as some kind of remote uncaring generalized abstract blob that has no real personal relationship with ANYONE. That is not what God is like.

Similarly, because in the world of form and ego, people recognize that ego is selfish and exclusive, many of us also think that being personal is an ego thing. That it means exclusive, or something applies to one person and not another, or someone gets special treatment, or that someone is lacking something that another has. That is an earthly definition of "personal", based on separation, and rooted in the ego thought system. It is NOT the proper definition of personal as it applies to God.

God gives all of himself to every child, in a fully personal relationship, while also giving all of himself to the whole of creation at once, transcending earthly limits and seeming to do the impossible - being wholly in relationship with multiple beings at the same time without the slightest indication of loss or limitation or sacrifice or compromise or being distracted or special.

This is why I firmly believe God to be BOTH impersonal and personal. Fully personal, indeed MORE personal than any kind of ego-based specialness idea of personal, MORE personal than even a single person receiving something exclusively that others lack. MORE personal than the ego's definition of personal, which is a definition of lack and limitation and selfishness and hoarding. God is MORE personal than what most people think would be a maximal amount of "personal".

It is also why God is fully impersonal, in the MOST spiritual way. Impersonal not in a cold detached remote way, but in terms of absolute equality and fairness, totally treating every single person in the same way, relating with the same ONE unconditional love towards EVERYONE at the same time, and giving everything TO everyone simultaneously. This is far beyond the ego's definition of impersonal relationship, and is the guarantee that God fully personally relates to EACH AND EVERY child of God in exactly the same absolute way.

You can see these facts reflected in many statements from A Course in Miracles. For example Jesus speaks about revelations, which are communications FROM GOD, to an INDIVIDUAL soul, in which the soul experiences a HIGHLY PERSONAL relationship with God, which doesn't even entail the inclusion of others. This relationship moment reflects the original form of communication between God and ONE child, which continues to be a reflection of the PERSONAL aspect of God's relationship with EACH child.

God knows YOU personally, and fully. You have a full total whole relationship with God, personally. But at the same time, God has personal full relationships with your brothers. And his treatment of the whole Kingdom as one is his impersonal consistency and honesty with every creation. This is why I believe God to be A PERSON (or, an "impersonal fully-personal person"), why the Holy Spirit is A PERSON, why the children of God are PERSONS, and why being a person/being is completely natural. We all share everything with everyone.

"Revelation is intensely personal"

"He DOES want revelation brought to others. This cannot be done with the actual revelation, because its content cannot be expressed, and it is intensely personal to the mind which receives it."

"Revelations induce complete but temporary suspension of doubt and fear. They represent the original form of communication between God and His Souls"

"God HAS kept your kingdom for you, but He cannot share His joy with you until you know it with your whole mind."

"The purpose of the Atonement is to restore everything TO you. You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

"The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is KNOW THYSELF. ***There is nothing else to learn.*** Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost."

"I do not know the thing I am, and THEREFORE do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world and on myself."

Jesus defines the course's ultimate goals in different ways, but a very significant angle is that we're trying to remember who we really are. We're trying to tune back into our real identity, to stop believing things are true of us which aren't, and wake up to our real self - a shared identity in Christ.

In the separation we denied who we really are, and pretended to be something we're not. This confused us greatly. Whatever you believe is true, you will believe must be true of you. As your sense of truth and reality shifted from heaven to hell, your whole sense of who and what you are went with it. Including a sense of "where" you are.

As your idea of truth shifted towards spacetime, toward bodies and the ego, it seemed as if your whole sense of self was flung out of heaven and transported into bodies. Having asserted "bodies are true", you believed they were true of you, which placed you in them.

All the things of spacetime, including the world and all bodies and the ego, are not of God. They are not created, or real. Since they are governed by time, they always change and are fickle, so they never have any sense of permanent identity. Even the notion that you are one of the things suggests you will die because your self is irrevocably changed against your will.

We have come to identify with the ego and the body because we think they are the truth. We've confused the truth with false things. Part of sorting out what is true and false is figuring out what category these things belong to. But at the same time, it's going to mean sorting out what category your identity belongs to. As your sense of truth changes, so must your identification with what's true.

The question then is, are you an aspect of a dream? Are you an artificial fake image of a body? Are you a fictional evil selfish ego? And by extension, anything that these things seem to do or experience or feel or think, must surely be NOT a part of your real self, if these things are not part of reality.

By saying you are not a body you're saying you are spirit. Your whole sense of "who and what I am" shifts away from the physical towards something spiritual. This HAS to entail an actual experiential sense of being something of spirit. The feeling of "this is my self" or "this is what I am". This locking-in of identity and self and home and a sense of where you belong, has to become anchored to your soul. So that you actually believe and recognize that you ARE a spirit being. So that you can SEE yourself.

To gain an understanding of what your real self's true nature is, and therefore what you should be trying to tune INTO, and to grasp what things are illusions which you should be tuning OUT of, you need a good sense of the nature of reality. God created you as a permanent, unchangeable, immortal, invulnerable, perfect, loving, powerful, happy being of light. That is what you must come to believe is your actual nature.

God did not create the world or the body, or the ego. He did not create suffering or sickness or death. He did not create unhappy feelings, sad emotions, grief or loss. He did not create sin or guilt or fear. He did not create any kind of suffering, any kind of selfishness, or any kind of specialness. So all of these things cannot be a part of the spirit-being that you are. They cannot truly be a part of your identity.

When you are believing that these false things are TRUE or real, you will identify with them. Anything you GIVE truth to you are trying to be ONE with. You embrace it and accept it and identify WITH it. You resonate with it and agree with it and want it for your own. You see your own reflection in it, and you merge with it. Therefore if you merge with illusory evil ego things, you start to become them.

This leads to experiences such as "I am suffering" "I am feeling unhappy" "I am sick" "I am having a broken body" "I am angry" "I am grieving" etc. And in this experience you will have become ONE with the ego so much that you will believe all of these experiences are literally YOU. That you are having them, you are the one feeling them, you are the one being victimized, and you are the one suffering. But this is because you've merged yourself WITH the ego and the body and have identified them AS you.

"if you are to RETAIN guilt, as the ego insists, YOU CANNOT BE YOU. Only by persuading you that IT is you, could the ego possibly induce you to PROJECT guilt, and thereby keep it in your mind."

"The ego believes that this is what YOU did, because it believes it IS you. It follows, then, that if you identify WITH the ego, you MUST perceive yourself as guilty."

What we have to realize then is that when we're in an "I am suffering" perspective, it is the EGO that is suffering. Because "only the ego can experience guilt." Only a weak frail unwanted miserable false self can possibly experience hell. Only the ego vantage point can make everything into hell. If you are therefore feeling like "I AM [fill in the ego attribute]", you have made yourself one with the ego and have taken it as your own identity. You are clinging to it to save you.

So then we have to realize that we are NOT this. We are not the sufferer. We are not the dream content. We are not the body. We are not the world. We are not that which feels guilt. We are not capable of grief and loss. We have to remember all of the true attributes of Christ and recognize that we ARE those things. We have to become ONE with Christ again, to merge with Christ and claim ownership of being Christ, unite with Christ, accept that everything true of Christ is purely true, and that it is true of us.

If God's truth is the only truth, then our immortal invulnerable self cannot POSSIBLY ever suffer in any way. Any sense of unhappiness, unworthiness, pain, despair, loss, fear, guilt, shame etc must NOT be a part of us. We cannot experience it from a vantage point of being perfect. It must be part of a dream, part of a fiction, part of the ego thought system. You cannot FEEL it if you are NOT that. It cannot BE there if it is unreal.

So now we have to sort out, who am I? What am I? What is true? What is true of ME? What is my real self? What is the nature of the soul that God created me to be as a son of God, as a part of Christ and as heaven? What is the only truth about me that I will accept as the definition of myself? What will I identify WITH which is real and true and permanent? And am I willing to let go of the ego, disconnect FROM it, separate it out from what I believe is part of myself, stop trusting it, stop using it, and stop being it?

Who are you really? You are the perfect child of God which God created to live forever. There is no darkness in you. There is no evil in you. There is no sin or guilt in you. There is no basis for you to fear or suffer. There is no possibility you can ever be sick or die. And nothing can ever attack or hurt you. You cannot BE hurt and you cannot FEEL unhappy. Only a false artificial self could be such things. Only a fictional self could suffer. Only a fake self could have attributes which are not of God.

You tried to reinvent yourself in the separation. You tried to be your own creator. You wanted to be different to how you were created. You wanted to redefine what is true and decide what you are, to make of yourself whatever you wanted to be. Anything except God-like. And so you have spent all this time making yourself into a body, turning yourself into the anti-christ, and trying to be dead. That is not who or what you are. It is not POSSIBLE.

"Now is our Source remembered, and Therein we find our true Identity at last. Holy indeed are we, because our Source can know no sin." "Father, You know my true Identity. Reveal It now to me who am Your Son, that I may waken to the truth in You, and know that Heaven is restored to me."

"Your altar stands serene and undefiled. It is the holy altar to my Self, and there I find my true Identity."

"But we have listened to Your Voice, and learned exactly what to do to be restored to Heaven and our true Identity."

"My true identity is so secure, so lofty, sinless, glorious and great, wholly beneficent and free from guilt, that Heaven looks to It to give it light. It lights the world as well. It is the gift my Father gave me, and the one as well I give the world. There is no gift but This that can be either given or received. This is reality, and only This. This is illusion's end. It is the Truth."

"Again, how simple is salvation! It is merely a statement of your true identity. It is this that we will celebrate today."

"We sing the song of thankfulness today in honor of the Self Which God has willed to be our true identity in Him. Today we smile on everyone we see, and walk with lightened footsteps as we go to do what is appointed us to do."

"For he who can accept his true identity is truly saved."

In ACIM, Jesus spells out that forgiveness and atonement are the same thing, and so is true perception. These are all a state in which there is recognition, accurate perception, and a forgiving attitude which sees that there is no sin. Or moreso, it is the acknowledgment and re-acceptance of God's truth and the willingness to accept your permanent innocence, as you are in the Kingdom.

"For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one. They are the one beginning, with the end to lead to oneness far beyond themselves. True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist. And it is this that true perception sees."

You can see that Jesus mingles these terms interchangeably. For example, here Jesus mixes forgiveness with true perception as a way of looking:

"Forgiveness looks on sinlessness alone, and judges not."

"But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals."

"This is the shift that true perception brings: What was projected out is seen within, and there forgiveness lets it disappear."

And here he mixes true perception and atonement, also indicating that a forgiving attitude produces atonement, which means it also produces true perception:

"It is concerned only with Atonement, or the correction of perception. The means of the Atonement is forgiveness."

And here he tells us that complete forgiveness, aka true perception, is a state in which you have let guilt go, and have accepted atonement.

"If what you offer IS complete forgiveness, you MUST have LET GUILT GO, accepting the Atonement for yourself, and learning you ARE guiltless."

And here he refers to atonement as the undoing of errors, which is accomplished by forgiveness, which is ITSELF the state of atonement and true perception.

"The sole responsibility of God's teacher is to accept the Atonement for himself. Atonement means correction, or the undoing of errors."

Also how about this:

"Healing and Atonement are not related; they are identical."

"there are no degrees of Atonement. It is the one complete concept possible in this world, because it is the source of a wholly unified perception."

"Accept Atonement and you are healed. Atonement is the Word of God."

"The offer of Atonement is universal. It is equally applicable to all individuals in all circumstances. And in it is the power to heal all individuals of all forms of sickness."

Here is something to consider which might be controversial. Jesus refers to forgiveness as a means of accomplishing atonement, but also as completely synonymous with the atonement itself. Because complete forgiveness is the atonement is the state you enter with true perception. Which means, by implication, that any state prior to acceptance of atonement is NOT forgiveness.

There is a very widely prevalent myth therefore in the ACIM community that we are to "do forgiveness" in order to reach atonement. But atonement IS forgiveness. So what are we to call that which leads UP TO it? Perhaps a better term which Jesus uses is "purification"

"Miracles are everyone's right (miracle mindedness is also the same thing as atonement and true perception), but purification is necessary first."

Now, we need to look at something a bit deeper. The main pivotal cornerstone of the ego's thought system is SIN. Sin can go one of two ways. If you take sin to be real, forgiveness is not justified, and so you become UNforgiving. Sin becomes a condemnation and attack, and you move into guilt.

But when you go the other way, if you take sin and recognize its unreality, untruth, and non-existence, THAT will put you into the state of forgiveness. And in effect, that means this recognition of "there is no sin" IS the atonement, and IS the basis for true perception or corrected perception. It is a forgiving way of seeing (Christ Vision).

This all "hinges" around sin. Don't forgive it and you move into guilt. Forgive it and you move into the recognition of innocence which is true forgiveness.

"From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away."

But let's take it even further.

There are two thought systems. One is the thought system of God which is Heaven and the Kingdom. Reality is run by this thought system because this is where God actually DOES His thinking, and all creative thought OCCURS there. Thats where the thought system IS.

Then, in contrast, the ego thought system, which opposes God's thought system, can be said to be LOCATED on this side of the idea of separation and sin. On this side, where sin is real, the entire contents of being on this side of the fence is unforgiving.

So what Jesus is asking us to do, really, is to take our mind out of the ENTIRE realm of unforgiveness, ie the entire ego thought system, and put it BACK into the Kingdom. Which means crossing over from the thought system of ego to the thought system of God.

What this means is that the Atonement and the acceptance of it, is an acceptance that God's system of thought is true and real, and it's a way of really regaining access to the Mind of God, to the Kingdom, and to your innocent holy self which resides on the OTHER side of the separation divide. Essentially, in another world.

So when we get into the state of forgiveness, in which there is nothing to forgive because sin is recognized as not existing, and thus no sin is perceived as true, it really means we're re-accessing heaven.

To accept atonement is the ONLY cure and the ONLY way to TRULY undo something. "Only atonement can be said to cure", meaning that only in the moment that you accept the truth about you that is IN HEAVEN, does your mind completely change and is cured and healed of its false beliefs.

Accepting atonement on any particular issue should entail you flipping over from the ego thought system to God's thought system. Going from sin and guilt, to innocence. Going from not accepting God's love, to accepting it.

There are actually some statements Jesus makes where he is saying that you do not REALLY change your mind, UNTIL you switch to the holy thought system. Which means getting out of the ego system ENTIRELY and putting your mind back into reality.

"To "change your mind" means to place it at the disposal of True authority. The miracle is thus a sign that the mind has elected to be guided by Christ in HIS service. The abundance of Christ is the natural result of choosing to follow him."

"the power of your simple change of mind: I loose the world from all I thought it was, And choose my own reality instead."

"The tiny change of mind by which the crucifixion is changed to Resurrection. And, being true, it is so simple that it cannot fail to be completely understood."

"Your hand becomes the giver of Christ's touch; your change of mind becomes the proof that who accepts God's gifts can never suffer anything."

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

Only choosing between TRUTH and ILLUSIONS, is your only choice, which is a choice BETWEEN thought systems, and therefore BETWEEN WORLDS. Either you will accept yourself as you are innocent in Heaven, or will accept yourself as sinful within the ego realm.

"Knowledge cannot dawn on a mind full of illusions, because truth and illusions are irreconcilable. Truth is whole, and CANNOT be known by PART of a mind."

While atonement and thus forgiveness and true perception might well be "illusions" within this world, outside the Kingdom, they are reflections of the Kingdom, and thus reflections of the truth about you IN the Kingdom. Accepting atonement is accepting that you are still as God created you, as you are in the Kingdom.

But Jesus clearly tells us that the FULL acceptance of Atonement SHOULD take you INTO HEAVEN. Whereby even true perception ends.

"Since perception rests on lack, those who perceive have not totally accepted the Atonement and given over themselves to truth. Perception IS a separated state, and the perceiver DOES need healing. Communion, not prayer, is the natural state of those who know. God and HIS miracles (you) are inseparable."

So when thinking of forgiveness, and doing forgiveness, or applying the course, we need to realize that if we DON'T get all the way to the atonement principle on some issue, we HAVE NOT really fully forgiven it. If we still believe that something happened or that sin was real, we are not IN a forgiving state of mind. In order to DO a forgiveness, successfully, essentially REQUIRES that you accept atonement - to accept the truth of your total ongoing innocence, and the complete recognition that there HAS NOT BEEN anything that needs forgiving.

While it seems there is something to forgive, and we think we're doing forgiveness, we actually are NOT doing forgiveness. What we're doing is preparing to enter a state of forgiveness. And that is purification work. But if we do that work, and we don't take it all the way to "nothing happened", "everyone is still innocent as God created us to be", "there is no sin", "sin is not real" etc... then we haven't really gone FAR enough in our change of mind, and are still really WITHIN the ego though system.

That means we've fallen short and the forgiveness is not complete, because we have not moved OVER to hooking our mind up with God, in service to Christ. Remember that mind in the service of Spirit/soul is its natural state, while when mind "goes rogue" and becomes its own tyrannical ruler, it is now in a separated state. To return to forgiveness and accept atonement is to actually put your mind back under the Authority of the Soul, which requires ACCEPTING THE INNOCENT SOUL AS YOUR TRUE SELF.

Only atonement can be said to cure, so we must be willing to go ALL THE WAY to the atonement truth and the acceptance of it, which opens you up to allow yourself to be loved by God, and to RECEIVE A MIRACLE, which you can then extend to others. Short of this, forgiveness is incomplete and atonement is still being avoided. And therefore it is not a complete cure. To truly forgive is to CURE, completely and totally and forever. Acceptance of your permanent innocence and worthiness is the only acceptable goal.

The ego's problem solving solution is to separate. It will tell you that the way to forgive something and free yourself from suffering at its expense, is to separate from it and/or attack it.

The way you'll separate from it is to deny it, try to believe it's not real, to see it as not happening, attach a label of illusion to it, affirm over and over how God didn't create it, label it as duality, and generally weaponise various parts of ACIM against it to "make it go away."

This is what the course calls "forgiveness to destroy". It demands that either a) the thing itself changes so that you're not affected, or b) you destroy its existence so that you're not affected. Both entail you not really changing yourself, while increasing separation - but disguised as "forgiveness."

The main problem is sin. Sin is a combination of two things: form and meaning. Meaning or interpretation is given to a form and associated with it, but then it seems like the form IS the meaning and you're dealing with ONE thing. One object that is evil, one act that is bad, one person body that is sinning, etc.

The combination of ego interpretation and form, makes it seem like your only solution is to get rid of the form. You have to throw it away in order to free yourself from the meaning. This immediately produces the spiritual bypass in which experience is denied, feelings are repressed, guilt is not looked at, beliefs are not questioned, the world is denied, bodies are denied, and the person tries to "escape" from the world of form.

The insight that HAS to happen for proper forgiveness to take place, is to recognize that "the problem" IS a combination of two things - form and a meaning you're giving it. You have to recognize that YOU are contributing something extra to the thing, you're adding something to it, you're giving it a meaning. And that means that there is an ASPECT of the thing that you can change your mind about.

This then leads to the realisation that if you were to think differently, believe differently, undo guilts, change your attitude, interpret in a lighter higher way, or generally alter YOUR MIND, it would change how you experience the thing. We're not talking here about doing this to make the form of the thing go away, but we're talking bout making the FALSE MEANING go away by REPLACING it with a higher meaning.

What this then does is it acknowledges the continued possible presence of the form without bypassing, without denying it's there, without trying to make it unreal, without attacking it with quotes, without ignoring the body, without numbing the feelings, without pretending you're not unhappy, and without denying the guilt.

Instead of being a "shove this thing into the pit of hell so that it's out of my way", it's more like "I'll change MY contribution to this so that I see it in a better way". This entails an honesty and a willingness to question your beliefs, to consider that your interpretation might be mistaken, to have a little willingness to admit to being wrong, and certainly a willingness to stop denying what you are experiencing. In fact you need to acknowledge the forms that are taking place EVEN MORE, before you can properly move into forgiveness.

For example if you are full of guilt but are in denial about it, you will project that guilt onto forms. And then you'll associate it with the forms. And then you'll think that the form + guilt is actually just "formguilt", like it's locked in as one thing. In order to move away from this delusion, you would have to be willing to stop denying that you feel guilty, stop denying that you believe you are guilty, and look at the guilt with the Holy Spirit and find a better to look at it so that you can overlook it and see your innocence.

As no time are we looking to write off, ignore, relegate, label, attack, dismiss, deny, pretend, or otherwise "make go away" anything physical or emotional or mental. We just want a different ANGLE on it. As soon as we start getting into "I want to make this go away", we're very likely binding meaning with form and are trying to get rid of it all at once. And that means we're going to move into a "reaction to sin", with a counter-measure of forgiveness to destroy. And then we're in a bypass.

When we use high-level lofty truths, the proper use of them is NOT to deny form or experience, or to create another separation or rift between heaven and earth. It's to use it to steer the mind towards truth WITHOUT negating or attacking or denying the illusory world. If there is any hint of "separate from it" in your forgiving, you're got some ego in there.

For example if you say "there is no world" and you're using that to try to write off the world and make it go away, that's a spiritual bypass and an attack. If you are saying it with the purpose of affirming your true identity and increasing the recognition of what the world IS, that's a proper use of it. There's a subtle difference there, but it's also huge.

If we say for example "I am not a body" the purpose isn't to destroy the body or make bodies go away. The purpose should be to affirm your identification with spirit and shift your identification away from the body. This isn't to be used as a statement with a hidden meaning of "bodies aren't real" or "bodies don't exist." Because the truth is that you DO believe very strongly that bodies exist. Your aim is to dis-identify from them not destroy them and not see them, at least not until much much later when you're ready for that.

We have to therefore always be careful to check whether how we're USING the course is using denial properly. If we've got some "make it go away" vibes in there, we're introducing some ego. If we're weaponising statements in order to "defend against", we're got some ego in there. If we're trying to say I am immortal spirit in an effort to get rid of the body and shut it out, that's a huge bypass.

Overall, the best way to avoid bypassing is to adopt an attitude that you are in this world, in this body, and you will remain in this world in this body, even when you are very close to awakening. An attitude that you will find peace even here in this world, and not initially attempt to escape the world in order to find it.

An attitude that you will repurpose and re-use the body and express the love of God through it to others here in this world while you have it. That you'll use the body for teaching and healing, rather than trying to not have a body at all.

That instead of trying to attack the world away, you'll find a way to forgive it and arrive at the forgiven world, seen here in a body with christ vision. An attitude that you will STAY AND HELP, rather than trying to "escape from hell", that you will be a healer and a teacher of God and bring light INTO this world. To be the light of the world!

As soon as the course is being used in an effort to escape from the world, you're going to go into a spiritual bypass. As soon as you're trying to write the world off, get rid of the body, demonise death, repress feelings, deny suffering, or make the whole of spacetime out to be some defective sinful thing that you want nothing to do with, you're going to be bypassing.

This bypass results in escaping into the intellect, using very lofty level 1 statements to try to "write off" the world and the body, using non-duality ideas to invalidate everything you experience, makes you sacrifice and control and limit everything you do including anything you enjoy, produces a cold dismissive attitude of rejection, develops a sense of total separation between heaven and earth, and generally increases the ego.

Jesus suggests to avoid this "top down" sort of approach where we just try to hammer high truths into our minds or force ourselves to believe things. We're meant instead to work from the bottom up, from where we are at now, without denial of experience or feelings or suffering, and work with whatever we're open to as the next step, to question our current beliefs and consider a better way to look at things. So that we can work our way up from the bottom, instead of pretending to sit on the mountain-top hurling down judgements.

"And as a man, I did not attempt to counteract error with knowledge, so much as to CORRECT error from the bottom up."

"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it."

"Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place, made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deception UNdone."

"When I said "I am come as a light into the world," I surely came to share this light with you."

"I am the light of the world. That is my only function. That is why I am here."

Miracle principle 11 says "A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

If you believe and perceive that your neighbor is not yourself, that they are a separate person, and you are not one, you will find yourself unwilling to give to them.

There is a very simple reason for this. If the two of you are separate, then logically when you give something to them, you are excluded from receiving it. What is theirs is not yours.

This leads to the quite sensible conclusion that, since your brother seems separate from you, you should NOT give to them, because if you do, you will stand to lose everything that you give.

It makes perfect sense because if the premise is that the two of you are separated, then it also makes sense to say that what belongs to you does not belong to them, and vice versa.

Believing that the two of you are separate, you will therefore find yourself "naturally" unwilling to give to others. You will not want to perform any miracles. You will not want to share yourself or give love.

Giving love across a divide, to a separate person, who is cut off from you, can only seem to entail a sense of loss. You believe quite logically that whatever you give you will lose, and giving will be a sacrifice.

This is rooted in the fundamental dynamic that giving and receiving are not one. If you and your brother are separated, then giving and receiving are also separated. Who you give to will appear to exclude your self, and so you will see yourself as not the receiver. If you do not stand to receive, then you will not want to give away, because it will seem detrimental to you.

In a sense, you could say that this appears to be selfish. However, the person is really just doing what seems logical based on the premise that they are separate. A person is unwilling to give because they want to keep what they give. They want to be included in the receipt of it. But because they see themselves as not included in the "list of receivers", they conclude that hoarding is a better strategy. This is entirely sensible and logical.

What this means then is that if you see yourself as separate from another, and you think you have something they lack, or you see yourself as a healer or giver, but do not see yourself as one with the other person, you will not want to give to them. You will be unwilling to perform a miracle of union on the grounds that giving so fully will deprive you of everything. And no-one is going to argue that this makes no sense.

If your brother is indeed separate from you, then by all means you should not give anything to him, because what he stands to gain you stand to lose. And so the ego will counsel that it's important to recognize the separation, make it real, and therefore stay within your private prison. And that it is in your best interests not to even try to give, or to perform a miracle of love, because this runs against your best interests.

So long as this separateness is maintained, you will of course maintain separate interests. What is in your own best interests is not the same as what is in the interests of another. If the two of you are not actually one, then there is no way for you to really receive or keep what you're giving. Only IF the two of you are one, can your interests be mutual, and therefore shared.

Only through shared interests, recognizing that you are one with the other person, they are a part of your self, and therefore it IS in your best interest to give to the part of you that you share with them, can you be naturally and logically willing to perform a miracle.

The ego will suggest this is impossible because it claims that you are currently separate. And if you are separate, there is no logical basis for saying that giving is going to help your situation. In fact giving will appear to deprive you, so long as you remain separate. And it's clue here is that if you give love, in an attempt to heal, the healing will have no effect on YOU, and therefore there is no way to bridge the gap anyway.

The interesting thing, however, is that regardless of how separated you are right now, when you TRY to give, you will find that the giving of love actually heals you along with it. You cannot heal without being healed. The love that you try to squeeze through to share with another is actually received by you as well. It includes you in it. And this inclusiveness of love actually unifies your minds and lifts your spirits.

If you can recognize therefore, however dimly, that your brother is yourself, and is part of you, and therefore you are not losing by giving, then you will become willing to give. Giving is sharing and inclusion, not loss If you believe that giving is going to deprive you, then you have to recognize you currently see yourself as separate. It's actually then a necessity to be willing to try to overcome this sense of separateness, in order for you to be okay with giving.

Indeed the course suggests that "miracles are taken first on faith", because you may be in a position where you do NOT really recognize your oneness with another, and you do not see them as part of yourself. They still seem separate to you. Which means that you're going to have to "take it on faith" that IF you give love and attempt to join, to heal the isolation that keeps you apart, then the love will do its job and make it clearer to you that you are in fact NOT separate, AND that you stand to gain from the giving.

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver AND the receiver."

Your willingness to try to share, join, be one with, see yourself as, with others, brings a healing love to you, to heal the gap in your own mind, and to lift you up in addition to lifting another up. You actually receive the love that you give. When you try to heal another, therefore, you should find that you yourself become healed as well. Both of you are recipients of love's benefit because it is inclusive.

So if you assess how much you see another as separate from you, you'll also find that this correlates to how much of an "unhealed healer" you are. If you regard yourself as having something others lack, you are seeing yourself as separate. And then you will feel that you can expend effort and therefore become taxed by trying to give healing.

This sense of limitation or that "healing is a sacrifice", is all part of the unhealed healer's thought process. To overcome this the healer has to be included in the healing and thus receive what is given. If I feel that I cannot perform miracles because it would be too much effort, would require me to give a lot, and I'm not willing to lose a lot in order to do so - because I'm selfish, then obviously I need to learn that by giving I will receive and the sense of separation and sacrifice is unfounded.

By learning to give to another AS yourself, you can actually take that all the way, and through such equality of giving and receving you will find God.

"Atonement is for all, because it is the way to UNDO the belief that ANYTHING is for you ALONE."

"It is impossible for a Child of God to love his neighbor EXCEPT as himself. That is why the healer's prayer is, "let me know this brother as I know myself."

"The unforgiving mind does not believe that giving and receiving are the same."

"The interval you think lies in between the giving and receiving of the gift SEEMS to be one in which you sacrifice, and suffer loss."

"Yet it is always God Who calls to you, and he who asks your help is but yourself. Who is the giver and the receiver then? Who asks the gift and who is given it?"

"Each miracle is an example of what justice can accomplish, when it is offered to everyone alike. It is received and GIVEN equally. It IS awareness that giving and receiving ARE the same."

""Father, I must return Your Love for me. For giving and receiving are the same, and You have given all Your Love to me. I must return It, for I want It mine in full awareness, blazing in my mind, and keeping it within Its kindly light, inviolate, beloved, with fear behind and only peace ahead. How still the way Your loving Son is led along to You!""

"Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN. To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember."

Read this carefully from ACIM.

"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial."

These are Jesus's words. They are correct. It does not say that impossible separation from God has been made possible. It does not say that we in fact DID separate from God. It says that something called "the separation" HAS happened. There is a major difference between THE separation, and the general impossible potential for actual separation.

There is a very popular myth in ACIM circles that we're supposed to just assert that "nothing happened." Jesus is saying this is NOT appropriate and is a misuse of denial. Did you ever notice that for example you actually are having SOME KIND of experience of a world, a world in which you have a body, you type posts on facebook, you respond to people and so on? Technically speaking if these "things" were UTTERLY impossible, in the strictest sense, there is no way that you would even be able to dream of them happening. You wouldn't be ABLE to sit there right now reading these words, whether they're real or not.

There is a view of many people that the separation - confused with separation in general - did NOT happen, and therefore the logical conclusion is that "there is no facebook". This is CLEARLY A DENIAL. It makes no sense at all. It does not explain how it is clearly obviously possible for there to be some kind of a facebook, some kind of a body, some kind of a physical life.

No-one who believes that "it never happened" has ever been able to satisfactorily explain HOW ITS POSSIBLE that we can be sitting here typing little text messages to each other. They don't have an explanation because they believe we're supposed to just sort of turn a blind eye to all this stuff, slap a label of "not real" on it, PRETEND ITS NOT THERE (denial), and carry on trying to assert its unreality.

Jesus is telling you that this is a MISUSE OF DENIAL. Because in fact, per his words, "THE SEPARATION HAS OCCURRED." This isn't a real separation, it is fictional. But a fictional separation HAS occurred. A belief in, a dream of, an illusion of, an impossible separation, HAS occurred in thought, in the mind. It HAS in fact produced a whole other "order of thought" in the mind.

"We have discussed the fall or Separation before, but its meaning must be clearly understood, without symbols. The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity. All beliefs are real to the believer."

Read it carefully. The separation is NOT symbolic. Jesus says it is an ORDER OF REALITY. And that while it "lasts" ie in time, it is PERFECTLY REAL. This is NOT something that most ACIM students are very happy about, do not want to admit to, and will run away from at high speed. It seems to fly in the face of what so many people are saying, that "it never happened". Well, if it could not have possibly happened in ANY WAY, you literally would not be reading these words right now. And you are. Whether its a dream or an hallucination it doesn't matter, you ARE reading.

In the separation we did in fact produce a second order of thought and gave it a sense of reality. "Whatever you accept into your mind becomes real to you." It doesn't mean it is ULTIMATELY real, or that it really has permanent existence. It is truly an illusion of a possibility. But Jesus is clear the mind is perfectly equipped to sleep and to dream. These are NATURAL CAPABILITIES.

In fact, God gave our minds free will. And part of that TOTAL FREEDOM, is that you can freely try to use your mind to deny its own freedom. Yes, you have that freedom. It doesn't mean that anything real or possible can necessarily come from it, and it hasn't, but you CAN TRY TO. And when you do try to, your mind DOES SEEM to go to sleep, entering a state in which it dreams. This is entirely WITHIN THE LAWS OF GOD.

"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."

This means God has given you the POTENTIAL, the freedom, to choose, per your own free will, whether to accept reality or not. You are CAPABLE of denying reality. This denial doesn't remove reality because denial is a pretense that you're doing something impossible. But while you are IN denial, your mind IS in a certain state. You ARE IN "the separation." This is why we DID produce a state of mind which Jesus refers to as "the separation". We DID have a mad idea, we DID fall asleep, we DID dream of spacetime, and we DID make bodies and facetime.

Denying any of this is not in line with the course. This isn't to say that these things we dream of are ultimately real, but they ARE real to the dreamer. They don't have permanence because they are denials of permanence, making them temporary, and reversible. But while they are HAPPENING, while the mind IS sleeping and dreaming, we ARE in fact CAUSING the mis-creation, the production, of states of mind, which entail a denial of reality.

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

In order to return TO ultimate reality, the denial has to be undone. But the denial is, itself, an actual state of mind. It's something you're holding in your thought. You are having a dream of being separate. "You are safe in God, dreaming of exile". It is not helpful to claim that you are NOT DREAMING. "you MUST change your mind and help others change theirs. It is pointless to refuse to tolerate change or changing because you believe that you can demonstrate by doing so that the Separation never occurred. The dreamer who doubts the reality of his dream while he is still dreaming it is not really healing the level-split."

"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."

"For you HAVE hurt yourself, and made your Self your enemy."

Jesus does not really ask that we "deny the dream is real" while STILL dreaming it. Because this is an false denial. The proper denial should END dreaming entirely. If you are still dreaming, then you are still giving reality to an order of thought.

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought"

This order of reality is being maintained by the mind and it HAS some reality while it is being maintained. That is why the world seems real. It is a kind of subjective reality but it's still a reality. Jesus asks us instead to ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THERE HAS BEEN A SUBJECTIVE SEPARATION - at least a state of denial and belief, a state of TRYING to oppose God - and that we must admit to this before we can heal it.

"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."

He doesn't say "just assert that it never happened." He doesn't say "just assert that separation is impossible." He says that you are supposed to ACCEPT THE ERROR TEMPORARILY, to acknowledge that your mind is in an unnatural state, so that you can change your mind into a more natural state. Eventually the unnatural state will diminish and be replaced by, or reveal, a more natural state. And by CHANGING YOUR MIND, which is always your freedom, you can revert it back to the service of spirit.

Remember that "The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial."

We HAVE chosen poorly, we HAVE used psychic mechanisms - mind power - thought and belief - to mis-create an illusory world. We did not create a NOTHING. We mis-created a distortion of reality. That HAS happened. But it can be undone. This far more accurately acknowledges your ACTUAL EXPERIENCE that you drive a car and eat food and go to the bathroom. There is SOME reality to this, some possibility to this, otherwise you literally could not even dream of it.

The dream is not nothing, it is a way of thinking that's out of alignment with God's will. That's why we NEED atonement. "Thus he becomes uncertain of his life, for what it is has been denied by him. It is for this denial that you need Atonement. Your denial made no change in what you are. But you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth."

"It is obvious, then, that when you are afraid you have placed yourself in a position where you NEED Atonement BECAUSE you have DONE something loveless because you WILLED without love. This is precisely the situation for which the Atonement was offered. The need for the remedy inspired its CREATION."

So Jesus is really saying that we did in fact enter a state of mind in which the mind does in fact experience strange illusory worlds as if they are real. A state of insanity. And we have given reality to this and it HAS SOME reality. It is relatively real, but not absolutely real. And because of this entering into a freely-chosen state of denial, a legitimate mind-state that is POSSIBLE because you have the freedom to try to deny your freedom - we DID in fact experience a "separate from God" - the fall of man.

And now we find ourselves in a mental state that NEEDS correction. There is a legitimate NEED for atonement, and we NEED to change our mind by free will in order to return to the acceptance of God's reality as the only reality that truly makes sense. A movement out of a state of sleep and denial, into a state of awakening and acceptance.

That's why the Holy Spirit was created, to guide us out of a state that we are PERFECTLY FREE TO ENTER, but which does not resonate well with our true nature, and so brings experiences of suffering. The atonement legitimately offers correction for this and restores the mind to a more natural functioning. It's not enough to just say "oh it never happened." You HAVE used your freedom and your power to choose something unnatural, and you DO need to choose again.

What is a miracle? Why would anyone want to heal the sick?

Miracles arise from a state of mind which is truly forgiving, which doesn't mean a mind which "needs to forgive" but a mind which recognizes there is nothing to forgive. Such a mind recognizes that God's truth is true, that illusions are illusions, and is not deceived by appearances of form.

It is only possible to perform a miracle if you are able to get your mind out of the ego's thought system and into the Holy Spirit's thought system. The miracle itself MAY shift perception if the person needs forgiveness still, but the shifting of the perception is not the miracle itself as such. The shifting of perception to Holy Spirit's thought system is what is REQUIRED IN ORDER TO become able to perform a miracle.

If you are shifting perception, i.e. correcting errors in your perception, then you are still in a process of PURIFICATION. As Jesus says in the miracle principles, miracles are everyone's right but "purification is necessary first". What is this purification? It is the PROCESS of what you call forgiveness, which is the weeding out of what is false from what is true, otherwise known as the correction of perception, or shifts in perception. That is required FIRST before you can become miracle minded. When a person first begins the Course and does their first half-baked error-prone forgiveness process, experiencing a slight shift in perception, is that a miracle? No.

Jesus as an example, Jesus was in a very advanced state of mind when he performed miracles. He did not perform these miracles IN ORDER TO shift his perception and to wake up. He had already purified His mind and His mind was now in alignment with Holy Spirit, clear about what is true and false, and not deceived by the illusions of sickness and death. He had already shifted his perception to correct true vision BEFORE becoming able to perform miracles. Accessing the mind of Holy Spirit facilitates the miracle, because the Holy Spirit is the mechanism of miracles.

He was already there. He performed miracles BECAUSE he had shifted his perception and woken up. As the principles say, miracles acknowledge the Christ in you. You can't truly acknowledge Christ when you are still sleeping and in need of forgiveness, and having a "shift in perception" as a stepping stone along that journey of purification is not going to necessarily be enough to bring about a miracle. It can bring about a correction, or an adjustment of perception, and a partial awakening, but this is in PREPARATION for being miraculous. If this were not the case, new students to the Course would be raising the dead on day 1.

Jesus performed miracles to heal the sick and raise the dead, among other things (multiplying food, walking on water and so on), in spite of the fact that He knew that the world was not real. He was very clear that the body is not real, that sickness is an illusion, and that God's truth was the only truth he depended on. He was not deceived by forms and He knew the miracle principle that there is no order of difficulty in miracles - because miracles recognize that all illusions are equally unreal. He was not deceived by the ego's illusions that one thing is harder than another.

It was BECAUSE Jesus knew illusions were just illusions, that He was miraculous. Being miraculous requires that you are clear about what is true and false - that God's truth is true and the ego's truth (illusions) are not reality. It is that certainty and clarity and sanity which allows the miracle to happen at all. The miracle overlooks form completely (which is complete forgiveness). It denies the illusion any power to prevent healing, and thereby is capable of defying all rules and laws that the illusion would exhibit, such as the laws of physics, biology, chemistry etc.

Jesus's ability to overlook form and to recognize the truth clearly, allowed Him to be miraculous. When He performed a miracle, He was not necessarily in need of having a "shift of perception". If there are only so many shifts in perception that you can have before you are fully awake, you would run out of miracles! And yet miracles are natural, they are supposed to be happening ALL THE TIME, otherwise something has gone wrong. They happen all the time when there are no illusions in the way to block them, rather than the idea that they only happen as removals of those blocks.

Yes they might remove blocks to awareness, but they come from a place of love, from a place of NO BLOCKAGE, where love is unlimited and miracles are completely normal and natural all the time. Jesus would've run out of blocks to awareness a long time before being able to perform the countless miracles that He did, if miracles were only shifts in perception. His perception had already shifted TO the miracle minded right mind of the Holy Spirit, and because of that He had UNLIMITED miracles at His disposal.

You might find it odd then that Jesus performed powerful miracles regularly, in spite of the fact that in order to perform miracles you have to recognize the world is an illusion. Why would He attempt to heal sick bodies if He knew sickness was an illusion? Why would He bother raising the dead - literally bodies which were dead - if He knew that the world was just an illusion? Why bother to help illusory bodies in a dream?

Some people use this as an explanation for why healing the sick is not important or something Jesus would do. Yet Jesus did it. What they don't understand is the paradoxical nature of this. Similarly there is a paradox whereby when you are forgiving, truly forgiving, there is nothing to forgive. You fore-give in order to prevent perceptual errors, so that there is nothing to forgive. Forgiveness is a constant state of mind - a forgiving attitude - not a process of purification. It's the permanent state of Holy Spirit's mind.

So the ego would logically deduce that there is no point raising the dead or healing the sick because they are illusions, and Jesus was very very aware that they were illusions. BUT the truth defies the ego's logic. The truth bypasses it. In the truth, miracles are extensions of love which are a service to OTHERS.

Miracles adjust spacetime in order to facilitate a greater closeness to God and an experience of love, as well as being teaching devices that help others to awaken. They correct illusions, not just illusions in the mind but illusions AS the world. Bodies are illusions just as much as thoughts and perceptions, since the body is IN the mind. They are just as correctable as faulty vision. Why would you correct only illusions in the mind and not recognize the body and the world are also in the mind, thus avoiding their correction? This is because most body-identified humans do not realize that the entire body and world is also an illusion and is also IN THEIR MIND.

When you become miracle minded, it is because you recognize that illusions are just illusions. It is that recognition that ALLOWS you to perform miracles, because you can't wield God's power if you don't believe God is real. To believe God is real is to recognize that illusions/world/body/sickness/death is NOT real. That's HOW you make these things disappear, through your not fueling them and not believing in them.

So when you become miraculous, it is in the recognition that miracles are not NEEDED as such, because nothing has gone wrong, everyone is innocent, everyone is immortal and eternal, and there isn't even any real problems to fix. AND YET, the miracle is still present. Jesus still performed them in spite of His advanced awareness of the unreality of the world, and BECAUSE of that awareness. He didn't just sit on his laurels like, oh, I know there's nothing to forgive and no real problems so I'm just going to sit back and let everyone suffer. That would've been cold and intellectual.

Instead Jesus went out to the people with an open heart and mind, knowing sickness and death had no power over Him, and demonstrating left right and center - teaching - that these things were not real by example. He was helping his brothers. He was healing people because He LOVED them and because He had a HEART engaged with the truth, not just an intellectual understanding. And He knew that even though there was no "real" need for healing or miracles because bodies were not real, OTHER PEOPLE believed they were real and were in a state of suffering. He was being loving by alleviating their suffering and simultaneously teaching them through demonstration that the body was not real. He didn't just take away people's suffering, He showed also how THEY could take it away by masterfully showing how it was done.

So to the ego, miracles make no sense. It makes no sense to heal the sick if the body is not real. It makes no sense to raise the dead if people aren't really bodies and they're supposed to be making the body disappear. But all things can be used as teaching devices and miracles are a maximal service to others. It says so in the miracle principles. Jesus could've raised a million people from the dead if he wanted to, but also He recognized that people needed to learn of this capability themselves as well and so was using miracles to teach (demonstrate) what the truth is.

This is why miracles are not just shifts in perception. They are not just corrections in your own mind, which is a process of purification. They are not just forgiveness, which is a process of progressively undoing belief in illusions. And they are not ineffective or unpowerful. And they are not reserved only for the "private" waking up of individuals.

As Jesus teaches, Love must be extended in order to be REAL. It is the nature of God's Kingdom and reality that it has no PRESENCE unless there is extension happening. It has to radiate and be shared. Sharing is the key element, and miracles share love with your brother. They unify your mind with theirs and correct BOTH of you, if there is any correction needed. Jesus didn't need that correction because He was already done with it. But He still corrected others and was TRULY HELPFUL.

The Course states (in its less edited-out versions) that miracles ENTAIL a shift in perception from illusions to truth. This means that you must shift your perception INTO a state of mind which recognizes truth in order to perform a miracle. It does not mean that the miracle shifts your perception, or that the purpose of the miracle is to shift your perception. You HAVE TO shift your perception into Holy Spirit's perception so that you become miracle minded in order to become miraculous.

He asks us now to continue His mission and help the brotherhood to awaken, by sharing and extending and expressing love to everyone, to be "active workers" in His plan, and to perform miracles on a daily basis. He even says in the urtext (later edited out) that we should be asking Him every day what miracles to perform. Note also that He instructed His disciples in the ways of miracles and told them to go out and heal the sick and raise the dead, which they did. Why would he tell them to do that and why did they do that and why were they able to do that? Because it was LOVING and because that love made it possible. So why wouldn't they?!

Miracles also affirm the truth in you, since you share in them, and so by performing them for others it reinforces for you the truth of God's reality, giving you additional faith and conviction and clarity that the body is not real and can be overcome. Death can be overcome. A Course in Miracles is not "armchair spirituality" where you just contemplate it behind closed doors and discuss it on Facebook. We are to be powerful workers of miracles helping Jesus in His plan of atonement for the great awakening - the great crusade.

Jesus performed miracles. I will perform miracles.

To accept the Atonement is to accept that God's truth is the truth. It also means accepting that nothing else is true.

Jesus demonstrates this when He speaks of His own state of Atonement:

"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you."

We would be perfectly willing to accept God's truth, IF we did not believe that something else is true. We have been listening to another "voice", the voice of the ego (untruth) rather than the Voice of God (truth).

If we believe the ego has some truth to it, it means we agree with it. We will defend it, protect it, want to keep it, and will shield it from God. We'll use it as justification for "why" we believe we cannot accept God's truth as true. This literally makes us perceive that God's truth is NOT true.

This is the meaning of "He who would not forgive MUST judge to justify his failure to forgive." We are busy justifying WHY we cannot accept atonement/forgiveness, in order to keep and protect the ego that we believe is sacred and true and worthy of us.

No-one in their right mind would want to accept something they believe is not the truth. No-one would want anything to do with something they regard as "false". The ego attributes all qualities of falseness to God, including perceiving Him as evil, as a threat, as an attacker, and as willing that we be dead. That's quite a lot of false belief to "reverse" - thought reversal - if we are to become genuinely WILLING to want to be with God.

An unwillingness to accept God's truth comes solely from a willingness to accept the ego's truth. Another way the Course puts this is in terms of faith. We have "faith" in the ego, we have come to TRUST it, we think it is helping us, protecting us, defending us, acting in our best interests, and is "working" for us. We think we WANT what it is offering. This is because we do not RECOGNIZE the ways that the ego is deceptive, a lie, a form of attack, self defeating, suicidal and fixated on death.

When we believe the ego is the truth, we literally become "blind" to the truth, and incapable of discerning that God's truth is true. We see falseness IN it, because there is falseness in our perception. We see reflected in God our own "evil" content, thinking it is his.

For example, whenever we misperceive the truth through the ego, we see it as attacking us, we put up a defense, which implements blocks to life, which produces sickness and death. This production of sickness is an attempt to "save our life" by protecting us from life. This is obviously insane. The ego's efforts to "help" us is actually an attempt to deceive us, to trick us into hurting ourselves "in the name of" helping ourselves. In other words, the ego's advice produces the opposite result from what it promises.

While we believe the ego has truth to it, we will not be WILLING to accept the atonement. In fact we'll not be able. We can't ACCEPT it, to really deeply abide in it and feel it and welcome it and want it and admit its truth and ALLOW IT to love us. That's because we have allegiance to the ego and "want" what it is offering instead. AND YOU CAN'T HAVE BOTH! You have to choose. This valuing of the ego's offering produces DOUBT. Being in two minds, or even entirely in ego, will make us very uncertain about whether the truth even IS true, and whether we even DO want it.

Failure to discern what IS true, and what IS false, forms the basis of this confusion, which makes us unwilling and unable to accept it. No-one wants to accept what they think will destroy them. It's just that, believing the ego we will believe GOD is the one who is going to destroy us, and the ego is our savior. It simply "makes sense" to us not to accept God's version of events, because His truth does not "make sense" when the ego perceives it.

If we believe there is really death, really punishment, really fear, really victimhood, really guilt, really sin, really separation, really sickness, really suffering, we will not be WILLING to accept the atonement. The atonement says the exact opposite is true. This means we WILL have to become willing to RECOGNIZE all of these illusions for what they ARE, how we are using them to support the ego, and how they are not TRUE or real.

So we are going to have to systematically let go of all belief that there is such a thing as real sickness, real death, real sin, real guilt, real fear, real suffering, real victims, etc. To do this, we will have to be a LITTLE WILLING to believe that the ego beliefs do NOT contain truth, they in fact are FALSE, and something else is MORE TRUE. If any of this ego stuff - illusions appearing to be real - is within our perception, i.e. within our attitude or beliefs about ourselves, it has to GO, BEFORE we will genuinely, deeply, feel WILLING and READY to accept the truth of God.

Each time that we are attempting to perform a "forgiveness", i.e. we're upset and suffering in some way and we want to get back to the truth, to apply the Course principles and heal ourselves, it's going to have to entail the UNDOING OF FALSE BELIEFS. i.e. the undoing of listening to the ego's interpretation, stopping listening to its voice, stopping believing its bullshit is true, discerning HOW and WHY it is not true, and RECOGNIZING the illusions - i.e. the lies - that you are perpetuating. This can take tremendous radical HONESTY. Honesty admits the truth - allows the truth to enter.

Applying forgiveness SHOULD also therefore mean, that you start with wherever you're at, with whatever you are experiencing now, and you need to transition from there ALL THE WAY TO THE ATONEMENT. If you do not go all the way, if you stop short and keep some beliefs, you will not "complete" the forgiveness because you're not getting to the point where you FULLY ACCEPT the truth and FULLY LET GO of the ego.

While over time you generally will move gradually towards truth, on the whole, you actually can take yourself ALL the way to the atonement at any time, on a SPECIFIC topic. For example if you have issues with a parent or a coworker or something, some belief that is getting triggered... to FULLY forgive that issue, or at least a big chunk of it, you need to look at the beliefs involved and undo them, ALL the way until you get to "sin did not happen in reality, there is no sin at all, therefore I'm still innocent".

Taking back a projection, for example, is only a FIRST STEP in forgiving. It only means then that you recognize some measure of responsibility, that it's actually "about you" and not "about" another person. That's a vital step, and taking of responsibility is essential to any application of forgiveness. But that's not the end of the story.

The problem is, even if you can recognize it's not about other people, you may still believe you are afraid, you are guilty, and you are sinful. These beliefs have to be uncovered as well. Part of the problem is, there are various stages of separation: sin > guilt > fear > punishment > death and each stage entails a shitload of DENIAL. That denial makes content in your mind UNCONSCIOUS. That means you don't even REALIZE that you have this stuff in your mind somewhere, buried, behind a wall of illusions.

So if all you do is take back a projection and then sit with it and don't really realize how you have unconscious guilt lurking in your mind, which your state of victimhood was made to cover up and distract away from, you may not even get to the stage of becoming AWARE of that guilt, to undo it. And even if you get to where you are undoing the guilt, you may not even be aware - there is such a things as UNCONSCIOUS SIN. That has to be undone as well. Only when all of these layers of DENIAL in the mind are undone, ONLY then will you find yourself actually WILLING and able and ready to wholeheartedly ACCEPT that the Atonement is true. That is the point where forgiveness is COMPLETE.

You can do this on any given topic. It doesn't have to just be the overall whole issue of separation. Every time you forgive all the way to the atonement you receive a miracle, and then can offer it. Every time you make a genuine effort to becoming WILLING to accept the truth - your innocence, that literally nothing happened in reality - your mind gets healed one more giant leap towards God. As much as you can accept at the time. This will have PROFOUND healing effects on your perception.

There was a woman that I couldn't stand, a social worker, who had poor sense of boundaries and was always overstepping her role. I had fear about seeing her, anger about her behavior and various other upsets. I thought she was the problem. Later I became willing to see how I was actually seeing some unhealed stuff about ANOTHER person, in this person. I applied forgiveness through various steps and went all the way to atonement on this issue about that person. This was a strong healing.

Later, when I saw this woman again, my entire perception of her was so different. She seemed like a completely different person, as though I'd never seen her before. I had no reaction to her and saw no "sin" in her. She didn't seem to bother me and I knew that I'd been accusing her of something that I thought someone else was guilty of, but which *I* was guilty of. The interesting thing is, when you lift off of other people your own sin, it doesn't necessarily make that person disappear. Instead, you see them more clearly for what is there, and what is theirs. It's interesting then how their OWN call for love suddenly becomes obvious, distinct from anything going on in yourself.

Anyway. I have many other examples where when I've gone all the way to really thoroughly undoing false beliefs and accepting God's truth, it's healed my mind in a major way and really cleared up my perception. It has allowed me to see "truth" where once I saw a distortion. Or rather, to see correctly and accurately where I once only saw what I wanted to see.

If you have been forgiving in some way but not going ALL the way to atonement, I recommend giving it a try. Even if it's on just one small topic. Forgiveness is only complete when you recognize there literally has not been a "real sin" in reality, that whatever it was only took place in a dream, and therefore has had no real effects.

Atonement DOES cure everything. There was an accident that happened years ago where I hurt someone. It produced tremendous guilt. A lot of things happened because of it including a major depression, ostracision from society and various other nightmares. I healed a lot of it over the years and rationalized in various ways why it was ok or not ok or whatever. But I could never QUITE really let go of it. That is, until I went to the atonement with it.

Going to the atonement on this, I FINALLY got to the point of realizing that what I thought happened DID NOT HAPPEN in reality. It only happened as part of a dream. All of my other healing efforts had been to somehow justify "what happened" or to explain "why" it was ok. That never healed me fully. I had to undo the belief it happened AT ALL. When I finally could accept and SEE and RECOGNIZE that it is TRUE, and makes sense, that I REALLY DID NOT DO ANYTHING, and nothing real can be threatened, I could actually willingly ACCEPT that God's truth is true. I could ACCEPT how God sees me. I could ACCEPT that I must still be innocent. And then there were tears of joy at FINALLY being able to LET GO of this "sin" and RECEIVE GOD's LOVE!

Only atonement can be said to cure. Miracles express from the atonement.

"God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death and see the life beyond."

You can say that death is bad, and everything should be moved towards life. That includes healing the body and mind. There should be resurrection happening, a reversal of aging, an undoing of the effects of space and time. A return to life from death.

But this can also be mixed in with an active avoidance of death, a fear of it happening, and a wish to stop a suffering that seems real. If a person's body is real, and it is sick, you'll be motivated to "perform miracles" to heal and rescue them from death. You just want it to all go away.

This attitude of death avoidance can seem like it is in support of miracles, and even can compel and entail attempts at healing. But it's still the behaviour of an unhealed healer - a mixture of trying to resurrect the dead while still believing death is real. If bodies are real, then fixing them becomes a priority.

I went through this whole phase over the course of many years, presented with an endless supply of pictures of my wife being sick and disabled. It was practically an embarrassment to a budding ACIM miracle-worker, the amount of assistive devices we had to use - lifts and wheelchairs and special beds and medicines.

Here I was, trying to stave off death at all costs, keep the body going, undo the sickness, reverse the symptoms, resurrect the dying and make it all better. But this too was driven by a belief that my wife was a body, constantly mixing her spirit and mind with the physical form, where references to "her" always included the body.

I resisted the sickness and the death. I didn't want it to happen. I wanted to keep the body-person around for as long as possible, and couldn't even conceive of any other way of living. Keeping her ticking over was a constant struggle and a daily effort, thwarting wrong diagnoses and fending off stupid medical staff. Trying to keep the death-mongers at bay.

But eventually it got to a point where it was all exhausted, and it occurred to me that I really should just let her die. And that seemed totally against everything I believed. Not that it was up to me anyway, but I had to stop fighting it. I realised I should stop trying to keep her here, and stop trying to prevent all hell breaking loose. She didn't want to really be here any more and we were both quite done with the daily drudgery of bodily upkeep.

It was within a week of that surrendering that she died. Well, I should say, she went to heaven. Her body for sure died, and she for sure did not. Which presented its own confusing challenges to get my head around. But a few things became super clear to me.

My entire attitude about death being "a really bad thing" was totally bullshit. It was fuelled by a belief that the body was the person and must be kept alive. My fear of it and avoidance of it just attracted it. My belief in the sickness just fuelled it. But all of a sudden she was in a state of extreme freedom and happiness, relieved and grateful, totally stunned yet overjoyed.

All the suffering simply switched off. All the daily grind came to an end. All the resistance to it happening was blown out of the water. And it seemed nothing but wonderful for her. I was really thrilled for her to be free at last, which she exclaimed to me "I'm free!" and "I'm happy".

So death really wasn't that bad, after all. In fact, it appeared like a kind of liberation and mercy, given how much she'd suffered for years. I wouldn't wish her for a second to return to that body, and her joy just made me realise more how cruel the world was in not allowing her to leave sooner. The whole idea of keeping someone in a body for as long as possible was shown to be utter bullshit. A multi-lifetime soul doesn't give a shit about it.

It taught me many things all at once. The bullshit of my anti-death pro-miracle deception. My demonising of death and making it out to be a terrible thing. My resistance to the fact that everything in the world dies. It all just popped the bubble. I stopped fighting against it, and that was liberating in its own right. If you try to stop it happening, you make it happen more. But if you stop resisting it, life can take over.

It's another one of those kind of paradoxes. If you make death out to be a bad thing you will choose it. If you don't make it out to be a bad thing, people will think you're anti-miraculous and a death worshipper. But giving it any reality, importance, meaning or value, even if its negative meanings, is just more ego. Death is supposed to be nothing, nothing whatsoever. Meaningless. It's not supposed to be the opposite end of some spiritual warfare between good and evil.

I still recognize and fully believe that death in any form is not supposed to happen. It is not God's nature. Nothing real ever dies. And pretty much everything in the world does. But we also can use the mind to reverse the world's laws and perform miracles, which does still include raising the dead and healing the sick, even to the extent of bodies recovering. In fact Jesus would like for us to demonstrate bodies so healthy and lovely and filled with life that they become symbols of immortality in the dream.

Still, you're not going to get there by opposing death. And when you decide to stop opposing death, that doesn't mean you condone it. It just means you stop fueling it and stop believing in it. Avoiding it just keeps it around. And believing in it while trying not to resist it just condones it. You have to stop believing in it entirely if you want to raise the dead, and believe only in life.

I have perhaps become more truly miracle-minded now that I am no longer fighting against sickness and death. I've stopped making them my enemies. I've stopped resisting them. Well, at least to some extent. My attitude is kind of, "let it all just die", but that too could sound like some murderous idea. The world is hell-bent on dying anyway, so fighting that is bullshit. But at the same time, in that same attitude of letting it go, we can also step into a power that's able to reverse those laws and undo death.

In effect, you bring an end to death by not making it out to be an ending. You withdraw your belief in it being some terrible tragic thing that everyone must avoid at all costs. So shit dies, so what. Fuck it. Who cares. Souls don't care. They just move on and have more lifetimes with fresh healthy new bodies. And being out of the body is fantastic in comparison to coming into one.

This is not in any way to glorify death or sickness, or to suggest to let people keep suffering and not be helpful. But make it real and you die alone with it. Only the living can raise the dead. We are still called to be miracle workers, to raise the dead and heal the sick where possible. To be truly helpful to everyone, to choose not to die ourselves, and to be an example of resurrection. Even to the extent of having our bodies become incapable of death.

But we don't get there by first believing in death and then trying to forgive or undo it. We're the ones that make death have power over us by believing in it. And having made it out to be a power that we can't prevent, which is a projection and disowning of our own power, all we do is end up fighting with ourselves in turmoil. I'm not interested in trying to come off as having some kind of saviour complex, wanting to heal and save everyone from dying.

Most people are going to snuff it in this lifetime because they'r not ready to go all the way. I spent decades trying to heal my wife and reverse her amputations and paralysis and heart disease and brain damage, but bullshit to that because, as it turns out, that was not the plan anyway. The plan was to use the opportunity to learn that making sickness and death real and then resisting it is not the way to be miraculous. To use the sickness as a way to learn to stop believing in it. The plan was never to radically zap her body into a state of perfection. Not in this life.

I totally failed to raise the dead, and it was a great lesson. It almost couldn't have gone any better. In the big picture, this is what I was ready to learn, not that I was some hero that could just zap away death with miracles all over the place. That heroic rescuer bullshit had to die as well. You're far better off letting shit go sometimes. Just as Jesus kept saying to me, "let her."

So some people are not meant to be resurrected in this life. The bigger plan might not call for it and they might not be willing. The Holy Spirit knows what's best and what's possible or appropriate. Some people don't want healing. Some are not ready for an "undiluted miracle." Some want to die too much and aren't ready to forgive themselves. Some are there to play a role for a while and then leave, perhaps to rejoin at a later encounter and carry on. It doesn't all have to happen in one lifetime, and most of the time doesn't.

So I have a much looser attitude now. I recognise the world is just full of disappointment and death so I get much less attached to the bullshit of temptation. I am no longer so mistaken to get all wound up if someone is sick. I'm not feeling like trying to fix and save and stop it happening out of some inability to let it be. Jesus was forever telling me "it's fine" even as my wife's leg was getting chopped off, even as she had a stroke, even as she was in the ICU twice and on her death bed. "It's fine" he said, because ultimately it doesn't matter whatsoever. Nothing real can be threatened. No-one ever dies. Just the body.

This has shown me that from the soul's perspective this world is just here for us to use temporarily. To repurpose. We go through bodies like water. We take on roles and challenges, lessons to learn and people to meet, and we move on. Probably across countless lifetimes. None of the physical shit really matters. It's not important at all. If people are to come and go and die off and leave, so what, you'll see them again. They were never a body in the first place, and the body is worthless anyway. This whole world will be thrown down the toilet and flushed away eventually "as the world spins into the nothingness from which it came."

So yeah. Be miraculous and overcome death by not believing in death and not resisting it. Gotta not resist it if you want there to be any freedom there. If you want to replace it with life you can't be dimming your light with death-believing thoughts of resistances rooted in a fear of loss. This is why we let the dead (in mind/heart) bury the dead (in body). It doesn't matter. Graveyards aren't even real. All of us are spiritual immortal beings who will live forever, and we will never ever be separate or alone.

When we're ready to surmount death and stop dying entirely, we'll resurrect the body and make it disappear. The body then becomes incapable of being sick or dying, so it can only leave by vanishing. The mind overlooks the illusion of death and recognises it as nothing, and away it goes. Then the body is no more, and never was, and you will never again go through death, or birth for that matter. I'm no longer an anti-death spokesperson. Death doesn't exist.

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

"We call it death, but it is liberty. It does not come in forms that seem to be thrust down in pain upon unwilling flesh, but as a gentle welcome to release. If there has been true healing, this can be the form in which death comes when it is time to rest a while from labor gladly done and gladly ended. Now we go in peace to freer air and gentler climate, where it is not hard to see the gifts we gave were saved for us. For Christ is clearer now; His vision more sustained in us; His Voice, the Word of God, more certainly our own."

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.

"The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Show THIS unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you. Here is the proof that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind. That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Only the mind and body need atonement."

"We said before that the purpose of the Resurrection was to "demonstrate that no amount of misperception has any influence at all on a Son of God." This demonstration EXONERATES those who misperceive, by establishing beyond doubt that they have NOT hurt anyone."

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

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you.Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies.Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body's condition. Yet the teacher of God does not make this decision alone. To do that would be to give the body another purpose from the one that keeps it holy.God's Voice will tell him when he has fulfilled his role, just as It tells him what his function is.He does not suffer either in going or remaining. Sickness is now impossible to him.

Oneness and sickness cannot coexist."

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

"Now is the body healed because the source of sickness has been opened to relief." ... "Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible.

Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgement or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick. Give instant remedy, should this occur, by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer."

The body is a symbol. It teaches either healing and life, or it teaches attack and death.

The body symbolizes and represents the attitude of the MIND that is using the body. The body is a SYMBOLIC MESSAGE.

When the mind is loving, its message is love and healing. The body TAKES ON THE FORM of this, by showing up as healed, whole, unharmed, free from attack or pain, devoid of all suffering, functioning perfectly, flawless and immaculate, free from all forms of sickness.

When the mind is not loving, its message is attack and death. The body TAKES ON THE FORM of this, by showing up as damaged, broken, attacked, defective, malfunctioning, hurt, diseased, infectious, half-dead and eventually fully dead.

Whatever comes THROUGH your body FROM your mind, CHANGES your body's form. Your body, as a FORM, takes on a form that represents the message. Healed minds automatically result in bodies showing up in a healed configuration. Attacking minds see themselves as vulnerable victims, project this onto the body, attack the body, and thus make it sick.

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body."

It's not possible to USE the body for a purpose beyond the body, WITHOUT having an attitude about the body ITSELF. If your attitude toward your brother is love, through the body, the body ITSELF will be loved. And being loved it will be healed. If your attitude toward your brother is attack, through the body, the body ITSELF will also be attacked, and it will show up as sick and damaged.

Bodies do not choose their own condition. The condition of the body is NOT determined OR caused by ANTHING in the world.

"The mind makes this decision as it makes ALL decisions responsible for the condition of the body."

"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."

Nothing in the world can injure you. Nothing in the world can CAUSE death. Nothing in the world can make the body sick. Nothing in the world has ANY POWER OVER your body because YOUR MIND has total power OVER your body.

"That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind proves the mind must be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this."

Your mind's decision and attitude is the SOLE CAUSAL POWER determining the health or sickness of your body. When your mind is loving, your body becomes lovely and healed. When your mind is attacking, your body becomes sick and dead. This is LAW. There are no exceptions.

The reason it is law is simple. It's all based on cause and effect. When you are CAUSAL, you simply do not regard yourself as "effect", so you don't PERCEIVE yourself BEING affected or "at the effect of" anything else. Not seeing yourself as a weak vulnerable attacked victim, you simply do not radiate this through the body, and the body is HEALED by your forgiving attitude.

"Now is the body healed by miracles."

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

"Sickness is a defense against the truth."

When your mind sees itself as EFFECT, not cause, its entire attitude and approach to itself and others and to the body changes. It now sees itself as CAUSED from the OUTSIDE IN. This is experienced as being attacked, as being WILLED AGAINST, and as being CHANGED against your will by others.

This automatically sets up a situation where you now perceive that all your brothers are SINNING against you, CAUSING you, HURTING you, affecting you against your will. This is really your own mind at war with itself and split in its ambitions. But you PROJECT SIN onto your brother BY HURTING YOUR BODY, so that you have a way to SHOW HIM that he has affected you.

What happens here is simple. Your mind, manufactures attack, projects it onto your body, MAKES YOUR BODY SICK, by believing it is AT THE EFFECT of your brother, who is simultaneously ACCUSED BY THE BODY, of making you AFFECTED. Seeing cause in him rather than in yourself, your mind INVENTS EFFECTS that come FROM his causality, and holds them in place, as judgement upon your brother, so that HE IS RESPONSIBLE for your health.

You either can believe and experience that YOU are responsible for the body's health, OR that OTHERS are responsible for YOUR body's health. These are your only options. If you choose to believe your body is NOT caused by you, you MUST believe it is caused by someone ELSE. And THEY now stand ACCUSED, responsible, sinful, for causing your body's condition "against your will." And in this belief your body WILL be sick because YOU are attacking.

Sickness in the body now becomes PROOF OF SIN. It forms what Jesus calls "a picture of crucifixion." You HOLD this picture in front of your brother's physical eyes so that he deliberately SEES IT, SO THAT he stands accused. By the mere fact that your body HAS a physical malfunction, damaged, harm, disease etc, IT IS ACCUSING HIM.

It does not matter what you THINK your mental state is. It does not matter how much you claim to be at peace. It does not matter how much you think you have forgiven him. The ONLY WAY your body BECOMES sick, the only way it STAYS sick, and the only way its sickness is NOT OVERRIDDEN by another cause, is by YOUR MIND NOT BEING HEALED.

This is why "damaged bodies REMAIN ACCUSERS."

Doesn't matter who you are or how advanced you think you are in the course. IF the physical body still shows up as damaged, somewhree in your MIND there is an UNFORGIVENESS. And there is STILL A DEFENSE against the truth. Because sickness is ALWAYS held in place by DEFENSES against God and therefore against love. Loving minds do not have sick bodies.

"If they loved themselves they would heal themselves."

"To witness sin and yet forgive it is a paradox which reason cannot see. For it maintains what has been done to you DESERVES no pardon. And, by GIVING it, you grant your brother mercy, but ***retain the proof he is not REALLY innocent.*** ***The sick remain accusers.*** They cannot forgive their brothers AND themselves as well. For no-one in whom true forgiveness reigns CAN suffer. He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes. And thus he MUST have overlooked it, and removed it from his own. Forgiveness CANNOT be for one, and not the other. Who forgives IS healed. And in his healing lies the PROOF that he has truly pardoned, and retains no trace of condemnation that he still would hold against himself or any living thing.

***Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself*** (this includes BOTH YOUR BODIES!). YOU must ***attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real***. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified ***UNLESS his sins have no effect*** to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

Realize this. Jesus here is literally saying that if you RETAIN THE PROOF OF SIN in the physical body, if the body is still damaged and sick, IT IS STILL accusing your brother, and YOU HAVE NOT made forgiveness real. You are not done with forgiveness if the physical body has any TRACE of attack in it. And when it DOES NOT have a trace of attack in it, it now serves a higher purpose.

"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."

Jesus actually is stating here that your PHYSICAL BODY has something to do with whether or not you are accusing your brother or sin or whether you are finding him innocent. That's because PROJECTION makes your body sick as part of the accusation process! You must PHYSICALLY FORGIVE HIM and PHYSICALLY RESURRECT and PHYSICALLY HEAL, otherwise your psychological condition CANNOT be one of healing and love.

"Only the mind AND body need atonement."

"Show THIS unto your brother, who will see that ***every scar is healed*** (that's PHYSICAL HEALING!), and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there (with physical eyes), and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you (symbolized in the body). Here is the ***proof*** that he has NEVER sinned; that ***NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind.***That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

In order for his madness to have had NO EFFECTS of any kind, and if his madness was stabbing your body 50 times with a knife, it is your responsibility through forgiveness to REMOVE ALL THE KNIFE WOUNDS, otherwise there is still proof of sin and accusation. He MUST be able to look at a HEALED BODY, in order to TRULY BELIEVE that he no longer stands accused. If the EVIDENCE remains, he is STILL BEING ACCUSED. His sin is PROVEN by it.

Just the mere FACT that there is STILL DAMAGE TO BE SEEN, that you can point a finger at, PROVES THAT SIN HAPPENED. You cannot CLAIM to have forgiven him WHILE STILL showing him a picture of PROOF that HE DID IT. If the body PROVES, SHOWS, DEMONSTRATES FOR ALL TO SEE, that "there was an attack", forgiveness is NOT complete and your mind IS NOT HEALED.

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

The body's HEALTH AND LOVELINESS will EXONERATE your brother and PHYSICALLY PROVE he is not a sinner.

While we have bodies, this is what we have to do. WE can't just pretend it does not matter. HERE, among others who look upon our body image, IT matters, because our body is a teaching device, and it IS THE MESSAGE. It takes on the form symbolizing the message. Messages of attack show up as sick bodies. Messages of healing and love show up as PHYSICAL HEALTH.

"Sick bodies remain accusers".

Healed bodies remain HEALERS.

YOUR PHYSICAL HEALTH has an effect on your brother's MENTAL HEALTH.

"Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. ***YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health.*** BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

"Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to ***show*** your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

You must show him through your physical healing that HE DID NOT ATTACK YOU. You must undo the wounds.

"How just are miracles! For they bestow an equal gift of full deliverance from guilt upon your brother AND yourself. YOUR healing saves HIM pain, as well as you. And YOU are healed BECAUSE you wished him well."

Your mental AND physical healing SAVES HIM PAIN.

"Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And ***in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him.*** A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

This is important. A POWER greater than a thousand tongues. The body, showing your brother HIS innocence, by way of ITS healed condition. A POWERFUL TEACHING DEVICE! He is convinced of his innocence when he sees YOUR INNOCENT BODY, because this MUST MEAN he has never attacked you, and so he is HEALED BY this recognition of your PHYSICAL HEALTH. He is healed ALONG WITH YOU.

In heaven, you and your brother share everything. Not just as two beings who "trade", but as two beings who are one. You overlap, sharing the same space. You are in him and he is in you. He literally is you, while also being himself. The two of you share everything as the Christ mind or One Son/Sonship. Along with everyone else also.

There is therefore a part of your own self, which is in your brother and is your brother. It's like you live inside of each other. His own self is part of your own self. Therefore the wholeness of who and what you are is not just you, it's that you are also him, and you are also part of God.

In the separation, the aspect of you which is hosted inside your brother, and which is one with his mind, was "sectioned off" through the separation device of the body. The body seemed to "fence in" the part of you which seems to be "you alone", and "keep out" the part of you which is literally in your brother "as" your brother.

Part of your mind is now seemingly housed inside the body prison, while the other part of your mind is seemingly housed inside your brother's body. And since the two appear in the form of "being separated by physical distance", it creates the illusion of a "gap" between not only you and your brother, but between you and the rest of you, which is in him and as him.

The initial function of bodies as separation devices was to make it appear that you are not in your brother, you are not one with him, you share nothing with him, you are not equal to him, you are different to him in every way, he is a stranger to you, you do not know him, and you do not recognize him or yourself. And the body paints a picture of an identity which is not in any way what you or your brother are really like.

This egoic view of him confines him to a body, and therefore also denies that he is in you. And so it reduces him and yourself you being less than whole. Bodies isolate the "self" portion of you while rejecting the "shared" portion of you. So now you and your brother find yourself inside prison cells and trapped in brains and kept apart and not communicating.

The body makes it appear that there is NO relationship between you. It demonstrates the proof of sin that separation has occurred. The two bodies being unalike do not share the same truth, and so are in disagreement, and are therefore at war with each other, just by virtue of their different natures. Which in turn, when identified with as your self or as your brother's self, makes it appear that you are fundamentally in perpetual war and competition with everyone. And everyone lacks what everyone else has."There is nothing so blinding as perception of form."

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone."

"The second law of chaos, dear indeed to every worshipper of sin, is that each one must sin, and therefore deserves attack and death."

In this state, you are in special relationship. Which we really should call, no relationship. It is a breakdown in communication, it is a lack of sharing, it is a broken interaction. It really is a lack of relating at all. And in this relating, neither party is viewed as a whole being, because wholeness means sharing and the part of you that is seemingly separated off inside your brother is rejected as "him alone". So now you are not your whole self, and he is not his whole self. And neither of you are wholly relating.

"Yet the special relationship which the EGO seeks, does NOT include even ONE whole individual. For the ego WANTS but part of him, and sees ONLY this part, and nothing else."

"An altar is erected IN BETWEEN two separate people, on which each seeks to kill his self, and on his body, raise another self that TAKES HIS POWER FROM HIS DEATH."

"The special relationship is totally meaningless without a body. If you value it, you must also value the body."

When your mindset is one of being only the you that is in your body, as a body, you cannot help but relate to others in a dysfunctional way. And may struggle to relate at all. You may think, "I cannot relate to them because I am not physically like them."

The gap seen between you also produces justification for getting away with murder, a breakdown in cause and effect, and justified selfishness. Any attack you make upon another you do not realize is attacking the part of you which is shared with him. And the more you push him away in a lack of love, the less you accept yourself.

To have holy relationship doesn't merely mean that you love another person a lot. It doesn't mean, that you are still a separate person trapped in a body whose whole self is in that body, and who then relates lovingly with other people. This is still special love. To be truly loving and holy you have to be whole, which means you have to recognize that your identity is shared with your brother. That there is a part of you IN him and a part of him IN you. And that through your oneness you transcend the body boundaries, and therefore ARE NOT bodies.

You can't be all of yourself while isolated to space and time. You can't fully relate to anyone if you don't recognize that they are simultaneously you, and therefore that you see yourself in them and truly have something in common. You cannot treat anyone correctly unless you have a vested interest of treating yourself correctly, having recognized that you are in them, so that what you do to them you do to yourself.

To relate in holiness isn't two separate wholes relating, it is a relationship in which two are one. You are not just loving another, you are loving yourself AS another. And you are loving the self that is in you and the self that is in the other, as yourself. And the two of you as one together share everything.

"Miracles are a way of loving your neighbor (brother) as yourself."This must entail the shared/joined state of mind, which is more than just two minds sitting next to each other sending love vibes from afar. It is two minds FUSED together sharing everything to such a degree you cannot even tell where one begins and the other ends. Where the identity of both individuals is recognized as the same, being one in Christ. Two Christs, who are one Christ. Where what is theirs is yours and what is yours is theirs and both of you have everything simultaneously.

"Forgiveness is the healing of the perception of separation. Correct perception of EACH OTHER is necessary ONLY because minds have willed to see themselves AS separate beings. Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul."

Each soul also knows all other souls completely. And you are part of God. And you are the whole Sonship. And you are the One Son, and Christ, and a Soul. And you are all Souls. And you are all Creations and all of Creation. And you are part of God Himself.

"We are the Kingdom, WE, the Sons of God."

"The Kingdom of Heaven IS you."

"The soul is the idea of self fullness."

To relate fully to your self, you have to relate to the whole of yourself. The whole of yourself includes the part you fenced off in your body, AND the part that is in literally in your brother. He has to be recognized as part of your self, in order for you to have shared interests with him. Because by recognizing that you are IN him, you recognize that how you treat him is how you treat yourself. You cannot "see the Christ in Him" without recognize that Christ SPANS the two of you and INCLUDES you both as one identity.

When you do not recognize yourself in your brother, a wall or gap starts to form between you, you lose recognition, you become blinded by form, you start to focus on the body, sickness arises, and you begin to attack. The formation of this "separation gap" in between you and your brother makes the world of bodies and sin. And it is there that you enter into illusions of suffering and death, war and competition, disagreement and hatred and fear.

When you re-embrace your brother AS yourself, recognizing that in actual factual truth this is how God created you - joined with everyone, you are putting aside that gap between you and are overflowing your body. You are now extending PAST the body and past the body of your brother. Because your full self transcends these imprisoning boundaries. You are everywhere. You are everything. And only by relating to yourself as that, can you be fully yourself and fully awake.

Two separate things bumping up against each other is no more relationship than two separate things being at a distance. But when the two separate things realize they are not separate and they fuse together and become one, in which each of them is in the other, like yin and yang, there is now a union and a harmony and an equality. To be equal with something means to BE IT, not just to be like it. a = b means a IS b, no just that a and b are alike.

Bodies present a picture which is a complete lie. It is totally opposite to the nature of reality. It is an attempt to pull deeply relating immersed beings away from each other and lock them up in little isolating prisons in the farthest corners of the earth. Kept apart, they believe they are their prisons, and that they have no relationship. And every way they relate is on a basis of a lack of self, the attempt to get self from the other, and the attempt to lose even more self in doing so through sacrifice and loss and bargaining.

When the body is your identity, and you think that the you that is solely within your body is all of yourself, and you have a "bodily identity" in your mind as a picture of who and what you are, you are cutting yourself off from yourself and from relationship. In order to become spirit identified, you need to identify with the spirit that is both in you AND in your brother. You cannot find yourself without sharing yourself. And you cannot accept atonement without sharing and extending it either. You have to give what you have received.

This is why the body has no part to play in a holy relationship. This is why focusing on the body is a rejection of health, because health comes from wholeness and from extension. When you do not allow your SELF or identity to extend past the body and past your brother's body to the SHARED identity that is the Christ in both of you, you cannot be healthy, because your mind is split BY the body. If you allow the body to separate you off from others, you have a split mind and are choosing death.

When you join with others, which does not mean ego joining or a special relationship joining or bodies joining or two separate selves remaining separate and hooking up, mind extends past limitation and separation. It transcends the gap. And now the two that were on either sides of the gap span across the gap and erase the gap. And there is no gap. And in this view the bodies actually become healed because the mind is healthy. In effect, mind has to adopt a state completely "alien" to the body in order for the body to be healthy, which overrides the body's laws with the laws of God.

Reunion with others is reunion with your self and with God. You are a "whole part" of the hologram of God's creation. What you are is what your brother is. Your minds are one. Your souls are connected. You both overlap with each other. You share the same space. You overflow bodies and transcend their limits. You are everywhere. You are infinite, immortal and unlimited. You are the whole Sonship and the whole Son of God. And you are part of God Himself. And what God has put together no man can put asudner. You are eternally married to all beings forever and ever.

In ACIM there is a very strong theme, based on the Golden Rule, which describes a dynamic we are all supposed to adopt. It's the idea that giving and receiving are one.

"giving and receiving are the same" UrW225

In fact, that entire phrase appears SIX times in the course.

It is the backbone of the Golden Rule, which is a law of God, that what you do unto another YOU directly DO unto yourself. And this is on the basis that your brother - other people - are a PART OF YOU. And therefore, what you do to them, you literally are doing to the part of you that is SHARED with them.

But think about this for a moment, because it really makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Jesus presents it with what appears to be a nice voodoo-sounding phrase, which is laden with impossibilities:

"Therefore, His teaching begins with the lesson: To HAVE, GIVE all TO ALL." UrT6F13

How on earth, can you give everything, to everyone, and still HAVE everything? This defies normal logic, does it not? It does not make sense. Ask anyone in the world how this is possible, they will probably be stumped. It seems totally false.

If I give you my dinner, I will not have my dinner. If I give you my car, I will not have the car. If I give you my money, I will not have the money. HOW can it MAKE SENSE, to say that if I give you everything, I will HAVE IT ALL? Or even worse, that I'm supposed to give what I have ***TO EVERYONE***? How is that even possible?

If you are savvy and paying attention, you should conclude that these kinds of statements MAKE NO SENSE AT ALL. They seem absolutely nonsense. They are totally out of line with what we experience in the world. How can they be true?

The big thing is... Jesus seems to be telling us that it is not only POSSIBLE, but the true law of God, that things which seem impossible to us are the ONLY possibility. That there is some WEIRD way by which something that makes absolutely no sense, IS in fact the truth.

He is telling us that we're supposed to "love others as ourselves" - as we would love ourselves, and knowing that they ARE a part of ourselves. How can this make any sense though? And be careful not to go into denial here and just PRETEND that "you believe it" because it sounds all magical and spiritual.

It seems ONLY to make sense to say that whatever I GIVE, I WILL LOSE. Yes? Have you ever experienced otherwise? Anything you have ever given you have lost. You have had to compromise. You have never been able to keep what you have given to anyone. Why is Jesus telling you that it is some kind of divine law or dynamic or way of relating to others that you're supposed to adopt? What nonsense!

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously." UrT1B18A

The thing is.. .. God's truth and laws are nothing like the laws of this world, or the dynamics of ego relationships, or the way by which physical objects interact and relate. What SEEMS to make sense to us here, is in truth absolutely nonsense. And that which SEEMS to be absolutely nonsense, is in fact the truth.

Now... that's a REALLY BIG CLAIM. Because now Jesus is telling us that something that seems to make NO SENSE, is in fact the truth! Nonsense is the truth?! Not only is it the truth, GOD HIMSELF apparently has a nature which makes NO SENSE.

Somehow, we're told, God gives everything to everyone, and yet keeps everything. And, supposedly we're supposed to adopt the same function, of giving everything to everyone, in order to have everything. And he even tells us that if we do NOT give it all away, we will have nothing. WHAT NONSENSE, SURELY?!

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT." UrT3G15

Here for example Jesus is saying not only are there souls created by God (hold that thought), but also that EACH of them knows God COMPLETELY. Which means, that I can have everything, and you can have everything, and we can both have everything simultaneously. WHAT THE F?! .... How can that make any sense at all?

How can you have everything, while I also have everything, without either of us having to compromise or share or take turns? But he's telling us that's how it is. And he describes this dynamic as miraculous - it IS a course in the miraculous, after all.

So here's the big issue. It is CLEARLY evident that all of the things which are true of God, and all of the dynamics of his creation and reality and the workings of his relationships and so on, SEEM TO MAKE ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.

They entail seemingly mind-bending possibilities, such as you handing over your entire inheritance and still having it all. Such that, in fact, when you give everything, the other person you gave it to now HAS IT ALL, AND YET... you ALSO have it all, which means the total amount HAS INCREASED. F me!

"God Himself created the law by creating BY it. And His Sons, who create LIKE Him, follow it gladly, knowing that the INCREASE of the Kingdom depends on it, just as THEIR creation did." UrT7C7

We're told that the entire Kingdom of God INCREASES, because when you GIVE ALL TO ALL, you still HAVE it all, and now everyone else HAS everything you gave, and now it is DOUBLED. So there is constant increase of everything real. This is a real dynamic in reality. How can this make any sense at all, that when you give stuff away IT MULTIPLIES?!!! What?

What it then boils down to, is that the ultimate truth is, God's nature, the nature of reality and oneness, what is possible, what is a fact, will always SEEM TO MAKE NO SENSE TO YOU. It will in fact seem like a collection of paradoxes. And it will seem like nonsense. And anything that is true WILL seem to be nonsense to your ego, and to your earthly way of thinking, and to the way that you REASON all your conclusions. They are all nonsense.

Here's the climax of my post. There is much debate about oneness and non-duality and so on. And people generally will say that whatever MAKES SENSE, must be the truth. Screw that! God has dynamics which DO NOT make sense to ordinary reasoning. Giving everything away in order to keep it, what?! What's given increases when you give it away, what?! It seems like nonsense. BUT IT IS TRUE.

So you should NOT be quite so certain, that God's reality and workings are supposed to fit nicely into what you think "makes sense". In fact, if you think that God's functioning makes sense based on ordinary reasoning, YOU ARE CONFUSED.

To normal reasoning, God's workings are supposed to look like paradoxes. They are SUPPOSED to look like contradictions. They are SUPPOSED to look like they make no sense at all and can't be true!! Because the reasoning being used to LOOK at it is itself BACKWARDS and false.

The people who thus claim ACIM is non-duality are using backwards reasoning to claim that "oneness" and "it's all God" and "you don't exist" makes perfect sense. That's a total fail. God is capable of BREAKING all your rules and TRANSCENDING all your little limitations and requirements.

ACIM clearly is teaching a transcendental thought system which, to the way that most people think, DOES NOT make sense. And this is supposed to reveal to you, at some point, that THE WAY YOU THINK IS WRONG. Not just what you think, but HOW. Not just the line of your thinking and the conclusions you come to that you THINK make sense, but the entire method and logic that you use to draw conclusions IS MISTAKEN. It is OPPOSITE to the nature of God.

This is why ACIM is not non-duality. Non-duality is far too absent paradoxes. It contains none of the mind-bending transcendence of laws and limits present in the Golden Rule. It has no recognition of the fact that God can do things which SEEM impossible, including the creation of multiple sons/souls who themselves are creators in reality, WITHOUT VIOLATING ONENESS. Which... you guessed it, seems like it would be "totally impossible" and "totally nonsense", BUT ISN'T.

So you should really get used to the fact that reality WILL NOT make sense to your typical reasoning. Your conclusions are all back to front and entirely within the separation-based thought system of the ego. Even non-duality and oneness are ego constructs resulting from a way of reasoning that doesn't even acknowledge the rule-breaking nature of God.

If you think this is not correct, think again. Think again about the facts we're being taught. We're being told to do something that seems TOTALLY COUNTER INTUITIVE. Which seems to run TOTALLY OPPOSITE to how your ENTIRE thought system works. To treat others in the knowledge that they are a part of you, such that what you do to them you do to yourself. That is not something that makes any sense to the world's thinking.

Don't be deceived that making sense of something means it is true. An entire system of thought can have internal consistency and seem to make total sense, and yet be entirely wrong. We are not here in the business of just being a sheep that follows the basic little conclusions the ego comes up with.

"It's all one therefore there can't be many"... nonsense.

"God couldn't create anything otherwise there would be separation" .... nonsense.

"If I exist then I must be an ego" ... nonsense.

"If there are many things in reality then reality is dualistic". ... nonsense.

The truth is FAR more mind-bending and waaaaaaaaay outside the box of how you think about things. If you have not encountered all the paradoxes and found a way to live with them, you are still squarely locked into the ego's thought system.

"ACIM is non-dualistic" is a conclusion drawn by egos following all of the ego's rules of separation-based reasoning, without showing the slightest sign of appreciation for God's PARADOXICAL nature, in which two completely opposite-seeming things can be simultaneously true, WITHOUT it being wrong.

If you think everything about God's nature has to sound like it makes nice tidy sense, you haven't even begun to recognize what God is like. God is a creator, and oneness DOES have real parts to it, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that fact at all. If YOU see a gross contradiction, YOU have not escaped the ego's mindset.

In ACIM we're told we have an authority problem. If you read ACIM it speaks about us having an issue with "who authored who".

We're told that God is the author of us, because he is our creator and cause. We're told we are forever an effect of God. This means God is the author of us and he has authority over us. And because he IS AN AUTHOR (creator), we HAVE BEEN authored (created).

"I, who am host to God, AM worthy of Him. He Who ESTABLISHED His dwelling- place in me created it ***as He would have it be***."

"When God GAVE Himself to you in your creation, ***He ESTABLISHED you*** as host to Him forever. He has NOT left you, and YOU have not left HIM."

This means that in terms of heaven's reality, we are really SECONDARY creations, and thus co-creators. We did not come first. We did not create ourselves. We did not have any say in who or what we are. It is entirely up to God to create and sustain us. You have a REAL PARENT!

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind."

You are not the primary creator. You are not "God" in this sense. You are A CREATION of God, and a co-creator with him. You have a father, therefore. You are a CHILD of God. This puts you in a position of being second-in-command, not commander-in-chief. You are his "number two".

In the separation, we as second-generation creations, rebelled against our creator. We rebelled against the idea of having been created by God. We wanted to believe we could overpower God and be his equal, to rebel against him, to overthrow his kingdom, and to have authority at least as equal to if not greater than his. We wanted to be the CAUSE OF HIM, and not his effect, thus separating cause from effect (father from son) and inventing the idea of sinning against God.

This meant throwing his authorship out the window and believing that he was NOT the author of you. This meant that you believed you were the author of yourself, in a position to define and create and redefine yourself according to your wishes. And it was this wishful thinking which made the ego, a SECOND SELF designed to deny you are a SON of God and to portray yourself as ruler of a world where God doesn't exist - as though you had destroyed him and his son through death.

"The world was made as an attack on God" ... "A place where God could enter not."

"The issue of authority is really a question of authorship. When an individual has an "authority problem," it is ALWAYS because he believes he is the author of himself."

This led to the curious belief that you actually are convinced that God is not your father, that you are not a child of God, and that you have therefore not really been created at all.

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

"being uncertain of their true Authorship, men believe that their creation was anonymous. This has left them in a position where it SOUNDS meaningful to consider the possibility that they must have created themselves."

You then replaced God with a false God - a God of judgement and vengeance. An ego God and a God of sickness. A god unlike God. A god of suffering and evil.

"The "attack on God" made His Son think he was fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god of depression."

So now we have a problem with God's authority. We think we are orphans (separated fatherless selves). Our egos do not want God to have authority over us. We don't want to be second-in-command. Wd don't want to admit that we ARE A SELF that is SECONDARY to God, he having created something other than himself, and that therefore we are NOT HIS EQUAL.

"This is because God and man are NOT equal."

"If you created GOD and He created you, the KINGDOM could not increase through its OWN creative thought. Creation would therefore be limited, and you would NOT be co-creators WITH God. As God's creative Thought proceeds FROM Him TO you, so must YOUR creative thoughts proceed FROM you to YOUR creations."

"God's accomplishments are NOT yours. But yours are LIKE His. HE created the Sonship, and YOU increase it. You HAVE the power to ADD to the Kingdom, but NOT to add to the Creator OF the Kingdom."

We need to kind of bow-down and accept that God is greater than us. That we do exist as "lesser beings" in a sense. We are his effects. We are his creations, his children. There is something above and beyond us which is bigger than us, of which we should have awe. This requires HUMILITY to accept that your REAL SELF is NOT GOD in this regard, and thus heaven contains you AND God.

"This appears to contradict another statement: "I and my Father are one." It doesn't. There are still separate parts in the statement, in recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER. Actually, the original statement was "are of one KIND."

"But it WAS emphasized that awe IS a proper reaction of the Soul in the presence of its Creator."

"You who are in the image of the Father need bow only to HIM, before whom I kneel with you."

We don't want to admit to having been created "against our will." We don't like the idea that God was the only one who could decide what we are. We want to redefine ourselves and imagine that we're something we're not. And we reject God's will as if it means we're going to be forced to do something we don't want to do.

In order to undo the authority problem, it does in fact entail having to accept that God is your creator. God has to be seen as the source of you, the cause of you, the creator of you, and the reason WHY you are the way that you are in reality. If you are to be "still as God created you", then you have to accept that you are immortal BECAUSE OF him. You are his son, not his equal!

God maintains you in his mind forever and gives you eternal life. He shares his innocence and his power with you. He handed down everything he had to you in your creation, and you therefore share everything with him. But to get over your power-trip you will have to acknowledge that you COME FROM GOD. That you did not create yourself, and have no say in what you are.

This is where acceptance of atonement comes in, because now we're talking about your willingness to put aside all attempts to define yourself, to decide what is true of you, or making it your business to be the one who says what is real. This requires a surrendering of ego and a surrendering of the position of "I want to be first" and "I want to rule God" and "I will do everything without God" and "I want it thus."

To accept atonement and thus undo the problem with authority, you have to be willing to acknowledge that God has authority above you. He has the authority to create and cause you. Everything you are and everything you have not only comes from him but is chosen BY him. You have to accept that you have no say in your nature, what you can and cannot do, who you are, or what you are. You have to be willing to simply accept what you have been GIVEN with gratitude.

That means an end to inventing artificial identities, an end to identifying with bodies, an end to believing stuff about yourself that is out of line with God's will, an end to trying to portray yourself as mortal, and an end to acting like you're not Christ.

This isn't about you just being true to yourself or knowing yourself, it's also about you acknowledging that everything you are and have COMES FROM GOD, and therefore he is your creator and father and you acknowledge him as having power over you. Not a power that coerces or manipulates or dictates, but nevertheless you have NOTHING other than what HE decides you have. And you have to be okay with that.

Thankfully God has given everything good, and everything worth having, and everything meaningful. He has given you his own power and strength, his own light and love, and his own happiness and joy. He has given you the ability to create life and also in this world to heal and resurrect. And he ultimately is all that you want and what you want to be like.

You are literally the will of God. God has willed what you are. You therefore are what he wills. And you are thus an extension of his will. Your free will therefore wills like his and wills for the same things that he wills, ie the creation and sharing of eternal life. To align your will with God's is to accept your place in heaven, orient yourself to filling the shoes he made for you, and lining up with the "way of living" that he designed for you in perfection.

God has GIVEN you what you are, where you live, what is true, what is real, and how you can function. He has defined you, decided for you, created you, chosen you, wanted you, and maintains you forever. You are what you are BECAUSE OF him which is why your soul is grateful to him eternally. You have to RECEIVE him to host him. And you have to acknowledge that you have a REAL PARENT, which means you have to get over all your authority issues and be willing to BE A CHILD.

Then, by acknowledging that God is your father, and you are his holy child, you are now in a position to recognize that you are also a co-creator WITH him, and that he creates through you. By your extension you now create your own children and are father to them, just as God is father to you. And thus accepting HIS fatherhood you accept YOUR fatherhood and become reacquainted with your own children in heaven.

"A son of a father must have a son."

"As miracles in this world join you to your brothers, so do your creations establish your fatherhood in Heaven."

"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The main difference between us as yet is that I have NOTHING ELSE. This leaves me in a state of true holiness, which is only a POTENTIAL in you."

"So would I look on everyone today. My brothers are Your Sons. Your Fatherhood created them, and gave them all to me as part of You and my own Self as well. Today I honor You through them, and thus I hope this day to recognize my Self."

"Without your Father you will not know your fatherhood. The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father. Know then the Sons of God, and you will know ALL Creation."

The ego is a devious, cunning, manipulative, deceptive monster, acting in deep unconsciousness, unaware of truth, unaware of the present, threatened by everything, threatening to everything, vicious and vile, mean and hateful, deeply suspicious, riddled with terror, certain of the death of itself and everyone else, deeply sick, distorted and distorting, murderous, vengeful and spiteful, dark and twisted, powerless, victimized and a victimizer, deeply sorrowful, alone, separate, lost, confused, uncertain of anything, knowing nothing, and thoroughly deluded.

This 'mind', when present in another person, will attempt to 'tempt' you to agree with it. Particularly if the 'pain body' of another person has activated and is taking over their consciousness, or rather, rendering the person unconscious and unaware of who they are or what the truth is. The ego will distort everything and yet is seemingly extremely cunning and clever at knowing when to strike, how to do so, and how to get what it wants. It can be seemingly formidable and a vicious enemy.

It wants to 'tempt' you to believe what it believes, by attempting to pull you into a drama, to lower your awareness, to distract you from truth, to mislead you, to push your buttons, to trigger off your unhealed upsets which may even entail triggering things that are deeply buried in yourself of which you are also mostly unconscious, just so that it can get you to react negatively and to enter into a state of separation. Once accomplished the ego is then 'feeding off of you' by attempting to take power from you, to possess you with its 'evil' intentions, to convert you to its thought system, to get you to be persuaded that its version of truth is the real truth, and to essentially corrupt you and diminish your light.

It is therefore a significant, deep challenge, to be around someone who is strongly in this kind of mindset, or who is having a pain-body attack, or who has a lot of negative emotion that is unhealed, or who has identified strongly with their ego self. Everything the ego does through another person or in them attempts to 'attract' you out of your peace and out of your mind, to 'tempt' you to believe things which are not true, and to get you to basically side with it so that you are resonating with it. Even as you begin to resonate with it, it is aligning with you and merging with you and thereby accessing you and absorbing you into it like a sponge. It is magnetic in its appeal that death is real and that you should be at war, in conflict with the other person, resisting of them, hating of them, rejecting of them, judging of them, reacting to their lies, or being drawn to basically lose your cool over the way the ego is behaving.

This is especially hard to deal with when you are attached to the person and depend on them, or when you rely on them being sane and sensible, or when you have expectations that the person should be a certain way in order to please your own unconscious bullshit, or that you have 'special bargains' with them in your 'special relationship' that you are still trying to fulfill but which are being ripped apart by the ego's refusal to honor the 'facade' or 'persona' that covers up its darkness (the shadow). When the gloves are off, all hell seems to break loose and at this time it can be extremely difficult to remain unaffected.

It is, however, a tremendous opportunity for learning and growth. Like it or not you will be driven to have to confront the things in yourself that cause you to become deceived by the ego in the other person, including having to examine and let go of attachments, having to look at and release and let go of special relationships and artificial ways of relating, to question why you have reactions or are deeply triggered by certain behaviors, to seek out God even more fervently in order to stay present in the truth, to come to realize that unconditional love is called for at all times because nothing else works, to be confronted with the ways in which your own ego is powerless to solve problems and how you yourself cannot fix anything, to question the motivation for fixing and saving, to be confronted with why it is that you fall for temptations or buy into the drama which is being put there as a deliberate provocation, to recognize where you are coming from your head and not your heart, to find levels of surrender and letting go that you never thought was possible, and to propel you into a greater awareness of God and yourself.

See, the bullshit drives you to awaken, when you allow it to, and when you use it to do so, by deciding that you will learn the lesson that it presents and that you will use it for the purpose of becoming even more honest. As such then it is not a curse but a blessing. And what may at first seem to be a horrendous terrifying unwanted attack may turn into a reason for salvation and a doorway to awakening. It is a catalyst (thank you for that word Holy Spirit). A catalyst for awakening, by getting you to be heavily triggered and to have to look at all the reasons why you are reacting so that you can heal and take responsibility for yourself.

All the ways you fail will be highlighted intensely because the ego in the other person will be very suspicious and rejective and quick to point out your faults and failures. It will not tolerate even tiny suggestions that you are innocent and will insinuate and accuse you of a great many things, some of which you are in fact doing that you do not want to admit to, and some things which you are in fact not doing which still cause you to react in some way.

The ego is like a highly highly untrusting scared sensitive little mouse that has absolutely no trust and no allegiance and no willingness to live or to see anything other than your sins. And because it powerfully highlights your sins, this presents a wonderful opportunity for you to confront false beliefs in yourself and to seek healing for your own sins. It is intense and painful and unpleasant, perhaps, but at the same time, you could think of it as a service, helping you to awaken by being as provocative and triggering of and pointing out all the ways you are being even slightly unloving, so that you will be forced to have to 'cunjour' up other-worldly amounts of love and forgiveness and unconditionality.

Ultimately it is for your good, even though being faced with the profound unconsciousness of ego and its pain can be terrifying and disempowering. For that you can be thankful, if you can finally let go enough to learn that the other person, who seems to have this evil ego inside them, is in fact NOT that ego, and that everything they believe is true about themselves and you is FALSE. They then become your savior, or at least, they provide the 'material' which you can USE to learn to recognize what is true and what is false. They can provide the catalyst for awakening and give motivation to your heart. And you can learn to forgive them, and overlook them, and see instead the light in them, and dismiss and filter out all of the ego's noise and screeches of suffering, which can be very difficult.

In this way and this way alone you could say that the ego is there to wake you up, or at least to provide the 'curriculum' and learning materials and role-play that may be necessary for you to be forced to take a really hard, deep look at yourself and what you believe. And it may be that the ONLY thing that seems to possibly 'work' with an ego-driven person is to COMPLETELY ignore what their ego is asserting, to learn to RECOGNIZE the sometimes subtle deviousness of the ego so that you can stop listening to it, and so that you can become aware that unconditional love is the ONLY TRULY HELPFUL REMEDY that you can offer.

In a way, the vicious 'evil' ego in another person is like a 'test' or exam, a very hard one, in which even slight unholiness in yourself will be pointed out in a big way and used against you. In fact, all of the ways in which you are yourself unconscious or unholy will become your own undoing, as you fall into a cascade of reactions and ego drama, trying desperately to 'fight off' the attacks that you believe are coming from the other person, but which in fact are your OWN self-attacks that you are now projecting onto them. The person in 'pain' is now like a final examiner, determining whether you are still easily fooled, whether you fall for ego lies, whether you still believe dark things about yourself, whether you still use ego yourself, and therefore whether you are truly 'clean' of ego to be in any kind of position to judge the other person. In this way, the ego becomes your motivation for admitting to and healing yourself, rising out of your own ego attitudes, removing your own darkness from your own mind, and stepping into light and power at an entirely higher level of functioning.

There is a way out of hell, but we have lessons to learn and a curriculum to undertake and things that we need to let go of and stop doing and there are also things we have yet to 'access' and become empowered by that we have yet to develop trust in. It's a journey - a journey without distance, and we are guaranteed to find our way home to love. Only in the context that the ego is helping you to awaken, to recognize how the ego is completely false, how it is INSANE, and ultimately does not exist, is the ONLY way it in which it is ever by any stretch of the imagination 'your friend'. Only be using it as a MIRROR or 'tester' to weed out the unconscious darkness within yourself, and to then correct it with Holy Spirit's truth, can you then be 'using' the ego for awakening. Coexisting with it is not the goal, or possible. Freedom from the ego is the goal and it is perfectly attainable. In a way, you 'need' the ego to help you awaken, but you awaken FROM it's and in spite of it.

And then you return to who you really are: invulnerable, unassailable, immortal, unconditional, innocent and holy.

There is a non-duality model which is frequently projected on ACIM's teachings. It suggests that in truth there is only "one", and that in the separation from God many individuals were formed. This however is very unlike what ACIM actually says when you go read it.

ACIM's teaching is that God created many individual beings - souls - who also share everything simultaneously. This comprises the sonship, which is a permanent family of living beings who each have their own self and yet share identity through the Christ mind, creating as one. Individuality was given to each soul/mind and therefore everyone has a real self. It is not a "blob" of one being sitting there all alone. It is a community.

In the separation from God, it was not an event where individuality was invented. It was an event where pre-existing individuals tried to be selfish. They didn't want to share everything with everyone, so they tried to separate themselves off. They became selfish, hoarding, possessive, owning, isolating, exclusive, special and rejecting of others.

The separation then was a breakdown in communication or a disruption of the family unit of the sonship. It's where some individuals became "the separated ones", by freely choosing individually to not share with others. It was like an attempt to rebel against the family and go off on their own as prodigal sons. But there is nothing about being a prodigal son that deletes you from existence when you return home.

What actually happened in the separation was you attempted to reject your wholeness and your self and your family. You tried to stop sharing with your permanent brothers. You wanted some special favor from God, which he would give you alone and not anyone else. It was simply an attitudinal problem, one of selfishness, and not an issue of trying to be an individual."The ego is the idea of selfishness."

Selfishness is an attitude. You can have a person who is an individual who shares, and you can have the same person who adopts a selfish attitude. Just because you're being selfish doesn't mean you suddenly invent an individuality.

In the separation, in denying our shared identity and family coherence, we actually tried to deny that we had a self. The ego is the idea of self denial, repression, hiding and withdrawal. It was an attempt to reject your self and to not be a self. In fact the ego idea even takes it so far as to try to eradicate your self entirely, which is why it is so murderous and always has the goal of the death of the sons of God in mind.

In death the ego reports that it is triumphant in erasing your self and removing your individuality. It is in death that you stop being an individual or having a self at all. Death is the attempt to destroy who and what you really are. And death is not about the production of an individual life, it's about ending it.

This also means that when you go in the opposite direction towards heaven, towards eternal life, you are moving away from the lack of individuality, towards individuality. Towards having a self. It's a movement back towards the family of God and towards the sonship and your equal brothers. It's a reintegration of self and a return to wholeness. It's a reclaiming of your identity and a recognizing that you do exist as an individual being. As a soul.

Jesus also states in the course that as you awaken, your sense of self actually expands, becoming more full and complete. This doesn't mean you are simply returning to one big blob in the sky, it means you are returning to being yourself. And the goal of the course is to "know thyself."

So in fact the traditional models of individuality are upside down. Especially in some eastern traditions which suggests that reality is no-self while illusion is self. This is completely backwards. The fact is that when you decide to try to reject your self, to deny your soul, you bring illusions of separation into your mind. Blocks and walls and grievances and attack thoughts etc enter the mind to try to cut down, isolate, narrow, limit, confine and section off who and what you are from the rest.

These walls and limits seem to form a restricted or reduced sense of self, surrounded with pictures of bodies and things that are too small to encompass what you really are, so that you'll believe that you are not the magnitude or scope of your unlimited self. And as you "identify with" these things, such as with the body, you believe that you are something small and little and cut off and separate. And this "bodily identity" in your mind forms a sense of who and what you are, which is a false sense of identity. But really it's a false IDENTIFICATION WITH something, not the invention of identity itself.

Those who are deceived, believe that this false sense of identity is their self. Such as believing you are your body. And it is this false sense of self which ends when you wake up to reality. It is this sense of being separated off and not sharing and not being whole, that ends. Which means you actually return to a greater fullness of self, more expansive and inclusive. You actually become full of self. You identity WITH your spiritual self and DIS-IDENTIFY from the false body."The soul is the idea of self fullness."

But self here does not mean selfishness, or an isolated self. It means a self that shares all of itself with other selves, in unity and oneness, as in having a real open and full relationship with all other individual beings in reality. God included.

So you have to then realize that ego is actually the attempted denial of your self and the denial of individuality. It's the attempt to suggest you do not exist and do not have any self and are dead. And just because this denial of self shows up as the seeming "presence" of an artificial identity, it does not mean that you have created an individuality. It's actually an ILLUSION OF an individual, which is ACTUALLY NOT an individual. Because remember the ego is always deceptive, being an illusion.

Your ego is really the absence of self, the absence of individuality, the suppression of personality, the denial of wholeness, and the rejection of being as God created you. The illusion of a separated off, selfish self, is undone as you awaken. This does not mean that your individuality is thrown out with the bathwater. What it means is that your individuality opens back up to sharing with the rest of your God-given family. It is actually a return to having a self. It is self acknowledgement, acceptance and awareness.

So when you have people teaching that ACIM is non-duality, or that you have no real self, or that you do not exist, or that you're supposed to deny yourself, or that your entire identity is going to just disappear someday, they are teaching absolute bullshit. They are teaching you that you do not exist, which is an ego teaching. It is an improper use of denial.

You're supposed to deny the DENIAL OF self, not deny that you have a self. You are to deny the ego, which is an illusion of a self, but which is actually the attempt to not have a self. You are to deny that you do not have a self. That is how you return to what you really are as a self in heaven. As an individual being which God created to share with others and co-create with Him.

"God who encompasses all being nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy."When you project these non-duality teachings onto ACIM and you start to claim that the path to enlightenment is self repression or self denial or "you don't exist" and trying to be so neutral and passive as if you don't even have a self at all, that is actually SELF DESTRUCTION, which is completely in accord with the ego. It is the ego attempting to be spiritual, in fact. The absolute pinnacle of the spiritualized ego is to deny that you exist, in the name of being spiritual and growing in size. It is arrogant and narcissistic and a mistake.

This is why ACIM's teaching is not the same as the teachings that people keep projecting onto it. It is not a non-duality teaching and it is NOT about trying to get rid of yourself. Remember you were created by God to HAVE a self in the first place. Your self is divine and holy and perfect. You also have equal brothers who are divine and holy and perfect, created by God as well. And you share everything with everyone always. That produces a perfect harmony of souls in the sonship who have and share everything with each other, as the family of God.

That is what is written in ACIM and that is what it teaches. That you had a self before the ego came along, and you will have a self again when the ego is erased. This is not a course in self destruction or repression of the sonship or the depressing argument of trying to not exist. You should not deny your soul, or you are denying reality. This is a course in awakening to who and what you are as created by God, as one of many of his beloved children in heaven.

All anti-individuality sentiment is therefore destructive and death-worshipping and depressing and a rejection of God's will. Ego does not mean or equate to individuality. It equates only to an ATTITUDE which an individual has that runs contrary to the sharing nature of the sonship. Removing the attitude problem does not have to entail you destroying yourself. You are in fact supposed to embrace yourself and your freedom and thank God that you have been given life to share with others forever.

Forgiveness is a state of mind in which you recognize that there is nothing that NEEDS forgiving. It is a recognition in which you know there is no sin, sin is impossible, attack is impossible, so nothing can have happened to be forgiven. It's an awareness of innocence.

Forgiveness however isn't "passive", it is ACTIVELY converting illusions into truth. It is actively translating sin into error. It is actively interpreting and changing something. It is causing a healing and radiating life.

What you do to get your mind INTO the state of forgiveness, in which forgiveness is "complete", or in which you are "completely forgiving all the time", as an attitude, is what we might call "purification" or correction or healing.

Healing, or shall we say, being in a state in which you or another is healed, must entail similarly a recognition that "there is nothing that NEEDS healing." If we are focusing on "something is wrong", we are reinforcing and giving reality to sickness and damage. If we think a person "is a sick body", that's actually an attack on their immortal nature.

Like forgiveness then, proper healing entails a recognition that there is nothing to heal, because it recognizes immortality and wholeness and harmlessness. It recognizes invulnerability and permanence and the impossibility of attack/sin/guilt. It ASSERTS only "you are fully alive".

Perhaps we can then say that you can ONLY correctly heal, as in correctly forgive a sick person, by looking for and focusing on the NON-SICK self in them. Finding the pre-existing UNCHANGED perfection in them. Recognizing them as NOT SICK, as not broken or damaged, as not guilty or punished, and as not a victim. And certainly not a body.

Holding this light for the person, shining the truth into them, seeing them IN the light WITH light AS light, is the absence of a BELIEF IN sickness. It places no attention ON the sickness. When you have made sickness real and are reacting to it, even trying to "fix it", you're giving it power and reinforcement. In order to heal sickness you have to NOT give sickness any power. Which means giving it no direct attention. The symptoms will disappear naturally when the UN-SICKNESS is given power.

Now, we have to be careful that we're not saying .. I'm not just going to "do nothing". We're not talking about NOT performing a miracle of healing. We're not talking about just idly sitting there. We're talking about HOW TO HEAL. You heal by actively choosing to "see health". To join with your brother's mind in the light and through a light-based vision. To SHINE LIGHT into them on purpose, to deliberately FILL them with light so that they are enlightened.

Just because we're recognizing that the person doesn't REALLY need healing, and isn't REALLY sick, doesn't mean we're just ignoring it or doing nothing about it. We must focus on their immortal self, remembering the truth about them, taking all attention off any illusion of a mortal self or a body self, and putting all attention on who they really are. Acknowledging who they are FOR them.

Recognizing their LACK OF SICKNESS for them. This is a SERVICE. "A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

To reject and thus to CANCEL all belief in, reality of, attention given to, power in, sickness or damage, WITHDRAWS power from those things and weakens them in your mind. Because you are joining in love/light with your brother's mind this weakens it in their mind also because you do not support their belief in being mortal.

Simultaneously, to not support death is to ASSERT LIFE. This is an actual active assertion, an EXPRESSION of love. Something which goes out and is given and is can be received by another. Something that can be shared. While you remove all power from death and mortality and ideas of a person being a body, you GIVE all power to where it belongs - to their immortal christ self which is flawless and perfect and has nothing wrong with it.

Miracle don't just "take away" the illusion of sickness which seemed present. They also ASSERT and EXPRESS and RE-ESTABLISH or "repair" what was given by God. By "cancelling" what is not really there, miracles remove the ego and the guilt and the symptoms of sickness. This IS A CHANGE, but it a change in the direction of REMOVAL, resulting from an ASSERTION or expression of love's power. "THE MIRACLE DOES NOTHING. All it does is to UNdo. And thus it cancels out the interference to what HAS BEEN done. It does not add, but merely takes away."

"A miracle inverts perception which was upside-down before, and thus it ends the strange distortions that were manifest."

All fearful reactions to someone's physical state are your own unforgiven deceptions. Trying to manage, control, defend against, make go away, all physical APPEARANCES of sickness is wasted effort. It's part of you giving power away to them, because you do not remember who you are. Having stopped knowing yourself, you have entertained the idea of mortality and death YOURSELF, and have forgotten you are unchangeable. As a result you begin to believe that you are a mortal body, that other people are mortal bodies, that your bodies are being changed and that you need to desperately do something to stop it.

None of that business and reaction helps at all. As Jesus frequently tells me, "relax", ie chill and stop dwelling on what's going wrong. Stop buying into the appearance of a LIE, and let us remember that ALL sickness is an illusion. There is no REAL sickness. And focusing on the body of another results from your OWN body-identification, which is you forgetting your own true nature. That means YOU need a miracle of healing for yourself.

"He MUST heal his perception in this respect. He MUST work a miracle on behalf of himself here (See the point about miracles as a perception corrector) before he can effect miracles as creative energizers, which they are."

To get your own mind right requires you remembering and knowing yourself, tuning into the fact you remain as God created you, recognizing why you cannot change or be changed, and identifying with your IMMORTAL SPIRIT. Knowing that you cannot be hurt, cannot be sick, cannot die and cannot suffer. Once you have accepted this for yourself and have thus received healing and correction, you can now GIVE what you have received. And this is where you become able to give a miracle as "a creative energizer."

It is creative energizers that are GIVEN TO OTHERS. This is where you now EXTEND the light of christ you've seen in yourself, and SHARE it with another. Where you have joined the Holy Spirit in his view of you within yourself, and now see that same unchangeability in another, focusing on their immortal nature and their incapability of being sick. You tell them psychologically, "you are immortal and perfect and you can never be sick." You recognize in the light of truth that their body and their sickness IS NOT TRUE. That it cannot be true in light of God's truth. Only God's truth is true and nothing else is true.

It is in this "joining in christ" or "sharing light" with another that both of you are resurrected. In which "those who temporarily have more give to those who temporarily have less." It is where you recognize your brother's inestimable worth as equal to your lovable value in God. And where you see the other as ALREADY HEALED AND WHOLE. Already perfect, created by God to be perfect forever. ALREADY devoid of sickness. INCAPABLE of suffering. In which death and sickness and deformity and disability as IMPOSSIBLE.

Thus do you know you brother as one with you, like you, whole like you, healed like you. Thus do you know your neighbor as yourself. Thus do you support ONLY LIFE, and completely give no attention whatsoever to the illusion of death or the goal of death. In which your ONLY goal is life, shared with the Holy Spirit, in which you ONLY RESURRECT, and CAN ONLY HEAL.

"The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept Atonement himself. This means that he knows that mind is the only creative level, and that its errors ARE healed by the Atonement. Once he accepts this, HIS mind can only heal (others). 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 (heal 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 (because they are immortal)."

"To the ego, the goal is death, which IS its end. But to the Holy Spirit, the goal is life (life=eternal life/immortality), which HAS no end."

"When you heal, that is exactly what you ARE learning (doing). You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by perceiving (knowing) that he could NOT have changed his mind. That is how you perceive the Holy Spirit in him. It is ONLY the Holy Spirit in him that never changes His mind. He himself must think he CAN, or he would not perceive himself as sick. He therefore does not know what his self IS. If YOU see only the changeless in him (his immortal self), you have not really changed (healed) him at all (have seen him as not NEEDING healing). But by changing your mind about HIS FOR him (recognizing his immortality), you help him undo (heal) the change his ego thinks it has made in him. "

"Your brother has a changelessness (immortality) in him beyond appearance and deception both. It is obscured by changing views of him which you PERCEIVE as his reality. The happy dream about him takes the form of the appearance of his perfect health; his perfect freedom from all forms of lack; and safety from disaster of all kinds (symbolic of his immortality). The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form BECAUSE IT CAN SO EASILY BE CHANGED."

Miracles and supernatural interventions occur more readily when there is physical relaxation and a willingness to surrender and receive.

The act of not 'acting', of not transmitting, of not even giving, but simply a willingness to let go and be open and RECEIVE, invites and allows Holy Spirit to access and help you.

I have now over the past few months received healing from the Holy Spirit on an almost daily basis. And I don't just mean he fixes some perceptual issues. I'm talking, supernatural power! Sometimes it will occur spontaneously even if I am in public, or anywhere that I need it, but Holy Spirit can be discreet and is able to tone-down the visual signs of this happening (which usually entails much shaking of body parts), lol.

Most readily I am open to this happening when laying in bed either towards sleeping or in the morning. Typically Holy Spirit begins by simply saying either "relax" or "surrender". This could be in the middle of some rant or some other conversation and is often unexpected and I don't always clue-in at first that this means He is going to do something, but then it begins.

Even if I am laying there relaxing, sometimes He knows that I am not necessarily letting go of a situation in order to let Him help, and so he will say "surrender". This signals me that I need to actively surrender.

To do this, I will repeat in words, "I surrender", several times. At first I seem to say this slowly and with gaps between, because I am not yet very willing to let go. But I notice that the healing really starts to flow when I say it quickly and in quick succession, so that there is no time in-between for my ego to get in there and keep holding on. "I surrender, I surrender, I surrender." After saying this several times, Holy Spirit will likely spontaneously activate and begin healing.

By surrendering, what I mean is, having a willingness to let go and give up and stop fighting. It's actually a 'feeling' I get of like, how you'd feel if you'd tried everything and failed and just threw up your arms and admitted defeat. It's an openness, a giving in, and an admitting. Admitting the truth literally means "allowing the truth to come in". This is why surrender is apparently a VITAL part of the miracle process, because it means you're willing to put aside doing this yourself, and admit that you cannot, and stop trying to be God.

Then God comes.

Sometimes I've heard Holy Spirit say, "come", and I'm not sure if this means for me to come to Him, but I've also had Him basically put words in my mouth as to what He wants me to say to Him to get things flowing, which is cool. So I will say, "come Holy Spirit", "come into me". This is an invitation. Also sometimes I will ask Him to join with me or to help me to join with Him.

In my willingness to surrender, there is much activity which I'll describe in a moment. But I've also found that in addition to surrendering and allowing Him to operate on me, if I am also actively doing some kind of forgiveness during this time, like, really getting down to the truth that stuff isn't real and it hasn't happened and I'm not a victim and so on, this will also activate additional 'phases' of healing. So just when I think it's kind of done, there'll be another whole wave of it.

What almost always happens, I'm finding, is there are about 4 or so different expressions of Holy Spirit healing me. The first one is that my head literally starts to shake from side to side "violently", i.e. very very rapidly, like a vibration, and the speed of this can be so fast that it's like just a really intense vibrating, and I have to trust that this is safe (lol), which it is. This seems to dislodge... I don't know what, from my head area. This can last anywhere from a few seconds to up to 20 seconds or more. Then there will often be a short pause, and then it kicks into phase 2.

In phase 2, all of a sudden whatever energy or whatever was drained from my head area flows down into the belly area. I suddenly start to experience muscle contractions in that area, which can be quite intense. The muscles become so contracting that it forces me to hunch over or partly sit up, and in the really strong cases there is such vibrational tension in the 'floor' of the abdominal area, that it feels like an earthquake vibrating very deeply. This will go on for possibly 15-30 seconds depending. As the energy or whatever clears, and He gets done, I relax back down, and I immediately notice that ... just something has changed in my experience.

Often I immediately notice that I feel expanded, calm, peaceful and relaxed, and soft. It feels really good. It's as though something happened on the inside of me and my whole awareness is different. Sometimes after several rounds of this, per my willingness to invite more and do more healing, I have felt really really peaceful. It also energizes me somewhat but can also make me a little ungrounded for a while.

A third way it manifests is that sometimes the energy or whatever goes out through my arms which will shake, sometimes quite aggressively. Sometimes this is followed by a series of belly contractions as well. A fourth way, which actually I think was the first way that I started to experience this, was that gradually some kind of presence would begin to fill me up from my feet upwards, causing the muscles to all become tensed all the way up my legs to my stomache, and then there would be much shaking and 'draining' where emotions and other energy from the upper torso would just seem to drain out of me quickly.

I have absolutely no idea really what Holy Spirit is doing. No idea. I don't know why His presence causes the body to shake. I have no clue why His healing focuses around the head and later around the belly, other than that these are the two main area of nervous systems and the "two brains".

Similarly, if I ask Jesus to come into my belly area when I am having intense feelings, He will do almost the same thing, resulting in a complete undoing of that feeling, its cause, and a state of happiness and laughter at the end.

Also I forgot there is also another way that this manifests, and it's to do with if I am focussing my attention on another person. If I am doing a forgiveness about someone and I am asking Holy Spirit to heal some part of them, I will start to experiencing shaking and vibrations in that area of MY body, sometimes quite intensely, and sometimes it's so unusual in its focus on that body part that there is just no way I could even conceive of making that body part move that way. Like it could be a healing in the lower back or something and it's shaking all over the place but if I were to think, how could I make the back muscles shake in just that one area like that, it's just totally impossible.

I have been learning to trust that when I do this for some other person, it is helping them, but this is an area of doubt for me, which I am still working on. I have, however, noticed that after some rounds of healing for someone else in this way, they do appear to exhibit signs of SOMETHING having changed in their experience, afterwards, through at least some kind of shift in mood or renewed clarity of awareness or even some physical side effects. This is especially an area that challenges me to trust because I am not the recipient of the benefits and I cannot tell from my own sensations whether it is helping or not.

This has all has come about through SURRENDER. Also through trust. Just opening up to Holy Spirit and inviting Him to come into me and to do whatever he wants to do... that alone is a big trust step at first, because you don't know what might happen. I did that numerous times with 'milder' healings taking place before it ever progressed to the intense shaking. Another way to approach this if you prefer, is to just address God, "God, I receive your healing love".... do that a few times and tell me you don't feel some sense of love come around and into you. This also can be sufficient to signal to Holy Spirit to allow healing love to flow into you, as much as you are willing to receive it. Receiving love from God takes seemingly a bit more willingness than letting Holy Spirit run riot, maybe it's a trust thing.

These are all acts of RECEIVING, and they entail that I relax. If in the middle of the healing I start to tighten up and resist, He reminds me to relax, because it does seem to interfere to some degree, whereby the shaking etc may stop or lessen if I start fighting it. I have had to learn to TRUST it and not be afraid of it and to just let Him do whatever. It is often quite funny when my head is shaking all over the place and my cheeks and mouth are flapping around and I'm actually relaxed, it's sort of fun!

I look forward in particular now to doing a pretty strong session of this for myself on the weekends, either toward sleep or upon waking, but really Holy Spirit I'm finding out doesn't care about schedules and sometimes will start doing the shakes even before I really seem to be ready. It's gotten to where even a slight 'hint' to Him to do it can kick it in, at any time. I believe the same is true of miracle performed for others - which is where this is leading, whereby we are to just spontaneously funnel the power of God without even thinking about it.

I was watching some videos today of a pastor who performs many many many miracles and has risen the dead etc, and one of his teachings is that you need to get the RECIPIENT of healing to surrender and relax a lot, in order to RECEIVE the full transformation and healing. This seems to be key. If the person is interfering and trying to pray and do stuff at the same time, that's actually a block. Receiving and transmitting are two different functions, and the person receiving the healing needs to be ideally in a RECEIVING mindset.

So relax! Surrender a lot. Be willing. Have courage and trust and invite Holy Spirit to come into you. He is willing and ready, He's just waiting on YOU to be RECEPTIVE. This is how you can receive your own healing miracles effortlessly. I think this is actually EASIER than sharing miracles with other people, which is a whole different dynamic. But I think,... Holy Spirit may be about to reveal a new way of looking at that, based on surrender.

Let us know how you get on! Happy shaking. And remember, "He will correct the consequences of my wrong decisions if I will let Him, and I choose to LET HIM"!!

To prove that your mind is restored to sanity and to its truly immortal nature, you must also be willing to prove physically that you are invulnerable. This demonstration of invulnerability requires great confidence, in that even when others attempt to harm you, the consequences of their attack disappears and is undone. You become "bullet proof" and incapable of being hurt by anyone.

You are literally being asked to show your brother, to prove to him visually, that on ALL levels, you have not been hurt by him. This includes and demands the healing of the body, so that it does not transmit a double contradictory message. The body must not be allowed to testify that HE DID attack you or your body, otherwise it continues to PROVE that he is a sinner.

This requires the use of miracles to override all external sources of attack, undoing all consequences of sin, and maintaining the body in perfect condition. Only by reversing or preventing any effects of attack by another, can you truly demonstrate to him that he HAS NOT attacked you OR your body. And only by showing him the complete ABSENCE of evidence to support his belief that he sinned, can you exonerate him and teach him his innocence.

Your body then becomes a SYMBOL of your own innocence, because it now represents your harmlessness and immortality. And by pointing TO your innocence, it also testifies to HIS. It cannot testify to his innocence if it retains ANY trace of harm or damage, which means that until forgiveness has brought a PHYSICAL healing to your body, it is not real or complete. And until it has transmitted healing TO your brother as well, through physical demonstration, forgiveness is not complete.

When you brother attempts to look upon your body which he believes he DID successfully attack, and does NOT see any proof of attack there, because it has been healed and undone by miracles, it becomes impossible for him to CONFIRM his own sinfulness. And in the demonstrated PHYSICAL PROOF that he did not do anything, the body testifies with a power greater than a thousand tongues, and beyond words or claims, that HE MUST NOT have attacked you. And therefore your body's unharmed condition shows him that he MUST still be innocent, and in its harmlessness induces HEALING in him, because his belief in sin is proven false.

This also extends to you demonstrating that your brother has not hurt you psychologically, and is not responsible for your suffering. Which ties into the secret of salvation that "you can be hurt by nothing but your thoughts" and "you did it to yourself." When someone appears to upset you, you are deceiving yourself and are using him as a scapegoat for your self-attack.

What you're supposed to do is assert that NO ONE CAN HURT YOU. Which is a position is great confidence and assertion. Whereby even if someone tries to hurt you, you act as if they have had NO EFFECT on you. Which means you do not hold anything against them.

To forgive therefore means to hold no sense of sin or guilt against anyone, REGARDLESS of what they do or attempt to do. Even if they accuse you or try to hurt you, you stand in the face of their onslaught unharmed and unwavering, like a rock in the river. You do not USE it to hurt YOURSELF, and so do not demonstrate that you can BE attacked. You show your brother, both mentally and physically, that he HAS NOT done anything to you, and you do not make him responsible for your condition, feelings, or physical state. You act as if you are invulnerable, and in fact are. You show him, "you can't do anything to me, not even physically."

If you think ACIM is not teaching you that you HAVE to heal the body in order NOT to accuse others of sin, then think again. The body MUST reflect the healed mind, and until it does, you HAVE NOT healed the mind. Sickness and pain cannot be kept, if you are to PROVE that you are healed and that you have power OVER it. Death and sickness must be UNDONE in order to demonstrate that you are the resurrection and the life.

This doesn't mean you ARE a body OR that the body is immortal, which it cannot be. But the body DOES symbolize your mind, as an outward picture of an inward condition. Its sickness is part of your effort to PROJECT SIN, and you cannot allow it to show up as a picture of crucifixion or proof of attack, if you are truly forgiving.

The pertinent quotes...

"The power of witness is beyond belief, because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness is believed BECAUSE he points beyond himself, to what he REPRESENTS. A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

"To witness sin, and yet forgive it, is a paradox which reason cannot see. For it maintains what has been done to you DESERVES no pardon. And, by GIVING it, you grant your brother mercy, but retain the proof he is not REALLY innocent. The sick remain accusers. They cannot forgive their brothers AND themselves as well. For no-one in whom true forgiveness reigns CAN suffer. He holds not the proof of sin, before his brother's eyes. And thus he MUST have overlooked it, and removed it from his own."

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

"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. The ancient Calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto his own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear. Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

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

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

Show THIS unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you. Here is the proof that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind. That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for, it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have It not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions which are responsible for the body's condition. Yet the teacher of God does not make this decision alone. To do that would be to give the body another purpose from the one that keeps it holy. God's Voice will tell him when he has fulfilled his role, just as It tells him what his function is. He does not suffer either in going or remaining. Sickness is now impossible to him.

"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."

"His dreams are happy and his rest secure; his safety certain and his body healed"

"With THIS as purpose IS the body healed. It is NOT used to witness to the dream of separation and disease."

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

"Thus is the body healed by miracles BECAUSE they show the mind MADE sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or EFFECT, of what it made."

"That is why the Bible says "There is no death," and that is why I demonstrated that death does not exist."

I have made a pretty big mistake with ACIM, and maybe you are doing the same. Sorry this is a bit long and rambly, I'm still coming to terms with it....

I always believed that the goal in ACIM was awakening to the awareness of God's presence, which was some kind of a singular state of being. As I read and worked with the Course it at first seemed plausible that every reference to 'what truth is like', or the high-level metaphysics, all described a single absolute state of being/mind.

I felt confused by some of the interpretations of this that other people were expressing because it seemed there was a level of truth deeper or 'more true' than what most other people were understanding. So I felt I needed to go deeper into re-reading it and re-learning what it has to say. So I started reading the urtext. And I actually learned a lot, much of which made me question what the status quo understanding was on many topics. I polished and refined my grasp of what the truth really meant, all still within this idea of 'there is only one kind of awakening', like, either you are totally doing it perfectly or you're kidding yourself.

I even saw how some people who claim to be awake were still falling short of what I believed that should really entail. I always felt a certain faith in Jesus and his example, and never could see anyone matching up to that. Yet I felt that in the Course it does directly speak to the kind of total mastery that he demonstrated. This included the ability to heal all sickness, raise the dead, have total mastery over illusions, be capable of changing form, of appearing as any kind of a body, absolute invulnerability (literally), not dying simply because you choose not to etc. I had Jesus practically flying around the room.

The thing is, all of the metaphysics in ACIM seemed to point to this potential and it made total logical sense to me that we "should" be able to wield total power over all illusions. Just like Jesus. So I had in my mind this kind of very high-level 'goal', which was very lofty, which I thought we were meant to strive to achieve. That was my idea of what it means to be fully awake, and anything short of that was not it. I felt frustrated that some people were saying they were awake and yet were clearly not demonstrating Jesus's level of mastery, and so of course that led to judgement but also confusion. Why was the Course saying one thing and then other things were happening? Why were people not matching up to Jesus's level and how is it possible there (obviously) has been an awakening of some kind in some people and yet they still can't raise the dead? The Course clearly spoke of some extremely high-level truths and implications which nobody seemed to be getting.

Well. As it turns out, the Course actually encompasses several "levels" of metaphysics. I had no idea of this, so I was always lumping everything together as a kind of super-level and then trying to attain that. I had no idea about this until Michael Murray started to bring forward this information about "the levels", or rather, the timing of me stumbling upon his videos and being ready to listen. Basically, there is much more going on than it appears, and without this extra information you'll make the huge mistakes I've made.

In very brief summary... this physical universe is only one of several levels or dimensions of the dream of separation. These dimensions are all states of mind but they also, to our senses, appear to be 'places' which have entire universes of their own. The physical universe is the lowest level. Above this there is a "spiritual universe" which is also the level at which the Holy Spirit resides. You might've heard it referred to also as the astral plane or similar. These levels are btw somewhat referred to in Hinduism and some other religions and you might be more familiar with them if you are "new age". Anyway.. above "level 2" the Holy Spirit's mind, there is a level 3 where our "higher self" resides, and also this is where angels seem to exist, the akashic records, and also this is where "the sonship" is - as separate higher selves. Above this level there is a fourth level which is the level of Christ where the sonship is ONE. Jesus 'the higher self' was the first to transcend the previous level and unify as Christ. Then above this level is Heaven - God.

Ok so... here's what I did totally wrong and this is where my spiritualizing ego got totally screwed up, and this is also probably where you are doing the same. Clearly, because there are levels to the dream beyond the physical, there are effectively different levels of awakening. This also means there are different levels of 'capability' and mastery (someone at level 3 does not have mastery over level 3 because to do that you must be on level 4). Also because of these levels, there are certain "capabilities" that are only possible at certain levels and there are certain 'parts' of the Course that are directly related to certain levels, e.g. the 'real world 'is a very high level thing (and nothing to do with the physical world). This also reveals that the Course itself 'speaks' on many different levels, in other words, in relation to different dimensions of the dream and different universes where the experience is on a whole different level. Truths which apply on one level totally superceded stuff on the levels below, so as we ASSUME that all of this is just ONE BIG LEVEL, or 'the one goal', we get really messed up and confused about what's being asked of us.

Also because of these levels, typically in order to go "up" the levels you need to go in sequence. You can't just jump to the 5th level or just pop into heaven when you're still down at level 1. And pretty much most of us are on level 1, me included. So here's the huge mistake I made.

In assuming there were no levels, and lumping them all together, and in becoming aware of the Christ-level truths in the Course, I created for myself an extremely lofty Christ-level goal, comparable to Jesus. Because I can see the parts of the Course which DO speak of/from this level (all of the course comes from the Christ level but speaks OF or as-if from other levels also), this 'highest truth' level became my concept of "the only level" or "what awakening means".

So I was basically down here on level 1, with my big ego, and trying to BYPASS all the way up to the Christ level in one straight shot. I wanted to embody and encompass ALL of the characteristics of Christ, in a kind of all-or nothing grand-master-of-the-universe power-over-everything ultra-mastery i-can-fly-around-the-room-if-i-like-and-there's-nothing-you-can-do-about-it sort of ideal. Anything short of this was "not good enough". So now I had this hugely lofty "should" or how I am supposed to be, or what I'm supposed to get to, or what I need to realize etc. And this also included this HUGE burden of 'what I am responsible for'... as if I caused the entire universe and everything in it, all by my little ego level-1 self, which is NOT true.

Having this extremely lofty goal of "be Christ", bypassing all of the levels that are REQUIRED to go THROUGH in order to get there, put an ENORMOUS BURDEN on my shoulders. A huge weight of guilt at falling short and not even barely being able to accomplish it. And believe me I tried, really hard. I even attained some small ability to bring about healing through Holy Spirit, some of the time, in small amounts. And I KNEW that the parts of the Course that speak of the Christ-level were true. So this kept me dangling from a thread, chasing after this carrot of perfection and power, but falling way short. All this did was put PRESSURE on me (and my wife) to match up to this enormous responsibility which is far beyond what 'I' (level 1 me) am actually capable of. Yes my Christ self IS capable of such things, but that's way above where I'm at or can even GET TO or ACCESS from where I'm at.

The truth is that we are only really capable of going from level 1 to level 2. The first awakening. Some people bypass this and jump to level 3 but only in extreme rare circumstances. The rest of us can only, and are only really asked to, go from level 1 to level 2, which in Course terms meaning letting go of the persona and shadow and aligning with Holy Spirit's mind and letting go of the *physical* world level. This lets us be in the "spiritual universe", or to move up from there. But we can't just jump to the top, especially not WITH the ego. And that's what we're all trying to do - a huge spiritual bypass in which our ego gets to try to be Christ.

So this is a blow to the ego. Here's little me down in level 1 world believing that I'm oh-so-spiritual, advanced, getting ready to graduate, believing that I'm more spiritual than others, and finding out that I actually am probably on this level BECAUSE I am still on level 1. Hah. Not level 2 or 3 or 4 or 5... level 1. Sucks! lol ... BUT the freedom comes from this realization..... you don't need to try to be Christ. You don't need to even try to be the higher self or to jump up to that level. You ONLY need to get to level 2 - the Holy Spirit's mind. So this somewhat lets you off the hook.

It means that you can drop all of huge expectation that you're putting on yourself to be Christ-like. It means you can stop trying to raise the dead or expect yourself to be able to. I have to tell you, I recently got a 'sty' in my eye and it was sort of infected and stuff, unsightly and uncomfortable, and I really dug DEEP into possible causes and unforgivenesses in attempt to heal it, because I was really convinced I was SUPPOSED to be able to just 'make it go away' with my mind. I did some healing, yes, but the dam fucker did not change. It didn't just disappear. So this was a blow to the spiritual ego, which thought it had to be Jesus-like or that it could. And I had to accept I just cant do that. Fuck it.

But this is really a relief. It's a huge relief to realize that you do not have to "try" to be christ. You do not have to be responsible for stuff that is in "the script" - a script written by and powered by a mind far huger than yours is now. You don't have to try to be this dead-raising master. You don't have to turn water into wine or be some extraordinary guru. You're not capable of that until probably the 5th dimensional awakening. You don't have to blame yourself for all the shit that comes from the unconscious mind that you are not consciously choosing, as if it's all your fault. You don't have to own every single little thing that happens as if, just by it happening, it proves that you SUCK and that you're a total course failure. You don't have to keep beating yourself up for "not doing the course right" ie not matching up to the kind of capabilities that you pretty much CANNOT accomplish until you ARE at the Christ level, which is not going to happen until you've at least gone through 2 or 3 other levels of awakening.

So there's all this huge weight of guilt and expectation that we've all been putting on ourselves because we're all trying to live up to this extraordinary goal of being Christ when, in fact, from this level 1, we can only really be expected to get to level 2. It's true that there is no world and its just a dream and that the Christ mind can create planets... ok... but little me, little you... at level 1, no, there isn't going to be any planets getting made. So that's not something you can be responsible for. We have this hugely inflated spiritual ego (ok, speaking for myself, but I bet you do too) that's trying to claim the "power" of being Christ while still being very limited and incapable.

We have to stop putting level 3/4/5+ realities and responsibilities and powers onto our shoulders as level 1 ego folks and stop expecting ourselves to live up to this hugely lofty standard. WE have to accept that we are NOT at the level of Jesus and probably very few people are going to be. We have to accept that even the best of the best of the ACIM teachers aren't even at that level. Not even the enlightened gurus and yogis necessarily at that level. All we need to do is do our SIMPLE job of forgiveness and development of trust in Holy Spirit and come into his mind and accept his truth and his way of perceiving. The other levels and the potency and power of those other levels will follow on from there naturally as the 'next steps'. But we can't just bypass and jump to those steps. And we have to admit we've been doing this, our spiritualized egos are about to POP, and we can take a big sigh of relief that we're NOT supposed to expect such huge things of ourselves.

This should relieve us of all the guilt, all the sense of failure, all of the exasperation at not getting it, all of the fear and guilt and frustration that we have to accomplish Christ-level capabilities otherwise we're going to die, etc. We have to strip it all back. Let go of the highest goals. Focus on the NEXT step which is just getting to level 2 - Holy Spirit's level, and letting go of the idea that our LEVEL 1 EGO is EVER going to be capable of being at the Christ level, LET ALONE even level 2. And yet it's trying. It's been trying hard this whole time to live up to some kind of universe-creating mega goal. It loves to. Even though it's a total failure at it. So we can at least admit, we don't have to think of ourselves as total failures any more because we were never meant to be level-5 ego's to begin with.

All this comes from the clarity that the Course contains levels, that we're on level 1 trying to get to level 2, and that everything else is irrelevant. Yes at some point we will create planets but not today. First things first. One step at a time. We're getting ahead of ourselves and our expectation and fear of not being able to match up to the high-level truths is, thankfully, not even being asked of us right now.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

The great lie of the world is that we are all separate. Each of our bodies testifies to this. I have my own body, my own feelings, my own mind, my own thoughts, my own beliefs. It seems that you have your own as well, and mine is separate from yours. We don't seem to really share anything. And any changes I make seem not to affect you.

This is what bodies were designed to do. They were meant to be "separation devices", to separate me off from you, to isolate each of us in our own little prisons, keeping us apart. They were made to imply that nothing is shared, what is mine is not yours, I am not like you, we are not the same in any way, I am unique and so are you. We're cut off and different. What I have you lack. What you have I lack. And thus we have no oneness.

But this is utterly completely opposite to the nature of spirit and mind as God created it. It's utterly opposite to your true nature, and mine as well. We're not meant to think of ourselves as separate from each other, sharing nothing, not overlapping, or kept at arm's length. We have to transcend the limits of the body entirely.

The truth is that there is a part of you which is shared by me. And there is a part of me that is shared by you. Kind of like one thing which has two people controlling it simultaneously. Kind of like siamese twins, with two heads and one torso. There is actually some of you in me and vice versa. There are actually aspects of your self which is what I am, and aspects of my own self which is you.

In truth we are joined together as one. In truth we share everything. And this is not in any way the same thing as sharing between two separate people, where they remain separate but there is some kind of transfer between them to bridge the gap. It's a real sharing where I literally am overlapping with where you are located, and vice versa. Where we are literally fused together as one thing, but from two vantage points. One mind, with two focal points.

Because of this, we are actually part of a collective consciousness. And the really big thing is this. Everything that I do or think or feel or choose or believe, affects the entire universe. And everything you do or think or feel or choose or believe, affects the entire universe. If I lift myself up, it must lift you up in some way as well because I am a part of your self. If you lift yourself up, I must be lifted up in some way because part of me is you.

We are NOT isolated, alone, separate, cut-off, imprisoned, separated, orphaned, divorced, abandoned, relegated, split apart or confined. Everything that we each do, affects us both. And even affects the whole sonship beyond us. What that means is that there are no private thoughts. Not simply from the vantage point of there being two separate people who send thought transmissions across the gap between them which they pick up on, but where my mind and your mind are literally welded together such that when I think something YOU think it with me. Part of your thought process is taking place in my mind and vice versa.

Jesus teaches similarly that if I am healed, I am never healed alone. If some kind of healing takes place for me, it is also on behalf of the whole universe, which is the sonship (not spacetime). Jesus also tells us that we are not alone in experiencing the effects of our thoughts. That if I have a thought, both me and you are affected by it. And your thoughts affect me. Not in terms of you sending them over to me across a brick wall but in terms of part of me BEING you and vice versa, SHARING those effects as one, transcendentally of space of time.

Jesus is even telling us that vision transcends all spatial limitations, depends not on any thing physical, can see and experience without regard for distance or seeming remoteness. Simply because you can BE everywhere, in everyone. This is the true nature of mind, that it is not really naturally limited to any one location at a time. Or to any one person at a time.

What this also leads to is a matter of responsibility. Anything that I think affects the whole world. Anything you think affects the whole world. In that sense, and given that these thoughts are never private or isolated from anyone, everyone experiences the effects of our thoughts, and therefore I have to consider that I need to "think responsibly", and without guilt, because my thoughts are actually affecting everyone.

I think on behalf of everyone, just as you do, and just as everyone does. And all our minds are joined. Which means that we're sort of like this one tapestry where each of us seems anchored to the fabric of it in different places, but if I pull upwards I'm pulling you all with me. And if you pull down you're going to drag a lot of others down with you. Unless of course they are pulling up at the same time. This means that we really are all a TEAM. Because we have to now consider that EACH PART of the sonship INFLUENCES THE WHOLE.

You ARE part of a holographic system and since you are the whole of the sonship at the same time as being part of it, your relationship INCLUDES everyone. It affects everyone. Every thought is offered to everyone. Every healing brings peace to everyone. Maybe in ways they might not entirely be aware of but in some way on some level, everyone affects everyone.

This also brings me to the proper understanding of why joined minds produce the healing of sickness in others. A part of your mind is actually my mind. And my mind is part of your mind. We are NOT separated off with entirely isolated minds. Our minds overlap and are shared. I actually manipulate part of your mind, so to speak, and you manipulate part of mine. Our minds are actually one and shared. Mutual minds. Like two people driving the same bus.

So let's say you believe in your part of the mind that you are sick, which is really an attempt to believe the whole sonship is sick. And then let's say that normally this belief would attempt to weaken me and others. But then let's say that I'm in a particularly loving space in my mind which is more powerful than your assertion of weakness.

If I choose to believe that there is nothing wrong with you, while you are believing there is something wrong with you, I override your belief. The part of your mind which is shared with me, which is my mind, changes your belief FOR you. Part of your mind is in me. If I change my mind, I am literally changing a part of your mind. And that actually influences what you might think of as the rest of your own mind.

As Jesus says, when you do not believe the falsehoods that your brother believes about himself, you weaken his own belief in being faulty. And so you weaken his sickness. If your mind, which is part of his, and his as part of yours, asserts strongly that your brother and you are not sick, then you are actually taking a part of HIS mind (as yours) and are causing it to not believe in sickness. And so he cannot get "his" mind to project sickness onto his body because YOU, as part of his mind, are not allowing it.

This is why Jesus says that you are your brother's keeper. This is why he says you should not allow your brother to be sick. This is why you are in a sense responsible for everyone, because your contribution to their experience is part of the fact that your minds are shared.

It's not simply that you are joining minds, because God actually joined all minds together in the creation. But moving away from the belief in being separate/isolated and returning to an awareness that your minds ARE joined, naturally, lets you tap into the ability to influence the minds of others more consciously. And naturally this openness to sharing is rooted in love, so can only be used for good.

So instead of seeing ourselves as separate people, living separate lives in separate bodies, as if everything we think and do is utterly isolated and affects no-one else, we need to really think of ourselves as part of a combined mind-mesh, part of a team, part of a collective hive mind, and there isn't anything we can think without it being shared by everyone in that collective. And any effects which those thoughts might produce are going to be shared by everyone.

This is also of course the foundation for shared interests. Because if mind is really yours AND your brother's, then what you use it for is being used on his behalf as well as your own. As per the golden rule, whatever applies to him applies to you equally. This is also why Jesus says that forgiveness is not real unless it brings a healing to both your brother and yourself. Your healing IS HIS healing. When you heal, HE ALSO is healed along with you in a very direct way - because he is part of your self.

And further, this also tells us that forgiveness is not just a gift of healing you give to yourself, it is also something that extends and is given to everyone. If you are healed you become an instrument of healing. If you are the light you shed light into other's minds and enlighten them. If you are filled with the Holy Spirit you can fill others with the Holy Spirit. If you are whole you can make others whole. And atonement is a lesson in sharing, not a lesson in isolated enlightenment.

When you forgive, you actually do heal both yourself and the mind of your brother. When you forgive and undo your belief in someone being sick, you do actually in fact undo some of their belief in being sick. This is sort of tied into the idea of "holding them in the light", not through some wishful thinking that the light might rub off on them but much moreso the fact that since you ARE them, you being the light "forces" them to be the light also.

Your mind influences other people! Your mind is not JUST your mind. It is yours AND it belongs to others. You are thinking on behalf of everyone. Your whole resurrection is for the benefit of the entire sonship. This is why Jesus's resurrection reconnected the ENTIRE sonship to God, and why in his awakening YOU woke up in some way to some degree as well. How could the whole world not be affected by such an event? Jesus did in fact "save you" from the belief in sin, through his own atonement.

I am you and you are me and we are one and everyone is us and we are all the collective sonship family of God. If I choose the light, you're coming with me.

"And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch, or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you. Perhaps you will not recognize them all, nor realize how great your offering to all the world, when you let healing come to you. But you are never healed alone. And legions upon legions will receive the gift which you receive when you are healed."

"Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. "

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself."

"Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him Judge what the response should be. So is he healed, and in his healing is his pupil healed with him. The sole responsibility of God's teacher is to accept the Atonement for himself. Atonement means correction, or the undoing of errors. When this has been accomplished, the teacher of God becomes a miracle worker by definition."

"Healing is an act of thought by which two minds perceive their oneness, and become glad. This gladness calls to every part of the Sonship to rejoice with them, and let God Himself go out into them and through them."

"Two minds with one intent become so strong that what they will becomes the Will of God. For minds can only join in truth."

"When two minds join as one, and share one idea equally, the first link in the awareness of the Sonship as one has been made."

"Whoever says, "There IS no gap between my mind and yours," has kept GOD's promise, NOT his tiny oath to be forever faithful unto death. And by his healing IS his brother healed. Let THIS be your agreement with each one; that you be one with him and NOT apart."

"Do not accept your brother's variable perception of himself, for his split mind is yours, and you will not accept YOUR healing without his. For you share the real world as you share Heaven, and his healing IS yours. To love yourself is to HEAL yourself, and you cannot perceive part of you as sick and achieve your OWN goal. Brother, we heal together as we live together, and love together."

"Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN. To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember."

"You will forsake yourselves and your God if you forsake any of YOUR brothers. You are more than your brother's keeper." "Concern yourselves not with the EXTENSION of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do NOT understand. Nor do you DO them. It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that demonstrates you did NOT do them. Why should you worry how the miracle extends to all the Sonship, when you do not understand the miracle itself?"

Lesson 54: ""I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts." ... I am alone in nothing. Everything I think or say or do touches all the universe. A Son of God cannot think or speak or act in vain. He cannot be alone in anything. It is therefore in my power to change every mind along with mine, for mine is the power of God."

Everything that we consider to be a sin, is nothing more than being mistaken. Being mistaken means you are making an error in judgement. You've come to a false conclusion. It means you are incorrect. You have faulty reasoning. You are not recognizing what is true.

Sin is also the idea of insanity, and insanity really is nothing more than confusion about what is true and real. Believing that something is true which is not, is simply a state of being mistaken. You have simply made an error, and now you are confused.

While you are in the confusion, believing that your false truth is true, you ARE mistaken, but you do not recognize that you are mistaken. You believe that you have actually sinned, pulled off the impossible, and accomplished something that can never happen in reality.

To believe this IS, nevertheless, being very mistaken. Just as denial hides the truth from you. Just as framing all acts as sins is a failure to recognize they are JUST mistakes. God knows that his children as simply mistaken, and can never be sinners, and all they need is to recognize their error and accept the truth.

In fact let's put it this way. You should reframe EVERY sin, as nothing more than being mistaken. Every single thing which you consider sinful, evil, wrong, bad, negative, etc should be recognized for what it IS and not for what you think it is.

If someone is trying to attack another, they are simply mistaken. They are mistaken about who they are. They are mistaken in believing the other person is not one with them. They are mistaken for believing they are guilty, and they are mistaken in believing that projecting that guilt onto someone else is going to make it leave their mind. Even if they go through with this, they are still simply making a sequence of mistakes.

Even serious attack such as murder is a state of being mistaken. The person is obviously insane, which means they are confused and do not recognize what is true. They are very much mistaken about what the truth is. They believe that they are justified in the attack, when in fact they aren't, and so they are mistaken. They believe that the death of the other will allow them to gain something, which isn't true, and so they are mistaken. And by finding the other person to be deserving of death, is a totally mistaken notion, since no-one deserves death.

No matter how you look at it, if you look at the big picture and recognize what is true - the immortal innocence and perfection of all beings, it becomes very clear that we can simply be MISTAKEN, but we cannot sin. All evil acts are mistakes. All scapegoating is a mistake. All belief in your own unworthiness is a mistake. Every abuse, torture, rape, killing, destruction, is all to do with people being very mistaken. Even the causation of horrible events is a mis-creation, a mistaken choice in what to cause.

No one in their right mind is mistaken. Being sane means recognizing reality and knowing what is true. If you know what is really true, you are not mistaken about what is true. If you are in touch with reality, you are not mistaken about what is possible. No one in their right mind would even try to sin or attack anyone, because they recognize that they would have to be VERY mistaken to believe it could a) be accomplished and b) be justified.

If you feel guilty, you are simply incorrect about being guilty. You cannot be guilty in God's eyes, because He created you to be innocent forever. So your belief that you are guilty is an error. You are incorrect. You are confused about what is true. You might be insisting that you are RIGHT, but it's not going to make you HAPPY, because being right about something which is false is a state of the denial of happiness.

Forgiveness, in the purest sense, is nothing more than recognizing what is true. It's a state of NOT being mistaken. It's a state of recognition, sanity, and having the whole story. It lacks no information and is not deceived. It simply looks and notices that everything ego or evil is simply false, impossible, untrue, unreal, has no consequences, and does not prove anything. It also recognizes that to believe in such things as possible would be a mistake.

It's kind of like, a question of whether or not you have the facts. If you have all the facts, you are in touch with reality. You know what the whole picture is. But if some facts (information) are missing, you probably are going to start drawing some false conclusions. And now you are entering into illusions, into temptation and deception, because something now appears to be something it isn't.

So let's put it this way. Right now this instant, there is no sin anywhere. There is no evil anywhere. All there is, is a bunch of people who are, temporarily, very mistaken. That is all. They're not evil. They're not sinners. They're just confused. They are out of touch with who they are. They don't recognize their brothers. They believe things are true which aren't. They are just temporarily insane. And insanity is nothing but being mistaken.

Mistakes can always be corrected. They are just temporary errors that you are making. Kind of an "oops". You concluded something which was incorrect. You decided that something means something that it doesn't. You reasoned with faults and ended up confused. You are perhaps unwilling to accept the truth and are in denial of it, which is just a desire to stay mistaken, due to not recognizing that you are.

Those who are insane therefore don't recognize they are simply mistaken, and believe their beliefs are completely true. Those who are in denial do not recognize that they are in denial, they believe they are fully aware of everything and are accepting all of the truth. They aren't, and so they are mistaken. But they believe they are not mistaken.

This then ends up being the key to the turning point in the mind. It's a matter of having to have that "little willingness", to be open to the possibility, that what you believe MIGHT simply be a mistake that you've made. Not like having to admit to being in sin, or that you really are guilty, but just that you are somehow "technically" incorrect. This doesn't have to entail shame or guilt or other rebounds related to being "wrong". It's just a simple fact.

If, while you are in the midst of believing you are completely right, and are not mistaken, and are not recognizing why you are mistaken, you become at least a little willing to consider with some humility that you MIGHT not be "correct", then you start to open up to CORRECTION. You have to be able to get some larger truth into your mind. You need a miracle to shine in the mind and remind you of what is true. To correct your level confusion. Being CORRECT has nothing to do with being RIGHTEOUS.

Correction, which is provided by the Holy Spirit and the truth he represents, is simple the radiant fact of "the miracle", the truth, reflecting the truth of God. It acts as a light of sanity, correctness, accuracy, truth, recognition and reason. You need correction, having made ERRORS, so that you will become "corrected". When you are corrected, you are sane. When you are corrected, you are happy.

So really it all boils down to a simple matter of whether you are correct or whether you are mistaken. Sin never really enters into it, nor does guilt or fear. Those are all the seeming side effects of being mistaken, coupled with the rejection of correction. The rejection of forgiveness. Forgiveness is really just a matter of diffusing the drama of "sin guilt and punishment" and looking at the facts. Looking with sight, with reason, at what things ACTUALLY are. Recognizing that ALL you are right now is in a mistaken state, you've made an error somewhere along the lines, and now all you need is to correct it.

"CORRECTION of the error brings release."

"The term "right-mindedness" is properly used as the correction for wrong- mindedness, and applies to the state of mind which induces accurate perception."

ALL sin must be re-framed as nothing more than being mistaken. Every person you hate, is just mistaken. And you are just mistaken for hating them. Anyone who ever hurt you, was simply mistaken for hurting you, because they made an error. And any hurt you experienced was simply you being mistaken, believing you can be hurt at all, given you are immortal. So now you, and the other person, are just mutually mistaken. And that is all.

And what that tells you is that if someone's attack upon you was merely a consequence of them being MISTAKEN about yourself and themselves, they DID NOT REALLY MEAN IT. They were NOT in their right mind when they expressed this action, based on a mistaken state of mind. They did not realize what they were doing. They THOUGHT they were right and correct and true, but they were mistaken. They were CONFUSED. And they attacked you BY MISTAKE. Since what they did was out of a state of mind of being mistaken and in error, an error which they THEMSELVES did not even realize they were making, you cannot hold it against them.

To forgive someone, therefore, for sin or abuse or attack or harm of any kind, for any kind of upset or broken relating or outright onslaught, is merely to RECOGNIZE that they are NOT in their right mind, they ARE very mistaken. And if you buy into it, into the belief that they are TOTALLY sane in all their decisions and are acting against you ON PURPOSE knowing exactly what they are doing, deliberately, YOU are very mistaken as well. There's just got all these people making mistakes all over the place, NOT sinning, NOT being truly guilty.

The world is just a world of insanity. A mad world, within a mad idea. Even the tiny mad idea that you can do the impossible, was simply a mistaken conclusion. It was an effort to assert something that can NEVER be true. It was an attempt to claim that God can be attacked or opposed. That is not possible. Anyone who believes in that is SIMPLY MISTAKEN. And any belief in sin or separation or bodies or spacetime is SIMPLY a mistaken belief. These things are all false, untrue and impossible.

It utterly boils down to nothing more than a question of accuracy. Are you correct, or are you mistaken? Are you really in touch with what is true, or are you confused and mistaken? Are your beliefs lined up with God's will and truth, or have you invented some MISTAKEN truth which contracts the truth and is therefore mistaken? Do you recognize you are mistaken and are you willing to accept correction?

When Jesus says (biblically) "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do", this encapsulates the whole thing. If you were to recognize what people are doing, or what their state of mind is being driven by, you'd recognize they simply DO NOT KNOW what they are doing. They are MISTAKEN, in a mistaken state of mind, a state of insanity. They aren't even aware of what they're doing. They think they are doing something else. And if they do not love you they don't even recognize you.

By recognizing that all "sinful behavior" is simply by confused, temporarily mentally ill people acting out from states of mistakenness, not realizing what they are doing, not really knowing why they are doing it, how can you accuse them or hold it against them? All they're doing is making a mistake and being in error, doing something by mistake, believing it was something else, not REALLY intending to. No-one REALLY wants to hurt anyone. No one REALLY in a right-minded sane state WANTS to induce suffering.

Let's say that simply, when someone's mind goes into a state of confusion, they lose touch with reality. How they act or express themselves then is going to be coming from a kind of unconsciousness, a lack of awareness, not really knowing what they are doing. They are going to act in error. They BELIEVE they know what is true, but they don't. And everyone simply acts on what they believe is true. It's not possible to do otherwise. So now you've got people seeming to exhibit insane evil behavior, justifying it, but who are only acting WITHIN the confines of their thought system - within the confines of their truth.

When their truth is not true, when they are mistaken and confused, they are LOST. And when they are lost they are out of touch with themselves and with others. And all their actions now become ACCIDENTAL. They keep making mistakes. They keep justifying things based on mistakes. They keep being motivated by mistakes. Compelled by mistakes. Urged into certain reactions based on mistakes. Because they are not awake. And the whole time they don't even know they are doing this because their conscious mind is disconnected from reality and everything they do they believe is totally justified.

There is no sin. There is only a temporary error. And all errors can be corrected. And making a mistake does not call for PUNISHMENT of any kind. If someone is taking a math test and makes a mis-calculation and comes up with a confused result, which they think is accurate, and which they will defend, they hardly deserve to be punished, hit, abused, damaged or destroyed. Because those are not the things that the person NEEDS, and those things are NOT CORRECTION. It does not provide them with the CORRECT ANSWER in any way.

PUNISHMENT DOES NOT CORRECT MISTAKES. THOSE WHO PUNISH ARE MAKING MISTAKES.

In fact, punishment is itself a mistake. It's based on a false perception that the error was a SIN, and not just a mistake, and that a person can undo their temporary insanity by experiencing pain and suffering, to "motivate" them towards the truth. This is utterly ridiculous. All that punishment does is cover up the mistake, turn it into a sin, solidify it, lock it in, and add to the mental illness in the mind by adding more confusion-inducing pain and suffering. It does not work. All it does is lead to even more resentment and mistaken conclusions later.

If someone has made an error on their math test, what it really calls for is proper correction of the mistake. The person needs to be SHOWN, by example, what the CORRECT truth is, and why it is true. The MISTAKE needs to be identified and pointed out, not as a sin, but simply to bring awareness and recognition. Then the student recognizes WHY it was a mistake, because the true truth makes more sense, and automatically justifies alignment with it because it is OBVIOUS. The student than "takes on" the greater truth and receives it and is now corrected, such that in future they will not be mistaken again. They have become the truth. This is the true correction of errors without punishment ever entering into it.

A belief in sin calls for punishment and death. A belief that a mistake is NOT merely a harmless correctable mistake, is a belief that it deserves to be punished. Evaluating that all mistakes CAN'T be corrected, due to severity or consequences, is still a further mistake, which justifies punishment. Oops sorry, your mistake was TOO BIG, so it's overflowed into sin territory, so now we're going to attack you and take something from you so that you suffer, to "atone for it". Punishment then becomes atonement.

Yet even murder is JUST A MISTAKE, and through miracles all the consequences of that wrong decision can be undone by the holy spirit. "He will correct all the consequences of my wrong (mistaken) decision IF I will let Him."

Real atonement, the undoing of error, which is forgiving, and which always recognizing that we're all JUST mistaken, not sinners, is a gentle correction, a loving correction, a harmless correction, which merely makes you aware of what the truth really is and shines a light so that you can see. And then in that light the mistake is recognized for what it is, its underpinnings are exposed, the steps are retraced, and it is undone at its source. Now is the mind corrected and correct, accurate and truthful. And now forgiveness has brought a healing and life instead of death.

There's a technique you can try, to help with removing sickness. I call it cancelling. Sometimes Holy Spirit advises me to do this.Basically, you attempt to focus on the NON-EXISTENCE of the symptom or problem. To recognize it as nothing. Or more importantly, that it is already gone. You affirm in various ways that it is not there. That it is gone. That it never did exist. You need to recognize it is NOTHING AT ALL.

"What is understood as nothing must disappear." - Jesus

There is a catch to this though. If you focus on the problem itself or the physical symptom, this lends it some reality. And this actually is a way that your mind KEEPS it and maintains it.

"Whenever you attempt to reach a goal in which the body's betterment is cast as major beneficiary, you try to bring about your death."

So as you say something like "This pain isn't there", you are in fact making the pain real by your belief that you are addressing a pain. And that means you're believing the body is REAL and are trying to "fix it", which actually attacks it. It then seems very difficult, and sometimes quite subtle, to figure out how to focus on it not being there, without implying that it is.

So the question is, how do you work to recognize that something does not exist, without giving it any existence? It seems like a catch 22.

Ideally what you want to do is simply focus on what you want things to be like, and NOT on what you want them to not be like. Think of this is a choice. It's an attempt to choose a new reality. To choose a new condition. You want to focus solely on what you want the body or whatever to be like, and emphasis and energize that.

"Miracles are energizing."

"Mind makes this decision as it makes all decisions responsible for the condition of the body."

I've found it's also very useful to place the symptom in the PAST. Because your mind already strongly believes that when something is GONE, it is not here NOW, because it is in the past. Placing it in the past removes it from the present. So by talking about the symptom on the PAST tense, this helps you to not lend it much reality.

This is why the focus should be on the fact that the symptom is ALREADY GONE, is not here now, has passed, has ALREADY been healed, and has been replaced by health. Since it's in the past, you are not working on it NOW, you are simply focus on what is here now. This helps your mind to visualize and focus on the CURRENT condition that you want to acknowledge as being healthy and healed.

This is a form of PRAYER. In prayer, you attempt to visualize, feel and experience what it is what you WANT. Not what you don't want. You give mental attention, energy and belief to what you NOW CHOOSE as your new reality. If you focus on what you don't want with efforts too attack it to make it go away, you will only increase it and keep it. As in the common 'new age' concept that "what you resist persists" or "what you fear comes to you".

For example to make it rain, you might visualize a heavy storm cloud, hear the rain falling, see the splashes in your mind, etc. Or to make it stop raining, you might visualize the ABSENCE of a storm, which has been REPLACED BY what you DO want, such as a blue sky, the sun shining, feeling the warmth of the sun, hearing the birds singing again etc.

This prayer is a way of "asking for" what you WANT. And you always are asking for what you WANT, even when you focus on what you think you don't want. So you have to be careful NOT to target or dwell on what you DON'T want. You have to experience it as having been REPLACED in your mind. Just as atonement REPLACES sin with love and undoes it. Just as reality replaces illusions. And just as forgiveness replaces attack.

If you think of the sickness as being simply a mistaken choice, then the question arises, how do you undo the sickness? Do you undo the sickness by focusing on the sickness? If you do, you are not really making a new choice, you are dwelling on the old choice. This doesn't allow it to go. And you'll think that you NEED to focus on it because it's a real problem, and this will compel you to try to force it to leave, which WILL NOT WORK. If you think about it, shifting to a NEW choice, should really entail completely IGNORING what you chose before.

Believe me, I've tried the approach of trying to "intensely go up against" sickness to try to force it to leave, and it devolves into nothing but anger and aggression and ridiculous attempts to get rid of something that you're making real. It simply is a total fail and is unmiraculous. You can't make something "go away", you can only RE-CHOOSE a NEW CHOICE.

"I made the decision myself. I want to choose otherwise"

This means that to "heal a sickness" isn't so much to do with zapping a real sickness with healing vibes, but rather to simply shift all your attention to what you DO WANT. Visualizing how the body is, now that the sickness is gone. You want to shift all your attention to the here-and-now renewed state, literally to the extent that you don't even really focus on the state that you used to be in.

"Holy Spirit does not attack the ego." It's more a matter of TUNIGN OUT of the ego (form, separation, suffering), and tuning INTO the Holy Spirit, light, wholeness, love.

It may seem like this wouldn't work, because you're not even really doing anything "to" the sickness. You aren't even sending love to it or trying to shine it away. Instead you're "forgetting" it and "remembering health". If it was your mistaken choice and focus that made the sickness in the first place, the way to correct it is to choose and focus on something else. This is similar to the idea of getting out of the desert or leaving hell. You can't fix it by dwelling on it - you need to move to a different territory.

In China, there is a hospital where they don't use any medicine. All they use is basically this technique, in which they focus on affirming and FEELING the state you would be in when the sickness is GONE. This isn't a way to attack the sickness at all. It's simply a NEW CHOICE, to tune INTO the body being in a state of healthy, in which the OLD choice is in the past. And in this new state you should be experiencing gratitude and thanks and appreciation that you are IN HEALTH.

By focusing on this idea that "it's already gone", which really is a focus on "what's is here now" minus any energy or attention given to what was removed, you celebrate being healthy as if there is no ill health at all. And when they do this in that hospital with a few people doing it at once, cancerous tumors shrink in a matter of minutes. And they can watch this happening on an ultrasound and see it simply disappearing.

Holy Spirit can also help with this and its always worth inviting His Healing Help. In fact your willingness to move from making illusions real, to focusing on the truth, IS an invitation too Him. Ask him to help you to "shift" into a truer perception, where your focus is on health and wholeness and light, rather than on the making real of illusions that you find in false perception. So really this "tool" is an attempt to heal the MIND, of its false focus on making bodies real, and shifting to a more care-free state where the body isn't that important.

It's actually when your mind stops AT the body, that it induces illness. And then the illness seems to demand your attention and distract you with pain and symptoms. And now it seems hard NOT to focus on the body. But it is really the focusing on the body that MADE it ill in the first place. Jesus refers to this as "arresting the extension of the mind", whereby if you do not let the mind go out PAST the body and focus on joining with your brother's mind, and it gets hung up or blinded by physical form, this INDUCES illness.

"Learning must lead beyond the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind in it. This can be accomplished only if the mind extends to other minds, and does not arrest itself in its extension. This arrest is the cause of all illness, because only extension is the mind's function."

So he's telling you that if your mind doesn't go out and JOIN with others, if it doesn't overlook form, and if it starts to get hung up on form itself, then it stops going out all the way, stops extending all the way, starts to dip down and make bodies real, this turns the body into a separation device, it is a form of attack and separation, and this induces all physical illness.

The antidote therefore is to rejoin and re-extend and move BEYOND the body. And this means not focusing ON the body or making it real. So in "canceling" a symptom, the aim is to NOT give the symptom any reality. To NOT focus on it. To try to move past it to a more expanded, more healed perspective of mind, in which you have no NEED to focus on the body because it's not sick, as a result or side effect of being more open and connected spiritually.

You really want to be moving from false perception to trust perception, which means moving from body focus to ignoring the body. Placing the body's sickness in the past helps you to move your focus from it now, so that you focus on the absence of what you were dwelling on. Even if you still have some body focus while you do this, you at least have reduced the intensity of making the symptoms real.

The more you cancel this, the more you affirm in various statements and ways that "it is gone already", "it is healed already", "I am healthy and whole now", the more it should disappear.

I've found that some things which maybe in normal terms should've become a more developed problem, or lasted longer, are halted in their tracks, shortened, and sometimes completely reversed by doing this.

It also ties into what I've been focusing on lately regarding the power of your mind to choose, your free will, being totally responsible for what you cause to happen etc, the secret of salvation. You need to recognize that you chose the symptom and put it there, so you can UNDO IT, by the use of miraculous thinking.

"Miracles reflect the statement - I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

Getting yourself OUT OF what you got yourself INTO, is a shift of focus, attention and belief, away from dwelling on the effects of what you MADE, and moving towards a future in which you no longer are choosing that. See yourself free from what you do not want, by NOT focusing on what you do not want, and ONLY focusing on what you do want.

This somewhat goes back to the 'new age' concept that "what you focus on increases."

As you experiment with this and try it out, and more than once, you'll start to notice the ways you imply or focus on the problem, rather than on a state in which there is no problem. You'll become more refined in your affirmations of health, and less likely to give any energy to the sickness. It is not healed by "healing it", it is healed by putting your attention back on the truth. Nothing can be forgiven or undone by making it real. It was making it real that made it show up in the first place.

Everything in the world is an illusion. Everything. And this includes the bodies which are seemingly healthy, the bodies which are seemingly sick, and the bodies that seem dead. This also means that trees which have fresh green leaves are as much an illusion as trees whose leaves have fallen and are decaying. Images of a lovely sunset are just as much an illusion as stormy skies. Animals leaping around happily is just as much illusion as carcasses on the side of the road.

In the ego world, there are symbols, because it is a dream. And sometimes these symbols seem to imply that some parts of the world are different to others, or mean something that other parts do not mean. So we are used to the idea that a dead body is the idea of death. But bodies that are walking around are also not really alive either. We can think that when the leaves are falling from the trees, it's death happening, but perhaps we didn't realize when the leaves were on the trees that it was still a dream of death.

So in this world, there is deception all over the place. Things appear to be something they are not. The symbols that look like life only seem to be life, while the ones that look like death are only different in their forms. And it is us who have given meaning to them and decided "this one means death and that one means life". All of the forms, in whatever condition they are, are forms of death. As Jesus tells us:

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. *****In any state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it seems like life; at worst, like death.***** Yet both are judgments on ****what is not life****, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven (e.g. on Earth), only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true. "

So because illusions are forms (objects, shapes, materials, bodies, planets etc), their content is not true. They are illusions of life and death. An illusion of life is not really life. Life actually means ETERNAL LIFE, that which can never perish, that which is not born and does not grow and does not die and has no sickness or transformation. Life means that which never changes because it is permanent. Only in Heaven's reality is there eternal life, and that is the only REAL life there is. The rest of what we call life, the "life forms" of this world, are an illusion of life AT BEST.

"Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible."

Here Jesus is contrasting vertically the two states or levels. In Heaven all things live and cannot die. In illusions, all things die and cannot really live. The world we see is an illusion of a world that God did not create.

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

So having been in this world a long time, we are likely very used to the deception that some things in the world are more alive than others. Some people seem to have more health than others. Some bodies seem more dead than others. This is an illusion. All bodies are illusions, and their condition or state does not make them more or less real. One is not really more or less dead than another. Even a dead body in the ground is, in terms of miracle mindedness, no more dead than a living body. This is why for a miracle worker "dead-seeming" bodies can be converted or resurrected into living-seeming bodies as a kind of "translation of form".

"EVERYTHING is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the Mind. The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

Again Jesus is telling us life is to do with mind and heaven, not to do with bodies. And it's reinforced by this idea.

""And the last to be overcome will be death." Of course! ***Without the idea of death there is no world.*** All dreams will end with this one. This is salvation's final goal; the end of all illusions. And in death are all illusions born. What can be born of death and still have life? But what is born of God and still can die? "

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."

So every illusion, every part of the dream, all objects, all bodies, in all states and configurations, are all made of illusions, and ALL illusions are made of death. We have to therefore realize that death does not mean HORIZONTAL death, as in, at the end of the road of time for a given object. Or a state that follows on after another. Rather, the ENTIRE world we made, the universe, is all a dream of death. This whole planet is an idea of death.

VERTICALLY, anything on this level physically is an attempt to remove ourselves away from where eternal life is, away from Heaven. To move down a level. To drop into illusions, to sink into a dream world. And that world is based entirely on the idea that reality, Heaven, is not real. It's the idea of separation or opposition to Eternal Life, that you are exiled and outside of the Kingdom where eternal life is. And so it's the idea of NOT being alive. It's an idea of the opposite to life and permanence. And everything in it, no matter its form or appearance, is an illusion of death or partial life at best.

Even the most vibrant bunch of flowers is actually an illusion of not life. Even a newborn baby, of any species, is not a "new life" but rather a new form of death. Even as the season of spring seems to give life to new fresh growth, it is only later to transition into the season of "dying" and decay simply because both the birthing and dying are built into the system. Anything made of illusions has the mark of death upon it, meaning it already is formed from ideas of death and separation at the moment it is made. Every particle of matter is a separation idea and therefore an idea of opposition or attack upon God.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. ****Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it.*** Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust ****even as you made it.****"

So even at the instant that illusory things are first formed, they are formed FROM the idea of death and separation and limitation. They have it built in. If they are born at all, death is guaranteed and "happening" already. Because all forms are lacking in some way, they are all lacking what the other forms seem to have, and all of them are inherently limited and limiting. None of them are whole, none are complete, and not have eternal life. And every single body is an idea of being little and lacking and less than everywhere.

"This aching world (Earth) has not the power to touch the living world (Heaven) at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world."

So this world is not the living world. The Kingdom of God is the living world, because life means permanent life, not some temporary mockery of life. It is insane to think that real life is a matter of existing a little while and then dying at a bodily level. Life perpetuates and sustains and continues forever and cannot be destroyed. God creates ONLY the eternal.

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

"What God creates is eternal."

A big part of awakening then must entail the re-framing or re-evaluating of everything you see here. We need to realize the dream entails a hierarchy of illusions, and this hierarchy is entirely fictional. And everything it suggest through different FORMS is a deception and a temptation to believe something that isn't true.

Big bodies, small bodies, healthy bodies, dead bodies, are all the same illusion. None of them are more real than another. None of them are really closer to God. Big sickness, small sickness, tiny headache, massive tumor, none of them are any different. The only reason you would believe they are different, or more or less serious, is by looking to the appearance of their form and taking it as evidence or MEANING as to what the thing is. Every single illusion is deceptive. Every appearance is a lie.

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. ***They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see.*** ***They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful.*** Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

When we reach a state of not being deceived by ANY appearance, we are in miracle mindedness. Which is right mindedness. Here the hierarchy of illusions is completely flattened and meaningless. There is no difference between a form in one configuration or another. We are not deceived by physical form, shape or appearance. One type of appearance does not trigger worse reactions than another, or any reactions, nor means something different to the rest. A "dead" appearing body is not regarded as any more dead than a living one. As such raising the dead is seen as NO MORE DIFFICULT than curing a headache, because all illusions are the same and you are not deceived by them. You can raise the dead as easily as heal an upset feeling.

"You who are dedicated to the incorruptible have been given through your acceptance, the power to release from corruption. What better way to teach the first and fundamental principle in a course on miracles than by showing you the one that seems to be the hardest can be accomplished first?"

When you are not deceived by illusions of life and death, forms of sickness, appearances of severity, you cannot be afraid, you can only be miraculous. Miracle mindedness transcends the world of illusions because The Miracle IS the state of Christ Vision which overlooks all forms. There is, from that position, nothing that your holiness cannot do. And it is from this state that you are a miracle worker. Here you are using miracles as demonstrations to PROVE that what appears to be death is not death, and you are under no laws but God's, where miracles break all the illusory laws of the world of appearances.

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

"Miracles reflect the laws of eternity, not of time."

"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."

In this world, sin is an EVENT. In fact, it is anything that seems to HAPPEN. Any physical change, any transformation of materials, any movement, any action, anything bodies of any kind do, any chemical interactions of particles, it is sin.

"The world of bodies is the world of sin."

Sin is also insanity.

"Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where truth should be, and where it really is. Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

The whole world, all of spacetime, anything the body can see, is a model of sin and punishment for sin. "Everything the body sees is a form of error."

"And FROM this error does the world of sin and sacrifice arise. This world is an attempt to prove your innocence, while cherishing attack."

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws that seem to govern it are the laws of death."

The physical world, matter, is also referred to in the course as a granite block of sin. The illusion of physicality, rooted in the idea of PHYSICAL SIN. This is why sin requires a BODY, because only bodies can PHYSICALLY SIN.

"Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. No-one who looks on it without the help of reason, would try to pass it. ****The body's eyes behold it as solid granite****, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. Yet reason sees through it (x-ray christ vision) easily, BECAUSE it is an error."

"And ***they were made to look on error, and not see past it***. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. To this distorted form of vision, the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

So basically, the entire physical universe is formed on the idea of sin. Everything that seems to transpire is sin. Breathing, eating, sleeping, working, laughing, milking a cow, sucking a milkshake, it's all sin. Even just the appearance of an illusion or a physical world AT ALL is sin.

It's sin in that sin is the idea of "something happening" or "something existing which doesn't", or "the impossible seeming possible", that "affects" something else seemingly against its will. Like a collision of two forces. And this is fundamental to the laws of physics.

When one thing "hits" another, it is the idea of sin taking place, that there can be a conflict, a war, a collision of interests, in which one thing is impacted seeming from outside of its own will.

And when sin occurs on this level, in this realm of spacetime, physical matter seems to change, reacting with effects and consequences. Materials change, properties change, objects change their locations, atoms rearrange, forces and counter-forces interact, and the whole picture shifts and changes and suffers and dies.

If anything CAN be changed, it CANNOT be real, because nothing real can be threatened. So that means that any change that occurs in anything, is artificial evidence that SIN IS HAPPENING TO IT. It is an illusion of sin, and not reality, but in THIS world it appears to "really happen".

This is why in this world, when you attack something, and it produces a "change" in any way, the change now TESTIFIES that "sin has occurred." If something happens to something else, and it is modified, and now it is different, and it seems to DEMONSTRATE that it is different, and maintains its "new state" for anyone to point a finger at and say, "look there, SOMETHING HAPPENED TO IT" .... this changed state is a PROOF OF SIN.

It then does not matter how you frame it. If the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE is still there to look at, to point out, to touch and see and evaluate, then it PROVES that SIN DID TAKE PLACE. You can't have effects without causes. This is how the ego "locks in" the consequences of sin, and uses physical evidence to PROVE that sin has occurred. If you can measure it, it's a sin.

This means that if you are playing in the realm of illusions, of physicality, you are automatically dabbling in sin. Because the WHOLE WORLD is founded on the idea of sin.

"The body is the idea of sin made flesh"

So let's say that someone seems to attack your body and this produces a CHANGE in the body. Maybe some kind of wound is inflicted, some kind of damage. The body is bleeding and there is a hole. Well, this physical appearance PROVES beyond a shadow of a doubt to anyone looking at it and thinking it real, that SIN HAPPENED. It testifies to it. You can't deny if, if you think it's reality.

You cannot claim that sin did not happen IF THE RESULTS ARE STILL THERE. If I can point a finger at it and say, well, it doesn't matter WHAT you claim, the EVIDENCE is still there, the body IS STILL WOUNDED, then it STILL SHOWS that SIN HAPPENED. There is no getting around this. Changing your perception to recognize that "there is no sin" also isn't the same thing as REVERSING THE CONSEQUENCES.

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

When attack is taking place, or more to the point, when a person REFUSES TO HEAL the effects of the sin, to reverse the physical symptoms of sickness, or to REMOVE the PROOF OF SIN from the body, then there is still ACCUSATION OF SIN HAPPENING. Because if the body is STILL damaged, the UNDENIABLE PROOF is still sitting right there staring you in the face. A damaged body is STILL testifying that NO MATTER what the state of mind is, or how forgiving you think you are, SIN STILL HAPPENED. I can look at it, I can see it, I can touch it, sin has NOT been undone. I can't claim to be holy while showing you PROOF THAT YOU SINNED!!

"For no-one in whom true forgiveness reigns CAN suffer. ***He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes.*** And thus he MUST have overlooked it, and removed it from his own. Forgiveness CANNOT be for one, and not the other. Who forgives IS healed. And in his (mental AND physical) healing lies the PROOF that he has truly pardoned, and retains no trace of condemnation that he still would hold against himself or any living thing."

"Only the mind AND body need atonement." ---- AND THE BODY NEEDS ATONEMENT!!

Do you see here that Jesus is literally saying that you MUST heal the body of any signs of attack, otherwise it STILL PROVES that sin happened?

If you hold a "proof of sin" before your brother's eyes - the wounds, the scars, the fallout, the consequences, the broken limbs, whatever. If you hold it in front of them you are SHOWING HIM consequential, cause-effect PROOF, that because this EFFECT is here, A CAUSE MUST HAVE BEEN HERE ALSO. And that testifies in a way that cannot be denied that you HAVE NOT forgiven him or yourself.

This is why Jesus says that forgiveness is not complete, is not real, and has not been finished, IF the PROOF OF SIN has not been removed. That means, the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE HAS TO BE UNDONE. THE BODY HAS TO BE HEALED, otherwise you HAVE NOT forgiven him.

This vital paragraph tells you exactly that.

"***Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself.*** ***YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real.*** How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

To demonstrate his sins were NOT REAL, you must SHOW HIM that THE EFFECTS ARE GONE.

You can only attest his sins had NO EFFECT on you, or your body, by REMOVING THE EFFECTS. If you still have the effects to show him, you are not only still accusing him ("sick bodies remain accusers"), you also HAVE NOT finished forgiving. Because effects REQUIRE an ONGOING CAUSE, and if the effects remains, you are STILL ATTACKING HIM for it. This is what the course is saying. You must heal the body in order NOT to accuse your brother of sin.

Forgiveness HAS TO INCLUDE the UNDOING OF PHYSICAL PROOF OF SIN. If it does not bring a physical healing along with it, and if all the signs and effects of the DOING OF SIN are not COMPLETELY OBLITERATED, the mind HAS NOT been healed and it still harbors attack thoughts and a purpose for accusation.

"A damaged body shows the mind has not been healed."

So you cannot say you are DONE forgiving, if PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS still remain. You cannot say you are DONE forgiving, if the BODY is still sick. You cannot say that a healing has taken place, if the BODY and the ENVIRONMENT testify in ANY WAY, to the PRESENCE OF PROOF that "something happened."

It has to be that all of the proof vanishes. If I spill milk on the kitchen floor, and there is STILL milk on the kitchen floor, IT PROVES that I MUST have spilled the milk. I cannot deny that. So long as the milk is ON THE FLOOR, there remains proof. The EFFECTS IMPLY that there WAS A CAUSE. Because you cannot have effects WITHOUT a cause. If the effects remain, it PROVES that a CAUSE did happen. And causation is tied to sin.

"Nothing can have effects without a cause"

And in this world, cause is SIN. So if someone CAUSES your body to be wounded, they CAUSED a sin. And the effects are the wound. And until the WOUND IS GONE, the sin is still PROVEN, which ACCUSES your brother and damns him to hell. This imprisons his mind and curses him to death.

So Jesus does in fact ask that even in this world, even in bodies, even if it's an illusion, and even if it seems to be meaningless, that you HEAL THE BODY of all effects of attack, IN ORDER TO exonerate your brother and TEACH HIM of his innocence. WHILE you have a body.

If he attempted to attack your body, chopping off your arms, and then you return and your ARMS ARE RESTORED.... HE has no way in his mind to connect cause and effect, he sees that HE CANNOT HAVE SINNED, and that your HEALING PROVES HIS INNOCENCE. And thereby he now recognizes that the SYMBOLIC HEALTH of your body TESTIFIES to his innocence, and this PROOF OF INNOCENCE ... HEALS HIS MIND. Physical health EXONERATES your brother, just as sickness is an ACCUSATION OF SIN.

"For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies ARE accusers." "Your body can be means to ***teach that it has never suffered pain because of him***. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak ***with power greater than a thousand tongues.***

**********For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. *********

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

This is using the physical body as a communication device FOR HEALING! Using it as a symbol of innocence. And using it to AFFECT YOUR BROTHER'S MIND. Your healing and your health IS your brother's healing and health. When you are healed, you are not healed alone, EVEN on the physical level.

This is what Jesus's physical resurrection was all about. "SHOW your brother you had no hurt of him."

"The Holy Spirit is the IDEA of healing. Being thought, the idea GAINS AS IT IS SHARED."

As we allow ourselves to be healed, we become healed, and in turn become healers. We are able to give the miracles we have received, and we can give healing to others.

"I will be healed as I let him teach me to heal."

"No one can give what he has not received. To give a thing requires first you have it in your own possession."

"Those who are healed become instruments of healing." (note that an instrument is used by something HIGHER than the instrument - in this case the Holy Spirit).

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another."

We're asked in ACIM to perform healing WITH the Holy Spirit. That means he is included in the healing process, and is actually the way by which the healing occurs. This is because HE is the only healer and therapist. Only HE understands miracles. He is the answer to the separation and KNOWS HOW to heal everything. You DO NOT know how to heal!

"the healer ALWAYS heals BY Him"

"The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION."

"help is His function"

"its presence becomes manifest THROUGH you. Do His work, for you SHARE in His function."

"he (you) LETS HEALING BE"

"the nature of miracles you do not understand" "Nor do you DO them."

"HE (you) can point to darkness, but he (you) CANNOT bring light OF HIMSELF"

"What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world"

"what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them"

In effect, we act like a kind of portal or window THROUGH which the Holy Spirit's radiance of healing power extends. The light of God comes from God through him, through us, to others. We are not able to GENERATE this light ourselves.

We of ourselves really have NO power at all. But when we OPEN ourselves to him, and allow him to work WITH AND THROUGH us, we GAIN the power of God. And this power works ON ITS OWN, because love automatically extends and shines.

It's kind of like, the radiant shining light of God, which has healing power in it, shines from God THROUGH you, to others. Which is why "Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me (Jesus, as an example of a brother), to my all brothers". The light of God is God's light, which shines through you, and extends to others, healing them.

"The Holy Spirit is the mechanism of miracles" or the way by which this miraculous power is bridged to you from God, so that it can be GIVEN TO OTHERS through you.

This is because in your creation, you are given the gift of giving, which means that God gives himself to create you, and creates you to BE a giver, so that HE can be given THROUGH you along WITH you, to co-create. He has given you something which you are meant to GIVE to others, to share with them, in order to have it.

"You CAN LEARN to bless, and CANNOT give WHAT YOU HAVE NOT. If, then, you OFFER blessing, it MUST have come FIRST TO YOURSELF. And you must also have ACCEPTED IT AS YOURS, for how else could you GIVE IT AWAY? This is WHY your miracles offer YOU the testimony that YOU are blessed."

"Your hands will heal, and give the gifts that you accept of me."

Healing miracles are a mirror of this creative dynamic, on Earth, whereby you give what you receive. And WHAT you receive (God's blessing/miracle) has within it the power to heal others, WITHOUT you having to know how it does it.

It's kind of like you are passing along or allowing to extend THROUGH you a power which you did not generate on your own, you did not author, but which you allow to TRANSFER as a form of communication. God shines through you, FOR you, and therefore FOR your "patient".

"The power of one mind CAN shine into another, because all the lamps of God were lit by the same spark."

Your function is, in effect, to participate in the Holy Spirits's healing work, by sharing his function, allowing HIM to PASS ON his healing (of you) through you to others. In this, you don't really get to claim any credit for being a healer, or special, or the source of the healing.

HE heals YOU, FOR you. And you in turn allow him to heal others, FOR you, FOR them. Because he is the help that God has appointed and given. He is supposed to be the one who DOES the miracles.

"The Holy Spirit does NOT work by chance, and the healing that is of HIM ALWAYS works. And unless the healer ALWAYS heals BY Him, the results WILL vary."

"And that is why the Holy Spirit IS the only therapist."

"The Holy Spirit is the radiance that you must let to banish the idea of darkness."

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

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

"All power in Heaven and earth is therefore given him and he will share it with you when you have completed yours."

This means that in truth the Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist, because ONLY he knows everything to be able to be certain how to heal everything. He is the GUARANTEE that the separation WILL be undone, because he has the power TO undo it entirely, given him by God. The Holy Spirit DOES NOT FAIL, and when He heals, IT ALWAYS WORKS. Your role then is really to LET HIM DO THE HEALING.

"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."

"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."

When I heal with the Holy Spirit, I am not really doing anything. I am specifically instructed what to do, to fulfill my part of the function I am sharing with him. I may be told to place my hand on a specific part of the body. I may be told when the healing is done. I may be asked to move to a different position.

But more often I will be asked to "rest" or "relax". In effect I am really being told to just take a chill pill and sit on the sidelines while I let HIM USE ME and work through me. He works through my body and through my hands. The more that I don't try to do anything at all, the less obstructing I am. I pretty much just relax and rest and just let him get on with it.

I have NO CLUE how he does what he does. I do not know what he is doing, only that he is doing it. My body shakes and my hands tremble and there is an intensity and various back-and-forth motions and so on. But these happen on their own, caused BY him, or as side effects of what HE is doing.

This means that I have to be willing to trust and to sort of "get out of the way", and to "not interfere". And you can be sure that at times my ego does try to BECOME the healer. The ego in me starts trying to say things to make healing happen, which really has little to no effect anyway. Or I start thinking that I need to force or push, or to hold my hand differently, or to think forgiveness thoughts, or to start doing affirmations, or say lofty things, and none of this is necessary. I am told to relax or even to stop.

In particular Jesus instructs me by saying "let me". Which I've come now to learn to mean, allow him to use the Holy Spirit through me to perform a healing on a person FOR me and FOR them, without me doing anything other than being used as a kind of vessel. It may still entail me "laying on hands" and spending some time involved in the process, but my participation is minimal.

It does take the willingness to allow something OTHER than yourself to DO stuff through you and through your body. This may be unsettling at first, learning to trust to allow some unseen force to make stuff happen IN your body and THROUGH it. To see that, even if you are standing there doing nothing of your own volition, your body is moving, even BEING moved by some unseen power.

Trusting that it WILL move on its own, without your intention to move it. And then seeing it consistently do so, without interference or motivation or control on your part. I am now at a point where I can let the Holy Spirit literally move my body parts ON HIS OWN. He can actually make my arms and hands move around with no motor intentions of my own.

"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."

"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."

"Concern yourselves not with the EXTENSION of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do NOT understand. Nor do you DO them. It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that demonstrates you did NOT do them. Why should you worry how the miracle extends to all the Sonship, when you do not understand the miracle itself?"

So here Jesus is clear, you don't even really DO miracles yourself. That is to say, you do not originate or source the power or the light that produces healing. You do not "use your own power". You are not the "battery" that charges someone. Instead, the Holy Spirit temporarily USES your system to infuse your battery with HIS power so that it extends beyond yourself to someone else. HE brings the power from God, and you allow it to extend.

This is also reflected here, where Jesus tells us that the miracle extends through you WITHOUT your help, because it's really something that's being given BY GOD. "Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life." "Miracles are a universal blessing from God." Their RADIANCE or GIVING to another is essentially AUTOMATIC, because you give it freely through sharing and letting it go. Ie not inhibiting it or stopping it from FLOWING THROUGH you.

"The ONLY way to heal is to be healed. The miracle extends WITHOUT your help. But you ARE needed that it can BEGIN. ACCEPT the miracle of healing, and it WILL go forth, because of what it IS. It is its NATURE to extend itself the instant it is born. And it is born the instant it is offered and RECEIVED. No-one can ask ANOTHER to be healed. But he can let HIMSELF be healed, and thus offer the other what he has received. Who can bestow upon another what he does not HAVE? And who can SHARE what he denies HIMSELF? The Holy Spirit speaks to YOU. He does not speak to someone ELSE. Yet BY your listening, His Voice extends, BECAUSE you have accepted what He says."

Essentially then you are to receive help and healing from the Holy Spirit to get your own mind into a state where it is more trusting of HIS help. Where you are willing to RECEIVE miracles for yourself, which you are willing to SHARE with others. You become infused with healing and love and power. And HIS light now shines out from you ON ITS OWN. This light "performs" the healing in another. The light comes from God and you just allow it to pass through you. You become a kind of CHANNEL or MEDIUM THROUGH which love, light, life, healing etc is communicated to your brother.

"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."

"You CANNOT choose to escape His care, because that is not His will. But you CAN choose to accept His care, and use the infinite power OF His care for all those He created BY it."

"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."

What I have learned now is to let Jesus and/or the Holy Spirit perform the healing. As in "You will see healing through your hands through me." This means acknowledging that the healing power or force or love which CAUSES the healing, the remedy, is something given by God and passes TO me and THROUGH me. I can let it pass through me when I have been willing to receive it for myself, because that means I am unblocking myself and getting MY blocks out of HIS way, so that HE can shine THROUGH me.

This means also recognizing I am NOT SPECIAL as "a healer". I have NO CLUE how to heal anyone to be honest. I don't know how bodies work, what makes emotions work, or the intricacies of the actual mind or how to make it sane. I cannot claim selfish credit for the healing that takes place, beacuse I am not the one doing it. Yes i am involved, yes I am facilitating, yes I am using my hands, yes I am maintaing a relaxed and non-interfering state of mind, but I am not the CAUSE of the healing. All "glory" for that goes to God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

At least, for now anyway. We are told that eventually we will become far more directly in-touch with all power in heaven and earth, that "I am not afraid but all powerful", and that by acknowledging that "all power is of God is to gain all power." But right now my experience is that I a pretty much powerless to do anything OF MYSELF, I don't HAVE any special powers, and I don't know HOW to heal. But I do know how to trust the Holy Spirit and Jesus to do healing through me.

"A better and FAR more helpful way to think of miracles is this: You do NOT understand them, either in part OR whole. Yet you have DONE them. Therefore, YOUR understanding CANNOT be necessary. Yet it is still impossible to accomplish what you do not understand. And so there must be Something IN you that DOES understand."

"As God communicates to the Holy Spirit in you, so does the Holy Spirit TRANSLATE His communications THROUGH you, so YOU can understand them."

"The Holy Spirit will teach me this, if I will let Him."

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

"You understand that you are healed when you give healing. You accept forgiveness as accomplished in yourself when you forgive. You recognize your brother as yourself, and thus do you perceive that you are whole. There is no miracle you cannot give, for all are given you. Receive them now by opening the storehouse of your mind where they are laid, and giving them away."

"But YOU must see the works I do through you, or you will not perceive that I have done them unto YOU. Do not set limits on what you believe I can do THROUGH YOU, or you will not accept what I can do FOR you. For it is done ALREADY, and unless you give ALL that you have received, you will not know that your Redeemer liveth and that YOU have awakened WITH Him. Redemption is recognized ONLY by sharing it."

Cause produces effects. This is God's permanent law, without exception. It applies everywhere always. There is a secret to performing miracles based on this, resulting in the undoing of effects. This is directly tied into the Atonement and The Miracle.

"the word "atone" really means "undo." (remove illusory effects)

"The miracle does nothing. All it does is to undo (removes effects). And thus it cancels out (by not causing) the interference (effects) to what has been done (caused in reality). It does not add, but merely takes away (removes effects)."

I have experienced several times the instant vanishing of symptoms when causation was removed. This takes place at the level of the mind and the mind's belief in causes. As I stripped away belief in who or what caused this, the entire symptom literally disappeared in a split second.

Nothing happens without causation. Effects can only appear when there is a cause. This includes the **belief** in there being a cause, even if the cause is made up in dreaming. When the cause stops causing, or is undone, the effects immediately disappear. Causation is like a broadcast, emitting consequences, effects, symptoms and results. Effects come from it.

Just as God is first cause, He MUST create effects. His effects are His Kingdom of Creation, including the Sonship. Because God is permanently causal, and true cause means creation, His creations have eternal life and always exist. True causality creates permanent, living beings. You did not cause God (which would be sin, authority problem, level confusion), God caused you.

"I am forever an effect of God."

There is also what we call "making", which is also a form of causality. It causes destructive illusions instead of creative reality. It is a made-up BELIEF in a cause, as an attempted cause, in the mind. It's a made-up cause that we believe is real, and which in turn produces made-up effects which we believe are real. Just because it is made-up doesn't mean it does not DO something.

A **belief** in a cause isn't a real cause, or of God. So what it produces is not a real effect, but is an effect nonetheless. Artificial causes produce artificial effects. But they DO produce these effects, which includes symptoms of sickness in the body, and ultimately the body itself.

"The body cannot remain without illusions (illusory causes)."

When the mind believes there is a cause, it MUST include the belief that there are effects. The mind thus believes in BOTH. They are made together, and are undone together. Effects cannot remain without a cause of some kind. When you switch off the broadcast projector, there is no more making of images. Both the broadcaster and the broadcast disappear.

It would be easy for us to switch on and off causes and effects at will. This always takes place in our minds. The problem is that we keep disassociating from the part of our mind that is causing or believing in causes, and project the ownership of the causation onto external things - anything other than our own mind.

So if we think a person is causing us to be upset, we're in false perception. We see cause as separate from and outside of our own mind. Yet this BELIEF in cause, is INSIDE our mind because "ideas leave not their source."

We are confused in thinking that someone else is causing our upset. But the IDEA of "someone is causing me to be upset" is our own mind's idea, which projects, resulting in a false perception. And this idea IS STILL CAUSAL. By believing, "I am being caused", we literally are CAUSING ourselves, and our mind DOES produce effects within us, from it. And this is actually part of the belief that we are creating ourselves, the result of a split mind.

It is not possible to believe in a cause, WITHOUT the belief itself having an effect. Even if the visualized cause seems to be mapped onto some other person, it is STILL a "belief in cause" in our mind, and this gives it power. If our mind is generating, picturing, imagining, "there is a cause", it WILL and MUST also picture, generate and imagine an effect to correspond to it. And usually the severity of the effect lines up with where the cause falls in the hierarchy of illusions.

This now means that as we picture ourselves as being caused, we WILL also picture ourselves as being affected. This believing in and use of causality, no matter how it is dressed up in appearances about others, will result in OUR MIND producing EFFECTS in ourselves. These will show up as symptoms in mind and body, as emotional reactions, fearful thought responses, justified anger, and other effects.

As the secret of salvation tells us, it does not matter how it appears that someone is a victimizer, or who is doing what. When your mind "sees itself" as being victimized, that way of seeing itself ALONE victimizes you. And you cannot see yourself as being victimized WITHOUT seeing yourself ALSO as a victim.

Funny that - as you believe in victimization it sets up a causal belief in your mind which causes you to MAKE YOURSELF a victim. Your mind then generates the effects and symptoms of having been affected. It pictures itself in the roles of victim AND victimizer.

Now, here's the key. Based on this law, that even your BELIEF in a cause IS CAUSAL, and has illusory believed-in effects, removing this belief in a cause MUST remove the effects. This even includes the physical symptoms of sickness which YOUR MIND put into your body, as a result of YOUR MIND visualizing itself as at the effect of its own causal beliefs.

If my belief is that a person is upsetting me, three things are happening. 1) I am "projecting" causality onto the person falsely, resulting in a false perception that "they" are causing me. 2) MY belief in being caused is causing me, 3) I am inventing the upsetting effects because of this belief, BY this belief. If I clear up the confusion about WHO is causing who, and then STOP causing through this belief, the effects MUST go.

If my mind is thinking, "I am upset because of them", and I"m feeling the upset, my mind MUST be seeing a line of causality starting with "them" and coming into me and impacting upon me, producing upset. This is what my mind is picturing. This is HOW I am making the effects. If I tell myself, "they are not causing me to be upset", I am taking a step towards undoing the cause.

I'm almost saying, "since they are not causing this upset, I am not upset." or "everything that came from them, has not come". They then become your savior because now you are using them to explain why you are NOT affected negatively, or as a way to say "I am healed because of you". Or as the course puts it, "Brother, at your hand I live." This requires the removal of all symptoms of attack in the body and mind, accomplished by removing fake causality or accusing your brother of causing (sinning against) you.

Sometimes, if the causing seems fairly clear-cut and well defined as to who I think did what, and I remind myself I am NOT caused by the person, it can be enough to undo my mind's belief in the cause, and thus stop causing my own upset. Symptoms of upset vanish instantly. Even physical symptoms, because *I* was producing them.

Other times, I've found I've built up a collection of beliefs in causes, which have to be dismantled more methodically, piece by piece. I have to remove all belief that anyone or anything else is causing my issue. I must not believe that I am at the effect of anyone else's mind or any "causes" that I THINK are in the world. My BELIEF in them being causes does not make them causes. This is confusion/projection/disassociation.

MY BELIEF in being caused is what causes me to suffer. When something is seen as having NO causes left, and being the cause of nothing, it disappears.

I have to also remove all belief that I am causing any issue in others, because this too ties me to guilt. For example if I have an argument, it is not enough to undo the belief that I am being upset by them. I will likely believe I upset them also, and this too is fake causality. Anything THEY are experiencing, THEIR mind has chosen to cause. I must be accepting of this by dismantling my belief that I caused them, which in turn will heal them and set them free from imprisonment.

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

Once this is clarified, that no-one caused my effects but myself, and that cause is in my mind because I believed I was caused, I must now recognize that my own choice to believe I am being negatively caused DID produce my own symptoms. I am responsible for it. This is the secret of salvation. But we can't stop there. WE must STOP causing our own suffering.

This requires us to stop believing that even WE have caused our suffering. Seeing that we did it to ourselves, and recognizing our own mind is causing itself, may be enough to collapse it. Recognizing the futility of hurting ourselves, we will drop the desire to continue. Seeing that we are causing our own suffering, we cannot escape the causation or blame it on anyone, have to admit the truth, and admitting the truth presents us with a fact - we did this, and we no longer choose to.

We might have to work on undoing the belief that we are caused, as well as being willing to no longer suffer the role of victim. Without a cause that we believe in, we cannot believe in being affected. In recognizing we were the victimizer of ourselves, we can stop being the victim. No-one has ever been victimized by another person.

Remember that you have no neutral thoughts. All thought creates form on some level. All thought is causal. You cannot neutrally casually think about stuff without producing effects. Imagining fearful things happening to you, IS actually you DOING them to yourself. Dreaming about scenarios isn't a freebie thought. We deliberately DO, or DO NOT. We cause, or do not cause. And only what we cause happens.

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

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

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

Stripping away all sense of "the cause of this", MUST undo the effects. When you cease attacking yourself with thoughts of being attacked, you will not be attacked or attackable.

Without a cause, there can be no effects. Without belief in separation, there can be no sickness. Without seeing yourself as a victim you cannot be victimized. Without victimizing yourself you cannot be hurt. Without belief you are sinful (caused bad stuff) you cannot be guilty, and without guilt you cannot frighten or threaten yourself. Without a cause, your sickness must vanish. And without a cause, the dead must rise.

All illusions have no REAL cause. The causes are made up beliefs, which DO cause illusory effects, and without maintaining these beliefs the effects cannot stay. Anything not of God or made without love has no real cause. We MADE sickness and death by believing they have been caused and are the cause of us (the God of sickness and death), and can abolish it by believing they have NOT been caused.

To recognize something has NOT been caused, is to recognize it CANNOT have happened. Without a cause, the effects must go. What has not been caused cannot exist. And since illusory effects and symptoms DEPEND on the mind believing in them, without believing in them they MUST vanish. Which undoes physical suffering, sickness and death

This is forgiveness and atonement. The recognition that separation has not been caused and sin has not caused effects because there is no sin. The lack of belief in sin as "causing evil" erases death. The knowing that there is no death. Withdrawing causes of illusions will undo them all.

"Illusions recognized (I caused this myself, it did not cause me) must disappear."

This literally is tied into the atonement. If to atone is to undo, then by cancelling the fake causes that we were using to make things "be done", and if miracles undo and take away the effects by recognizing they have not been caused, then to accept the atonement is to accept that there are NO CAUSES other than God. We HAVE NOT CAUSED separation, there is no cause of death (sin), illusions DO NOT exist, and we are no longer manufacturing fake effects.

This will ultimately UNDO the world because the world is nothing but an EFFECT of a belief - the spacetime belief.

Shifting away from made-up causes, and aligning ourselves with God's Will, which is truly causal and creative, we become miracle workers. Operating from vertical causation, not mis-creation. Our causing now becomes love-based, constructive, creative, healing and miraculous. No longer against ourselves, no longer affected by the world, we regain invulnerability and power. We can now give life and cause resurrection.

We become a cause that does not cause itself. We become free from effects of our own making, or the illusion of effects made by others. Our will is now undivided and single-minded. Nothing can oppose us as ruler of the universe. We are free to carry out the will of God. To cause with IMMEDIATE effects. And to be truly helpful to others through causal miracles.

"This is a course in cause and not effect."

"miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo.""

"Without a cause there can be no effects, and yet, without effects, there is no CAUSE."

"Who can predict effects without a cause? And who could fear effects UNLESS he thought they had BEEN caused, and judged disastrous NOW?"

"Who can perceive effect WITHOUT a cause? What can the causeless BE but nothingness."

"And this DENIES the fact that ALL are senseless; EQUALLY without a cause or consequence, and CANNOT have effects of ANY kind."

"In its passing went its consequences, left without a cause."

"And to realize that pain is purposeless, without a cause, and with no power to accomplish anything."

"Nothing can have effects without a cause, and to confuse the two is merely to fail to understand them both."

"Without a cause, and now without a function in Christ's sight, it merely slips away to nothingness."

"It denies the ability of anything which is not of God to effect you in any way."

"Fear cannot be real without a cause, and GOD is the only Cause."

"The healing of effect WITHOUT the cause can merely shift effects to other forms."

"A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect. What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief."

"And therefore all your sins have been forgiven because they carried no effects at all."

"There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression."

"And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect it cannot make effects."

"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."

"Here is the proof that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind."

"It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move (cause) mountains. It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not the real reason why you don't believe it. People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert (cause) real control (effects) because they are literally AFRAID of them."

"And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place?"

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

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

Unconditionality, means that something applies the same way to many things. In a sense this is impersonal, in that it does not treat a given person differently from others. At the same time, if the treatment is TOTAL all inclusive love, then EACH person can be FULLY loved, provided that it means this love does not EXCLUDE ANYONE.

This means that you literally cannot unconditionally love only one other person. Nor can you unconditoinally love a million people. You can ONLY unconditionally love the ENTIRE WHOLE of creation. There cannot be any exceptions or conditions, otherwise it is not unconditional.

We might say well, I unconditionally love my kids or my parents etc, but this isn't really true. Because the same maximal love is not felt in relationship to EVERYONE. So it isn't unconditional in the broader sense. It may seen unconditional in that, the child or parent is loved quite fully or that they're loved regardless of what they do or say or believe or how they live. That's a form of unconditionality. But it isn't TOTAL unconditionality.

Total unconditionality requires that the entirety of existence be loved as one, and equally. You have to love EVERY person the same if you want to claim unconditional love. Similarly, you cannot claim holiness until you do this because conditions mean a lack of wholeness.

Holiness means wholeness. It recognizes that you are whole. It recognizes that other people are whole. But it also recognizes that the whole of you is the whole of them in truth. It is a holographic principle.

To be holy, ie whole, in and of yourself, you cannot be in need of anyone. It sounds like a paradox but to to love anyone in a holy way you have be whole in and of yourself so that you have wholeness to share with them. And by being whole, you do not NEED them. Moreso it means you HAVE them because you ARE them. All of them.

Holiness, and unconditoinal love, have to go hand in hand with a complete lack of limits or confinement of any kind. It can't just apply to you, or to your closest partner, or to only your friends and family. It has to be the same everywhere. To be whole is to be the whole of creation. You have to be the entire Kingdom of God to be holy. Which means you cannot have a holy relationship without EVERYONE being included.

No one can claim to unconditionally love only A PART of the totality. This is partial love. That love is not unconditional. It may be approaching it but so long as it remains applying ONLY to certain individuals it is NOT unconditional love.

Unconditional love is universal love. It has to apply to EVERYONE equally and all at the same time. Nor can it apply only to some person that is temporarily "nearby" while applying later to someone else who happens to be "nearby." It has to transcend time and space as well. It is unlimited in every way.

This means that a real holy relationship is one where you are whole in your soul, and you know intimately that EVERYONE is included in you. And therefore you love EVERYONE simultaneously. This is the only way for it to be holy, and the only way to be whole. There is no other unconditional love that is as fully unconditional as this.

What that means is, you cannot have a truly holy relationship which its just between TWO people. That is too confining. Any sense of walls, barriers, exclusiveness, limits of any kind, any way that it is not FULLY SHARED, is a limit on holiness and on love. The love has to totally transcend ALL FORMS of relationship. Like how Jesus loves everyone the same.

When a special relationship, which is really a lack of relationship, is taken and repurposed for a holy purpose, it is used as a framework to develop wholeness. Holiness is the goal so wholeness is the goal. To be whole, EACH person, as a soul, must individually attain THEIR OWN wholeness. And their wholeness cannot be held back by each other. To be whole, EACH individual has to be open to loving EVERYONE equally. And if I am whole, I am recognizing that I AM THE WHOLE OF YOU as well, so you cannot limit me.

At the highest level, this means that the specialness which began as "two" for practical or collaborative learning purposes, is transcended. Even if there are still seeming to be two bodies in proximity, or a marriage, or a friendship, or any other FORM of a relationship that seems to isolate individuals, even for those two people "relationship" has to transcend the boundaries of that container.

If it does not transcend the boundaries, it cannot be whole. It is ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE for a confined pair of individuals to be holy together while NOT being holy in relationship to EVERYONE. However, if they ARE holy towards everyone, they CAN be holy in relation to each other.

We need to perhaps then SEPARATE OUT, the difference between an arrangement of bodies, versus psychological relationship. If you decouple the two, it becomes more obvious how it works. In the atonement plan, TWO OR MORE individuals (tied to bodies) are orchestrated to meet and form a special connection. A time spent seemingly in proximity. This is not a relationship. This is just being near to each other for the sake of working on THEMSELVES in the company of each other and with each other's support. To learn to fully share themselves with everyone. They cannot fully share themselves with EACH OTHER because this excudes everyone else - UNTIL they can share with everyone.

While the two are together, they EACH may be becoming more unconditionally loving, which melts the specialness or form that holds the two of them in proximity. But at some point a threshold has to be reached, in which they cannot increase the love any further if the love is thought to have to be LIMITED to the two of them, or that it excludes anyone, or is switched off in certain encounters.

In order for the love to become IMPERSONALLY PERSONAL, which means total full love given in FULL to EACH of ALL individuals at once (this is ominpresence), the sense of two-ness has to be dissolved completely, BEFORE even getting close to total holiness. The twoness is just there as a repurposing of the device of physical closeness. It has nothing to do with relationship or holiness. It's just a way to focus on a project.

To go beyond this ceiling, EITHER of them has to decide to transcend their 'relationship' and love OTHERS in the same way. The only way TO love unconditionally and ALL the time, is to love everyone the same way all the time, no matter who they are, and no matter where they are. That means you are IN love, at all times, regardless of location. This has nothing then to do with whether you are with a particular person's body/mind or not.

At its absolute maximal expression, then, a holy relationship has gone BEYOND the necessity of two people, and now applies simultaneously to ONESELF, and to ALL SELVES. And ALL holy relationships MERGE INTO ONE. It is then not a question of whether a holy relationship requires ONE person OR TWO... which is an either/or reasoning, but actually in a holographic manner, it applies to ONE AND INFINITE.

Therefore I, as an individual soul, who God created in full love and completion, who is also sharing everything with all other souls, who in turn love EVERYONE, have the task of individually accepting atonement for MYSELF, so that it is SHARED, so that it is given to EVERYONE. THIS is holy relationship. It is one soul sharing all of itself wholly and fully in holiness with the entire sonship at once. This reflects this logical statement:

"You cannot enter into real relationship with any of God's Sons unless you are willing to love them all, AND equally."

Total real relationship, in heaven, which a holy relationship is based on or becomes a reflection of, requires YOU to love everyone. It does NOT require everyone to be aware of loving you. In reality, yes, all souls love all souls. In the dream, where minds are blocked, it does not entail all minds being AWARE of that oneness. But ideally, everyone should eventually love everyone. This allows the ENTIRE sonship to unite in a single relationship of co-creation with God.

"Everyone should love everyone".

While it is possible for example for me to be in total love which means unconditionally loving the entire universe - universal love, this is because I am a free soul. I am in freedom and therefore NOT TIED to anyone in the sense of, no one can impede my freedom or require me to do anything in order to be FULLY myself. God established me perfect from the start. And that means i can go into holiness/wholeness and unconditionally love everyone, EVEN IF they do not reciprocate. Nor can their lack of love hold me in hell against my will. I am free to choose to love. "Heaven is a choice I must make."

If another person happens to also be in a very unconditional state of mind, then it is possible, that that person can connect with you and be AWARE OF sharing everything with you. BUT, this is NOT JUST personal. It is personal and impersonal. Everything is shared with YOU, BUT at the same time, it is also being shared with everyone. It is not exclusive to you. It is completely open. It is fully given to you, AND fully given to everyone equally. Such a person can fully love you, but ONLY because they are unconditionally loving the whole sonship at the same time. You receive the PERSONAL love, while the IMPERSONAL aspect is personally loving all the others. It's almost like, two people just happening to 'bump into each other'.

When two people consent to FULLY LOVE, the "each other" part does not enter into it. They happen to fully love EVERYONE. Two people, who fully love everyone, and who are in intimate relationship with EVERY SOUL as their own wholeness, "meet", and experience their mutual position of unconditional love. They fully embrace and express their shared nature in TOTAL holy relationship. But IT DOES NOT EXCLUDE ANYONE ELSE. It is not exclusive to them. An analogy might be one parent who equally loves all their children. They don't stop loving the OTHER kids just because they love you.

"Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad."The only requirement for you to enter heaven, is that you reflect heaven's relationship status. That is, I am in a relationship with EVERYONE EQUALLY. You "enter into real relationship" with ALL of God's children. And thus you "enter into reality" itself. This is the only requirement for entry to heaven by ANY INDIVIDUAL SOUL. That is, all you have to do is accept and love all of yourself which IS all of the sonship, loving every son of God equally.

No one can keep you from this. No partner can hold you back. No duo or pair or special relationship or repurposed relationship has a quality that causes any REQUIREMENT that TWO such people are doing this at the same time. The two-ness is part of specialness and it will always be. Two-ness has to be TOTALLY TRANSCENDED in order to have ANY holiness. EVERY person has to be loved equally otherwise NONE OF THEM ARE TRULY LOVED AT ALL.

To meet another person who is fully in christ, is a pleasure. And it is a total relationship with that person AND with everyone else. But it doesn't mean that you need that person's love, or that they are imprisoning you. You are completely free to come and go. You are the free willed soul that God created one with him. You have no needs and are not bound by any special rules other than God's law. You are under no laws but God's and God himself established you as holy forever.

In essence, first there is JUST ME. Then there is JUST ME AND YOU. Then there is US trying to transcend JUST US (a "holy relationship couple"). And then there is EVERYONE. That is the progression of relationship towards holiness. And anyone can go there WITHOUT a partner.

So really the requirement of having to have another "special person" to have a holy relationship with, is false. A repurposed special relationship goes THROUGH a purpose or goal of holiness, and DISSOLVES away, leaving only unconditional love for everyone. The two are no longer two, they are THE ENTIRE KINGDOM. Or maybe one of them went there and is the entire kingdom, and the other lagged behind still. Everyone is free to come and go.

Only then, when ONE PERSON has attained a state of unconditional universal love and equality, can that ONE person enter heaven. It does not require anyone else to do this. It's just that, in this world, the holy spirit is repurposing what we MADE (specialness) for a holy PURPOSE, so that it can be USED like a device or tool, to help us to move towards unconditionality. But this cannot mean that you ONLY learn to love another single person unconditionally. If you ONLY love them unconditionally you are NOT LOVING UNCONDITIONALLY. Walls cannot remain if it is to be universally applied and extended. Unconditional love MUST be impersonal as well as personal.

Therefore, any single person/soul CAN enter heaven WITHOUT the need for particular encounters, relations, conversations, physical proximities, lengths of time, or any other "requirement". They may in fact have enjoyed MULTIPLE relationships to get to that point. They may have had many partners, even simultaneously. They may have even had NO ONE ELSE. They might've even been sitting in a cave in a mountain and seeing no one since 50 years ago. It doesn't matter. If any one person attains holographic love, they are done and out of here, entering real relationship with the ENTIRE sonship.

Did you know you're living inside a giant hologram?

(this may take a bit to explain, so bear with me)...

Actually, that's only the half of it. There's a reason why you are inside a hologram, and there's a motive for making it that the ego wants to keep a secret.

The purpose of the physical universe, as a hologram (a holographic dream), is to profoundly obscure awareness of God. The ego has used it to create a way of experiencing which seems to be completely devoid of God. The physical universe was made to literally shut God out and to make it look like He does not exist. And it's done a pretty good job, because we all believe it. And you don't even realize you believe it.

As Jesus says in ACIM: "Nothing so blinding as perception of form".

So, how does this work and how does it obscure God, and why is form (physical matter) blinding? And what's this got to do with holograms?

Ok so bear with me as I try to explain, this is VERY hard to explain because it defies a lot of ego logic, so let me know if I lose you.

First we define what God is like.

God is oneness. God is omnipresent, meaning He exists everywhere. And God is whole and completely equal everywhere. What this means is, if you could think of God as occupying 'space', no matter where you are in that space, God is *exactly* the same there as He is in any other part of it. Over here He is God, over there He is God. No matter where you are in God, it's exactly the same as everywhere else.

It's kind of like if you were to take a road trip inside God you'd be driving for a while and then remark to yourself, you know what, this place looks exactly the same as the place we just came from. Exactly. Then you drive some more and it still looks exactly the same. It's almost like you aren't going anywhere. Ok so God is the same everywhere.

Now there's another part to this. This may be hard to imagine, but ALL of God is in all *parts* of God. (NB: The ego will say this is IMPOSSIBLE!) As you think of God as occupying space, and you're driving in that car to different parts of God, and its all the same, you might still be tempted to believe each 'part' or 'location' in God is actually a DIFFERENT part, but just 'looks' the same. Like, as if the whole landscape is a giant set in a movie and its all painted in white paint. You're accustomed to thinking that the stuff 'over there' is not the same as the stuff 'over here', in some way. Its sort of similar with God.

ALL of the properties of God are everywhere. ALL of the awareness of God is everywhere. ALL of the attention of God is everywhere. So then when you ask yourself, what parts of God are 'here', in this location, the answer is, ALL of Him. And when you then ask yourself, well what parts are over there in that other part, the answer is also - ALL of Him. And what about those parts you were driving through 50 hours ago... ALL of Him was there.

To the ego this would have to mean, well, if all of God is here, then there's no other parts left to be elsewhere, so elsewhere there is no God. But in God's reality, in God's 'universe', somehow God is capable of being fully present in every single part of it at the same time. In this sense its almost as if God is PERSONAL, personal and local to every single part of existence, and yet, simultaneously personal to ALL parts at the same time. (Revelations speak of this intensely personal quality.)

You could kind of think of God as though there are trillions of copies of Himself, which the ego mind might be able to grasp. Except that in God there are no separations. Absolutely all of God's being, all of God's mind, all of God's identity, all of God's wholeness, is SHARED by all parts of existence. And when you try to think of this in terms of what you are USED TO, in the physical world, you can only relate to like a large stretch of land that you call 'The United States', within which there are many different distinct places. But if this land were God, everywhere would be the same and there would only be ONE of anything. Hard to get your mind around!

Now, this is where the ego comes up with a device to shut God out.

As we know, the ego's only tool is "separation". What the ego does, is it tries to take the omnipresent oneness of God and start to make it `look like` God maybe ISN'T the same everywhere, or ISN'T fully present everywhere. The only way it can obscure God, i.e. make it seem like God has gone away, or that God does not exist at all, is to go against the nature of God. So if the nature of God is, all of Him is the same everywhere, the ego's attack will entail the idea that only PART of Him is PARTIALLY present in each location. And this implies that God is riddled with contradictory differences. (The ego is contradictory, God isn't).

So now it's kind of like, you're driving in that car through God and you notice that, some of these hills are starting to take on a different shade of color. There's some slight differences in how things look over here than how they looked back there. At first, the separation isn't strong or well defined. In fact it starts out very subtly with just a 'hint' of differences. Then as you keep driving the intensity of the separation increases, and it really starts to stand out that different parts of God are different in quite noticeable ways.

What's happening at the same time is that the ego is now suggesting, by manipulating your perception, that maybe God is not fully present here. Maybe God has some parts of Himself which are sort of 'tied up' elsewhere, or occupied or busy with something else, so he can only be partially present. And also the ego is suggesting God isn't the same everywhere. The way God is over here is not quite the same as over there, and the over-there parts are somehow distracted from being fully present here.

This is how the holographic dream is born. A hologram is the concept that "the all is in every part" - which is pretty close to the way I described God being if God were a 'space'. i.e. All of God is fully in every part of existence. If you want a primer on holograms or whatever maybe check out The Holographic Universe which is quite an interesting book.

Anyway. Basically, at the early stages of the hologram forming, a lot is still shared and things are still almost-one. But the 'density', if you will, of the hologram, increases by continued ego belief in separation. The ego starts noticing and emphasizing the ways in which different parts of existence seem not to be the same. And as this grows stronger, it starts to seem more and more as though only a small part of God is still present here, because all the `other parts of God` are apparently quite different and have become quite finite and specific, and they're all localized to other parts of existence. So what exists over there maybe does not or cannot exist over here.

As this progresses, in the mind, the hologram 'solidifies' more and more. Or another way to describe it is that, formless reality in which everything is the same everywhere starts to 'descend' into localized properties, differences, separations, divisions, fragmented identities. The more separate and clearly defined these differences become, the more the awareness of God's omnipresence, God's total attention, God's total awareness, and God's equal presence everywhere, APPEARS to be shut out of awareness. If it seems true to you that differences are real, and that you start to look AT those differences and breathe reality into them, then you will become fixated on the ways in which God is NOT THE SAME ANYWHERE.

Not only is God not the same anywhere, but this also has a dire conclusion. If you really strongly believe in the reality of differences, you must start to fixate only on the appearance of what's left. All of the different 'forms' of difference. And those forms of difference is what we call PHYSICAL MATTER. The solidification of wholeness into locality, the contraction and density of 'energy' if you will, is what happens in the 'lower levels' of the hologram. The further into separation and differences you go the more 'solid' everything starts to look, and the less there is any evidence or awareness that God is present, even AT ALL. At a certain point you would be forgiven for even believing that God does not exist AT ALL because ALL you can see are the intense, real-seeming differences of physical matter. The physical universe 'stops' God from being able to be in all places at once, or in all places equally, or in all places fully, replaced with the idea that everything is separate from everything else.

So while holograms start out subtle, or what scientists call 'diffused', the lower levels of the holographic 'dream' are much more divided and separated out and form 'images'. When you see the little images on your credit card which look 3d when you see them from different angles - those are a form of holograms. You see an image, and yet when you look from another angle, you see another image. Its as if ALL of the images are somehow 'in' the one location, SHARED. But on the level of physical matter, you can only ever see ONE of the versions of the image at a time. You can't see the 'all'. You can't see all of the angles of the little dove or whatever it is in the hologram, because it is obscured by the rules of the physical universe.

So when the Course is saying, nothing so blinding as perception of form, what it's saying is, physical matter is a very dense level of a holographic interpretation of God, which has the effect of completely obscuring any trace of oneness or all-ness, so that you fixate on only one version of one image, in which it seems like NOTHING is shared and therefore there is no God. 'Sharing' is the same as 'Oneness' so if there is no sharing (co-existing in the same space) then God doesn't exist.

In the physical world, an object does not seem to have anything shared with another object. There is no sense of there being any unity between them. There is nothing 'the same' that is exactly the same in both. This defies the property of God that all of him is everywhere. And then because the stuff that is `in` one object is NOT the stuff that is `in` another object, defies the property of God that all of his same properties are in all objects at the same time. So if you look at that matter and you BELIEVE the illusion that it is trying to SHOW you, its statement of 'what is', you will be blinded from seeing God.

Physical matter LITERALLY was made by the ego to make the properties of God totally obscured and distracted away from. If you believe physical matter does not share anything, you do not have awareness of God. It blinds you. If you do not believe that physical matter contains all of something which is also fully present in other parts of matter, you are blinded to God. Matter, in all its forms, is a giant blanket of the 'undoing' of God's reality, God's omnipresence. It is a physicalization of the idea of separation, but even moreso, the idea that God's law-defying everywhereness is NOT what existence is like, and therefore God does not exist.

It is designed SPECIFICALLY to shut out the awareness of God's presence so that, IF your mind is aligned with it and IF your mind functions according to the 'laws of matter' then you WILL NOT SEE GOD. If you SEE MATTER, you do not see God. Not fully. If you do not see PAST matter, you do not see God. If you fixate ON or look AT matter, you will not see God. Your mind needs to become able to OVERLOOK (forgive) the ILLUSIONS that are presented to you BY MATTER ITSELF.

This isn't just a matter of fixing your mind and staying in the world and not seeing God. Your mind needs to go back `up` the hologram to the point of Oneness, eventually, so that your awareness is able to discern that a) God is fully present, b) All of God is here, c) All of God is everywhere, and d) All of God is the same everywhere. If you believe that MATTER IS REAL or MATTER IS TRUE, then you cannot be aware of God. If the form of matter dictates how your mind perceives or you believe in its ILLUSION, you cannot see God. Matter is BLINDING. That is its function. And it will never have another function until it is undone.

What the ego in your mind does, is it looks at matter and uses it as a 'model' for what is true about your mind and what is true in your perception. Its illusion infuses into your mind and you take it at its word and consider it 'reality'. You buy into its illusion, its way of obscuring God, and its statements of the ways in which God is not here, God is not everywhere, God is not ALL in ALL. That is matter's message. That is the 'state of existence' of the physical universe, designed solely to shut God out - IF you believe it is real.

This also leads to another way to say, the physical universe is just a holographic dream, and it is just an illusion designed to obscure God, and NEVER will it be Heaven (because heaven is formless), and THE WORLD IS NOT REAL. Matter is not real. Separate forms are not real. Bodies are not real. Planets are not real. Physical matter is AN ILLUSION AND NOTHING ELSE. It is the illusion that God is dead and can never be real.

These are all ways of expressing the idea that God is not God, and that can never be true. And this is why eventually the physical universe WILL DISAPPEAR.

I have no idea if I explained this well or conveyed what I wanted to. I had a profound experience a few years ago which SHOWED me an EXPERIENCE of this - I experienced what it was like to go up the hologram in my mind, back toward Oneness, and how this allowed me to be AWARE of God's presence - all of His presence in every part of the dream, and how this totally defied what 'form' was trying to telling me was the truth of existence. So I speak from experience, but these things really defy the ego's logic so it's very hard to put into words. Let me know if I need to clarify something.

All is not as it seems in this world. The physical world ITSELF IS the 'form' of the egos attack on God, and IS its defense. You think you only have defenses in your mind inside your body. But the physical universe as a whole is a giant defense mechanism - IN the larger mind of the Son of God. You're literally looking at the MIND of the Son of God attempting to shut God out. That's what this world is.

Before the separation, you were simply in heaven having a great time. Immortal, invulnerable, happy, loving, full of life.

Then the separation happened and we produced a state exactly opposite to heaven - heaven's logical opposite. A physical world in which bodies gave us constant "false perception", deceived by everything, seemingly at the effect of everything and prone to attack.

"Earth, heaven's opposite in every way."

"For this world is the opposite of Heaven, being made to be its opposite, and everything here takes a direction exactly opposite of what is true."

"Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions are but forms. Their content is never true."

"Heaven remains your one alternative to the strange world you made."

These are really the only two states. These are the two worlds, heaven and hell.

The question then becomes, how do you get out of the second world and go back to the first?

As the course says, you might find a sudden leap into heaven as frightening, if you retained your ego and interpreted it through it. In fact the ego interprets heaven as hell, beings its unwanted opposite.

So instead, we gradually transition towards heaven. But let's be clear that heaven IS your only alternative to the physical world. There is no other place to go. It's one or the other.

It's also a fact that the world you made is false, and heaven is true. In the denial of God and the rejection of heaven, you came to believe that a world of lies and illusions is true and real.

That puts you in a position where, to return to a full awareness and acceptance of heaven's truth, you're going to have to both invest belief and acceptance in heaven's truth, while shifting your whole focus away from the physical.

As the course describes, beginning to do this begins the process of "opening the spiritual eye" and "weakening the investment in physical sight".

"Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way. As this recognition becomes more firmly established, it becomes a turning point. This ultimately reawakens spiritual vision, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict, which can become very acute."

Now, we need to keep in mind that you are either in a realm of perception or a realm of knowledge. We really only made false perception, built into the functioning of the body senses. And leapt straight from heaven to false perception, placing us in bodies.

"The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive something and with something."

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and complete idea."

Your goal, really, is to return to heaven. The goal of God. Any goal less than this is not enough. You are to return to your original state of reality and immortality. To identifying as Christ. To being as God created you and co-creating with Him in reality.

But trying to leap into heaven from a perspective of false perception, which is total confusion about what is true, would be too jarring. The contrast is too great, and we have gone deeply into the ego thought system.

Instead, there is a seeming path, the atonement plan, the personal curriculum, which lays out a more gradual transition. This is partly because the use of your free will choice is required in order for you to make any changes in your beliefs at all.

So it seems that, in time, we gradually then progress from abject hell, which is a heavy identification with a body, special relationships, attack thoughts, fear of death, sickness and suffering seeming real, etc, towards a more God-given inheritance of perfection and immortality.

This doesn't just mean you're going to run up against the "ceiling" or external walls of the perceptual realm, before experiencing ANY heaven. It means that you need to transition so that you are experiencing ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY heaven, just before you leave this world.

But how do you do that? How do you move "towards heaven", towards reality and truth and immortality, while still being within the realm of perceptual dreams? How do you become heaven-like or as close to your original nature as possible, while still being in a state which is fundamentally separate?

"Perception is a separated state. Those who perceive still need healing."

It's going to entail some kind of re-purposing of perception, some way to use it against itself. To use what we made, to undo what we made, from the inside out. We need a reinterpretation of the meaning of the world. Or a different vantage point or way of looking, that makes it seem like hell has been turned into something similar to heaven.

"Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it."

What we find out now is that there are kind of two components to what we're experiencing. There's whatever "the world is" that we made, and then there's our interpretation of it. We seem to be able to change its meaning or how it looks to us.

What we're then told is that there is a "forgiven world" or a version of hell which, seen with some kind of light, or seen with loving eyes, doesn't look like hell anymore. It's still a dream world, still an illusion, still unreal, and still false, but seems to reflect heaven's innocence.

So where does this light come from, or this loving perspective? Well, a clue is that "Perception is a result, not a cause". And "projection makes perception". We look within first, at our idea of what truth is, and then we broadcast that out, and the end result is a kind of hallucinated image, which we call perception.

So the main deal is, the question of whether when you look within you see a belief in the reality of the world, that false things are true, that you yourself are something false and evil, or whether when you look within you see sinlessness, a lack of guilt and fear, innocence and holiness. Those spiritual attributes are not attributes of a dream figure, they are attributes of YOUR SOUL, which needs to come into your awareness while you're still dreaming.

How do you go about changing your inner landscape, so that it contains only attributes which seem to reflect the state of heaven, so that when you look out you see then projected?

Well if you remember, perception is always essentially false, and the realm of knowledge is always true. The illusory world is always illusory, and heaven is reality. So in order to transition your inner world so that it "matches" heaven or is heaven-like, you're going to have to reach out beyond the illusory world and start identifying with God's creation.

"The world you see must be denied" "Beyond this world is a world I want." "No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth."

So now you're in a position where, you're inside a dream, and trying to shift your attention to not only see but identify with, to recognize as true, and to accept, a reality which is entirely OUTSIDE of the dream.

"The miracle is taken first on faith, because to ask for it implies the mind has been made ready to conceive of what it cannot see and does not understand. Yet faith will bring its witnesses to show that what it rested on is really there. And thus the miracle will justify your faith in it, and show it rested on a world more real than what you saw before; a world redeemed from what you thought was there."

You're trying to learn what you ARE in the Kingdom, while still being inside of the classroom of hell. Your real identity is your soul which God created which has inherited its truth from Him.

In order for you to transition your inner identity to christ, you're going to have to start identifying with something that isn't even in the world.

The best analogy I've come up with is the comparison of two rooms. We made a room with no windows, inside heaven, kind of like a prison cell. It's a dark room which shuts out the light. The walls seem solid and impassable. There is no awareness of what is outside the walls. Your whole identity seems bound to a lump of matter, the same thing that the prison seems to be made of.

Then as you begin to reach out beyond the dream, beyond the prison, beyond believing the walls are true - the granite block of sin, the veil which hangs before the face of christ, the walls of the prison begin to become transparent. They lose their heaviness and solidity. Even your own body seems to start to disappear.

This happens only by extending your mind past the separating limits of the walls, reaching out (or in) to heaven's truth, and latching onto (identifying with) the ever-growing awareness of who you are outside the prison. Your real self, which God created, and which stands beyond the world of form.

As your mind starts to associate with being a christ-soul, and starts to believe in God's truth, and starts to accept that only heaven is real, and shifts all of its attention away from the tempting deceptions and lies of physical matter, it puts its faith and belief in reality and love and light. Things which are not even INSIDE the dream world.

"Love was never in the world of dreams."

While still inside the prison, which is fast becoming a glass room with a door, enabling you to see through the walls and beyond them to the light with "christ vision", you become able to see again.

You can see a light beyond the body and beyond the world, beyond the room, and your sense of "who and what I am" or "what is true of me" is shifting away from the body and onto spirit - a spirit which is well outside of the room entirely.

Eventually this room, which acts like a veil covering up the greater environment of heaven, becomes so transparent that it disappears, and finally you are able to see christ clearly. To recognize what you are. And to see the contents of heaven. You then move through or past the walls of the room, the room disappears, and you find yourself squarely and fully in the shoes God created for you to fill.

We may talk about true perception, atonement, forgiveness, salvation, right mindedness, miracle mindedness, sanity, the spiritual eye, and various other aspects of the awakening mind. But ultimately true perception is an act of OVERLOOKING the realm of perception, overlooking hell, overlooking the opposition to God, and fixating on the Kingdom.

Essentially, true perception is a re-purposing of perception, such that it actually UNDOES ITSELF. Similarly to how forgiveness is way of using illusions to point AWAY from illusions. True perception is a cancellation of perception. Just as false perception was an attempt to fixate perception on itself and make perceptions real. True perception points AWAY from the realm of perception entirely, and towards the light of God, beyond the dream.

"Forgiveness is illusion that is answer to the rest."

"Forgiveness sweeps all other dreams away, and though it is itself a dream, it breeds no others."

"Forgiveness is the end of dreams, because it is a dream of waking."

"Forgiveness is the only road that leads out of disaster, past all suffering, and finally away from death."

To dream of awakening, which is the happy dream, is to dream of what it is like to BE AWAKE. To be awake is to be IN HEAVEN. Therefore, forgiveness is a dream in which you imagine yourself to be NOT ASLEEP. To be similar to the way you actually are in reality, outside of dreaming. It is a dream based on the knowledge of heaven, in which, while still technically being in a dream-perception realm, you dream a dream so close to heaven that it's almost like being in heaven itself.

Just prior to leaving the prison, with sight firmly fixed on christ, who is in heaven and not in the world, you see the face of christ through the perceptual system (based on judgement/evaluation), and this "vision" is "the real world". It's you being able to see. "God is the light in which I see."

The real world is really heaven. It is the only reality and the only world truly deserving of being described as real. From within perception we see it through a perceptual filter, then we leave perception behind and KNOW its reality. "First you dream of peace, then awaken to it."

To see the real world, is to look out from within spacetime, within the perceptual realm, using perception, but using it in a special way which enalbles you to look OUTSIDE the perceptual realm. To peer into heaven beyond the separate bubble of spacetime. You don't actually become able to BE IN heaven at this point, outside the dream, but you stand within the dream, looking through its transparent walls like an window onto God.

As you do this, as you open up to reality while still dreaming, as you disbelieve in the solidity of the prison walls, as you form a bridge to the Kingdom, as you reunite gradually with God and with love, light seems to stream into your mind.

In fact an awareness of God gradually seems to return to your mind, and starts to be "seen in" the things you see. "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind." Eventually God is ALL that you see, which causes the "things you were seeing him in" to disappear.

So what we're really doing is, shifting our attention, away from hell, towards heaven. Shifting it away from God's absence, towards God. Away from body identification to spirit identification. Away from darkenss to light.

Away from fear to love. God, christ, soul, spirit, light, love, truth and everything real, is squarely NOT a part of the illusory prison world. It is "outside" of it, psychologically. So our job is to "position" oursleves in heaven, while still in the separated realm, and shine our light from heaven, into this world, erasing it.

This is why the closer your mind comes to aligning with God's will, with heaven's light, the more that light and love are able to stream into the dream through you.

The miraculousness of heaven begins to seep into the dream. The laws of spacetime begin to be overruled as you learn "I am under no laws but God's." You start becoming able to do things which "are not of this world." Your body returns to health as a symbol of eternal life. And you become empowered to overrule death.

To be the light of the world, is to extend heaven's light into the dream. To shine into the darkness, to illuminate it and shine away death. "Eternity will shine away the world." "The stars will disappear in light."

As your perception becomes "truer", it simply means that you are not mis-perceiving, so become able to "accurately" perceive what God created. This isn't the same as knowing what's there, but we can use perception to interpret what's there. "To perceive the truth is not the same as knowing it." - but you CAN perceive the truth, which is heaven.

As the walls of spacetime melt, as the granite block of sin turns to whisps of smoke easily dispelled, as the light of God shines into the world through forgiveness, and as the hell we made no longer has internal sin projected onto it, the world is seen as beautiful and forgiven. A beautiful illusion. Yet "A world forgiven cannot last" because it's still an illusion of a world. And it will disappear.

"Illusions recognized must disappear."

"The old one has left no trace upon it in its passing."

"Idols must disappear, and leave no trace behind their going."

"And you will be with him when time is over and no trace remains of dreams of spite in which you dance to death's thin melody."

"Heaven is all that remains."

"When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that you will last forever."

This is pretty much the "model" of the course's levels and metaphysics that I've converged towards over time. Simply that there are only two states, realms or worlds. They are logical opposites. And while we're in the world opposite to heaven, we gradually transition our truth, reality and identity over to the other world, such that toward the end we are almost entirely heaven-identified and vigilant only for the Kingdom.

Our task is simply to ANCHOR ourselves into our soul, remember who we really are outside of the perceptual dream environment, tune into God, leave all perception of form behind, forget the world and embrace our true nature, inherited from God.

You are the spirit that God created. You are the reality that God established. You are the power that God extended. You are the will that God has expressed. You are the light which God radiated. You are the truth which God gave you. You are nothing and have nothing that does not come from God. And nothing in the world of illusions has ever changed that.

"So fearful is the dream, so seeming real, he could not waken to reality without the sweat of terror and a scream of mortal fear, unless a gentler dream preceded his awaking, and allowed his calmer mind to welcome, not to fear, the Voice that calls with love to waken him; a gentler dream, in which his suffering was healed and where his brother was his friend. God willed he waken gently and with joy, and gave him means to waken without fear."

"Dream softly of your sinless brother, who unites with you in holy innocence. And from this dream the Lord of Heaven will Himself awaken His beloved Son."

Here is an ACIM teaching which many will find controversial or unacceptable. This is often overlooked or disbelieved. Surely it can't be claiming what it's claiming? Let's find out.

Basically, Jesus says that your body must be healed, so that it can teach life and resurrection and innocence to your brothers, in the dream. When it is not healed, it presents a "picture of crucifixion" to him, whose symptoms of sickness or damage actually accuse him of sin. Jesus also states that it is by healing your body, that you PROVE to him that he must be innocent, and therefore your health heals him. This is not figurative or metaphoric.

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

Healing by the way typically means the actual transformation of the mind AND body from a state of sickness to a state of health and wholeness.

"YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real."

How will you attest this? How will you demonstrate, visually, that your brother's sin did not affect you in any way? Only by healing the body of any damage or consequences of sin/attack is this possible.

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

So if your brother attacks you, sins against you, seeming to damage your body, and if you maintain the symptoms of attack, these symptoms testify that your brother DID SIN. They prove it, and you hold this proof before him to demonstrate to him, he IS a sinner. Only by forgiving AND REMOVING the signs of attack do you prevent him from having grounds for guilt. He cannot be guilty if his attack DID NOT WORK.

"Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors."

As the effects of sin/attack are undone, in your mind and body, overlooked by forgiveness, healed, reversed, you prove that sin IS REVERSIBLE. This occurs through a miracle of healing. The undoing of the symptoms proves that he did not sin, he was just mistaken, and there is no evidence to back up his claims.

"LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself."

So you heal your mind, which also heals your body, which OFFERS salvation to your brother, by showing him that because YOU are saved from the effects of sin, SO IS HE. Your healed body testifies to his innocence and TEACHES him that he is NOT a sinner.

Now, you might be skeptical and are wondering, maybe this applies only at a mental level of perception, that you must heal your mind only. But Jesus clarifies, this is not so...

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

He's clearly been talking about the BODY being healed by a miracle, all along. And so yes, he does mean, that the physical body must be healed by a miracle, in order to NOT accuse your brother of sin. You are either accusing your brother of sin or accusing him of innocence, by the depiction of your body, which is a teaching device. You either teach him "I am hurt, therefore you are sinful" or "I am healed, therefore you are innocent."

Jesus goes much further into this teaching by talking about how the body, in a state of sickness, accuses your brother of sinning against you.

"Sickness is but a "little" death; a form of vengeance not yet total. Yet it speaks with certainty for what it represents. The bleak and bitter picture you have sent your brother, YOU have looked upon in grief."

You send the picture of your human body to your brother, by showing it to him. This bleak picture attempts to suggest, "look what you've done to me." Because you have damage, he must have caused you. Because you are at the effect, he is the sinner. Your symptoms attempt to convince him of his sinfulness.

"And everything that it has shown to him have you believed, BECAUSE it witnessed to the guilt in him, which you perceived and loved."

He elaborates further:

"The power of witness is beyond belief, because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness is believed BECAUSE he points beyond himself, to what he REPRESENTS."

The human body is a witness. It testifies. It represents something. It symbolizes, either eternal life, or death. What you use it to symbolize, teaches that to your brother. It is a communication device which takes on the form of its message. And so as your body is sick, it is holding sin against your brother.

"A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape."

Don't think that sickness is in isolation. It is never "just you" that is sick. It is not "just your body" sitting there sick. There is cause and effect at work. If your body shows effects of sickness, your mind MUST be believing that an EXTERNAL cause put the effects there. This external cause is your sinful brother. By making your body sick, you accuse him of sin. Your body now witnesses to this and attempts to find him guilty. If he looks upon this and believes it, he stands condemned.

"This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him."

What this means is that you deliberately make your own body sick, in order to be ABLE to accuse your brother of sin. You are willing to ACCEPT this broken image, in order to reap the side effect benefits, which is that it assuages YOUR guilt and projects it onto him. You allow some amount of physical suffering SO THAT the "cause" of the sickness can be displaced onto your brother. In your physical sickness, you believe you are now innocent. That your death is caused by the world. You would even go so far as to KILL the body, in order to be able to displace ALL your sin onto another. You believe the payoff is worth it.

"The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

Jesus is not holding anything back here. He's literally saying that we make our bodies sick in an effort to be contagious. Sickness is an attack, not just on ourselves, but on our brother also. It attempts to come between brothers and prove them different. To separate them. "Arrest the extension of the mind and you foster separation and induce illness." Your physical sickness then becomes a witness to HIS guilt, and the death of your body prove HIS sinfulness. Your death is thus a huge accusation that everyone BUT you is a sinner. That THEY caused you to die, and not you. And all the while YOU put the death in place to accomplish this lie.

In another passage, Jesus says much the same thing.

"Is healing (of the body) frightening? To many, yes. For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies ARE accusers."

When the body is damaged, it DOES ACCUSE, beacuse the damage is an EFFECT of external causes. So long as the effects are showing up, physically, they testify that there WAS a cause, and this accuses your brother of sin.

"They stand firmly in the way of trust and peace, proclaiming that the frail can HAVE no trust, and that the damaged HAVE no grounds for peace. Who has been injured BY his brother, and could love and trust him still?"

By the body being sick, it claims that you cannot trust your brother, nor can you be at peace. It gives justification to NOT LOVING your brother. A sick body is a finger you are pointing at others, condemning them to death.

"He HAS attacked, and will attack again. Protect him not, because your damaged body shows that you must be protected FROM him."

Here Jesus says that you are justified in revenge, because your damaged body shows that you need protection from HIM. And by the way, this is true EVEN IF he did not seem to have ANYTHING to do with your body becoming sick. Your brother is FALSELY accused regardless of his participation.

"To forgive may be an act of charity, but NOT his due. He may be PITIED for his guilt, but NOT exonerated. And if you forgive him his transgressions, you but ADD to all the guilt that he has really earned."

Here Jesus is basically saying that you might pardon your brother or pity him, on the basis that you think "he did it", but by keeping the sin real, and keeping the effects to prove it, your pardoning of him will induce MORE guilt because he'll feel you are forgiving him for something he DID do, and so he won't be able to believe in his innocence. Your pardoning is a guilt trip.

And here, Jesus gets explicit again that you must remove the sickness.

"The unhealed CANNOT pardon. For they are the witnesses that pardon is unfair. They would retain the CONSEQUENCES of the guilt they overlook."

The consequences are the physical effects, the symptoms and signs, which PROVE "sin happened." So long as the symptoms remain, pardon is UNFAIR and unjustified.

"Yet no-one CAN forgive a sin which he believes is real. And what has consequences MUST be real, because what it has DONE is there to see."

If you can SEE the EFFECTS of sin, symptoms, sickness, damage, then you cannot forgive this. Thus you cannot forgive your brother. Thus he cannot forgive himself.

"Forgiveness is NOT pity, which but seeks to pardon what it knows to be the truth. Good cannot BE returned for evil, for forgiveness does not first ESTABLISH sin, and THEN forgive it. Who can say and MEAN, "My brother, you have injured me, and yet, because I am the BETTER of the two, I pardon you my hurt." HIS pardon and YOUR hurt can NOT exist together. One DENIES the other, and MUST make it false."

If your hurt remains, mentally, emotionally, or physically, your brother is still accused.

"To witness sin and yet forgive it is a paradox which reason cannot see. For it maintains what has been done to you DESERVES no pardon. And, by GIVING it, you grant your brother mercy, but retain the proof he is not REALLY innocent."

If you retain the proof, ie the body is STILL sick, this MUST imply, that your brother is NOT really innocent. The appearance of "seemingly real sickness" proves, if believed, that he is a sinner.

Jesus now instructs us to REMOVE THE SICKNESS. Get rid of the proof. Cancel the evidence. Demonstrate physically that there is no damage, therefore THERE IS NO SIN.

"The sick remain accusers. They cannot forgive their brothers AND themselves as well. For no-one in whom true forgiveness reigns CAN suffer. He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes. And thus he MUST have overlooked it, and removed it from his own."

"Forgiveness CANNOT be for one, and not the other. Who forgives IS healed. And in his healing (mind and body) lies the PROOF that he has truly pardoned, and retains no trace of condemnation that he still would hold against himself or any living thing."

Pretty dam literal here. If you hold a picture of crucifixion (crucified, attacked, damaged, sick body) in front of your brother's eyes, you apparently are STILL CONDEMNING HIM. Your mind MUST still be using the body to attack and accuse him. Your mind CANNOT BE HEALED, because it if WERE, it would have healed the body and STOPPED PRODUCING effects, accusations, sickness or death. "The mind, being sane, heals the body."

Not one single trace of condemnation must remain in the body. Sickness is condemnation. And here Jesus is suggesting to you, something very powerful.

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

You PUT the condemnation there, which made the body sick. You can REMOVE IT.

But this goes on to indicate something even more profound. You absolutely MUST remove it if you are to NOT BE CONDEMNING. If your mind is healed, it WILL heal the body. No one in their right mind would CONTINUE making the body sick, if they are teaching and demonstrating harmlessness. And the Holy Spirit CAN ONLY use the body to teach healing by SHOWING that the body is healed. "Thus is the body healed by miracles." The Holy Spirit intends to HEAL THE BODY, so that you can use it to SYMBOLIZE your brother's innocence to him, which teaches him his own belief in sin is mistaken, and heals his mind.

"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."

The holy spirit heals the body and presents a picture (body image) of you, representing your innocence.

"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."

And there it is. He heals your body SO THAT it is a picture of health, a demonstration of having NEVER been hurt, a PROOF that BECAUSE it has no damage, suffering or pain (no symptoms of sickness), it CANNOT be attacked. That YOU have never been attacked, YOU believe in healing, YOU CAN PROVE IT, and you are giving an EXAMPLE for all to see.

"Show THIS unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you."

You see, your healed body now becomes a teaching device, for your brothers. HE looks on it, and because of its LACK of damage, he sees only harmlessness and innocence in it. He sees no PROOF of sin. Especially if HE was the one who seemed to attack your body, to put the effects there, the effects are GONE, reversed, undone by the power of the Holy Spirit through miracles. "The mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this." And so this says to him, YOU DID NOT SIN. He sees His forgiveness in YOUR healing, shown to him physically.

"Here is the proof that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ***ever had effects of any kind***. That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

This is powerful, because your healing, your body being healed along with your mind, COMFORTS HIM, and MAKES HIM HEALTHY. It denies HIS belief that he sinned, proves he is mistaken, and proves he MUST be innocent. Your body thus teaches him, "brother, at your hand I live." ie, "you have caused me to be innocent, you have forgiven me, you have healed me, so you too must be innocent, healed, and forgiven."

We can USE the body to TEACH INNOCENCE in this world, by reversing sickness and demonstrating ONLY healing and health. To SYMBOLIZE eternal life, rather than to symbolize death.

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

"The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents."

By the body's HEALTH and loveliness, it relays the message of holiness it RECEIVED from the mind, and PROCLAIMS that holiness by REPRESENTING it symbolically.

"Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live."

Here is why the body is powerful as a testament to eternal life, WHEN used by the Holy Spirit to DEMONSTRATE immortality.

"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, ****and healed along with you****."

This is the proper USE of the body to EXTEND HEALING to your brother. This cannot be done while the body maintains sickness. Because if the sickness remains, the mind HAS NOT been healed. There SHOULD NOT BE SICKNESS IN THE BODY.

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

You give the miracle you receive. You AND your brother are healed through your healing.

"How just are miracles! For they bestow an equal gift of full deliverance from guilt upon your brother AND yourself. YOUR healing saves HIM pain, as well as you. And YOU are healed BECAUSE you wished him well."

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

Love your brother that YOU AND HIM may be healed together, and both your bodies may testify to the whole world that forgiveness is complete, there is no sin or sickness or death, and nothing can happen against your will.

Resurrections means life. This is a course in returning to the LIVING. The reversal of death in all its forms. Physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

A total CURE.

Here, you can read the THE ONLY PARAGRAPH in the entire Course where a "shift in perception" is mentioned in connection with "miracles". There are NO other references to this and there is not even a single reference to any kind of "shifting" OR changing of perception in relation to "miracles" mentioned within the same context or section of text, anywhere.

I am going to explain what it really means and what a MIRACLE is, below.

"The miracle minimizes the need for time. In the longitudinal or horizontal plane the recognition of the equality of the members of the Sonship appears to involve almost endless time. However, the miracle entails a sudden SHIFT from horizontal to vertical perception. This introduces an interval from which the giver and receiver both emerge farther along in time than they would otherwise have been. The miracle thus has the unique property of abolishing time to the extent that it renders the interval of time it spans unnecessary."

So, for a start, the "shift" referred to is in the context of the collapsing of time, and not so much talking about the so-called "shifts in perception" that you undergo when you are correcting/purifying the mind. But it does mention perception.

The KEY sentence is this: "The miracle entails a sudden SHIFT from horizontal to vertical perception."

Now, we need to understand what the Course means by a "horizontal perception" and a "vertical perception" and how they are different and what exactly is "entailed" by "shifting" from one to the other.

"Horizontal perception" is ego perception. It means that you believe in and are perceiving causes on this level, which are producing effects on this SAME level. Therefore it seems that cause and effect are operating sideways. So for example, if it SEEMS as if a person throws a ball at another person and it hits them on the head, person A is the cause and person B is affected. This illusion sets up a scenario of victimhood, if the people are thinking with the ego.

On the surface it appears there was an independent, separate cause on this level, which produced independent, separate effects in some other part of this level. This way of perceiving relies on separation and fragmentation of the level, ie multiple separate individual causes and effects. And also in horizontal perception, it is believed that a cause "escapes" from the effects it produces, so is not at the effect of itself and can get away with murder.

Horizontal perception is a murderous thought system of attack and the attempt to deny effects ie to deny oneness, to have separate rules for separate individuals, to perceive inequality and to seem capable of attacking without being attacked. This is all "standard" within horizontal perception. It's ego perception.

"Vertical perception" is very different to this. Instead of looking sideways for causality on this level, or thinking that this level causes effects in a higher level, perception instead places you IN GOD, ie in truth/heaven, looking DOWNWARDS upon the lower level (this world).

From that higher perspective, it is seen that the ENTIRE world is one dream, it is all coming FROM the higher level, the higher level is the cause of it, all of the things happening in the world are EFFECTS ONLY, there ARE no causes in the world on the horizontal level, and therefore there also are no victims, no possibility of one part of the world attacking another, and no separated opposing wills working against each other. It is the perspective of God, or the perspective of the dreamer of the dream.

In vertical perception, you literally RECOGNIZE that everything in this world/lower level is expressing FROM the higher level, thus mind is the cause of everything that's showing up, and there are no other causes of anything. That means there is no horizontal cause of sickness or death. There is nothing that is happening or showing up in the world which "explains" or "justifies" or "causes" anything else on the same level. So someone does not die from a car crash, someone is not sick because of bad food, someone is not suffering with PTSD from a war, someone is not lacking money because someone stole it, etc. No horizontal causes whatsoever.

Instead, vertical perception sees that there can be no victimhood, there are NO causes on the level of form, the entire universe is an effect, mind is the cause, mind has all the power, mind has projected this entire world and it can CHANGE ANYTHING if it so chooses. When it changes something, it basically goes behind the back of any fictional "horizontal laws", which includes all of the laws of physics, biology, chemistry, etc, and pulls the plug on them.

That means, while it is physically impossible for a physical object to suddenly disappear from one location and show up in another, based on the horizontal laws of causality, "vertically" this is absolutely effortless. The vertical mind can choose, from above, to simply undo the projection of the object and to project another object somewhere else. To the observer on the physical level it will seem like A MIRACLE! A demonstration of what appears to be horizontally impossible. A law-breaking, physics-defying demonstration that the horizontal laws ARE NOT TRUE, and that the laws of God ARE TRUE.

This is also the true meaning of "there is no order of difficulty in miracles". They are all the same because all that happens is a vertically-perceiving person who does not buy into any of the horizontal illusions/laws whatsoever, decides to rearrange the illusion in a way which completely defies all of the laws and which horizontal-believing people find to be impossible. If at first a person appeared dead, and if the horizontal laws say that once death occurs there is no going back, and the vertically perceiving person decides to remove the dead body and put life back into it and manifest a living body in its place, THAT IS A MIRACLE.

A miracle is an expression, rooted in love, aligned with the Atonement (vertical truth), which CAUSES FROM ABOVE, and produces effects BELOW (e.g. in the physical level). And since all such acts are basically the SAME ACT of causality from above to below, it does not matter whatsoever what the below rules say should be possible, or what seems more difficult or easy, or the magnitude of the effects, or how long lasting they have been, or how many times a person was caused, or how long sickness has been present, or how long someone is dead for. None of it matters vertically because love expresses maximally from above, will full power and effect below, and everything is essentially the SAME ACTION. One problem, one solution.

Now, we need to therefore recognize that when someone is in the ego mindset, if they are trying to apply the course and are trying to shift perception or have a healing or receive a correction, the only "actual" healing possible is to move in the direction of the vertical.

However, if we are being honest here, a person who is just starting out with this and who has a "little" willingness and accepts a small correction, can barely be called a miracle worker. They may "shift" from 99% horizontal perception, to 98.5% horizontal perception. A very slight shift away from horizontal toward vertical truth. And that person WILL NOT be able to move mountains. They will not be able to reverse death nor will they be able to heal the blind etc.

Each little shift in perception gradually, slowly, over a long period of time, moves the person from the horizontal upward toward God. And it takes a LOT of purification work to do this. A huge amount of investment in horizontal ego perception must be let go in order to move upwards. And there is NOT a "sudden shift" here. You do not suddenly go from heavy ego investment to "no ego" in the blink of an eye (at least almost never). We're not talking about going from horizontal to "slightly more vertical" perception. A miracle entails a shift ALL THE WAY to vertical perception.

Notice also it says "entails", which doesn't necessarily mean "is". It's not saying a miracle IS a shift to vertical perception. It ENTAILS getting into vertical perception first. You need to get your mind up there into the perspective of God, first, before you will be able to perform a miracle. And for most people that is going to take YEARS of dedicated undoing and correction, which the course calls PURIFICATION. It's not even the same thing as forgiveness.

Now, there are parts in the Course where Jesus makes a distinction between being "miracle ready" and the actual "action" of performing a miracle. Miracle readiness means being in vertical perception at all times. Actually PERFORMING a miracle, which expresses FROM love, in a vertical direction, producing changes in EFFECTS on the level of this world (almost always observable), is a separate part of being miraculous. You don't just sit there "being miraculous". It is not a spectator sport. Members of Jesus's party are ACTIVE WORKERS. There is an activity involved. A USE of the POWER of causality. An EXPRESSION of it to where love was LACKING, providing what was lacking, so that LIFE is restored and death is reversed. (Miracles fulfill a lack).

So the "shifting of perception" from fear to love, or from ego to truth, or from darkness to light, or from death to life, is not ITSELF a miracle. Miracles flow DOWNWARD FROM HEAVEN. "Miracles fall like drop of healing rain from heaven on a dry a dusty world where starved and thirsty creatures come to die." They come DOWN from ABOVE, not up from below, and they are not your movement upwards. Nor do they flow sideways. A sideways shift in perception is not a miracle. A slight shift towards vertical perception is not a miracle. A person is not performing miracles by MOVING UPWARD, they perform miracles by expressing FROM a high place, downward, which then LIFTS upward. The shifting of perception towards God is an EFFECT of a miracle, not a cause.

It is in fact the EGO which likes to believe that IT is a miracle worker. It does this through level confusion, which is the belief that a lower level causes a higher level. In this belief, the ego says, well, if I shift my perception toward truth, then I am being causal and am triggering a miracle. Or as if, the shifting itself is a cause, and it produces vertical effects. This is A LIE. This is classic ego thinking. God is cause, not the ego. Cause comes DOWN from above, not up from below.

Miracles ENTAIL a shift into a vertical perceiving mode, FIRST, in order to SEE with God's eyes, to recognize suffering for the illusion it is so that you do not make it real, and then LOVE EXPRESSES. The expression of love is downwards from God. Causality flows vertically, from God, to us. Getting your perception INTO a state of perceiving vertically IS NOT a miracle, it is PREPARATION for a miracle.

Recognize that miracles are rooted in forgiveness and forgiveness is a HIGH STATE of mind, in which there is nothing LEFT to forgive. It is the atonement. Forgiveness, atonement, salvation, are all the same thing. They are end goals after a great deal of purification work and much correction of perception. Correction of perception is not a miracle, but miracles DO have a corrective function.

They are extensions of, expressions of, the atonement principle, once it has ALREADY been accepted. Atonement has to be RECEIVED, BEFORE miracles can be GIVEN. You can only give the miracles you have received, and miracles are something you SHARE and GIVE, not something that you "only receive". You cannot express a miracle UNTIL you accept atonement, and you cannot accept atonement UNTIL you have "shifted perception". So the shifts in perception have to happen FIRST, over a long period of time, gradually, to get your mind to where you are WILLING to ACCEPT the atonement, and THEN you will be willing to RECEIVE, and THEN you will be ABLE to extend and perform a miracle. You cannot give miracles you have not received and that means you cannot express atonement if you have not accepted it yet!

You can't sit there and think, well, I just shifted "my perception" and so "I" have now received a "miracle" in isolation, which only I have benefited from, and it has no causal effects on anyone else. Giving and receiving are one, and once you accept atonement you GO OUT and you extend the atonement to others and HELP OTHERS. Miracles are services to others FROM a state of love, not little stepping stones in your own awakening.

Miracles can rearrange time because they operate from above and outside of time and therefore can DEFY linear/horizontal causality/time. Does shifting your perception rearrange time? Does it have effects which are POTENTIALLY SPECTACLES, which you then have to be careful not to use AS spectacles (ie for that sake alone)? Could you describe your own correction of your own perception, something that could have the "risk" of being considered SPECTACULAR in the eyes of other people, with effects so extraordinary (like Jesus appearing out of thin air after having "died")? Not likely.

Jesus walking on water to prove that gravity means nothing and He is not under the laws of the horizontal, THAT is a miracle. Jesus completely defying all laws by MULTIPLYING a few loaves of bread and fishes enough to feed 5000 people, that is a MIRACLE. Jesus raising someone from "certain death" and reversing death and restoring him to a living state, that is IMPOSSIBLE on the horizontal level of laws (death is irreversible), but He proved that it is NOT irreversible, because he has his hand on the "controls" of this entire world "there is nothing my holiness cannot do."

If it is not supernatural, it is NOT a miracle. It there is not some kind of causality coming from above and expressing below and BREAKING the ego's laws, it is NOT a demonstration of God's truth and is not a miracle. If it is merely someone having a personal healing in the privacy of their home and perceiving slightly more truthfully afterwards, that is NOT a miracle. It is merely a stepping stone TOWARDS being able to let miracles flow. If all expressions of love (FULL love) are a miracle, then love has to be able to flow fully and freely through you before you can be miraculous, and that is NOT even remotely going to happen while you still have a ton of correction and purification to do. "Miracles are everyone's right, but PURIFICATION IS NECESSARY FIRST." Purification is a process of gradual shifting of perception towards truth and a LOT of it is needed FIRST BEFORE you gain access to the right to perform miracles.

MIRACLES ARE NOT SHIFTS IN PERCEPTION!!!!!!!!!

Miracles are expressions from love. To be able to express from love, you have to have willingness to allow love to be in you. You have to be aware of love, and you have to be free of blocks to love. That's a HIGH STATE of mind. That's advanced. You try to get someone who has just picked up ACIM and accepted a little bit of correction, to express God's love through them.

They will not be willing OR able, because there are too many blocks in the way. Miracle working DOES NOT come to the beginner. It takes a lot of undoing and correction of the mind - a lot of "shifts", which add up overall to a much bigger shift, which eventually put you closer to God and more in alignment with vertical perception, which THEN starts to reveal miracle working abilities. The ability to cause from above. To cause from above (super) the natural (ego horizontal nature).

If it does not PROVE and DEMONSTRATE that the ego's laws are not natural and do not APPLY at all, it is not a miracle.

And note that Jesus walking on water COULD have been considered a spectacle. However, the Course actually says, do not use miracles as a spectacle as an attempt to INDUCE BELIEF. This is often cut short. The end part is vital. If you use a miracle ONLY to try to "force" someone to "believe" or to become a follower or to go along with your teaching or whatever, to coerce, to manipulate them, THEN you are producing a (potentially spectacular) miracle for the sake of achieving an ego purpose. And this IS a mistaken understanding of their purpose.

But if you are not doing that, and you're not going around putting on a show just to shock and awe people, without using them to actually TEACH or HEAL or UNDO or RAISE THE DEAD so that people become MORE RESURRECTED, THAT is the only way that they are used incorrectly as spectacles. It's got NOTHING to do with whether the miracle is spectacular or not. And this idea of "not doing anything spectacular" has led people to hide in a hole and be afraid of miracles and to play them down and shove them in a box to suggest not doing ANYTHING that could be considered a spectacle. It's a gross misunderstanding.

So anyway. Stepping off my soapbox for now. Miracles are miraculous. This is a Course in SUPERNATURAL MIRACLES, ego-law breaking miracles, what appears "impossible" to the horizontal ego thought system, and expressions of real love which has the power to LITERALLY move mountains.

Come on people. This is a course in MIRACLES. MIRACLES!!!!! Not a course in fixing yourself up and sitting on a fence.

How was the tiny mad idea possible? How was it possible for us to mis-create? Why did God give us the ability to try to sin? Did we lose our innocence in the separation? How is it that this world seems to exist?

When God created his children, He gave them the freedom to will and create. The mind is not capable of ever doing anything that God didn't give it the ability to do. It cannot add abilities to itself, it can only operate within the parameters of its design. This means you literally cannot go against God's will or do anything He did not make possible.

"God creates only mind awake. He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them."

But what God did do, was give you freedom. The power of the mind to freely choose to will to co-create. And this freedom is fully given.

"The world, in its original connotation, included both the proper creation of man by God, AND the proper creation by man in his Right Mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given. "

Within the context of being "completely free", it is technically possible for you to try to USE your freedom against itself. You HAVE to be free to do this, in order to truly have freedom. While you have free will, it HAS to be possible for you to potentially USE that free will to try NOT to will anything. If this weren't a part of the freedom of will, you would not have free will. It's not a productive USE of will, since it creates nothing, but it is still part of it.

The thing is, although you are free to TRY to deny freedom, something completely pointless happens when you do so. Since it remains true that God's will cannot be opposed, and you cannot remove your freedom from yourself, and you cannot make yourself unpowerful, and you cannot be changed in any way, the exercise of TRYING to use your will to NOT will, to be "unwilling" or to oppose God's will, HAS to be futile.

It's not that you aren't free to TRY to do this, it's just that there is really no point in doing it. It's not possible to cause anything real to happen this way, because it denies creation. So it's like saying, I want to use my free will against itself to cause nothing to happen. I want to will not to will. I want to not create anything. I want to deny myself.

There is a circular logic which enters into this. You are trying to use your free will to cause your free will to stop being free and to will nothing. But how can you still be WILLING that you will nothing? You have to still USE the will to will that you don't will anything. So the notion is really absurd. You have to keep using the will, while claiming that you're not using it. And so it has to entail denial and it has to NOT accomplish what you're trying to make it accomplish. And never can you will the WILL itself to cease to exist, because you'd have to USE will to do that.

It has to be a state of denial, because the fact remains you can't change your freedom or power. So trying to DO so can only mean you are going into a DENIAL of what is true of you, and are PRETENDING to do whatever you're doing. You can't actually make yourself un-free or destroy your power. You can, however, seemingly deceive yourself in believing that its possible. Precisely BECAUSE you are free to do so. God did make it possible for you to be free to try to not be free, but He did not make it possible for you to ACTUALLY affect your freedom.

"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."

Another way to put it is, it is not possible to change God's will or to cause your own will to stop. It is literally impossible to separate from God or be where God is not. However, you are FREE to use your freedom to TRY to do so. You can INSIST that it is possible, and invest belief in it, and try to GIVE IT truth and make it real and convince yourself of it and deceive yourself, but you STILL cannot make it a reality or actually do it in reality.

As you try to do so, as you attempt to use your freedom to stop being free, as you try to will not to will anything, or as you try to will nothingness, or try to give reality and meaning to something impossible, you go into what we're calling the "tiny mad idea". The idea of separation and sin. Which just means you're insisting that something impossible is possible - that something false is true. That you CAN separate, you CAN sin, you have done so, and there is proof that the impossible is happening.

This can only be self deception and denial, because it's still impossible. But you are free to believe it if you want to. To believe it you have to DENY what is true, try to be out of touch with the facts, and pretend that the will has been denied. You are free to pretend that you have no freedom, which seems to place the mind in a state of "sleep" or dormancy, as though it is not creating or has no power, or is not alive. A sort of "stand-by mode", in which the mind believes that everything impossible is possible, and thus imagines that the opposite of God is happening through a kind of hallucinatory process of wishful thinking. ("There is no world apart from what you wish").

"When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere."

Now, going into this state, is NOT A SIN. NOR is it outside of the scope of what God made possible. You can never actually rewrite the laws of God. You can't give yourself something He did not give you. You cannot change yourself. You cannot destroy yourself or your freedom or your will. But it IS within your rights and within your power to deny or pretend that you can do these things.

Pretending that you are not immortal is the best you can do, because you cannot cause yourself to die. But you certainly can produce illusions, fabrications, that its happening, through the DESIRE to have it be possible. You can confuse your identity with these illusions. You can also believe that the suffering is real. But it remains unreal, and the truth is unchanged.

What this simply means is that by "mis-using" the mind to believe that impossibilities are possible and happening, you hallucinate a world of make-believe, which you try to invest in and convince yourself is true and real. You even try to give it immortality and life and will and a mind of its own. But you can't succeed. You can only fake it. But you are free to fake it.

Entering into this state of "denying that you are free", using your freedom of will to try to will not to have freedom of will, you are ONLY entering into a state of being MISTAKEN. If it is true that you HAVE freedom and will, you are mistaken when you believe that you don't. If it is true that you are immortal, you are mistaken when you believe death is possible. If it is true that sin is utterly impossible, you are mistaken when you believe sin is happening.

Being mistaken is still an "innocent" condition. Guilt does not have to enter into it at all. Someone can make an "innocent mistake", which is simply a failure to willingly admit that you're trying to do something which makes no sense. You can be mistaken in believing that willing against God's free will is possible. It's not possible. Nor can you really will against yourself. But you are free to believe it's possible, and to try to do it, and to try to convince yourself that you've done it. But you cannot do it, and so are mistaken when you believe this.

Believing that you can be separate from God, is a simple mistake. Since it's not possible, you can't do it. But you can try to convince yourself that it's possible. Doing that is pointless and futile because it can't BE possible. But you are free to try. You are free to resist the truth. Or to use your power to try to pretend to be powerless. You are innocent in this because all you're doing is using your God-given powers in a way that is a pointless exercise. A way which results in nothing really happening, as you "play small" and try to be little and powerless.

Provided that you recognize that mis-creation is just a state of being mistaken, and is not a sin, and is still well within the laws of God, and that at no time is God's will violated, even when you are mistaken, then you can also see that mis-creating is an innocent act. It's really not an act at all. And it does not change the truth about you. All it does is set up some illusion of deception and some confusion about what's really possible.

"There is another Maker of the world, the simultaneous Corrector of the mad belief that ANYTHING could be established and maintained without some link that kept it still within the laws of God; NOT as the law itself upholds the universe as God created it, but in some form adapted to the need the Son of God believes he has. Corrected error IS the error's end. And thus has God protected still His Son, even in error."

"Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release."

The Course also talks about how entering into this "detour into fear", which is just an attempt to make true what is not true, or to use will against itself, produced a "lower order mind" or a "system of thought" which seems to function opposite to how God originally indended it in higher reality. This lower (ego) mind is a mind of denial, deception, untruth and confusion. But it is not a sin. It's just a mis-configured and unwise mis-use of your God-given abilities.

"Thoughts can represent the lower or bodily level of experience, or the higher or spiritual level of experience. One makes the physical, and the other creates the spiritual."

The physical world of bodies is what is produced in the deceptive state of being mistaken about the truth. In the state of denial, the dream of death, the illusion of separation, the pretense at being powerless and imprisoned, it produces the "forms of error" which the body sees. Error is just a mistake.

"No one CAN be "taken over" unless he wills to be. However, if he places his mind under tyranny, rather than authority, he intrudes the submission/dominance onto free will himself. This produces the obvious contradiction inherent in any formulation that associates free will with imprisonment."

Attempting to assert that will can cause will not to will, produced an illusion of an "unwilling world." A world in opposition to God. But this is STILL within the confines of the Son of God's freedom. The angels also have this freedom.

"Error cannot really threaten truth, which can always withstand it. Only the error is actually vulnerable. You are free to establish your kingdom where you see fit..."

"The "Princes of this World" are princes only because they are really angels. But they are free to establish their kingdom where they see fit.""God does not coerce".

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true, unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception. "

God is not viewing your excursion into "trying to make impossible things possible", as being a sin. He doesn't see it as a real threat to what you are, either. Nor does he coerce you into stopping doing this against your will. For God to oppose your free will he would have to oppose his own. He does however "encourage" and guide and help his children to "come to their senses". Because it remains true that "trying not to will anything" is a rather pointless exercise which can't really result in anything creative. It's more like, taking a nap where you dream of destruction or "the opposite of creating". A dream of mortality and death as "the opposite of eternal life."

We mis-created the world, but only as a mistake. Not as a sin. When it is recognized as only a mistake, sin is lifted away from it and it is regarded as forgiven. Being an illusion of something impossible seeming to be possible, this is seen through and beyond, and this overlooking is forgiveness. It's a forgiveness which looks past bodies and the physical to the light of reality, not deceived by the illusion that false things are true. To the the light of sanity and reason. We simply made the world in error and it can be undone.

"You made the body in attempting to deceive yourself."

"Miracles reflect..." "I have done this thing and it is this I would undo."All we're doing here, is basically, innocently, trying to do something which isn't really possible. We're using our freedom to try to imprison ourselves. We're using our immortality to pretend to be mortal. We're using our holiness to pretend to be sinners. And we're using the power of the mind to pretend to be weak and powerless. We can't ACTUALLY be imprisoned, or mortal, or sinful, or powerless. And so we're using all these things against themselves, to PRETEND that we don't have these things. This BLOCKS and disguises them, using illusions to make it appear something is true which isn't.

Seen as nothing more than an error, a mistake, a futile attempt, a pointless exercise, the dream of death is not "against" God's will, which cannot be opposed, but is an ATTEMPT to believe that opposing God's will is possible or has merit. The mind is just stretching the truth. But using the mind in a "destructive" way, against its own nature, isn't constructive or creative and it also doesn't allow you to experience happiness.

"The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly but yet within Themselves, for They are everywhere."

"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."

God DOES will that you maintain the sanity of the clear recognition that there is NO POINT trying to use your freedom against itself. That it is truly impossible to WILL nothing. Or to make yourself have no power. Believing you are powerless when you are powerful, or that you are imprisoned when you are free, is obviously a state of denial, and this denial of life can only produce illusions of suffering and pain and misery."We also have observed that man can create an empty shell, but cannot create nothing at all."

"Whenever projection (creation) in its inappropriate sense is utilized, it ALWAYS implies that some emptiness (or lack of everything) must exist, and that it is within man's ability to put his own ideas there INSTEAD of the truth."

When you try NOT to create, you enter into "making" illusions. You produce an "emptiness" or lack of love, which is the world of "sin", meaning just the illusion of love's absence, or the absence of light. It isn't the presence of darkness, or of sin, or of real death, it is the illusion of the absence of their opposite. Because even in illusions you can't get outside of God's laws. You can never violate the parameters of your functioning as given by God. And so the world remains ONLY a mistake, not a real sin.

God's own will follows the knowledge that it is pointless to use will against itself, even though its possible to TRY to do so. Because when you try to do so, nothing is willed, and so nothing happens. God knows this and he is sane. His will is that you know it also. When you refuse to know it or you deny it, insisting that you CAN will nothingness to be something, you become deceived and confused. And God does not will that you enter into such suffering. "God's will for me is perfect happiness". And you can only be happy when you will in accord with God's true will - purely constructively and using your freedom to create. Free from self destruction.

"God Himself gave you the perfect correction for everything you have made which is not in accord with His Holy Will."

"The miracle compares the creations of man with the higher level of creation, accepting what is in ACCORD as true, and rejecting the DISCORDANT as false."

In all this, you always remain innocent, you can be correct or mistaken, but you cannot change the laws of God or of your true nature. You can be asleep in a denial state of trying to pretend that impossibilities are possible, but you can't ACTUALLY cause an opposite to God to happen. You can dream of it, imagine it, try to give it reality, even convince yourself of it, but you can't make it true. So at some point you have to admit, it's a fruitless exercise, and just return to creating with God. Using will to willingly will your creations, as God intended.

I'd like to try to explain from my point of view what a miracle is. However, I have to acknowledge that there are still some aspects of miracles I do not understand. So this is a work in progress. Take what you like and leave the rest.

Firstly, there are two levels. A higher level and a lower level. Think of each level as a realm of existence. The higher level is where God hangs out. In-between them is the idea of separation, and then below is where the ego hangs out. You could equate these to heaven and earth.

In truth, the higher level is the only causal power. In this higher level sits the Son of God who is dreaming, and in His dreaming he makes the lower level. He sort of projects it downwards from above. Mind, as cause, produces the picture of the world, an effect.

This picture of the world contains *everything* in the world, and he simultaneously puts in place everything that moves or seems to have affects on other things, plus the effects that those causes seem to have.

There are no causes inside the dream, only effects. So he is actually like a puppeteer pulling the strings to make BOTH the "causes and effects" or "victims and victimizers" do everything that they seem to do, and the "story" of how one causes the other is FICTIONAL.

In this perspective, cause and effect are VERTICAL. What is above, causes what is below. So this means everything in the world below is only an effect of the dreamer above.

Within the world below, however, there are illusions of separation, and many of these illusions make it SEEM as if there are independent causes within the dream. An example would be that the wind blows and makes the leaves on the tree move. Or a person kicks a ball.

The wind DOES NOT blow the tree - the wind AND the tree moving are BOTH dreamed SIMULTANEOUSLY by the higher level mind. The person does NOT kick the ball, the person kicking and the ball moving are BOTH dreamed simultaneously by a single mind, to create an ILLUSION of cause and effect when viewed in "linear time".

In this perspective, cause and effect are HORIZONTAL. Or in other words, there is an ILLUSION that something in the dream is able to "cause" something else in the dream to be an effect. In essence, this turns the "effect" of dreaming into a cause in its own right. So then we believe that this world contains "causes" which produce "effects". In the horizontal, causes are VICTIMIZERS, and effects are VICTIMS. And it is possible for victimizers to be affected as causes transform into effects and back again, because they are all the same ILLUSION.

Someone kicks you in the leg and you develop a bruise. If you are a body, this puts you AT THE EFFECT of the world, making you an instant VICTIM. Being born "by" the world into a body is an ILLUSION which makes you an instant victim, but in truth you are NOT at the effect of the world, and you are NOT "created by" your parent's bodies.

This horizontal perception of cause and effect is ENTIRELY illusory, because even the things which seem to "cause" other things, and the "effects" of those causes, are actually BOTH EFFECTS of the higher level mind which is the only cause of them. The higher level mind, in its vertical causality, manifests both the person kicking the leg, and the bruise on the leg, simultaneously, making it SEEM as though there was a horizontal cause of the bruise.

In the horizontal perception, we come to believe there are thus illusory "laws" which SEEM to describe what we are seeing happen from within this level, without being awakened to the true nature of cause and effect. It SEEMS to us that every action (cause) has an equal and opposite reaction (effect). The laws of physics are based on this. Science has gone to great lengths to describe the APPARENT way in which stuff happens at the level of being inside the dream, unaware of the higher level.

All of these ego laws, horiziontal laws, are SHOWN to be completely false and illusory, when the higher level decides to DEMONSTRATE that IT is the cause of everything. It is therefore possible for the higher level to decide to project a different image or dream, below, which is unlike the condition it was in previously, WITHOUT OBEYING any of the lower level illusory laws. Because the higher level "overrides" the lower level, any illusions of how things are supposed to happen, or what is supposed to be possible, are completely ignored.

The higher level is the level of love. But it is not just love as we think of love "separate from" other qualities. It is also joy, peace, life etc. In particular, it is ALIVE. God's love is a LIVING PRESENCE, which contains within it life-giving, eternal-life giving qualities. It is able to extend life forever. It is able to express SO MUCH "livingness", that it is permanently in a state of incorruptible "health", it is absolutely impossible for it to become sick or die, and it is therefore a state of immortality.

The life-giving quality of God's love, naturally EXPRESSES at all times. God is therefore ALWAYS giving life and continuing life. God's love is so life-giving and restorative and absolutely refuses to include any form of death or problem, that if any kind of illusion of sickness or death were "exposed" to it, it would be so INFUSED with life, that all signs of decay or sickness or death will be completely reversed. Health (light) will totally obliterate suffering (darkness), shining it away permanently.

This life-giving quality of God, is what we refer to as MIRACULOUS. It literally is 100% unlimited in what it can do, and there is absolutely nothing that can deter it or prevent it from healing, ie being in a permanent state of perfection. God is PERMANENTLY MIRACULOUS. Permanently life-giving. And so is His Son. It is completely NATURAL for God and His Son to be permanently miraculous. If they were to seem to be not miraculous, something must have gone wrong! Miraculousness does not ever stop. It is an eternal aspect of God's creative power.

With this in mind, when we "descend" into the darkness, going down to the lower "level", into the ego world, hell, we are attempting to put distance between ourselves and God. The further we become distant from God, as though descending further downwards towards death (eventually to be buried in the ground), the more we will be blocked from the life-giving properties of God's loving expression. This will result in a mind which believes sickness and death are reality, and it will project a body which is sick and later dead.

Death, in the ego's world, is the final statement that God's life has ended, or that we are so distant from God's Will to Live, that "our" will to live is no longer a will to live, but a will to cease living, ie to die. This means we believe we are becoming *completely* separate from God. Death of the body and mind is the ego's final attempt to completely escape the realm where God's light shines. Only complete "non-existence" can seem to fulfill the ego's wish to be separate from where God is.

In the dark, our mind is believing in separation, and is therefore sick. We have blocks to awareness, so do not see the light very well. This causes us to attack ourselves and our body will show this. Forms of sickness will appear, and eventually the body will die because we have attacked it. In order to UNDO this and reverse it, even to reverse what shows up as physical death, we need a miracle. We need some of the miraculous life-giving radiance of God's love.

Exposure to such radiance will RESURRECT us back to life, first a restoration of health and life in the mind and body, and then later the completion of the resurrection in which the body disappears, because the mind has become SO pure that it can no longer be bound by a body image. There are degrees of darkness and because the body is an outward picture of an inner condition at all times, if the mind resurrects, the body will also. Any "symptoms" (fake effects) from the illusion of horizontal causality, will be UNDONE by the shift to vertical perception (true causality - mind over matter).

A "miracle" as we tend to think of it, seems to be a step towards God. Or as some people call it, a "shift in perception" from death to life. However, we need to be clear that God is permanently miraculous and so is His Son. The miraculous life-giving property of God never stops. The ability to do absolutely anything never comes to an end. The creative power of the mind never ceases. And God is ALWAYS being loving. Anything that comes from love as an expression of love, IS MIRACULOUS. This means that God is ALWAYS MIRACULOUS.

A miracle then, CANNOT BE defined as the shift from death to life itself. The miracle is the LOVE which EXPRESSES in order to PRODUCE a shift from death to life. The shift is an EFFECT. The shift takes place entirely in the realm of the ego's world, the lower level, the level of EFFECT, because a miracle is an expression from the higher level of love, shining down onto what is below, and lifting it upwards towards God.

A helpful analogy, is when Jesus says beautifully:

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."

What this is saying is, miraculous healing love shines "down from above" onto the illusory world below where stuff seemed dead, giving it life, pulling it closer to itself, and "life" erupts to show SIGNS (symbols) of the immortality that has been extended from love. Love expresses, the dead come back to life, even forms and bodies and objects come back towards life. As far as forms of life can, being limited as symbols in a dream.

Corresponding to this then, realize that miracles come down from heaven, from the higher level, FROM LOVE, as an expression of Love, and BLESS what is below (the dusty dead world), bestowing upon it the MIRACULOUS radiance of love's life-giving properties, and therefore "bringing life" to what is there, RESTORING to being "more alive".

Jesus says in his analogy that the signs of life now spring up. Simply, what once was seemingly dead or even partly dead, has had some measure of its "dead-ness" lifted away, that thing has been RAISED upwards, vertically, towards God, and therefore is now in closer proximity to the life-giving power of God's love, and therefore COMES BACK TO LIFE. This even means that ROADKILL can be brought back to life, all "effects" of war can be undone, and all death reversed. The body can even be made immortal, incapable of sickness and death, because it is SO infused with the life-giving power of love. A miracle indeed.

Miracles are also referred to as a shift in perception - FROM HORIZONTAL TO VERTICAL PERCEPTION. As I described, when the mind changes how it sees things, and no longer sees things entirely in a "horizontal" way in terms of cause and effect, is no longer believing that one thing in the dream caused another thing, it shifts its VIEWPOINT by moving awareness VERTICALLY up towards God.

Vertical perception is the awareness that the higher level (love) is the ONLY CAUSE, and everything "below" that seems to be in the world - bodies and such, is ONLY EFFECT. This so-called shift into alignment with how God operates, is a shift into the recognition that cause is inside you not outside you, or to put it another way, cause is above, and all effects are below.

The "shifting" itself IS NOT the miracle as such. The shifting itself, the transition from darkness to light, is not really what causes healing. What causes healing is God's LOVE expressing FROM above, shining down onto what is below, causing what is below to be partly dissolved, such that the mind seems to shift upward.

This has to be true, because if the miracle itself - the miraculousness of love - were ONLY the shifting from horizontal to vertical, then once the "shifting" itself had been completed, the miracle would be ENDED, and that means, love would stop being miraculous. Love is PERMANENTLY MIRACULOUS. It cannot stop being miraculous.

What happens is, once a shift to vertical has taken place and healing has been RECEIVED FROM ABOVE, and the level of communication has been raised (oneness increased, separation decreased), there are simply LESS BLOCKS to the extension of love. More love is allowed to SHINE from above, through the mind, and to extend outward.

It extends outward completely naturally because that is what love does all the time. So when you remove your block to awareness, whether you call it a shift or not, you REVEAL the presence of love in the mind, you open up to the higher level and allow it to shine through you, and therefore love can now EXTEND THROUGH YOU.

Removing blocks to love, is an act of removing blocks to the AWARENESS of love's presence, because love is ALREADY FULLY PRESENT, being miraculous all the time. Correction, shifting, purification, or removal of blocks, simply UNCOVERS the love which was trying to express, allowing it to express more.

Shifting perception DOES NOT CAUSE A MIRACLE and DOES NOT CAUSE LOVE TO EXIST. Love, miraculousness, already exists. That is the *ego's version of miracles*, which it thinks IT causes, because IT thinks that IT has power over love to make healing happen! The shift is seen by the ego as a cause, but it is an EFFECT from a higher level. A gift. A sign that the mind is WILLING TO RECEIVE LOVE, not an ability to 'make love happen'.

The shift merely puts us closer TO it and allows us to EXTEND it, thus RECEIVING healing FROM love. "We" do not cause healing by shifting perception, LOVE DOES ALL THE WORK. And this also means, that being open to RECEIVING LOVE from God is important in healing, not just doing stuff with your mind on your own. You do not have to do everything yourself, God WANTS TO HEAL YOU FOR YOU.

The INCREASE in the expressability of that love through you is what HEALS YOU. The shift does not heal, the unblocking does not heal, LOVE IS THE ONLY HEALER. Love is the miracle.

After a while, when you have removed enough blocks to love that you are starting to RADIATE LOVE on a more constant basis, or at least something approaching towards love, YOUR MIND is now being restored as a conduit or medium through which love can naturally extend.

This means you will now be willing and able to extend love outward. And since you're still in the body at the moment, that means you will be able to DO GOD'S WILL ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN, ie you will be able to express the LOVE OF GOD, here, which means expressing God's LIFE-GIVING POWER, here, to HEAL and undo absolutely any sign of "non-life" you encounter.

In other words, you do not simply perform a miracle in order to shift your mind towards love. You shift your mind towards love SO THAT you can be miraculous. Otherwise it would mean that someone who is heavily steeped in ego lies, upon making their first little shift, is suddenly a full-blown miracle worker. That is pretty much impossible.

"Miracles are everyone's right, but PURIFICATION IS NECESSARY FIRST". This means that your purification efforts will have to happen first, possibly over a prolonged period of time, BEFORE you will GAIN ACCESS TO the right to perform miracles. This is because you need to remove quite a lot of blocks to love BEFORE love can flow through you fully enough to show up as miracles in your life or on behalf of others. If you have a lot of blocks to love, you are GETTING IN THE WAY of the extension of love and therefore are blocking miracles.

You are not miraculous just because you start studying the course or doing the workbook, or "shifting your perception". Miracles come LATER, after much purification work ie correction of your mind, letting go of ego, applying forgiveness etc. Shifts in perception are not miracles, but eventually they LEAD TO miracles. If you could suddenly shift your perception very much to a highly vertical perception, you could conceivably perform a miracle right now. But it is uncommon. Usually we have to "prepare" to be able to do that.

You will OPEN UP TO miracles over time, the more you release blocks to love, because you will be placing yourself closer to God and therefore regaining access to love, a willingness to extend it, and therefore miracles can work through you from God. You can then perform God's WILL, but you are not going to be able to perform God's will after a few perceptual adjustments.

However, at some point, you WILL get to the point where you are spending much more of your time IN vertical perception, not believing in the horizontal ILLUSION of causality, and will become much more miraculous. When miracles are not happening ALL THE TIME, something has gone wrong. This means that miracles are a PERMANENT PART of the NATURE of the Son of God. And of God. It is a natural part of love and life. When we are not being constantly miraculous, constantly loving, we are not performing miracles all the time, so something is wrong.

When we do become more consistently aligned with God's Will, the Power of God will now extend through us. We will now be ABLE to EXPRESS LOVE. And since we're still in this world, this means, we are able to render the MAXIMAL SERVICE to our brothers, which is what every miracle does. At this point, "miracle working" does NOT simply entail shifting someone's perception towards truth. It entails utilizing the vertical perception of the higher level (God/Love/Life) to OVERRIDE any and every illusory "effect", or "cause" in this world.

This means your holiness is very powerful and there is literally nothing that it cannot do in the world. Miracles expressing from the higher level, love, do not see orders of difficulty because they do not believe the lower-level illusion of cause and effect. They overthrow ALL physical laws because all laws on the horizontal level are FICTION. What appears to be a cause in the world is NOT A CAUSE. Any state or condition or sickness or form of suffering or even physical death, CAN BE REVERSED.

Why would you do this? Well, you're going be expressing a LOT OF LOVE. And it is NATURAL for love to be miraculous. It is NATURAL for love to want to HEAL, to reverse suffering, to undo ego pain, to heal the SEPARATION, and so if separation is showing up as physical sickness or broken bodies, LOVE WANTS TO HEAL IT. It is not God's will that ANYONE suffer or die. It is God's Will that EVERYONE experience perfect health and resurrection and permanent happiness.

Why express miracles in a world which isn't real? First of all, that's level confusion. Second of all, it's because this is what LOVE WANTS TO DO. Love wants to HEAL THE WORLD to resurrect everything to a reflection of perfect health and incorruptability, and to then bring everyone home across the tiny gap between that "real world" and heaven. The world NEEDS miracles of healing from love. And third of all, it is our FUNCTION in this world to HEAL, a function which we share with the holy spirit, and while we are here, it is our natural RIGHT and PURPOSE to heal at all times.

This means PERFORMING MIRACLES EVERY SINGLE DAY. God wants us to BE MIRACLE WORKERS, in the world, helping our brother, healing our brother SUPERNATURALLY through the Holy Spirit, DEMONSTRATING that vertical perception is the truth, demonstrating that ego laws DO NOT APPLY, and teaching everyone by EXAMPLE what the TRUTH OF LOVE IS. We ARE supposed to be going out and healing the sick and raising the dead and teaching everyone that God is Love and all limitations are fictional. Miracles are the MAXIMAL SERVICE you can render your brother, and that means, extending God's love TO EVERYONE, which WILL HEAL THEM.

And what will the nature of these miracles be, will it be that we help someone to see differently? Perhaps. ANY expression of love is miraculous. But love is also capable of healing the sick, raising the dead, reversing death, undoing all suffering, curing all incurable diseases, even transforming bodies into different bodies. Love has so much power that it also is capable of DEFYING ALL PHYSICAL LAWS, including laws of gravity and space and time and size and mass and properties of matter and anything else which is an ILLUSION on this level.

This means, if necessary, you will have the ability to DO ANYTHING if it is helpful and loving. If it demonstrates that the egos' horizontal laws are COMPLETELY UNTRUE, and easily proven to be false, you will be willing to do it. If that means, lifting up a car with your mind to show that gravity means nothing, so be it. If it means, moving an entire physical mountain in order to show that the mind has power over the world, so be it. If it means manifesting food out of thin air to feed 5000 people, so be it. If it means making your body walk on water to prove that the laws of physics are bullshit, so be it.

You will walk this earth PROVING that cause and effect are VERTICAL, proving that love has the power to GIVE LIFE to the dead, curing what everyone says cannot be undone, proving that resurrection is God's Guarantee, and there will be literally NOTHING that your holiness cannot do. You will heal sick people, you will raise the dead, you will move mountains, and you will SAVE THE WORLD.

Saving the world does not so much mean that you save it FROM some attacker, but rather, that you save it from itself, because it is an ILLUSION. The ultimate healing of all the world will be the restoration of "immortal bodies" temporarily, the total undoing of all sickness across the entire planet, the recognition of the real world by the entire sonship, and then the complete DISAPPEARANCE of the universe, revealing that ONLY HEAVEN IS REAL.

Miracles are the MEANS of the atonement - how YOU get there, but because they are expressions from a higher level of love, you will also BECOME PART OF THE ATONEMENT by continuing to express love even as you are about to accept the atonement, still in a body, walking the earth. You become part of the atonement by becoming part of LOVE, part of God's Will, and DOING WHAT GOD WANTS YOU TO DO, which is to extend love and healing to everyone who needs it!

This is why you will join the "great crusade" and be part of the plan of atonement long-term, because it is YOUR NATURAL FUNCTION when you have received healing and naturally desire to alleviate the suffering of others. You will not have any willingness to support or keep sickness in yourself OR in others. You will be miraculous ALL THE TIME, EVERY DAY. Being miraculous is a PERMANENT QUALITY of the Son of God and all of God's creations. Being constantly miraculous in this world is NORMAL. Being un-miraculous is ABNORMAL. You will also have no desire to "opt out" of this crusade. Jesus needs active miracle workers to bring about the resurrection!

Miracles raise everyone towards God's eternal life. We are to use them WHILE it seems there is a "need". But miracles really acknowledge that "there is nothing to heal" just as forgiveness recognizes "there is nothing to forgive" and God's power recognizes "there is nothing to have power over". So long as illusions persist however, miracles HEAL the illusion, forgiveness UNDOES the ego, and God's power DEMONSTRATES what is true.

Miracles mean life. Resurrection of "what is dead" and brought back to life is the goal of the atonement. Miracles lead to revelation and atonement as the ultimate healing. We are in a state of semi-death right now, in this dream world, separate from God. We NEED miracles. The whole world NEEDS miracles from God. This world NEEDS LOVE.

And love will restore life, to turn the world into a SYMBOL of life, and then the symbol will give way to REAL LIFE. The lower level will disappear (since it was never real) and all that will be LEFT will be the higher level of God/heaven/truth. This is a course in CAUSE, not effect, a cause in how to express the miracle of love from that higher level, not to suffer as a victim of fake effects of death in an ego illusion!

Then we will simply extend God's love forever, which has been happening all along, continuing the miracle of eternal life.

It can be very difficult to forgive abuse. Typically in abusive situations, both persons are identified with their bodies. One person does something to the other person's body, which is taken very personally and hurtfully.

It seems that one person has power to affect the other, to do something to them against their will. And the whole scenario seems to paint a very closed picture of unfair treatment, unwilling participation, obvious fault on the part of the abuser, and total helplessness on the part of the victim.

If you look solely at what is happening at the physical level, and if this is believed to be reality, then all of this makes sense. The abuser physically does do something. The victim physically or emotionally or mentally does seem to receive the fallout of the abuse. The separation between the bodies and wills seems to portray the victim as "not wanting it" etc. At a purely surface-appearance level, this is all very real and threatening and traumatic. As if the is the whole story.

But viewing the situation purely in terms of surface appearance, is actually an unforgiving perception. It means the form of what happened was blinding. It means you were identified with your body, such that anything happening from the outside in seemed to affect your actual self. There is no recognition that "its just a dream." And there certainly doesn't appear to be any hope of escape from the hellish nightmare.

The difficult part comes when you start to explore how to heal this, forgive it, undo the consequences, or to become free from the aftereffects, some of which can be debilitating and even life threatening. But at some point, there has to be a willingness to entertain the possibility that there was "more happening" than met the eye, and that there might be a different way of looking at it. It is this unwillingness to remain in pain, that inspires the beginning of opening up to spirit.

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

Even if you are left with pain and scars, emotional hurt, physical damage, psychological wounds or forms of insanity, carrying this baggage around forever becomes intolerable. Pain is not pleasant. Constant fear is a nightmare. The sheer weight of suffering can potentially inspire a person to try to find a way out of hell, unless they become so distraught that it leads to suicide.

For those who do find at least "a little willingness", there becomes a glimmer of openness to at least the possibility that, just maybe, there is some way to heal and be free of this. That maybe if you look at it from a different vantage point you might find out some hidden facts, previously unrecognized influences, or even some ways that you might have caused it. Of course, for abused people, leaping to "I did this to myself" is a pretty huge leap, when everything the physical reports testifies to "they did everything to me and I did nothing."

It can even seem horrendously offensive to a person who is very heavily believing in "what appeared to happen" as the only reality. When pain backs it up, when suffering seemed to come from it, and when the person didn't seem to want any of it, there is tremendous resistance to healing and forgiveness. It is in fact, part of the pyschological blindness that placed their mind in an unforgiving experience to begin with, and this denial may even have been increased through the abusive experiences.

This is why it can take time, a lot of willingness and gradual transformation, to work through the ins-and-outs of everything that happened, all the pain it entailed, to be able to purge and purify the suffering, to even get to a point where you might be open to another way of looking at it. But if there is to be another way of looking at it, it can't be at the physical level. It can't be just another attempt to frame the situation in terms of "it was real, but the person had their reasons."

True forgiveness has to entail moving away from the sheer physcality of the abusive situation, away from appearances and forms, and away from the illusion of causality. It has to rise above the "he did this to me" and the "she did that to me". And it has to go into the "Maybe I had something to do with this." Given how intense and horrifying abuse can be, and the seeming unhealable wounds it leaves behind, even being open to that suggestion can be a seemingly insurmountable stretch.

The key factor which lifts a person out of perception of abuse, is becoming identified with spirit instead of the body. And that all by itself is a journey. And it also requires that you recognize that you can be free from suffering, even if people seem to be vicious and hurtful. As the Course says:

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true.

Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

To allow there to be a maximum amount of viciousness and attack by others, yet to be in such a state of mind in which this has NO effect on you, seems like a very tall order. But it is not impossible. It entails the recognition that this world is a dream, and not a reality. Yes it will seem like the abuse was VERY real, with disturbing memories and wounds to show for it, but in the really big picture it nevertheless was still part of a dream.

Jesus suggests that if we can approach the awareness and recognition that this IS a dream world, and not a reality, we will become more identified as spirit, or as the dreamer of the dream. We are the mind/soul that is beyond the dream which houses it within ourselves.

With willingness, it's going to become apparent that the events in dreams are something WE are contributing to. This produces a profound shift in how we look at what the other person "did to us", because now we're starting to question not only whether it really happened in reality at all, but also who was really causing what.

It can seem to be a bitter pill to swallow, that we would be hurtful to ourselves, that we ourselves might've agreed to or arranged or produced suffering, that in effect we wanted to be abused for some other purpose of scapegoating. It's especially heinous to many people to suggest that someone in a victim role is not entirely faultless, that they in fact are using the opportunity to position themselves as victim in order to be ABLE to find the abuser guilty. And as the course says, this has a tremendous payoff in allowing us to position ourselves as innocent, as a way to asuage our OWN guilt for our own sense of sin.

Could it be then, quite a shocking but deep truth, that we may well not only consent to abuse but even encourage it and bring it upon ourselves, because of the benefit to us psychologically - that we can convince ourselves that if the other person is especially evil, it portrays us as especially good. And given that we are loaded with uhealed guilt over the separation from God, it provides a wonderful opportunity to exonerate ourselves by finding someone else to be especially sinful. We may in fact be using the abuser as a fall-guy for our own sin.

This then completely turns the tables on the situation, and is the secret hidden truth that the abusive situation seems to reject. While the situation said, "they did this to me, I did nothing", in truth the fact is "I did this to me and used them to make myself look better." That is not something that is easy to admit to, but it has to be admitted to if you want freedom.

Here is Jesus saying that we are even willing to BE KILLED, if it means the payoff that we can find someone ELSE to be the sinner and to exonerate ourselves. And that we may even welcome being highly severly abused, attacked, afflicted, murdered and destroyed, as a tremendously opportunistic bargain, if it means we can be found guiltless. Even that what WE get out of it is even MORE than they get out of it - a great deal!

"Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

This isn't simply a teaching about sickness and how we use the body to try to show proof that our brother caused us to be sick, so that we'll be exonerated of sin. It's a general teaching that in many ways, abuse included, we try to position ourselves as victims in order to get a great payoff. That we're even willing to enter into highly abusive, detrimental, suffering situations, with terrible power loss and mistreatment, if it means that secretly this causes the OTHER person to seem like the sinner. What did abuse turn you into, if not someone justified in anger and blame?

Jesus doesn't hold back, in that he is even saying that we are WILLING TO DIE, if it will provide us with an opportunity to point a finger at the CAUSE of death, other than ourselves, and say "look there, that's where the sin is". And thus to say, "Look at me, I didn't do anything at all." We even lay down in death in a kind of passive way, totally hands-off, making ourselves appear to be COMPLETELY at the effect of something outside our control, so that it paints a very vivid picture of unfair destruction, un-asked for killing, and unwanted torment. In which we appear innocent.

The driving force behind all of this is the guilt that WE feel in OUR mind, over a situation which doesn't even have anything to do with these abusers. It's the fact that we are bringing some very heavy shit, TO the situation, from our past. And we're causing and involving ourselves in relationships and situations which afford us opportunities to PROJECT, dissociate from, and disown this hidden secret suffering, in order to try to deal with it.

What could be so big and deep and hidden and painful that we would want to go so far as to ALLOW ourselves to seem to be destroyed by another, if it would mean escaping it? What possible severity of sin could we have possibly either committed tor accused ourselves of, that we would ENCOURAGE sickness in an attempt to be seen with pity and favor? What kind of hideous act did we commit which could possibly require death as the only "solution", in which by accusing anyone OTHER than ourselves of TERRIBLE mistreatment, we can try to make a dent in it and be seen as the innocent one?

Don't doubt for a second that the ego's entire drive is to use denial to its full extent. It denies who you are, it denies God through sin, it denies sin through guilt, it denies guilt through the face of innocence, and it denies the face of innocence by destroying the body through "a will of punishment not my own." Denial upon denial upon denial are used to gradually remove you from existence and to disown everything. Even in abuse we are disowning the way in which we are abusing ourselves.

All of this is really based on our secret sins and hidden hates, the self accusation, the condenation upon yourself BY yourself, the belief in the reality of sin, the authority problem and desire to overthrow God, and indeed the belief that you HAVE attacked God against His will. It is really the original sin, the belief that you opposed the entire Kingdom of God through evil, that you are running and hiding from. And it is the unforgiven guilt for that perceived sin that you try to push onto others when you form abusive relationships.

Those who feel particularly guilty are apt to not only cause physical sickness, they are also apt to be vicious and very accusatory. They project heavily because trying to dissociate that unconscious guilt from their minds seems like the only way to hide from it. By putting it onto someone else and framing them as an abuser or attacker, it SEEMS to make it look like they are more evil than you, thus you are partly exonerated for your belief in sin against God. And those who are especially OPEN to being a victim, unfairly treated, abused, in fact are the most deceptive and blameful. He who has "been destroyed against his will" has gotten away with the crime of the century.

So now as the tables turn, we find out that a person who on the surface seemed to be the innocent party in the abuse, who was purely victimized, who asked for nothing and who made no contribution to it at all, actually turns out to be the ONLY one who was really doing anything at all, who did it all to themselves, and EVEN went so far as to USE the "abuser" for their own aims. What more benefit could a guilty person find than to position themselves as helplesly suffering, if it would create the illusion that SOMEONE ELSE is guilty? And how sick is it that we would actively WANT to do this, even if it meant we had to suffer to pull it off?

You can see why the truth of these situations is so hard to accept. It litearlly suggests that "the abused" are abusers, that victims are in fact victimizers, that those who are afraid are vicious, and that this is all a secret plot to GAIN from suffering. Even that we would happily die if it meant someone else would pay for what we've done to God.

"We said before that those who are afraid are apt to be vicious. " On the surface, the world being so back to front, it always seems at first glance that those who are suffering are NOT the ones doing the attacking. And that those who are seeming to be the cause of the suffering, are NOT the victims. But this is literally what Jesus is telling us. And it is this complete "180" that our minds have to go through in order to heal this psychological conditioning. And that's not easy.

If I was abused, even if the abuse and the emotional pain tells me that it happened, it was unfair, I did not ask for it, the abusers were evil monsters, and they ought to receive a death sentence, my act to MAINTAIN this position is in fact driven by a motive of wanting to keep BENEFITING from it. And that is not an easy thing to admit to. Yet alone to look at the fact that I was the one doing the abuse to myself and to the abusers. That I was USING them as a scapegoat, and WANTED to be abused in order to get away with FRAMING THEM for my own murder.

It's even harder to admit to any of this if the victim is a helpless innocent young child who appears, at the face of it, to be utterly devoid of sin and guilt, and who has no power or ability to stop anything happening. This all sets up the perfect scenario for the ego to manipulate the situation and USE it to its advantage. Not o much to cause the child to suffer cruelly, but to cause the child to WANT to suffer in order to develop a wonderful collection of scapegoats. Of course, saying something like this is NOT going to be popular with most of society.

Admitting to all this is, nevertheless, the eventual place our mind has to get to if we truly want to be free from pain and suffering. We have to approach the secret of salvation. We have to be willing to admit to what we are doing and the part we play. And we certainly have to completely let the abusers off the hook, otherwise we cannot experience psycholgoical repair. So long as we are looking to project and get rid of our own inner guilt onto these people, we keep ourselves in a prison of denial and suffering. And we can't feel happy while we're AVOIDING the original guilt that we were using the abuser to try to get rid of.

It begs the question, far more importantly, not "why did they do that to me"... but "why did I do this to me?". That's the really deeper issue. Why did you accuse yourself of sin FIRST, before you arranged for someone to sin against you? Why did you believe in sin, at all, before inviting others to seem to sin against you? Why did you fall into the authority problem, prior to ever needing an external authority to pretend to have power over you? Why did you attack yourself first? Why were you overtly vicious against yourself and God, before portraying yourself as a helpless victim? That's the bigger deal to heal.

"I but accuse my brother of my own sins."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

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

"You are doing this to yourself."

"There is no sin."

Self destruction and self attack and self victimization and self punishment, are far more the problem and death-inducing than the two-times removed scapegoats that we find externally. The abuser isn't even the beginning of the process, they're a device that we use later down the line to try to deal with what we've done to oursevles. And the ultimate freedom can only come when you find YOURSELF to be innocent, having never sinned in reality, forming the basis for the total lack of NEED to have an "abuser" take on the burden for you.

These external influencers are not even the cause of anything. They're scapegoats that we use to project sin and disown responsibility. And until this power is taken back and reclaimed, a "victim" cannot feel empowered or free of victimization. It's kind of a two-way street. You can't be secretly victimizing, which all victims do, if you want to be free of being victimized. If you believe in victimization you become a victimizer and pretend you are the opposite. Obviously that's not a sane position to take.

There is hope for healing and true release from all suffering, all abuse, all symptoms and effects, all baggage and all pain. But it does require that you take full responsibility for your choices and your participation on making happen what you thought happened against your will. You cannot see yourself as being an unwilling participant if you want to find the power of the wil. And the only way to be truly free is to accept the atonement truth that you never sinned in the first place, such that you don't need anyone to exonerate you through suffering.

Who is the abuser who really needs your forgiveness? It's you.

In A Course in Miracles there are hundreds of references to FREEDOM scattered throughout. Freedom is also contrasted against its opposite, which is imprisonment, enslavement, being bound to the ego, to the body, to darkness, suffering and death. The whole course is geared towards you reclaiming your freedom, and giving freedom to others. Through your miracles you are setting others free, and releasing them from the chains of imprisonment you held them in before.

"I am not a body I am free."

"Essentially, ALL healing is the release from fear."

"I have deluded myself into believing it is possible to imprison the Son of God. I was bitterly mistaken in this belief, which I no longer want."

"It is NOT your will to be imprisoned, BECAUSE your will is free."

"That is the same as saying that He teaches you the difference between imprisonment and freedom."

"I give you to the Holy Spirit, as part of myself.

I know that you will be released, UNLESS I WANT TO

USE YOU TO IMPRISON MYSELF."

"But their thought is so powerful that they can even imprison the mind of God's Son IF THEY SO CHOOSE."

"For you have taught yourselves HOW TO IMPRISON THE SON OF GOD, a lesson so unthinkable that only the insane, in deepest sleep, could even DREAM of it." "When man projects this onto others, he DOES imprison them, but only to the extent that he reinforces errors they have already made."

"They release him from a prison in which he has imprisoned himself. By freeing his mind from illusions, they restore his sanity, and place him at the feet of Jesus."

The idea of freedom really goes back to your creation as a free-willed being by God. God has absolute freedom, being free from all limitation. God is unlimited. He who is unlimited can only give complete freedom, because he knows not of imprisonment. God does not create by imprisoning, he creates by giving freedom. All his children are not only free, they are fully free. It is because they are completely free ... in a sense, free from God .... though still sharing freely with him, that they are established as truly cooperative co-creators in heaven.

"Think not HE wills to bind you, Who has made you co-creator of the universe along with Him. He would but KEEP your will forever and forever limitless."

"Nothing God created can oppose your will, as nothing God created can oppose His."

Any attempt you make to imprison another, to attack, to judge, to condemn, to blame, to project, to hurt, to destroy, to make guilty, to accuse of sin, to be victimized by, to victimize, to narrow to a body, to induce suffering of any kind, is actually an attempt to take away the freedom of others, AND to deny your own freedom. You cannot be a victim or suffer in ANY way if you acknowledge your total freedom. But in order to gain your own freedom, you MUST acknowledge that everyone else is also free from YOU, and you from them. You are not bound BY your brothers, any more than they are bound by you.

Dwell for a moment on the feeling of "keeping to yourself", in the sense that you ALLOW everyone to be free FROM YOU. Acknowledge that everyone is completely free. You are free from their tyranny over you. They are free from your tyranny over them. Let go of all manipulation, expectation, wanting others to be a certain way, or resisting their choices. Withdraw all your efforts to control and coerce, to blame and accuse. Let go of everyone. Let the whole world be itself. Settle back into your own inner freedom. You are free from enemies, free from attack, free from the choices of others, free from the body, and free from the world.

The course is in fact leading entirely to your TOTAL FREEDOM. Claiming your freedom is the restoration of your birth right. You cannot however claim your total freedom if you are imprisoning others, because the attempt to do so is an attempt to reinforce the idea that freedom doesn't exist. And thus you imprison yourself. It is said that your brother can set you free, or is the key to your salvation. By GIVING him total freedom, you give it to yourself. By recognizing he IS FREE, you recognize YOU are free. Try it.

Atonement is all about claiming freedom for yourself and the whole sonship. It is an act of setting everyone free from imprisonment. It releases you and everyone from slavery, bondage, body identification, death identification, and from all forms of suffering. You cannot BE affected by forces outside of you. The world cannot make you imprisoned or take your freedom away. No-one can deny your freedom for you. Not even God can decide whether you are free or not. He established you as free forever, and only you can deny your OWN freedom by denying it to the whole sonship.

When you acknowledge that you are COMPLETELY FREE FROM EVERYTHING, you settle back into your soul, you lift your hands away from the territory and lives of others and you set everyone free. In so doing you BECOME free yourself. You can feel it inside you, an acknowledgement of your own freedom, and it makes you feel happy and safe. You are safe from all attack because you are claiming your freedom. You are even save from suffering and death and from all the forces in the world. Nothing can imprison you or act against your will, but your will itself. When you stop imprisoning, you stop imprisoning yourself.

Below is an extensive collection of quotes from ACIM on the topic of freedom.

"How wonderful it is to do your will! For that IS freedom. There is nothing else that ever should be called by freedom's name."

"The world awaits the freedom you will give, when you have recognized that YOU are free."

"And no-one walks upon the earth but must depend on YOUR decision, that he learn death HAS no power over him because he shares YOUR freedom, as he shares your will."

"No-one but yearns for freedom, and tries to find it, but he will seek for it where he believes it IS, and CAN be found."

"But be you, rather, grateful that YOU can be the means to serve His end. This is the ONLY service which leads to freedom. To serve THIS end, the body MUST be perceived as sinless, BECAUSE the goal is sinlessness."

"Only in dreams is there a time when he appears to be in prison, and awaits a future freedom if it be at all. Yet in reality his dreams are gone, with truth established in their place. And now is freedom his already. Should I wait in chains which have been severed for release, when God is offering me freedom now?"

"I did not understand what made me free, nor what my freedom is, nor where to look to find it. Father, I have searched in vain until I heard Your Voice directing me. Now I would guide myself no more. For I have neither made nor understood the way to find my freedom. But I trust in You. You Who endowed me with my freedom as Your holy Son will not be lost to me. Your Voice directs me. And the way to You is opening and clear to me at last. Father, my freedom is in You alone. Father, it is my will that I return."

"How glad are we to find our freedom through the certain way our Father has established. And how sure is all the world's salvation, when we learn our freedom can be found in God alone."

"Freedom must be impossible as long as you perceive a body as yourself. The body is a limit. Who would seek for freedom in a body looks for it where it can not be found."

"We sound the call of freedom 'round the world with this idea."

"The Holy Spirit is the home of minds that seek for freedom."

"In conflict-free and unequivocal response to mind with but the thought of freedom as its goal, the body serves, and serves its purpose well. Without the power to enslave, it is a worthy servant of the freedom which the mind within the Holy Spirit seeks."

"Be free today, and carry freedom as your gift to those who still believe they are enslaved within a body."

"For He would give you perfect freedom, perfect joy, and hope that finds its full accomplishment in God."

"Yet with forgiveness does the light shine through the dream of darkness, offering it hope, and giving it the means to realize the freedom that is its inheritance."

"For as we offer freedom it is given us. And we would not remain as prisoners, while You hold out our freedom unto us."

"He leads you steadily along the path of freedom, teaching you how to disregard, or look beyond EVERYTHING that would hold you back."

"That is the same as saying that He teaches you the difference between imprisonment and freedom"

"That is because you have taught YOURSELF that imprisonment IS freedom"

"The Holy Spirit's teaching takes only one direction, and has only one goal. His direction is freedom, and His goal is God."

"Will to BE without you. When you have learned that your will IS God's, you could no more will to be without Him than He could will to be without YOU. This IS freedom and this IS joy."

"Father, I thank You for today, and for the freedom I am certain it will bring. This day is holy, for today Your Son will be redeemed. His suffering is done."

"Thanks for today, my Father. I was born into this world but to achieve this day, and what it holds in joy and freedom for Your holy Son, and for the world he made, which is released along with him today."

"Remind yourself that you are making a declaration of independence in the name of your own freedom. And in your freedom lies the freedom of the world."

"Let us not worship idols, nor believe in any laws idolatry would make to hide the freedom of the Son of God. He is not bound except by his beliefs. Yet what he is is far beyond his faith in slavery or freedom."

"But those who are FOR freedom, even if they are misguided in HOW they defend it, are siding with the one thing in this world which IS true."

"And is it THIS that you would see within your Savior FROM insanity? He is as free from this as you are, and in the freedom that you see in HIM, you see your own."

"Those who choose freedom will experience only ITS results. Their power is of God."

"Nothing but this can touch them, for they see ONLY this, sharing their power according to the Will of God. And thus their freedom is established AND MAINTAINED. It is upheld through ALL temptations to imprison and to BE imprisoned. It is THEM, who learned of freedom, that you should ask what freedom IS."

"And where he rests a while, to forget imprisonment, and to remember freedom."

"Here is the perfect statement of my freedom. I am under no laws but God's." "I am perfectly free of the effects of all laws save God's. And His are the laws of freedom."

"Forgiveness, truly given, is the only way in which your hope of freedom lies."

"Yet you must learn alternatives for choice, or you will not be able to attain your freedom."

"The level of your prayer depends on this, for here it waits its freedom to ascend above the world of chaos into peace."

"For thus is freedom given us from all we did not know and failed to understand."

"If you want to be LIKE me, I will help you, knowing that we ARE alike. If you want to be DIFFERENT, I will wait until you change your mind. I can TEACH you, but only you can choose to LISTEN to my teaching. How else can it be, if God's Kingdom IS freedom? Freedom cannot be learned by tyranny of ANY kind, and the perfect equality of ALL God's Sons cannot be recognized through the dominion of one will over another. God's Sons are equal in will, all being the Will of their Father. This is the ONLY lesson I can teach, knowing that it is true."

"In our remembrance of EACH OTHER lies our remembrance of God. And in this remembrance lies your freedom, because your freedom is in Him."

"This is our gift of gratitude to Him, which He will share with ALL His Creations, to whom He gives equally whatever is acceptable to Him. BECAUSE it is acceptable to Him, it is the gift of freedom, which IS His Will for all His Sons. By OFFERING freedom you will be free, because freedom is the only gift which you can offer to God's Sons, being an acknowledgment of what they are and what HE is."

"Freedom is creation because it is love. What you seek to imprison you do NOT love. Therefore, when you seek to imprison ANYONE, including YOURSELF, you do not love him and you cannot identify with him. When you imprison yourself, you are losing sight of your true identification with me and with the Father."

"Only the function God has given me

can offer freedom. Only this I seek,

and only this will I accept as mine."

"In this world the only remaining freedom is the freedom of choice; this choice is always between two choices or two voices. Will is not involved in perception at any level, and has nothing to do with choice."

"It must be, then, that the world is really a place where he can be set free. I would look upon the world as it is, and see it as a place where the Son of God finds his freedom."

"When I see the world as a place of freedom, I will realize that it reflects the laws of God instead of the rules which I made up for it to obey. I will understand that peace, not war, abides in it. And I will perceive that peace also abides in the hearts of all who share this place with me."

"Can I lay limits on the Son of God, whose Father willed that he be limitless, and like Himself in freedom and in love?"

"So will YOU learn the freedom that I taught, by teaching freedom to each other, and so releasing me. I am within your holy relationship, yet you would imprison me behind the obstacles you RAISE to freedom, and bar my way to YOU."

"So would I liberate all things I see, and give to them the freedom that I seek. For thus do I obey the law of love, and give what I would find and make my own."

"Today's idea is one step we take in leading us from bondage to the state of perfect freedom."

"And you are free, and glad of freedom. You have sought to be both weak and bound, because you feared your strength and freedom. Yet salvation lies in them."

"All this lies in the Holy Spirit's plan to free you from the past, and open up the way to freedom FOR you."

"Accept this key to freedom, from the hands of Christ, Who gives it to you, that you may join Him in the holy task of bringing light to darkness. For, like your brothers, YOU do not realize the light has come, and freed you from the sleep of darkness."

"Behold your brothers in their freedom, and learn of them how to be FREE of darkness. The light in you will waken them, and they will not leave YOU asleep."

"His are the laws of freedom, but yours are the laws of bondage. Since freedom and bondage are irreconcilable, their laws CANNOT BE UNDERSTOOD TOGETHER."

"You are NOT free to give up freedom, but only to DENY it."

"Think what a happy world you walk, with truth beside you! Do not give up this world of freedom, for a little sigh of seeming sin, nor for a tiny stirring of guilt's attraction."

"How beautiful it is to walk, clean and redeemed and happy, through a world in bitter need of the redemption that your innocence bestows upon it! What can you value MORE than this? For here is YOUR salvation and YOUR freedom. And it MUST be complete, if YOU would recognize it."

"But You have offered freedom, and I choose to claim Your gift today."

"My sinlessness ensures me perfect peace, eternal safety, everlasting love, freedom forever from all thought of loss; complete deliverance from suffering. And only happiness can be my state, for only happiness is given me."

"The mind that is made willing to accept God's gifts has been restored to Spirit, and extends its freedom and its joy, as is the Will of God united with its own."

"Then are you free, for freedom is your gift, and you can now receive the gift you gave."

"Condemn and you are made a prisoner. Forgive and you are freed. Such is the law that rules perception. It is not a law that knowledge understands, for freedom is a part of knowledge."

"Today we practice letting freedom come to make its home with you."

"Thus do we lift the chains which bar the door to freedom from the world, and go beyond all little values and diminished goals."

"Peace and be still a little while, and see how far you rise above the world when you release your mind from chains, and let it seek the level where it finds itself at home. It will be grateful to be free a while. It knows where it belongs. But free its wings, and it will fly in sureness and in joy to join its holy purpose. Let it rest in its Creator, there to be restored to sanity, to freedom and to love.

"He would only have you learn your OWN will and follow it, not in the spirit of sacrifice and submission, but in the gladness of freedom."

"The freedom to leave behind everything that hurts you and humbles you and frightens you cannot be thrust upon you, but it CAN be offered you through the grace of God."

"It contains the foundation for the peace, relaxation and freedom from worry that we are trying to achieve."

"The happy dream about him takes the form of the appearance of his perfect health; his perfect freedom from all forms of lack; and safety from disaster of all kinds."

"LOVE IS FREEDOM. To look for it by placing yourself in BONDAGE, is to SEPARATE yourself from it. For the love of God, no longer seek for union in separation, nor for freedom in bondage! As you release, so will you BE released."

"The holy instant is His most helpful tool in protecting you from the attraction of guilt, the REAL lure in the special relationship. You do NOT recognize that this IS its REAL appeal, for the ego has taught you that FREEDOM lies in it."

"It is impossible to see two worlds.

Let me accept the strength God offers me

And see no value in this world, that I

May find my freedom and deliverance."

"It is impossible to see two worlds.

I seek my freedom and deliverance,

And this is not a part of what I want."

"And think how holy HE must be, when in him sleeps your OWN salvation, with HIS freedom joined."

"What hatred claimed is given up to love, and freedom lights up every living thing and lifts it into Heaven, where the lights grow ever brighter as each one comes home."

"It is no sacrifice that he be saved, for BY his freedom will you gain your own."

"He HAS no need but this; that you allow him freedom to complete the task God gave to him."

"But if he could but realize the war is between forces that are real and UNREAL powers, he could look upon himself, and SEE his freedom."

"The war is gone. For you have heard the hymn of freedom, rising unto Heaven. Gladness and joy belong to God for your release, because YOU made it not. But, as you made not freedom, so you made not a war that could ENDANGER freedom. Nothing destructive ever was, or will be. The war, the guilt, the past, are gone as one, into the unreality from whence they came."

"In the holy instant, in which you see yourself as bright with freedom, you WILL remember God. For remembering Him IS to remember freedom."

"Practice GIVING this blessed instant of freedom to all who are ENSLAVED by time, and thus make time their friend FOR them."

"Freedom is given you where you beheld but chains and iron doors. For you must change your mind about the purpose of the world, if you would find escape."

"Peace is the answer to conflicting goals, to senseless journeys, frantic vain pursuits and meaningless endeavors. Now the way is easy, sloping gently toward the bridge where freedom lies within the peace of God." "Be merciful today. The Son of God deserves your mercy. It is he who asks that you accept the way to freedom now. Deny him not. His Father's Love for him belongs to you."

"Think of the freedom in the recognition that you are not bound by all the strange and twisted laws which you have set up to save you."

"It is our statement of freedom from all danger and all tyranny. It is our acknowledgment that God is our Father, and that His Son is saved."

"The song of freedom, which sings the praises of ANOTHER world, brings to it hope of peace."

"Real freedom depends on welcoming REALITY, and of your guests only He IS real."

"But the experience of freedom and of peace that comes as you give up your tight control of what you see speaks for itself."

"The song of our rejoicing is the call to all the world that freedom is returned, that time is almost over, and God's Son has but an instant more to wait until his Father is remembered, dreams are done, eternity has shined away the world, and only Heaven now exists at all."

"For you have cause for freedom NOW. What profits freedom in a prisoner's form?"

"You have denied HIS freedom, and by so doing, you have denied the witness unto YOURS. You could as easily have FREED him from the past, and lifted from his mind the cloud of guilt that binds him TO it. And in HIS freedom would have been your OWN."

"Salvation is accomplished. Freedom from conflict has been given you. Accept that fact, and you are ready to take your rightful place in God's plan for salvation."

"There is ANOTHER vision and ANOTHER voice, in which your freedom lies, awaiting but your choice. And, if you place your faith in them, you will perceive ANOTHER Self in YOU."

"The time of Christ is the time appointed for the gift of freedom, offered to everyone."

"You will have to choose between TOTAL freedom and TOTAL bondage, for there are no alternatives but these."

"In the name of MY freedom, I WILL your release,

Because I recognize that we will be released TOGETHER.

So will the year begin in joy and freedom."

"For we would meet with our Reality in freedom and in peace."

"Let him be freed from all the thoughts you had of sin in him. And now you are prepared for freedom."

"A madman thinks the world he sees is real and does not doubt it. Nor can he be swayed by questioning his thoughts' effects. It is but when their source is raised to question that the hope of freedom comes to him at last." "Throughout the day, increase the freedom sent through your ideas to all the world"

"Where COULD his freedom lie but in himself, if he be free ALREADY? And who could bind him but HIMSELF, if he DENY his freedom?"

"Prisoners bound with heavy chains for years, starved and emaciated, weak and exhausted, and with eyes so long cast down in darkness they remember not the light, do not leap up in joy the instant they are made free. It takes a while for them to understand what freedom IS."

"Strengthen your hold, and raise your eyes unto your strong companion, in whom the meaning of your freedom lies."

"Freedom to choose is the same POWER as freedom to create, but its APPLICATION is different."

"Today escape from madness. You are set on freedom's road, and now today's idea brings wings to speed you on, and hope to go still faster to the waiting goal of peace."

"The first step toward freedom, then, MUST entail a sorting out of the false from the true. This is a process of division only in the constructive sense, and reflects the true meaning of the Apocalypse."

"Give joyously to one another the freedom and the strength to lead you there. And come before each other's holy altar, where the strength and freedom wait, to offer and receive the bright awareness that leads you home."

"His is the Voice of God, and also yours. And thus He speaks of freedom and of truth."

"There is no death. The Son of God is free. And in His freedom is the end of fear."

"Whom you forgive is GIVEN power to forgive you your illusions. By your gift of freedom is it given unto YOU."

"Behold the gift of freedom that I gave the Holy Spirit, for BOTH of you. And be you free together, as you offer TO the Holy Spirit this SAME gift, and, giving it, receive it OF Him, in RETURN for what you gave."

"Offer each other freedom and complete release from sin, here in the garden of seeming agony and death. So will we prepare TOGETHER the way unto the Resurrection of God's Son."

"Fear of escape makes it difficult to welcome freedom, and to make a jailer of an enemy seems to be safety."

"It is the Word of freedom and of peace, of unity of will and purpose, with no separation nor division in the single Mind of Father and of Son."

"There are the laws of limit lifted FOR you, to welcome you to openness of mind, and freedom."

"Do not ALLOW him to belittle himself in YOUR mind, but give him freedom from his belief in littleness, and escape from YOURS."

"Freedom from illusions lies only in not BELIEVING them."

"Nor will you leave the prison house or claim your strength until guilt and salvation are not seen as one, and freedom and salvation are perceived as joined, with strength beside them, to be sought and claimed and found and fully recognized."

"And what they see upholds their freedom FROM imprisonment and death." "Those who would let illusions be lifted from their minds are this world's Saviors, walking the world with their Redeemer, and carrying His message of hope and freedom and RELEASE from suffering to everyone who NEEDS a miracle to save him."

"The prayer for enemies thus becomes a prayer for your own freedom." "We bless the world as we behold it in the light in which our Savior looks on us, and offer it the freedom given us through His forgiving vision, now our own."

"Begin each day with time devoted to the preparation of your mind to learn what each idea you will review that day can offer you in freedom and in peace."

"Accept today's idea, and you have released the world from all imprisonment by loosening the heavy chains that locked the door to freedom on it."

"We offer thanks to God our Father that in us all things will find their freedom."

"What you have asked for cannot be denied. Your Savior has been waiting long for this. He would be free, and make his freedom yours."

"Above all else you want the freedom to remember who you really are."

"It is your special function to ensure the door be opened, that he may come forth to shine on you, and give you back the gift of freedom by receiving it of you"

"The special ones are all asleep, surrounded by a world of loveliness they do not see. Freedom and peace and joy stand there, beside the bier on which they sleep, and call them to come forth and waken from their dream of death."

"When you have seen your brothers as yourself, you will be RELEASED to knowledge, having learned to FREE yourself, of Him who knows of freedom. "

"The miracle teaches you that you have chosen guiltlessness, freedom, and joy. It is not a cause, but an EFFECT. It is the natural result of CHOOSING RIGHT, attesting to your happiness that comes from choosing to be FREE of guilt."

"Therefore, make your INVULNERABILITY manifest to everyone, and teach him that, WHATEVER he may try to do to you, your perfect freedom from the belief that you can BE harmed, shows him HE is guiltless."

"You who will yet work miracles, be sure you practice well the idea for today. Try to perceive the strength in what you say, for these are words in which your freedom lies. Your Father loves you."

"The possibility of freedom has been grasped and welcomed, and the means by which it can be gained can now be understood."

"I call you to fulfill your holy part in the plan that He has given to the world, for its release from littleness. God would have His host abide in perfect freedom."

"He cannot choose to change His Son, nor make your mind accept the perfect freedom He has given you." "Healing is freedom, for it demonstrates that dreams will not prevail against the truth."

"Your special relationships will remain, NOT as a source of pain and guilt, but as a source of joy and freedom. It will NOT be for you alone, for therein lay its misery."

"The ego is immobilized in the presence of God's grandeur, because HIS grandeur establishes YOUR freedom. Even the faintest hint of your reality literally drives the ego from your mind, because of the complete lack of investment in it."

"For faith can keep the Son of God in chains, as long as he believes he IS in chains. And, when he is RELEASED from them, it will be simply because he no longer BELIEVES in them, WITHDRAWING faith that they can hold him, and placing it in his freedom INSTEAD."

"Here it is given him to choose to spend this instant paying tribute to the body, or LET himself be given freedom from it."

"He may not yet have learned HOW to exchange his guilt for innocence, nor realize that ONLY in this exchange can freedom from pain be his."

"My role is only to unchain your will and make it free. Your egos cannot accept this freedom, and will oppose your free decision at every possible moment, and in every possible way."

"Free will MUST lead to freedom. Judgment always imprisons, because it separates segments of reality according to highly unstable scales of desire."

"Miracles need freedom from fear. Part of their Atonement value involves just that. Note that the word "atone" really means "undo."

"In this phase of learning, working miracles is more valuable because freedom from fear cannot be thrust upon you."

"Look on your brother, and behold in him the whole reversal of the laws that SEEM to rule this world. See in his freedom YOURS, for such it IS."

"To have faith is to heal. It is the sign that you HAVE accepted the Atonement for yourself, and would therefore share it. By faith, you OFFER the gift of freedom from the past, which you have RECEIVED." "Be not afraid to look upon the special hate relationship, for freedom lies here."

"For the body IS little and limited, and only those whom you would see WITHOUT the limits that the ego would impose on them, can offer YOU the gift of freedom."

"Your past was made in anger, and if you use it to ATTACK the present you will NOT SEE the freedom that the present holds."

"For you have chosen but the goal of God, from which your true intent was NEVER absent. Throughout the Sonship is the song of freedom heard, in joyous echo of your choice."

"The power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of this world. YOU CAN DECIDE TO SEE IT RIGHT. What you MADE of it is NOT its reality, for its reality is only what you GAVE it."

"And you will carry its message of love and safety and freedom to everyone who draws nigh unto your temple, where healing waits for him."

"The belief in EGO autonomy is costing you the knowledge of your dependence on God, IN WHICH YOUR FREEDOM LIES."

"You could accept peace NOW, for everyone you meet, and offer them perfect freedom from ALL illusions, BECAUSE YOU HEARD. But have no other gods before Him, or you will NOT hear."

"Nothing of God will enslave His Son, whom He created free and whose freedom is protected by HIS Being."

"HIS slip (rivet) was an expression of a Soul gaining enough strength to request freedom from prison. It will ultimately DEMAND it."

"Because of his failure to accept his own perfect freedom FROM the past, Cayce could not really perceive others as similarly free."

"Freedom from fear can be achieved by BOTH teacher and pupil ONLY if they do not compare either their needs or their positions in regard to each other in terms of higher and lower."

"In the service of the "Right Mind", the denial of ERROR frees the mind and re-establishes the freedom of the will. When the will is REALLY free, it CANNOT miscreate, because it recognizes ONLY TRUTH.