When minds are separated, there is a gap between you and others. You become isolated. This prevents your mind from extending to and joining with other minds. It prevents you from recognizing your oneness with your brother, and so disrupts the holy relationship, induces separation, fosters specialness, and in turn increases body identification. You become anchored to the body and this increased fixation on the body causes it to become sick. It is under attack by beliefs in not sharing, selfishness and defensiveness.

"Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster 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. 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."

"Sickness is a defense against the truth"

"All forms of sickness even unto death are physical expressions of the fear of awakening."

Sickness arises, physically, as a result of the "fear of awakening" to the joined nature you share with your brother. It defends against the truth that you and your brother are one.

Therefore, by resuming extension of the mind through the body, to connect with and join to the minds of your brothers, recognizing your oneness with them, your sense of self expands back out past the body to be inclusive of others, the gap between you closes, the separation is erased, there is nothing to split your mind away from your brother's mind, and thus unity results. This unity erases all forms of separation and sickness. The gap, the "wound", is closed up.

"Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad."

"Miracles unite you with your brother."

The inevitable result of this is that the body is no longer the focus of identity, the mind is not contracting itself into the body, the body is not being attacked by the idea of isolation and separation, love is flowing through it again rather than visions of hell, and in turn the BODY is now healed as an effect of the joining of minds.

"The mind makes this decision as it makes every decision responsible for the condition of the body."

"The mind being sane heals the body."

All physical sickness results from and symbolizes the psychological sickness of contraction (fear) away from your brothers and the attempted severing of oneness with them. The restoration of that oneness is miraculous and forces the body to symbolize wholeness, healing, health, innocence, harmlessness, unity and freedom from attack. The body is induced into health as a natural byproduct of healed minds joining as one.

The body is a part of the equation. The body has not STATE of its own, it is ONLY a symbol, and not an end in itself, and it can only symbolize what the mind wants it to represent. It can either represent attack (sickness) as a result of separation of minds, or it can represent eternal life (wholeness, health) as a result of joined minds. Its condition is entirely an effect of the mind.

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

Where the mind is separating from others, it WILL induce physical sickness as a result of the fear of awakening to oneness, and as a defense against the truth of that oneness. When the mind is joining with others in love it WILL induce physical healing as a result of the overcoming of the fear of awakening and the disregarding of a NEED for a defense against the truth of your oneness with your brother.

Holy relationships heal the mind AND the body.

Special relationships cause sickness and death.

Here is an interesting teaching.

In its natural state, the body is a communication medium. The mind is supposed to flow through it and extend BEYOND it outwards. The body itself is not supposed to be part of the message as such.

But when the mind starts to STOP at the body, or to be blocked by the body, or runs up against the body, it prevents it from extending PAST the body. The communication medium can no longer communicate because the flow is blocked. This is what blocks to love do. They make you fixate on form and be blinded by illusion, which get in the way of seeing Christ.

When there are blocks to love, mind cannot extend through and past and overlook the body, and so fixates ON the body. This causes you to perceive that the body is what is there, in the mind, rather than looking PAST it. The body becomes what you are looking AT, rather than that you are looking at Christ PAST the body.

Making perception stop AT the body and blocking the flow of love, basically cuts that flow off and stops it from moving outward. That means it has become stifled, and now there is a kind of "separation" which has been introduced between the body and the outside. Or a gap, where extension of love was supposed to fill it externally, but is now left empty due to the blocked expression.

This blocking of extension makes the body SICK, because it focuses the mind ON the body and AT the body, instead of PAST the body. The body then becomes attacked by the mind as though "colliding with it" instead of flowing naturally through it and past it and onward in communication. Kind of like a dirty camera lens, or a blocked toilet, or a bunch of boarded up windows made to block the light. Another example would be a "blocked artery", making the blood flow impeded, and resulting in death.

So the blocks to love have to be removed so that the "surface" of the communication medium doesn't turn into the "message" and so that love can flow and extend, which means love is radiated and increased, which means HEALING comes through the body and the body is MADE WHOLE because it is COMMUNICATING WHOLENESS. When the mind is sane and flowing fully and freely THROUGH the body, the body is HEALED as the love passes through it making it essentially immortal, incapable of sickness or death.

Here is how Jesus says it:

"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.

To use a medium of communication as a medium of ATTACK is an obvious confusion in purpose. To communicate is to join and to attack is to separate. How can you do both simultaneously WITH THE SAME THING, and NOT suffer? Perception of the body can be unified only by ONE PURPOSE. This releases the mind from the temptation to see it in many lights, and gives it over ENTIRELY to the One Light in which it can be really understood at all."

In this world it's becoming increasingly popular to regard "all bodies" as equal. This is a good step towards the recognition of true equality, but right now it's still heavily focused on making bodies real and then trying to equalize them and be more accepting of them. To accept a body as real is to make sin real.

The whole purpose of the body, to the ego, is to create an image of difference. Difference is an attack on the equality of God's children. Bodies show images of how we are not the same, live by different rules, have different values, and are imprisoned by forms.

So you get for example social movements to treat men and women equally. And you get the feminists and whatever the male counterpart of that is. And then you get the people with certain sexual orientations and gender identities having their say. And then it all gradually moves toward attempting to KEEP all of these different bodies, but somehow regard them as equal to each other.

The ideal is to have no racism, no sexism, no gender discrimination, no abuse of people who are different. But the ego wants to keep the differences and find a way to accept the differences. That is insanity and it is impossible, but it does show that on a deeper level, mentally, we're trying to move towards the truth.

What should and will eventually happen, is that we all *recognize* each other as immortal spirit, as beings of light, as completely identical children of God, who have no differences, are equal in *every* possible way, and this will completely ERASE the body which is a separation device. The body only shows up when minds believe in separation and differences.

So the goal shouldn't really be to find ways to "accept other bodies as they are", although that's a good step in the right direction. At least if we try to accept bodies as neutral or indifferent or that form doesn't matter, we're starting to foster the right kind of thinking towards a sane mind.

But at some point we have to admit, bodies come between people, bodies are illusions, you are not a body you are free, and the body is not the person at all. Bodies are nothing, bodies are not important, and if we're TRULY interested in equality then it has to go completely beyond bodies to the recognition of perfect identical christhood in each of us. And that means overlooking the body in a state of forgiveness.

Until then I guess we'll continue to see the stepping stones, the social movements and the mens/womens rights and the appreciation of the minorities and all the rest of it. It's just that, ultimately, that's limited and can only go so far before you realize bodies themselves are the problem.

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

As I see it now, guilt isn't just some little emotion you have only some of the time, in certain situations. The way Jesus presents it, ANY amount of separation produces guilt.

As soon as you separate, you are asserting a desire to not share. This means you want to take from others and have what they lack. This selfishness brings with it automatic guilt, based on the knowing that you have deprived someone and caused them to suffer.

Similarly as soon as you attack, you are asserting that you want someone else to not have something. You are attacking an innocent being, which induces guilt. Any desire to separate from another in any way is an attack and will foster guilt in the mind. Seeing yourself as not at-one with them will make you guilty for having pushed them away.

Jesus also describes attack as being another word for sin, and another word for sin is also insanity, which is a split mind. Any amount of separation whatsoever produces a spit mind which believes in sin, is attacking, and therefore is inducing guilt.

It's not as if you are just innocent most of the time and then you only feel guilty if you specifically attack someone on a specific day. You are ALWAYS IN GUILT so long as you are in separation. So long as your mind is split, there is guilt. So long as you deny God, there is guilt.

Guilt is a universal guilt, a systemic system-wide guilt, a side-effect of separation. If there is any separation at all, to any degree, or the mind is in any way divided or split or attacking, it MUST produce a guilty state. Such attacks are sin, and all sin demands guilt and punishment.

So in fact, for example, you being body identified, is a guilt-inducing state. Believing you do not share an identity with other people will produce guilt. Seeing someone as a body induces guilt. Having any lack of oneness whatsoever produces guilt.

This has to be the case because, as Jesus says, the ego depends on guilt.

"Only the ego can feel guilty."

"Without guilt there is no ego."

This means that fundamentally, if you are IN separation you are IN guilt and are being ego. If you are NOT separate there is no ego and there is no guilt. That has to mean that the guilt accompanies the separation. Where there is separation THERE IS guilt, and you cannot have separation without it.

To undo guilt you must transcend all separation, and only upon doing so do you undo the ego. And until you do so, you will feel guilty because you still have an ego that attacks. To be separated off is to be guilty, to be a body is to be guilty, and to see yourself as not your brother is to be guilty.

"To be alone IS to be guilty. For to experience yourself AS alone, is to deny the Oneness of the Father and His Son, and thus to ATTACK REALITY."

"You WILL feel guilty 'til you learn this. For, in the end, whatever form it takes, your guilt arises from your failure to fulfill your function in God's Mind with ALL OF YOURS."

"And you WILL feel guilty for this imagined "crime," which no one in this world, or Heaven, CAN POSSIBLY commit."

"And who, BECAUSE he wishes to attack, can FAIL to think it MUST be guilty, to DESERVE the wish and leave HIM innocent? And who would see the Son of God as innocent, and wish him dead?"

"Are YOU a sin? You answer "yes" WHENEVER you attack, for BY attack do you assert that you are guilty, and must give as you deserve."

"You are guilty OR guiltless, bound OR free, happy OR unhappy."

"The ego teaches you to attack yourself BECAUSE you are guilty, and this MUST INCREASE the guilt, for guilt is the RESULT of attack. In the ego's teaching, then, there IS no escape from guilt."

"You are NOT guiltless in time, but IN ETERNITY."

The body is supposed to be used as a communication device. This is much misundestood. What it means is that the body is to be used in a way that reflects our function of extension in heaven. We (mind/soul) are a MEDIUM or "communication channel" of extension, through which God is hosted and extends. We are to pass on what we receive. And this produces a continuous outward expansion and increase of creation. This is also communication - the outward expression of love.

"Creation and communication are synonymous. 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." That means, the body is supposed to, from a higher repurposing perspective, be used solely to extend and join and communicate, like a medium that you express THROUGH and BEYOND. Whereby you use it solely like a tool to give to others, placing no focus ON the body itself, or on the bodies of others. Because bodies become a LIMIT on communication if you make them real. They turn into brick walls.

The entire problem comes when you begin to focus ON the body, making it an idol, worshipping it, mistaking it for a THING in its own right, considering it an entity, dwelling on its form and function, and identifying with it as if it is your self. This converts the "channel" from being a channel, to being a roadblock in the channel. It turns the body into a blockage of separation instead of extension.

All of the minds attention is put ON the MEDIUM ITSELF, as if the medium itself is important. This separates the mind off because it now stops at the body's limits and does not go past it to join with other minds beyond their bodies. This increases the rift in the mind and induces all forms of sickness including death. It's a mis-use of the body - trying to use what's supposed to be a PIPE, as though it's a brick wall.

This is also why holy relationship is important because you're supposed to USE the body to relate BEYOND the body. It's only supposed to be used temporarily as a device for this purpose, and is not supposed to be used to exalt itself or to act as a prison or barrier. When you become body focused, you literally "lose sight" of your brother and yourself. It means we're turning a device for learning into the FOCUS of learning, as if trying to make the body BE something in its own right, which it isn't. The body is used for communication when the body ITSELF becomes NOTHING and invisible in the equasion.

"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."

"To confuse a learning device with a curriculum GOAL is a fundamental confusion. Learning can hardly be meaningfully arrested at its own aids, and hope to understand them OR its real purpose. 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."

"The Holy Spirit's purpose lies safe in your RELATIONSHIP, and NOT your bodies. You have ESCAPED the body. Where you are now, the BODY cannot enter, for the Holy Spirit has set HIS temple there."

"You CANNOT make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will NEVER be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love's CONDEMNATION. For here is love made fearful, and hope abandoned. Even the idols that are worshipped here are shrouded deep in mystery, and kept APART from those who worship them. This is the temple dedicated to no relationships, and no return."

"The Holy Spirit's temple is NOT a body, but a RELATIONSHIP. The body is an isolated speck of darkness; a hidden secret room, a tiny spot of senseless mystery, a meaningless enclosure carefully protected, yet hiding nothing. Here, the unholy relationship escapes reality, and seeks for crumbs to keep itself alive. Here it would drag its brothers, holding them here in its idolatry. Here it is "safe," for here love CANNOT enter. The Holy Spirit does not build His temples where love can never be. Would He Who SEES the face of Christ choose as His home the only place in all the universe where it can NOT be seen?"

A Course in Miracles teaches:

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom."

"Love did not create the body."

"The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate parts of his Self from other parts."

"The body will not stay."

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love."

"God cannot come into a body, nor can you join Him there."

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea."

"Love's answer is inevitable. It will come, because you came WITHOUT the body, and interposed no barriers which would INTERFERE with its glad coming."

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that YOU will last forever"

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom."

"The body is the symbol of what you THINK you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist."

"To be of one mind is meaningful, but to be of one body is meaningless. By the laws of mind, then, the body IS meaningless. "

"The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it, MAKING it sick because of its identification WITH it. "

"Grace is not given to a BODY, but to a MIND."

"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but NEVER experienced just now."

"The ego is idolatry; the sign of limited and separated self, born in a body, doomed to suffer and to end its life in death."

"You can escape the body if you choose."

"The Christ in you inhabits NOT a body. Yet He IS in you. And thus MUST it be that YOU are not within a body."

"The body needs NO healing. But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed!"

"A mind and body cannot both exist."

"If you are physical your mind is gone from your self-concept, for it has no place in which it could be really part of you. If you are Spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality."

"You CANNOT make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will NEVER be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love's condemnation."

"The special relationship is a device for limiting Your self to a body, and for limiting your perception of others to THEIRS."

"Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster illness."

"The body does not really exist, except as a learning device for the mind"

"It offers nothing, and does not exist."

"The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream, in which it acts as if it were a person."

"The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive SOMETHING, and WITH something."

"I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body AND the power of the mind, by uniting MY will with that of my Creator, which naturally remembered the Soul and its own real purpose."

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. It merely became what it always was. And that is what 'rolling the stone away means.' The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness."

"I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body's worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand."

"Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there any time you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does. And then-and then-I cannot speak of that. A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death."

I've seen how when I want to make something go away, I make myself sick.

We attempt to psychologically reject and push something away when we find it threatening, dangerous or undesirable, all of which is a perceptual error. This however immediately implements some form of sickness. Sickness is INDUCED by the attempt to separate from your BROTHER!

"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."

When we perceive a threat or danger, or someone is fear-mongering, or there is "bad news", or some obnoxious person is hanging around, or whatever... if we perceive it as having power to attack and we want it to stop, instead of making it stop or dis-believing in it, we put up defenses. We try to reject and separate ourselves from it. That's a bad move. It attacks our body. "If I defend myself I am attacked."

I gave myself a panic attack yesterday at a medical office when the staff started becoming serious about heart problems that aren't real. Try as I might I couldn't help but try to reject and resist, and thus induced sickness and almost fainted. Later during forgiveness I saw how I'd done that to myself, trying to make it go away, as the result of *perceiving* that there was a real threat or danger.

Previously also I recall a very talkative coworker kept hanging around at my desk trying to chat, and wouldn't go away. And then got into chatting with others nearby. And instead of standing up to tell them to leave I just tolerated and tried to be patient, but wanted them to go away. And this induced a sudden immediate headache. Trying to separate from your brother induces sickness.

I also once gave myself an ear infection in a matter of hours as a result of trying to make Holy Spirit go away, having perceived his lack of "boundaries" as a threat. I suffered for a few days before being able to re-approach him without fear and thus recognize what I'd done to myself, and upon recognizing I did not NEED the defense, all symptoms disappeared within a matter of hours.

Whenever we USE SEPARATION as a tool, which is an ego tool, to try to "deal with" perceived situations, our attempt to put up a defense and withdraw into ourselves cuts us off from life, blocks extension, fosters separation, produces sickness, and eventually death ("sickness is but a little death"). Our attempt to DENY GOD or our brothers (whom God is in) is the only cause of bodily death. This is why all death is suicide - we give our consent through our denial of God's will. IT IS NOT GOD's WILL THAT ANYONE DIE. A dream of death is not left THROUGh death, but through life - truth.

Sickness cannot happen at all when you do not have a belief in separation in any way. When your mind extends to your brothers mind sharing love, it undoes all sense of separation and your minds join. In this joining there is no split and no division and no attack, and nothing for sickness to latch onto. It therefore MUST heal, and as such death is surmounted. This is a miracle, it is resurrection.

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

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

Notice it says NOW IS THE *BODY* HEALED.

"You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible." This is literal. Sickness becomes impossible when your mind is whole and healed.

Atonement makes sickness IMPOSSIBLE. This DOES MEAN BODY SICKNESS as well as mental illness.

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

So sickness IS A FORM OF GUILT, and if there is no guilt, there can be no sickness or death. Period.

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

"That the body cannot heal the mind but the mind can heal the body proves the mind must be stronger than the body. EVERY MIRACLE DEMONSTRATES THIS."

When your mind is sane, you know you are causal. You have no level confusion. The body comes OUT from you.

When your mind is insane, you project causality outside of yourself, which causes you to see yourself as an effect.

The levels are now reversed and perception is backwards.

Seeing yourself as an effect is the idea that you are being CAUSED from outside yourself, and that must mean you believe you are at the effect of those causes.

Seeing yourself as "affected" is an external attack (really self attack) and shows up as ALL forms of sickness in the body, including death. The mind that sees itself under siege cannot help but PICTURE itself as attacked, and this picturing shows up AS THE BODY.

When externalized causes are believed to define what you are, you begin to DEMONSTRATE that you are at the effect of others. And you now start to PROJECT an image of a body that is under attack.

This demonstration is an accusation and an attempt to condemn your brother as the "cause" of sin. If he is a sinner, and you are not, you might be innocent, but you ARE now AFFECTED.

This means you now believe you are BEING attacked by your brother, and you PROVE this by manifesting illness in your body. Then you claim, "brother at your hand I die." "Sick bodies are accusers"!

When this reversal of levels, this belief in magic, this projection of sin, and this displacement of causality, which is ALL THE SAME THING, is corrected, your mind becomes sane again.

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

Now that you see yourself as CAUSE and NOT at the effect of anything, you now position yourself as incapable of suffering, incapable of BEING AFFECTED, and incapable of being attacked. This invulnerability shines away the sickness which was held in place by insane level confusion, and THE BODY NOW HEALS.

The mind is responsible for every condition of the body. At all times. When mind has level confusion, it SHOWS UP in the body as illness. When the mind does not have level confusion, it SHOWS UP in the body as physical health.

This is the central teaching of the course, that you cannot be at the effect of others and when you recognize this you will ONLY CAUSE LIFE.

This is a course in life, healing and miracles. It is not a course in being sick or dead.

"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. The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form, because it can so easily be CHANGED."

"The Holy Spirit offers you, to give to him, a picture of yourself in which there is NO pain, and NO reproach at all. And what was martyred to his guilt becomes the perfect witness to his innocence."

"The power of witness is beyond belief, because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness is believed BECAUSE he points beyond himself, to what he REPRESENTS. A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

"Healing is the result of using the body solely for communication. Since this IS natural, it heals by making whole, which is also natural. All mind is whole, and the belief that part of it is physical or NOT MIND is a fragmented (or sick) interpretation. Mind cannot be made physical, but it can be made manifest THROUGH the physical if it uses the body to GO BEYOND itself. By reaching out, the mind EXTENDS itself. It does not stop at the body, for if it does it is blocked in its purpose. A mind which has been blocked has allowed itself to be vulnerable to attack, because it has TURNED AGAINST ITSELF.

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."

When your sense of identity has become confused with the ego or body, you see it as your SELF. You associate your existence with it as though it is you.

In order to then preserve your "own life", you will defend the thing you are identified with because you think it is really you. When it is threatened, you are threatened. You will therefore seek to maintain and preserve IT at all costs.

When the truth comes along to reveal that you are not the ego or body, your ego-identified self WILL perceive it as a threat. It’s a threat because IF the truth is true, it proves that the ego is not real. If YOU are the ego, that means YOU are not true and you don’t really exist.

What could seem more threatening than this implication that "you are going to be undone", or "your life" is going to end because what you ARE is being attacked by the truth?

In the name of protecting what you THINK is your life - your self, you will DEFEND your "self". Or at least, you think you are. You are defending the ego because you think it is your self, not recognizing it as not you, because you don’t recognize who you really are.

To defend yourself AS the ego, you will USE ego methods to protect yourself. The ego has only one tool - separation, which is the same thing as denial. In the name of what you THINK is protecting your SELF, you will implement MORE separation to try to put safe distance between you and the truth.

When you emphasize more separation, you split your mind, increase mental illness, and foster sickness in the body. This is unavoidable. Choosing to withdraw from truth is choosing to withdraw from life and health and wholeness. The defense that SEEMS like it is there to PROTECT you and save your life, with the purpose of self-preservation, is actually HURTING you. It makes you sick.

The ego is insane and every guidance it gives is a lie that does exactly the opposite to what it claims. It claimed that you protecting it (you) would make you safe from attack. Instead, it attacked you and now you are sick and worse off. The signs and symptoms of sickness start to show up in the body as well. You tried to protect yourself and you were attacked ("if I defend myself I am attacked").

In this state, you are WILLING TO TOLERATE SICKNESS and KEEP IT because, to your ego-body-identified self, the purpose of the sickness is to KEEP YOU SAFE. While you perceive that you NEED this defense, to keep your "self" safe from the truth, you will NOT be willing to drop the sickness. To do so would make you LESS safe and expose you to the perceived attacker. No-one in their right mind would want to become more vulnerable to attack, so it seems a reasonable to maintain and increase the sickness.

Even though the sickness is intolerable, and suffering is awful, you unconsciously chose it on purpose. Consciously now, because you are in denial and implemented denial in order to make the threat go away, you have blocked awareness of the choice you made.

You therefore don’t see that you did it to yourself. You then will see the symptoms of sickness as unchosen, unwanted, undesired and unacceptable. You will seek externally for possible "causes" trying to explain what caused the sickness to show up. It was you.

The secret to salvation is that you did this to yourself. The sickness is protecting you from God. The more you can make the body sick, the more pain it is in, the more you will focus on the body. You withdraw and contract yourself towards it, hugging it tightly in pain, because doing so reinforces your sense that you ARE the ego body. The more identified with the body you are, the more you are trying to make your ego-self strong. The more tightly you cling to it, the sicker it becomes.

The body is the primary place where you escape from God’s wrath, and yet escaping to it attacks it. An increase in confinement and isolation and body-identification seems to prevent God from stealing your identity away - your self, which you are trying to protect. But the more you BIND yourself to the body in suffering, the sicker you become. You simultaneously believe you are actually becoming SAFER from God, but are horrified that you also are in a state of suffering. The sickness seems to prove that the truth is attacking you, and that you do not want it.

The ONLY problem here is a mistaken sense of identity. If we did not believe we are the ego or the body, we would not perceive our SELF as under threat from the truth. We would have no reason to defend ourselves because we would be strong and truly safe. And recognizing ourselves as immortal we transcend the NEED for sickness. Without a purpose of protection, sickness HAS no purpose, and not perceiving a purpose in it, you will withdraw your belief in it. "Illusions recognized must disappear". Sickness will vanish.

Atonement cures because it removes the perceived NEED for the sickness. Accepting atonement is a willing acceptance of the truth without resistance or fear. In that willingness there is no more identification with ego or body. Nothing to defend, nothing under attack, nothing real can be threatened. In this is the TRUE escape from all sickness and death forever. Atonement is the resurrection of God’s Son to eternal life.

Since you are OF God, being FROM God, you are exactly LIKE God. You cannot BE like anything else because you are not of or from anything else. You are not OF this world, or OF the body, or OF your parent's bodies. You are not FROM this world. You are not of or from the ego. You have been given BY God because you are a part of him. And anything he has not given you is nothing.

Your real identity must therefore be a part of God as well, aligned with Christ and shared with all your brothers. What you are can ONLY be of God. It cannot include anything else because only the truth is true. Anything you made, anything you invented, including the ego, the body, suffering, sickness, death, despair, unhappiness, depression, lack or loss or grief, fear or guilt, cannot be a part of what you are. It therefore cannot exist.

Anything which is not OF or FROM God, must be denied and rejected. It must be filtered out and forgiven. It must be handed over and let go. Anything in you which God did not put there, must be exhumed and purified away. All the barriers you built against love must be removed, because they are barriers against your real self, suggesting that you have and want something not of God.

"This is the PROPER use of denial. It is not used to HIDE anything, but it IS used to correct error."

"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."

"THIS peace is totally incapable of being shaken by human errors of any kind. It denies the ability of anything which is not of God to affect you in any way."

As Jesus states here, if you want SANITY, then you MUST deny anything AND everything which is not of God. This is in the extreme. It means you have to deny the ego and the body and the world and all forms of suffering. To deny them is to withdraw value and belief and truth and reality from them. It is to dis-identify with them, recognizing them as NOT of God, and therefore that they cannot possibly be a part of you or your experience.

You have to take this ALL the way, because enlightenment is the recognition that only that which is of God exists, and nothing else has ANY power over you. Nor does it really exist at all. Enlightenment IS sanity. It is the end of false perception. It is forgiveness. Anything not created by God has to be thrown out. Anything not of God is impossible. Anything he did not create or give has no truth, no reality, no meaning, and no existence. It cannot therefore be WHAT you are.

You cannot be your emotions, your upsets, your unhappiness, your losses, your pain, your physical sickness, your death, your stresses, your thoughts, your body, the bodies of others, or part of the world. God did not create the world so you cannot be OF the world, or IN the world, or FROM the world. You are from another world. Your real self is IN HEAVEN WITH GOD. That is where you must anchor your whole sense of who and what you are. You are not ANYTHING that you made.

"Sickness and separation are not of God, but the Kingdom IS. If you obscure the Kingdom, you are perceiving WHAT IS NOT OF GOD."

"That is why you can choose to listen to two voices within you. One you made yourself, and that one is not of God. But the other is given you by God, Who asks you only to listen to it. The Holy Spirit IS in you in a very literal sense. It is the voice that calls you back to where you were before and will be again."

"Recognize this gladly, for in this recognition lies the realization that your banishment is not of God, and therefore does not exist. You are at home in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of awakening to Reality."

"Forgive all thoughts which would oppose the truth of your completeness, unity and peace. You cannot lose the gifts your Father gave. You do not want to be another self. You have no function that is not of God. Forgive yourself the one you think you made. Forgiveness and salvation are the same. Forgive what you have made, and you are saved."

"Failure is of the ego, NOT of God. "

"Guilt is more than merely not of God. It is the symbol of the ATTACK on God. This is a totally meaningless concept EXCEPT to the ego, but do not underestimate the power of the ego's belief in it. This is the belief from which ALL guilt really stems."

"We therefore are embarking on an organized, well-structured, and carefully planned program, aimed at learning how to offer to the Holy Spirit everything you do NOT want. HE knows what to DO with it. You do NOT know how to use what He knows. Whatever is revealed to Him that is not of God, is gone. But you must reveal it to YOURSELF in perfect willingness, for otherwise His knowledge remains useless TO you."

"You have condemned yourself, but condemnation is not of God. Therefore, it is not true. No more are any of the RESULTS of your condemnation."

"God is the ONLY Cause, and guilt is NOT of Him. Teach no-one he has hurt you, for, if you do, you teach YOURSELF that what is NOT of God, HAS POWER OVER YOU. THE CAUSELESS CANNOT BE. Do not attest to it, and do not foster belief in it in any mind."

"NOTHING you made has ANY power over you, unless you still would be APART from your Creator, and with a will OPPOSED to His."

You are in your brother's mind, and he is in yours. You share minds and are joined in holy relationship.

When you believe in separation, using the ego weapons of attack, judgement, sin, guilt, fear, etc, you split off a part of yourself from your brother and isolate it into a body. You become body identified. The part of you in his mind is hidden from your awareness, and you see yourself as being only in your body.

In this state you are in a state of sickness, because you have introduced a split into your mind. The split isn't happening inside your body. The split is between the part of you that is in your body, and the part of you that is in your brother. The body, as a wall, is the separation device that is coming between you and the rest of yourself. Between the you that is in your body, and the you that is in your brother.

The body is then emphasized and focused on, made real, given artificial powers, and made to serve purposes of attack. The body now symbolizes attack and death in an effort to prove or enforce the idea that you are separate from others (and yourself).

The body takes on forms of sickness to both accuse your brother of sin, and to attack both of you in both directions. The body becomes an image of sickness and suffering to depict the belief you have that you are not one with others or yourself. It depicts death in all its forms, because the mind is using it to separate. And so the body faithfully reports death as the message being shared between you and others, and yourself.

When you join with others, reconnecting to the part of you that is in their mind and body, beyond the body of yourself and theirs also, you are returning to a state of whole mindedness. This erases the split in the mind, closes the gap of separation between you and others, and restores you to union with your brothers.

This "heals" or erases the separation that was coming between you and yourself, thus healing your split mind. Your mind no longer pays any attention at all to the body, using it solely to extend through and beyond. It's purpose is only to get out of the way to allow the mind to extend past its limitations and to join with others.

It no longer is forming a solid barrier and is no long needed to depict images of attack. Thus the body "heals", its sign and symptoms of death vanish, and all of its sicknesses are reversed. It now symbolizes only eternal life because now there is no attack upon it from the mind attacking itself. A mind that does not attack can only heal and so it heals the body.

This healing of the body is the only sane thing to do, and is unavoidable, because now the body is communicating a message of innocence, joining, wholeness and harmlessness. It must depict and symbolize love and life, so all signs of error and sin and attack are removed from it. This allows the body to physically and symbolically communicate innocence, and to exonerate your brother from any accusation of sin.

Anything you think he did to you, which you depicted in your body to prove his sinfulness, is removed by your mind's willingness to join and be wholly united. Any symptoms or effects which he seemed to put there are reversed. All symbols of pain and suffering and sickness and distortion are corrected. The mind heals the body so that he body is only communicating love and wholeness on all levels.

The body has no choice in this. It can only symbolize what its user is transmitting through it. It either depicts pain and death or it depict health and life. The mind makes this decision as to how to use the body, and the body responds by demonstrating and depicting the mind's intentions. Either the body relays images of death or images of life, depending on the mind's attitude. A living mind can only heal, a sick mind can only destroy.

Your brother can now see, hear, feel, touch, taste, no signs of death upon your body, proving that any sin he thinks he might have committed against it cannot have happened. His mind cannot maintain the belief that he really did sin or attack, because there is no proof. And so he must be mistaken and his innocence is revealed to him through your demonstration of a body symbolizing eternal life.

As minds join, bodies raise from the dead. Your health becomes his health, and together you are healed.

"Forgiveness lets me know that minds are joined."

"Minds that are joined, AND RECOGNIZE THEY ARE, can feel no guilt. For they can NOT attack, and they REJOICE that this is so, seeing their safety in this happy fact. Their joy is in the INNOCENCE they see."

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

"Today we are again emphasizing the fact that minds are joined."

"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."

"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."

While ACIM, as a book, is a collection fo words, these words are twice removed from reality. They are symbols of symbols.

Jesus, who wrote the material, was not operating on a level of symbols upon symbols, or even a level of symbols. He is operating from a level of total awareness and experience of truth. He is in heaven, and wrote the course material from that perspective.

What you have to realize then is that the words in the book are just expressions from a higher state. They are a sort of translation. So if there is some kind of truth or principle and it's talked about in the book, it may be presented in several different ways, using various words. Because the words aren't the starting point of the truth.

For example Jesus touches on the topic of forgiveness hundreds of times, and many of those statements say practically the same thing. There are even some sentences which are worded almost identically. Yet they appear different in form just because they use different words.

It's important to realize that the words in the book are NOT the highest level of truth, or the origin of that truth. They are expressions OF truth, turned into symbolic form.

For example if Jesus is expert on the topic of forgiveness, he could write literally 1 million books solely on that topic, all using a plethora of words and coming at the same teaching from a variety of angles.

Although he might choose certain words to try to represent the subject matter, that doesn't mean the words chosen are doctrine or some kind of perfect representation. Because you have to remember that they are not only removed from reality, they are part of a strange ego-generated language and is trying to work within their confines so that the people who speak that language will be able to get some measure of coherent meaning from it.

Many of us begin learning the course from the bottom up, starting in the darkness and trying to find our way to the light. We have some pieces of the puzzle but not all, and based on various clues and consistencies we gradually piece together a clearer picture of what it's saying or means. And that can take a long time to sort out what it means without any contradictions or confusion.

Just because the course says something in one passage that doesn't mean that's the whole truth either. Because Jesus may say something in another passage which either clarifies it or seems to contradict it. This is because each set of words are jut one form or expression, and each expression may have nuances or implications or suggestions of meaning which, if taken too out of context or in isolation, may lead to false conclusions.

You can try to think that the words are the meaning, but this isn't always true, and quite often you'll see people quoting isolated passages as if they are the whole story. Since Jesus is coming from a singular whole truth, the course should be considered a kind of holographic projection of that, and that means there is fragmentation and differences and in some cases there may appear to be things which don't seem to add up.

Jesus has gone to great lengths to try to ensure that the course words are as unambiguous and consistent as possible, but the nature of the beast is that words are limiting and sometimes this adds some confusion.

It's important to gradually realize that beyond the words, and prior to the words, there is a state of truth and an entire logical system of metaphysics. For example the idea that the world was made as an opposite to reality. That's a simple metaphysical concept and you could put that into a million words to express it.

As you "see through" the words, read between the lines, and look to the deeper meaning, you're gradually going to find yourself moving beyond the words of the course entirely. Once you SEE the underlying metaphysical basis for what he's saying and why he's saying it, and therefore what his statement MUST mean regardless of their words, then you are really starting to see the "course beyond the course". The higher form of it.

In a way, this means that you have to "forgive the course", you have to overlook its forms and not be deceived by the appearance of its words. Just as much as anything else. It's easy to get hung up on trying to preserve the perfect words or read the earliest edition or whatever but that's all surface fluff. The real meaning behind it is way deeper than any of the words and any of the editions.

This is also why it's important to foster a personal relationship with Jesus and Holy Spirit and to get truth from the horse's mouth rather than getting lost in the book. Logically it makes more sense to speak to the author who is an expert, than to get lot in confusion based solely on some words on a page.

Once you grasp the logical concepts, they transcend the words. And then you can look at the words and you can see where Jesus is expressing FROM and what he's getting at and therefore, logically, what the words must mean. And this can be quite eye opening because then you'll start to compare and contrast the clearly logical meaning of the metaphysics against the English-languge expression or discussion "about" that metaphysics. And this begins to highlight the ways that they can at time be a little different in form. But the higher metaphysics is more accurate than the language-form of it.

One of the problems people have with the course is the sheer mass of words, the holographic scattering of subject matter, the seeming visiting and revisiting of topics, and the difficulty getting through the density of all that language to try to really get a clear view of what's behind it all. And what's behind it is actually very simple and organized and clean. What began as seemingly a huge collection of cryptic statements, few of which were believed or made sense, you end up with a massively stripped down and very simple foundation.

It takes a lot of sifting through the sheer weight of the course material to come to realize just how simple and logical the underlying metaphysics is. It's kind of like a sculpture where you have to continually chisel away at the rough details and the seeming differences until gradually a clear picture forms. And what them emerges is simple and beautiful and clear and well formed.

This is why it's important to learn not to get too hung up on what is written in the book. The form of the words can become a distraction away from the meaning. Some people get really hung up on what it says, taking words and phrases in isolation and thinking that they represent the whole meaning. This is because the ego believes that form IS meaning. The form of the course is not its meaning, however. Its meaning comes from where it CAME FROM, and the form it took in it expression is just a symbolic version of that.

There is a truth beyond words. There are structures and relationships between things that underly their English-language expressions. There is a metaphysics deeper than any page of the text. And as you move closer toward the deeper meaning you also more closer toward experiencing it. This is all part of the purification process. All part of undoing the seemingly elaborate complexities of the ego and replacing them with the sheer simplicity of God's truth.

This is an important point. When you are being forgiving, you do not continue to LOOK AT the thing that you were forgiving. Sight of it was the result of NOT forgiving.

Forgiveness is NOT ABOUT looking "at" bodies and at the world and regarding them as sinless and holy. This is not how forgiveness functions. Forgiveness does not make something real and then try to look past it, nor does it make something real and then attempt to endow it with qualities of love and perfection.

To forgive the world does NOT MEAN to keep looking AT the world in a loving way. To forgive the world does NOT MEAN to love the world and believe it is God's creation. To forgive does not mean that your SIGHT stops at the outside surface of material objects and still regards them as reality. I'm sorry but that is NOT forgiveness.

To forgive means to OVERLOOK. It means to SEE PAST. It means to NOT FIXATE ON. It means to NOT BE DECEIVED BY. It means to GIVE NO REALITY TO. It means to CANCEL illusions. It means to DIMINISH illusions in your sight so that you can see THROUGH THEM and PAST THEM to the truth (Christ) that was being hidden BY them.

The world stands like a block of sin before the face of Christ. So does all bodies. You have to OVERLOOK THEM if you want to see Christ in your brother. The Christ in him is BEYOND HIS BODY.

"It must reach out beyond itself, as you reached out beyond the body to LET yourselves be joined."

"Beyond the bodies that you interposed between you, and shining in the golden light"

"And place no value on your brother's body, which held him to illusions of what he is."

You have to OVERLOOK PHYSICAL OBJECTS. Your sight, your spiritual sight, has to take the place of your body's vision (which lies to you and only looks at bodies). To be forgiving, to forgive your brother, and to forgive the world, does not mean you're still SEEING THE WORLD or seeing bodies. Nor does it mean you still see exactly the same stuff you saw before but with a sense of innocence and loveliness. You are NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SEEING THIS WORLD.

Those of you who believe that God created this planet, are particularly apt to be mistaken about this. It is an error to say that your aim is to "love the world". Your love would dispel the world. "Eternity shines away the world." You cannot love what isn't really there. You can only love the reality and truth which is BEYOND the world. To want to keep the world and the bodies and keep SEEING them, and keep being BLINDED by sight of form, while trying to simultaneously reach a state of love and forgiveness, is IMPOSSIBLE. You have to let the world go. You are NOT being forgiving if you keep fixating on it.

All things in this world are the form of sin and error. You must learn to OVERLOOK these errors and see PAST them with reason. Only this way can you "see God in everything you see". It's not because you keep seeing the world AS God. You see God IN PLACE OF the world. Behind the world. He was hidden BY the world. That was why you made it, to shut him out. To forgive is to recognize that this illusory world IS NOT THERE, HAS NOT HAPPENED, AND DOES NOT REALLY EXIST. Only by looking PAST forms to the Christ BEYOND can you recognize God's Son.

When your mind stops at the outer surface of objects, you are blinded and the extension of your mind has been arrested. If you arrest the extension of the mind you foster separation and induce illness. It is unnatural to see this world and bad for your health. You need to see PAST its illusion in order for your mind to JOIN with the Christ that is hidden BEYOND the world and beyond bodies. It is the only way you can communicate and it is the only way you can love. Love shines PAST illusions and renders them unreal and irrelevant. The world is irrelevant. The body is irrelevant.

It's like in the Matrix movies... you have to learn to see the 'matrix code' instead of being deceived by illusions of a world that doesn't exist. Then you can get out of hell and get back to being in Heaven.

Only love is real and "love was never in the world". Love wants the world to end.

"Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins..."

"...brought to its forgiveness is gently overlooked, and disappears"

"He overlooks the mind and body, seeing only the face of Christ"

"Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances."

"By its ability to overlook what is not there, it opens up the way to truth"

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK."

"You can overlook your brother's dreams. So perfectly can you forgive him his illusions"

"For you are asked but to forgive all things that no-one ever did; to overlook what is not there; and not to look upon the unreal as reality."

"For it is your unwillingness to overlook what seems to stand between you that makes it look impenetrable"

"(body)... Its eyes ADJUST to sin, unable to overlook it in any form, and seeing it everywhere, in everything."

"Let love draw near them and overlook the body, as it will surely do"

"Thus are his sins forgiven him, for Christ has vision which has power to overlook them all. In His forgiveness they are gone. Unseen by One, they merely disappear because a vision of the holiness which lies beyond them comes to take their place."

"When you have looked upon each other with complete forgiveness, from which no error is excluded and nothing kept hidden, what mistake can there be anywhere you can not overlook? What form of suffering could block your sight, preventing you from seeing past it?"

"In your madness, you OVERLOOK REALITY COMPLETELY, and you see ONLY YOUR SPLIT MIND everywhere you look."

"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."

"See him as guiltless as I look on you, and OVERLOOK the sins he THINKS he sees within himself. "

"Condemn your Savior not because he thinks he is a body. Far beyond his dreams is his reality"

"But what is that to those who have been given one true relationship, BEYOND the body?"

"He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes."

"This separating off is symbolized, in your perception, by a body which is clearly separate and a thing apart. "

"To see a brother in ANOTHER body, SEPARATE from yours, is the expression of a wish to see a little PART of him, and sacrifice the rest."

"And while you see your brother as a body, APART from you and separate in his cell, you are demanding sacrifice of him AND you. "

"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."

"In Heaven God's Son is NOT imprisoned in a body, nor is sacrificed in solitude to sin."

"If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness of your union! Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within you, there is a force which no illusions can resist. This body only seems to be immovable. This force is irresistible in truth. What, then, must happen when they come together? Can the illusion of immovability be long defended for what is quietly passed through and gone beyond?"

God did create me. The truth about me is that I am still in the condition He originally created me, having not really changed at all.

God is everywhere in Heaven/Reality. Having created me as His Son in His Image, I am also everywhere. For this to be possible we must SHARE existence, we must overlap. You can think of this like sharing one space, where two beings permeate and occupy the entire space, together.

Since God created many beings, many beings who are everywhere, many beings thus overlap and share existence with God and with each other. Everyone shares in and has full access to everyone's being. Everyone exists WHERE everyone else exists.

The separation idea was nothing other than an attempt to stop sharing existence with others. And since the state of sharing was one of overlap and communion (common-union), this meant the attempt to "withdraw" from or to "isolate" away from the existence that others were sharing in.

In the separation, you took a small fragment of your everywhere-self, and tried to draw a fence around it. The aim was to keep everyone else including God outside of the circle, and to maintain a place inside the circle where they could not share existence with you. The result of this was the sensation that, within the circle, you are "alone", there is ONLY YOU there, and you are now "separated off" from where the others are existing.

This is the idea of the separated self. It is a portion of self which has attempted to not share, which wants special selfish rights, which wants ownership of a small segment of existence, and wants to be different and unlike the rest. To have something that is only for itself, rather than to share with others. And so finds itself having an illusory experience of existing in a place, in a space, where the space it occupies is not occupied by others (spacetime). Where it is alone and distinct within its own walls, where no-one else exists. "Only me" seems to exist there.

And this has resulted in being isolated and confined, imprisoned, inside a wall of flesh, which is the idea of sin, which is the body. The body symbolizes the separation and is a separation device, keeping the rest of you and creation out, and isolating you within.

From "inside" your body, you then have an experience that you are "the only one" who is inhabiting it. That you are in there alone. That your brothers do not share the insides with you, and that God is not in you either. And so now you are alone and lonely, as if exiled from Heaven, and as if you are now "a separate self" who no longer is communing with the rest. The body defends against the entire universe, so that you can pretend to exist in a "space" where God is not. Spacetime's entire purpose is to facilitate this illusion of separation.

The walls around the mind, which take on the form of a body, are nothing but thoughts and ideas of separation and sin. They are attempts to make manifest "blocks" which separate you from the whole and keep the whole out of your inner self. It is also an attempt to split you off from the rest of your Christ Self, which is everywhere "except" inside your body. Everything outside of you is the rest of your self, which you have separated from, using the body walls. The body itself, as the symbol of separation, "comes between", you and the rest of you, and between you and brothers/God.

These walls, the separation itself, the gap, and the body, which is a symbol of the ego, forms an alternative illusion of an identity. This identity, the body-identity, seems to substitute for, and block, and split, your real identity. The more you try to prove you are not sharing with the universe, the more you will "foster separation and induce illness." The body will then become sick in an attempt to strengthen the idea of separation and imprisonment even further. The final protest is the killing of the body in death, where the mind is attempting to completely sever the small portion of mind, in the body, from the rest of existence entirely. Death is the attempt to destroy the Son of God.

Now, when you are being yourself as God created you, you are unlimited. You are being yourself. When you go into the ego separation idea, you start to deny and reject yourself, and so are no longer being yourself. You instead are now trying to be something you are not. And this "something you are not" takes the form of the body. "The body is the idea of what you THINK you are". The ego illusion, which now seems to be "a self you made" when you came into the dream, is a secondary self that pretends to stand-in for your real self. The more the ego is emphasized, the more this artificial "not myself" self-image body-image is focused on. And so now you have "made up a self", an ego, which you think is all of you, is your identity, and causes you to be unaware of your REAL SELF.

The result then is that the more you try NOT to be yourself as God created you, the more you become ego, body identified, and sick. And the result of this is twofold. 1) The ego seems to increase thus "strengthening" the ILLUSION that you "have a separate self", and 2) you become LESS of yourself and thus reduce down and limit yourself more and more until there is death. Therefore, death is not really the idea that you are "being a separate self". Death is the idea that you are trying NOT TO EXIST AT ALL. To not HAVE a self of any kind. It is the total denial of yourself and the attempt to destroy God's son.

Therefore, when you awaken, you are not awakening to the loss of yourself. You are returning to HAVING a self, BEING your self, KNOWING THYSELF, and returning to an awareness that you are STILL as God created you in Heaven. You expand your sense of self/identity, you be authentically true to your God-given nature, you heal the separation of the split mind, and you stop trying to be something you are not. The separation ITSELF is undone, and thus the body which was IN THE GAP is closed up and removed, and thus the false self disappears REVEALING who you really are.

It is only the artificial body walls and images that disappear. It is only the ILLUSION of becoming "something you are not" or "who you think you are" that disappears. It is only the denial, self attack, blocks to awareness, and artificial senses of identity that are removed and undone and let go. NOT YOUR SELF. Your identification shifts to spirit identification. You remember your soul.

You lift these things away so that you can see who and what YOU really are, as a child of God, a soul. Awakening is the return to the awareness of God's presence, AND YOUR PRESENCE, as a spiritual being. The true self. Your real self. The self that DOES EXIST. The self that GOD GAVE YOU. Your God-given eternally living soul, which no illusion can ever take from you. And which does not die NOR disappear when you wake up - totally the opposite in fact. Fear not that awakening means the death of you, it means the LIFE OF YOU.

You do not awaken to "no self". No self is the idea of DEATH. You awaken to HAVING a FULL SELF. As your FULL self, you are everywhere, sharing everything with God and with all your brothers in Heaven forever. ONLY the ego "dies". ONLY the ego disappears. The WALLS that fenced you in and made you alone, are lifted away. You are reunited with the Sonship. You return to oneness and sharing. And you allow yourself to SHARE YOUR SELF with other selves again. You expose yourself, you become visible, and you commune with God. You let God in, you share space with Him and His creations, and return to communing with the creations of light.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness. The soul is the idea of self fullness."

"The Kingdom of God includes all his children, and their creations."

A selection of quites about the causes of physical sickness, from A Course in Miracles.

THE CAUSES OF BODILY (PHYSICAL) SICKNESS

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body, so that it will suffer pain."

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. 2 Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. 3 Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies."

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

"Sickness or "not-right-mindedness" is the result of level confusion"

"Sickness is a defense against the truth."

"Its health or sickness depends ENTIRELY on how the mind perceives it, and the purpose that the mind would use it FOR."

"Sickness is idolatry, because it is the belief that POWER CAN BE TAKEN FROM YOU."

"For sickness is a meaningless attempt to give effects to causelessness, and MAKE it be a cause."

"Sickness is a demand the body be a thing that it is not."

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

"What is a sense of sickness but a sense of limitation? Of a splitting OFF and separating FROM?"

"This heals at all levels, because all sickness comes from confusing the levels."

"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."

"To believe that a Son of God can be sick is to believe that part of God can suffer."

"When a brother is sick it is because he is not asking for peace, and therefore does not know he has it."

"For sickness is an election; a decision. It is the choice of weakness, in the mistaken conviction that it is strength."

"Sickness is a method, conceived in madness, for placing God's Son on his Father's throne. God is seen as outside, fierce and powerful, eager to keep all power for Himself. Only by His death can He be conquered by His Son."

"If sickness is but a faulty problem-solving approach, it is a decision. And if it is a decision, it is the mind and not the body that makes it."

"Sickness is a retreat from others, and a shutting off of joining. It becomes a door that closes on a separate self, and keeps it isolated and alone."

"Sickness is but another name for sin."

"Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster illness, because it is not true."

"Any form of mental illness can truthfully be described as an expression of viciousness."

"We said before that illness is a form of magic."

"The mind makes this decision as it makes all decisions responsible for the condition of the body."

"A damaged body is proof the mind has not been healed."

"Damaged bodies are accusers."

"Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception."

"You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you made one with it."

"It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey."

"If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."

"Sickness is a decision. 2 It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. 3 It is a choice you make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. 4 Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more."

"How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? 2 Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth."

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

"Physical illness represents a belief in magic. "

"All forms of sickness even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of TRYING NOT TO KNOW by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual."

"Pain demonstrates the body must be real. 2 It is a loud, obscuring voice whose shrieks would silence what the Holy Spirit says, and keep His words from your awareness."

"Pain is a wrong perspective. 2 When it is experienced in any form, it is a proof of self-deception."

"And idols are not wanted there, for guilt is understood as the sole cause of pain in any form."

"And you are free of dreams of pain because you let him be. 6 Unless you help him, you will suffer pain with him because that is your wish"

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. 2 No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. 3 No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. 4 And no one dies without his own consent"

"Let me not try to make another will, for it is senseless and will cause me pain."

"Yet can the mind deny that this is so, believing there are gaps in love where sin can enter, bringing pain instead of joy."

"How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth?"

"When attack in ANY form enters your mind, you are EQUATING YOURSELF WITH A BODY."

"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."

HOWEVER...

"Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness." ... "It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. 6 And that is cure indeed." "Peace be to you who have been cured in God"

The message here is CLEAR. The body is NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SICK. Sickness of mind OR body is unnatural and unholy. Even death of the body is not supposed to occur. It demonstrates and proves that the person does not want to be awake and would rather be unconscious. Death is utterly unnatural and against God's will at mental and physical levels. All physical sickness is a demonstration of the presence of a false belief and an attempt to DENY HEALTH by denying God.

A Course in Miracles IS attempting to help us to see that YOU NEED NOT SUFFER IN ANY WAY, not even physically, and any presence of ANY kind of sickness CAN AND MUST be healed by miracles.

"This means that I cannot allow them to leave their mind unguarded, or they will not be able to help me. Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation. Otherwise, the miracle will be necessary to set the mind ITSELF straight, a circular process which would hardly foster the time-collapse for which the miracle was intended. Nor would it induce the healthy respect that every miracle-worker must have for true cause and effect."

When you're having emotions, typically they are reactions. You have a thought which produces a perception of the world. And in this thought you're seeing yourself as a victim or being affected in some way. And this produces a negative emotion.

These ego emotions seem to be changes in you, which you believe are the effect of causes outside of you. They cause you to change against your will, and so your "emotions" or "effects" go on a rollercoaster ride or constant shifts, seemingly chosen BY the world and enforced upon you.

But if you'll look you'll notice that all ego emotions have this backwards cause-effect quality to them. They all seem like they are telling YOU what you feel. They seem like they are happening to you. And the basis for these feelings always seems to be something you believe is happening to you outside of you.

How can it be that if you are the cause of everything you experience, per the secret of salvation, that you can be at the effect of emotions? How can it even be that you even HAVE emotions that have this affected quality to them? Emotions of fear and guilt, emotions of grief and loss, emotions of suffering?

If you are cause, and are owning up to being the cause, then you must realize your emotions are coming from you. You are causing them. Not the world, not the circumstances, not other people or the body. You must be choosing them. You must have made a wrong decision if your emotion is not peace.

Surely you have the ability to choose what you are going to feel? Or at least, you have the ability to choose whether to produce upset feelings or not. You can choose whether you feel guilty. You can choose whether to feel grief. You can choose whether to feel unhappy for any reason. It is always you that chooses what you are experiencing.

So this then means we have to get behind the feelings and stop regarding them as just "happening to us". And stop interacting with them as if they are telling US how we feel. We need to stop listening to them as if looking to them to guide us and inform us of what state we're in. WE PUT THEM THERE. We shouldn't be asking something WE PUT THERE to tell us how we feel, as if they know and we don't.

All ego emotions are "effects" which your mind puts in place, under the belief that the world puts them in place. If you believe the world has power over you then you will produce emotions, effects, symptoms, reactions, which all seem to try to TELL YOU what you are and how you feel and what you must experience. You have to stop listening to them. But even more you have to stop creating them.

This all goes back to the mind. It goes back to thought. If you look at thought you will notice that it is the CAUSE of all your suffering. You can be affected by nothing but your thoughts. It is your thoughts alone that bring you pain. Nothing in the world can bring oppression. Your thoughts literally cause all of your upset emotions.

The origin of upset feelings therefore is the nature of your thinking. You might be used to thinking and feeling like a victim, in which you seem to only have feelings if they happen "to you", and you only have thoughts as a kind of passive "commentary" on what is "happening to you." But this is really a destructive use of thought, which reverses cause and effect, and sees you as at the effect of the world.

You have to realize also then that your thoughts have been acting just like a victim, just like your ego emotions, pretending to be happening to you. They have been thoughts of suffering, thoughts of despair, thoughts of being victimized, thoughts of being attacked, thoughts of sickness and death. These thoughts have CAUSED what you have been experiencing, emotionally and physically.

Your thoughts, or rather your thinking, therefore has to go through a transformation in terms of how much destructiveness they contain. Thought has been used by the mind in its belief in death, to produce suffering. Thought can similarly be used far more constructively, positively, in a life affirming way, to uplift and heal and bring life. Thought can be used to give strength.

But you are not used to thinking like this. You are used to being a victim on a battlefield where everything happens to you. You even think that your thoughts are thinking you. This has to be reversed. You have to start using your POWER to think higher thoughts. To think well of yourself and others. To think of happiness. To elect light and love and life.

At first it will seem like you can't do this because you have been so used to just "having" thought and you don't realize you can control it and master it. This is why it takes some practice. But you need to learn that you can actively choose to have uplifting thoughts. You can just as easily have a thought that someone actually is doing well, as you can have a thought that they are suffering. And you have to realize your thoughts have a REAL POWER which can produce REAL EFFECTS.

Your thoughts can and do affect you AND other people. You are not alone in experiencing the EFFECTS of YOUR THINKING. Probably all your life you've been thinking in an egoic way, in a victimy way, which has actually contributed to the suffering of yourself and others. Now you are going to think deliberate, intentional, chosen, free-willed and higher thoughts. Purposeful thoughts of deciding that someone IS doing well, IS healthy, IS healed, IS happy, IS safe, IS innocent, IS resurrected.

You may have never even conceived that your thoughts even have any power. You might've only experienced thoughts like a mental chatter which seems to ramble on without seeming to affect anyone or anything. You might not have put two-and-two together to realize your thoughts have a causal power in them. That they are creative. And that you have been using them TO destroy.

Your mind can heal. Your mind can raise the dead. Your mind can think of miracles. Your mind can decide someone is not sick. Your mind can strengthen and reinforce the truth. Your mind can give life. And your mind can be filled with the power of God. Your thoughts are extremely powerful. The misuse of them has been the sole cause of all your suffering. And now you can turn your thoughts to God and to reality and truth and light and love and express the power of love through thought to others.

"Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities."

"He, too, MUST begin to think of himself as a very powerful receiving and sending channel"

"The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will. Many of your ordinary expressions reflect this. For example, when you say "don't give it a thought", you are implying that if you do not think about something, it will have no effect on you. This is true enough."

"While expressions like "think big" give some recognition to the power of thought, they still come nowhere near the truth. You do not expect to grow when you say it, because you don't really believe it. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains."

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).

A collection of A Course in Miracles quotes...

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

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

----

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

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

----

"The miracle returns the CAUSE of fear to you who made it. But it ALSO shows that, HAVING no effects it is NOT cause, because the function of causation is to HAVE effects. And where effects are gone, there IS no cause. Thus is the ***body healed*** by miracles BECAUSE they show the mind MADE sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or EFFECT of what it made."

----

"I am as God created me"

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

----

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

----

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

----

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

----

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

----

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

----

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

----

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

----

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

----

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

----

"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. ***Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him***. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him."

----

"Here its peace can come, and perfect healing take the place of death. The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. ***Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness*** proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live.""

----

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

----

"Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. The ***body's health is fully guaranteed*** because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for ***sickness has become impossible.***"

----

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

----

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

----

"No-one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No-one ***suffers pain*** except his choice elects this state for him. No-one can grieve nor fear ***nor think him sick*** unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And ***no-one dies without his own consent***. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

----

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

----

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body."

----

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

----

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

In the course Jesus describes how, sometimes miracles can potentially induce fear. Also that even though someone seems to be asking for healing, they might in fact become afraid if they were to suddenly be healed.

He goes on to add also that if you were to take away something which someone is using as a defense, for the perceived purpose of protection, they may then become afraid due to having no defenses. And in turn, if you take away something which someone values or seems to need, even if it is working against them, they can become depressed.

"Yet what if the patient uses sickness as a way of life, believing healing is the way to death? When this is so, a sudden healing may precipitate intense depression, and a sense of loss so deep that the patient may even try to destroy himself. Having nothing to live for, he may ask for death. Healing must wait, for his protection."

The reason this happens is fairly straightforward. In the separation from God, we have reversed what is true and what is false, what is real and unreal. We have tried to give all the attributes of God to the ego illusions, and vice versa. So in our confusion, we think that heaven is hell, death is life, attack is salvation, and truth is a lie.

Anyone with an ego has this distortion to some degree, and usually extensively. It's the upside-down nature of the thought system. We actually think God is evil and help is harm and that we need to be protected from health.

If someone then comes along and attempts to "remove" that which we're valuing, depending on, seeming to need or want, without us having a change of mind and heart, we may interpret it as an attack and a threat. If someone were to shine a lot of light onto you, you might think you are being dragged kicking and creaming into the light, interpreting light as darkness.

This is the nature of insanity. We are confused about what things are. We lack recognition. We are out of touch with what is true. So in our confusion we are lost and deceived. We need to be aware that even if we ourselves are willing to go to the light and be the light of the world, others who need help are not there. They still defend against God and to some degree do not want your love. They fear it.

Similarly with fear, fear is the state of the rejection of love, and being afraid is bad for your health. But those who are afraid believe that the fear is protecting them from the threat of God. You can also be afraid of awakening, because to your ego awakening is like death or dissolution of the false sense of identity.

"All forms of sickness even unto death are physical manifestations of the fear of awakening."

Having identified with the ego or body, sudden miraculous changes to the body could be interpreted as frightening. If you think that you are a body and suddenly your broken leg is healed, or you literally see physical changes happening before your eyes, it could be interpreted as an intrusion or strange external power. It could upset your sense of protection and make you feel vulnerable.

Indeed for many people the idea of "spirit" or "spirits" is frightening. The idea that there is some kind of person or entity which is not in a body, which you can't see, and which is there doing stuff, can be terrifying. The Holy Spirit and angels, even a discarnate Jesus, can be interpreted as being able to bypass your physical defenses and "get to you". At least that is, until you have developed trust and recognition and are not using fear as a defense.

As miracle workers, Jesus cautions us that we need to be aware of the fact that all those who need help are backwards, insane, afraid, confused, lost, uncertain, deceived, defensive, poised to attack, and that they may even see your help as alien and vicious. It is this that they need saving FROM, but the help has to be carefully provided with love and a care not to "trigger" the person into greater retreat.

"Before it is safe to let miracle workers loose in this world, it is essential that they understand fully the fear of release. Otherwise, they may unwittingly foster the misbelief that release is imprisonment, which is very prevalent."

So the situation is, that you are working with patients who have various forms of insanity and fear, they need help to have their minds healed, but it has to be done in such a way that doesn't make the situation worse. They are booby-trapped with all kinds of mental reasons why they would misperceive what you are trying to do, and a significant supernatural miracle could be interpreted falsely as terrifying.

This in no way means that you should not perform miracles, nor spectacular ones. But you can also be sure that many people who are not READY or WILLING to receive them, may reject and run from them. In essence, people who need help generally do not want help, which is precisely why they need it. If the help is seen an encroaching on their territory, or attacking their valued beliefs, they will put up defenses. Even if the help is valid.

Unless they are willing to come forth with some sense of trust and willingness, they may not be too "closed" to reach through powerful means. They might require a lot more time and patience and a gentler approach, to use language or symbols they understand, and to not expose a "raw undiluted miracle" to them knowing what their reaction will be.

"Sometimes the illness has sufficiently great a hold over an individual's mind to render him inaccessible to Atonement. In this case, one may be wise to utilize a compromise approach to mind and body, in which something from the OUTSIDE is temporarily given healing belief. This is because the last thing that can help the non-Right-Minded (or the sick) is an increase in fear. They are already in a fear-weakened state. If they are inappropriately exposed to a straight and undiluted miracle, they may be precipitated into panic. This is particularly likely to occur when upside down perception has induced the belief that miracles are frightening."

Since everyone has free will, and chooses everything, even those who are seemingly far from God and being "evil" are rejecting love. They do not want your help. But unconditional love nevertheless shines upon them gently, slowly melting their resistance. Tolerance for pain is not without limits etc... eventually everyone seeks for a better way and thus invites the holy spirit with a little willingness.

In effect, those you are helping need to have a little willingness, otherwise to help them is to violate their freedom. You can't corece or force them to be well. "God does not coerce." Which poses the sad but necessary scenario that sometimes you have to let people remain in suffering, not because you are cruel and don't want to help but because they aren't willing enough to receive it without making their own situation worse. And sometimes being too helpful is actually a form of imprisonment and disempowerment.

"The use of miracles as a spectacle to INDUCE belief is wrong. They are really used for and by believers."

What this means is that miracles are generally more openly given and received for those who are willing to be open to it. They need to "believe" to some extent, ie to trust the help without being frightened by it, in order to be helpable. This is why miracles are not used to FORCE someone to heal or improve. Trying to INDUCE someone to align with truth is inappropriate and a form of ego manipulation, disguised as help.

Those who are open to it, bring it on. Those who are willing to get help, go ahead and offer it. Those who are willing to put aside fear, and to trust, and be open to a powerful supernatural event, all the better. You'll notice that God doesn't just snap his fingers and force everyone to wake up in a flash of light. Because people are free and they don't want it. Otherwise his mere presence would anchor them in reality and the world would vanish.

"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."

Your role as miracle worker then is to discern clearly where people atre"at", psychologically, and to seek advice from Jesus/Holy Spirit, so that you don't perform indiscriminate miracles, or waste your efforts, or burn yourself out trying, or cause the patient to become worse off due to your "heavy-handed healing". But certainly, for those who are ready and willing to receive help, the help is there to be given.

Treat gently on the bruises. Tip-toe around the defense systems. Gently invite the person into the light. And provide plenty of reassurances. The limiting of fear and reactions is vital. Triggers must be carefully navigated. And you especially don't want to go for the ego's jugular right off the bat. Perhaps the motto should be, "gently does it."

"The test of EVERYTHING on earth is simply this: "What is it FOR?" The answer makes it what it IS for you. It has NO meaning of itself, yet you can GIVE reality to it, according to the purpose which YOU serve."

What you use the world FOR, what PURPOSE you give it, what it MEANS to you, and the GOAL that you ascribe to it, determines everything about WHY it is there and HOW you see it.

If you give the world a purpose of death, you steer towards false perception and murder and hell. If you give the world a purpose of resurrection, you steer towards true perception and heaven. And which purpose you choose determines how you interpret what you see.

The world isn't just sitting there as a WHAT. It's sitting there as a WHY. The world was made FOR A REASON. It was chosen specifically and deliberately. Its making was intentional and on purpose. It was made to serve a GOAL and to accomplish that goal. It's not just a "thing", it's a DEVICE.

"The concept is really one of space-time BELIEF. The physical world exists only because man can use it to correct his UNBELIEF, which placed him in it originally. As long as man KNEW he did not need anything, the whole device was unnecessary."

"The ego made the world as IT perceives it, but the Holy Spirit, the RE-INTERPRETER of what the ego made, sees it only as a teaching device for bringing you home."

It's not enough to ask "what the world is". Science can study the WHAT as long as it likes, but it's not asking the right question. You can't just look at the nature of the world through analysis of WHAT, to discover the REASON WHY it exists at all. For that, you have to ask WHY it's there at all, what it means, and what purpose it is serving. Then it becomes obvious WHY it is the way it is.

We're also taught in ACIM that everything is deliberate, because there is free will. Anything that happens MUST have your consent. Nothing happens WITHOUT your choosing it. You choose everything ON PURPOSE. You are completely deliberate, intentional, and responsible. Nothing happens at all unless it serves a purpose. And everything must have a purpose.

"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."

"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."

The world did not exist before the separation from God. It was made ON PURPOSE, to serve a goal. The goal was to deny God, to make separation real, to murder God's son, to make possible what is impossible, to bring about death, and to rule a kingdom in which God was absent. That is the original PURPOSE of this world. That is WHY it seems to be here. That is why the "what it is" is the way it is, and why it functions the way it does, and HOW it accomplishes this goal.

Make no mistake here. The world isn't just sitting there happily churning over all innocent and sweet. While the world is actually nothing, we give it belief and try to MAKE it serve the purpose of hell. We made it by rebelling against God, throwing away our inheritance, not WANTING to communicate with God, and by wanting to re-create ourselves in our own images. That's how spacetime came to be made as an opposite to omnipresence and eternity. That's that's why "the world was made as an attack on God."

So if we're just examining what the world is, we're not really looking at the rather extraordinary fact that it is in fact "the hell you made" for the purpose of fighting against heaven and trying to overthrow God's reality. That's WHY it's here. That's WHAT it is FOR. Or at least, that was what it WAS for, in the past, when we made it with our egos. The world functions the way it does simply because that's how its function SERVES the PURPOSE of destruction.

What ACIM is then telling us is that, since the world itself is nothing, and acts like a TOOL, to serve a certain purpose, with a certain USE, we can choose instead to RE-PURPOSE it. To give it a NEW GOAL. A new purpose which can serve a higher goal. We can take what we made, which was originally a weapon for destruction, and turn it into a way to UNDO the weapon. We can take hell, and convert it into a reflection of heaven, so that it will disappear in light. And we can USE it to bring ourselves and others back to God through holy relationship.

"For here, the GOAL of the relationship is abruptly shifted to the EXACT OPPOSITE of what it was."

"For, once the unholy relationship has ACCEPTED the goal of holiness, it can never again be what it was."

This means giving the world a different PURPOSE from the one we originally gave it. And that means it has to have a different GOAL than the one of murder and death that we originally gave it. So now, whatever state of mind you're in, whatever attitude you have, you have to ask yourself what you are USING IT FOR, or what purpose or goal you are trying to accomplish. Are you using it for attack to bring about the goal of death, or are you USING it for resurrection and healing and the goal of atonement, to restore the sonship and bring us back to God?

"Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me. Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor USE it for destruction.

Teach me how NOT to make of it an OBSTACLE (goal) to peace, but let You USE it FOR me, to FACILITATE its coming (of the higher goal)."

Let's be clear, that the power of the mind and the law of cause and effect determines that nothing can happen without your will, and anything that happens MUST be something you want. And by wanting it you WANT it to SERVE a purpose for you. To fullfill a FUNCTION. And a function is a way of operating that leads to the accomplishment of a goal. Our true function is to create life, and our false function is to destroy. Even YOU have a function that serves the creator of that function, because your function is to serve God for HIS purpose of sharing creation.

""Let me not use this to hide my function from me."

"I would use this as an opportunity to fulfill my function." "Let me not use this to justify a function God did not give to me."

Even all forms of sickness are there to SERVE a function, for a PURPOSE. This is why "sickness is a defense against the truth". It serves the PURPOSE of protecting you from the truth and hiding from it in darkness, by blocking the light/life, which implements forms of death. So long as a person has a USE FOR the sickness, serving a purpose, BENEFITING from it, wanting it, NEEDING it, choosing it, the sickness remains. And sickness is always ONLY there because of the PURPOSE it is serviing for the person. All sickness is intentional and deliberate and providing a function to achieve a GOAL.

"The patient could merely rise up without their aid and say, "I have no USE for this." There is no form of sickness that would not be cured at once."

"No one can heal unless he understands what PURPOSE sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. When this is seen, healing is automatic."

"Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real? All this cannot be done unconsciously."

"Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make, a plan you lay when, for an instant, truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick, that truth may go away, and threaten your establishments no more. How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth?"

So as ACIM rightly states, we should always ask, WHAT IS IT FOR? What am I using this FOR? What is the goal I am trying to achieve? What is the purpose of this? Am I using this for an ego purpose, and if so, how can I switch to a higher purpose? What was my original purpose in CHOOSING this, for what NEED, to achieve what GOAL? Why do I still believe I need it? Maybe I'm mistaken about my REASON FOR THIS and can choose otherwise?

How can I use this to FACILITATE the coming of peace, or the fulfillment of a higher function? How can I USE the world which I made in hate, to demonstrate the truth and awaken my brothers? What renewed spiritual PURPOSE can I give TO the world, to USE it in such a way, that it brings about the undoing of the world and the restoration of holy relationship and health and happiness? How can I USE the world for the GOAL OF GOD, in which everything in the world is seen with forgiveness so that it only serves the purpose of awakening and atonement?

When the Holy Spirit's PURPOSE for the world is accomplished, when the atonement is complete, the world no longer needs to SERVE this new purpose. And WITHOUT A PURPOSE, it simply now disappears into nothing.

"The ultimate purpose of the body is to render itself unnecessary"

"And, like all the things you made, it can be used to serve ANOTHER purpose, and to be means for something ELSE. It can be used to heal, and NOT to hurt, if you so wish."

"Yet we have learned that the Holy Spirit has another use for all the illusions you have made, and therefore He sees another purpose in them. To the Holy Spirit, the world is a place where you learn to forgive yourself what you think of as your sins. In this perception, the physical appearance of temptation becomes the spiritual recognition of salvation."

"What purpose could it serve? What is it for?"

"In any situation in which YOU are uncertain, the FIRST thing to consider, very simply, is, "What do I want to come of this? What is it FOR?""

"What purpose has an idol, then? What is it FOR?"

"The purpose of the world you see is to obscure your function of forgiveness, and provide you with a justification for forgetting it."

"Let us forget the purpose of the world the past has given it."

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

"Since the purpose of the world is not the one I ascribed to it, there must be another way of looking at it."

"If I so choose, I can depart this world entirely. It is not death which makes this possible, but it is change of mind about the purpose of the world."

"When joy has come the purpose of the world has gone. The world will end in peace because it is a place of war. When peace has come, what is the purpose of the world? The world will end in laughter because it is a place of tears. Where there is laughter, who can longer weep? And only complete forgiveness brings all this to bless the world. In blessing it departs, for it will not end as it began."

"The Great Transformer of perception will undertake WITH you the careful searching of the mind that MADE this world, and uncover TO YOU the SEEMING reasons for your making it. In the light of the REAL reason that He brings, as you follow Him, He will SHOW you that there is NO reason here at all. Each spot HIS reason touches, grows alive with beauty. And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release."

"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. There IS another purpose in the world that error made because it has another Maker, Who CAN reconcile its goal with His Creator's Purpose."

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

"Illusions serve the purpose they were MADE to serve. And FROM their purpose, they derive whatever meaning that they seem to have. God gave to ALL illusions that were made ANOTHER purpose that would justify a miracle, WHATEVER form they took. In every miracle ALL healing lies, for God gave Answer to them all as one."

"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."

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

All bodies are different. Even the bodies of identical twins. No two are alike. No two share the same molecules. They can be similar, but more often than not they'll be different in a multitude of ways.

The whole world seems to thrive on the differences between bodies. And then we all tend to compare our body to the bodies of others. As if we are our bodies, and as if having certain body attributes defines whether we're good enough or lovable or correct or fit in.

But all bodies were fundamentally born from the idea of inequality, difference and conflict. They might appear to be of the same species, as if sharing common characteristics, but within that framework there is great variety. Even the wings of butterflies are not all identical. Not every fish has quite the same scales. And no two voices are quite the same.

Sometimes, those who are body-identitied then try to adjust to this fact by making out that the body is special for being different. It's unique and unalike, standing out from the crowd. And then we exalt them for certain noticeable abilities and features.

But the fact is that in order to have something in this world, you have to lack something else. In order to define yourself as one thing, you have to exlude other things. You can't have or be everything on a physical level. You must be deprived in order to gain. You must lose in order to win. And you must sacrifice in order to measure up.

There are great movements towards trying to get bodies to be considered equal. Equal rights for each gender. Equal rights or sexual persuasions. Equal rights for ethnicity or skin color. As if to say, everyone who is a body is the same. But bodies are never the same. No two are exactly the same, and never will be. They can't be. To be what they are they have to lack what the others have.

This means that no-one can ever be in a position to have everything as a body. No body can be perfect. No body has it all. Some might seem to turn out more lucky or favorable than others. Some are uglier, some more aesthetic. Some are larger, smaller, taller, thinner. Some may be fundamentally more artistic, more athletic, quicker to move, clumsier, better shaped, more manly or womanly, better able to think or analyze, more emotional etc.

So then it comes down to the fact that all bodies are really just pieces of equipment. Because people are not bodies and minds are not bodies. So each of us has this chunk of equipment strapped onto us which we express through and use. But the particular configuration or "features" of the equipment will determine what the body can seem to do.

I will not ever have the low bassy voice of Barry White. I will not ever have female parts. I will not ever have the genetically blessed muscle definitions of Arnold. I will not ever have Betty Davis's eyes. My legs won't look like that of an olympic runner. My fingers aren't ever going to be nimble enough to play Spanish guitar music. My face isn't ever going to look like a rugged lumberjack. And there is just no way my bum is ever going to look big in this.

These are just simply the facts of what kind of equipment I am using. And for some people there are significant defects. People with disabilities, limbs missing, motor control problems, defects of skin, wonky eyes, a propensity for deadly farts, and hopelessly crooked teeth. That's just what the body has, and shows us what the body also does not have.

Both of which go to defining what it seems to be capable of. If you identify with your body you are doomed to enter into a realm of comparison and low self esteem and dissatisfaction and dysmorphia and food disorders and judgement and all manner of concern. Jealousy and envy and hatred and anger and sadness and all sorts of stuff can arise from this. Because if the body's limitations are considered the truth of you, then the fact is that EVERYONE is limited in one way or another, and no-one in the whole world will ever have physical perfection.

"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."

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin, and it was MADE to limit the UNlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical; for it was made to limit YOU. Can you who see yourselves WITHIN a body, know yourself AS AN IDEA? Everything you recognize you identify by EXTERNALS, something OUTSIDE itself. You cannot even think of GOD without a body, or some form you think you recognize. The body cannot KNOW. And while you limit your awareness to its tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur that surrounds you."

"The body is a limit imposed on the universal communication which is an eternal property of mind."

ALL bodies are lacking and all bodies are defective and all bodies are limited and all bodies are special. They're supposed to be. They were made in an effort to limit you and act as a decoy and disguise for your inner perfection. They were meant to separate you off and confine you and act like a prison wall. And they were designed to be a representation of what you are NOT like.

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

Some bodies thus seem to have talents or abilities that others do not, or aptitudes or intelligences or particular quirks that others lack. Some seem to be born blessed and others cursed. Some have wonderful voices and others sound like a freight train. Some are beautifully symmetrical and others are like a lopsided lump of lard. These are just the way bodies are. They are greatly varied and unalike and unfamiliar and unequal and unnatural.

Some will take advantage of the particular traits of their particular body to try to maximize its capabilities. And this usually means certain aptitudes in certain areas. Some become brain surgeons while totally sucking at singing. Others become pop stars but completely suck at relationships. Some become athletes but can't dance to save their lives. And others just get dealt a bad hand of shit and crap and deformity and bullshit. Then we have to sort of make the best of it, or just hate ourselves.

We can't look to the body for perfection because perfection means wholeness. Bodies are limited and varied and none of them have everything, so none of them are whole. They are fundamentally lacking. Not one of them can fully or accurately represent who and what you are. None of them look like you. And none of them can picture what you really look like.

"For what you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

If you identify with or AS your body, or your body's attributes or abilities, or the roles you assign it or the labels you give it, you are mis-identifying yourself and do not know who and what you are. This narrows you and confines you and shuts you in a prison and places major limitations on you. It distorts and shuts down your awareness, diminishes your mind, and deranges your mind.

In fact, Jesus tells us that if we conceive of ourselves as a body in any way, even slightly, we are in fact attacking what we are. Given that we are perfect whole spirit lacking nothing and sharing everything, when we identify with or as a body we are literally putting limits on ourselves. And this is an attack on ourselves, which produces symptoms of sickness, which then manifest in the body. So now the body becomes sick if you believe you are your body, because you're shutting down your unlimited life.

"If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."

"Any relationship in which the body enters is based, NOT on love, but on idolatry."

"The ego is idolatry; the sign of limited and separated self, born in a body, doomed to suffer and to end its life in death. It is the will that sees the Will of God as enemy, and takes a form in which It is denied. The ego is the "proof" that strength is weak and love is fearful, life is really death, and what opposes God alone is true."

"God created love, NOT idolatry. ALL forms of idolatry are caricatures of creation, taught by sick minds, who are too divided to know that Creation SHARES power, and NEVER usurps it."

"The power to heal is now his Father's gift, for through His Voice He still can reach His Son, reminding him the body may become his chosen home, but it will never be his home in truth."

"You CANNOT make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will NEVER be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love's CONDEMNATION. For here is love made fearful, and hope abandoned. Even the idols that are worshipped here are shrouded deep in mystery, and kept APART from those who worship them. This is the temple dedicated to no relationships, and no return."

Jesus in fact is saying here that the body, designed to be a device for separation, becomes a way to NOT RELATE TO ANYONE, by being cut off and limited physically behind a wall of flesh. If you identify with it, make it your self, see it as defining you, accept its limitations as true of you, associate or align with it, dwell on it, focus on it, make it an obstacle, or in any way allow it to come between you and others to any degree, then you are entering into the separation and into death.

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master. And this unholy instant SEEMS to be life. An instant of despair, a tiny island of dry sand, bereft of water, and set uncertainly upon oblivion. Here does the Son of God stop briefly by, to offer his devotion to death's idols, and then pass on."

"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." There is a way to work through the body and to use it for a higher purpose, but this doesn't change what the body IS. It doesn't make it become whole or holy. It doesn't lift away its nature or stop it from being a confining limited mechanism. In truth, the Holy Spirit's repurposing of the body in fact renders the body FUNCTIONLESS and MEANINGLESS.

"Yet freedom of the body HAS no meaning."

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used ONLY as the Holy Spirit teaches, ***it has no function***. For minds NEED not the body to communicate. The sight that SEES the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship. And while you look upon each other thus, the means and end have NOT been brought in line."

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

"The love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another. That is because the real vision is still so dim. Everyone can use his body best by enlarging man's perception, so he can see the real VISION. THIS VISION is invisible to the physical eye. The ultimate purpose of the body is to ***render itself unnecessary.*** Learning to do this is the only real reason for its creation."

The body is supposed to become UNNECESSARY to you. Un-needed, and cast off. Adding nothing to you. Giving you no abilities. Not defining you or limiting you or getting in your way. Nor does it remain and succeed in doing this, because the body has to go in order for you to experience unlimitedness. "To be without a body is to be in your natural state."

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

"God cannot come into a body, nor can you join Him there. ****Limits on love will ALWAYS seem to shut Him out, and to keep you APART from Him.**** The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that, within it, is YOUR Kingdom, where God can enter not. Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe."

The body must be transcended, then let go completely. You must surmount it and go beyond it.

"To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you awaken and decide to dream no more."

Lately I've been noticing that .... my state of mind, has something to do with what happens. I know that sounds a bit far fetched to many people. But we are after all told that this world is a dream, and that our minds are dreaming it.

I see how sometimes events and the appearance of certain people seem to correlate to certain attitudes or modes that I'm in. Sometimes a freer happier mode seems to produce the appearance of certain types of people, while unhappier or angrier modes seem to produce other types.

One of the ways that I've noticed this manifesting is with the idea that "what you resist persists". For example if you are driving a car and some slow person is in front of you, and you resist them being there, they seem to linger more than if you let them be there. When you let them go and don't make them an obstacle, they seem to leave sooner. In a sense, the showing up of a roadblock or "reason to slow down" shows up when you are "pushing too hard" or rushing. It influences what happens.

I've seen also times where, if I am doing a healing and saying things which are truthful, such as a few times in the hospital recently, following those times I noticed how other people seemed to lighten up a lot and laugh more. The whole sort of "atmosphere" of the place changed, the people changed and their moods changed and the events became more supportive.

For sure I also find that if I am upset or angry or frustrated, I start producing things going wrong. More and more things seem to fall on the floor, break, slip out of reach, get in the way, or generally just become "more reasons to be annoyed." I don't think that this is merely a matter of being annoyed and interpreting them as annoying. I think there is actually an increase in the number of things that happen, which don't appear to happen in such a condensed way at other times. Mind mind is literally influencing what happens.

Sometimes I get a sense that there is a kind of "psychic weather", in which, let's say.... it seems like maybe there are some minds that are contributing to external conditions - to dream content. Certain events seem to transpire as though "put there" by the minds of certain people. It seems at times as if there is a kind of psychological war playing out, literally orchestrating changes in events and what objects or people show up, in a subtle but noticeable way.

"This is not safe, because ***external conditions are produced by the thoughts of many***, not all of whom are pure in heart as yet."

Overall, I sense and notice more often, that the world in fact does appear to be a malleable dream. Not just some fixed physics-driven state of objective reality, but really a much more malleable fluid sort of "mix" of contributions and influences. It even appears to be possible that stuff which seems like it would've taken a long time to "plan" or "make possible", becomes possible complete with backstory, just to "fit" into place. As if the whole world just "changed" to line up with expectations.

There are some days when I wake up and I feel like everything has changed, in a subtle but noticeable way. Almost like as if you had jumped to a different "dimension" or "version" of the world, in which everyone and everything is subtly different in the same way.

I wouldn't be the first to claim this either, because there is plenty of evidence and stories out there about buildings appearing out of nowhere, strange correlations, sudden appearances or disappearances of things which couldn't seem possible, etc. Again suggesting that this world is not a fixed predictable place but rather a "mind-driven" realtime mixture of effects coming from the minds of people.

I think that in some way, the more that I become responsible for causation, as per the secret of salvation, and less of a victim, and perhaps stronger spiritually, I'm seeing more "influence" happening. Perhaps in the early stages of this development, but it does seem that my mind and focus and mood often influences the environment around me. Not merely in a subtle way as suggested in the heisenberg principle of quantum physics, but at even a much more "macrocosmic" level.

I feel this also points to having to also be more responsible and vigilant for thought, for more carefully managing my projections and my ego activities. After all, Jesus in ACIM also says that we need a healthy respect for the power of the mind....

"All miracle-workers HAVE to be trained that way. I have to be able to count on them. This means that I cannot allow them to leave their mind unguarded, or they will not be able to help me. ***Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation.*** Otherwise, the miracle will be necessary to set the mind ITSELF straight, a circular process which would hardly foster the time-collapse for which the miracle was intended. Nor would it induce the ***healthy respect that every miracle-worker must have for true cause and effect.***"

Notice here that Jesus says that mind is very powerful and we need to be careful about mis-creating. If we are indeed powerful creators, and we have power of mind over matter, and mind is stronger than bodies, etc... and mind knows its dreaming, then obviously mind is going to start being able to "control" what dream content there is, what happens, and what does not happen.

"Yet this world is ONLY in the mind of its maker, along with his REAL salvation. Do not believe it is outside of yourself, for only by recognizing WHERE it is, ***will you gain control over it***. For you DO have control over your mind, for the mind is the mechanism of decision."

This suggests to me that in fact the workbook lesson "my self is ruler of the universe" where "what happens is what i desire" is not merely suggesting that we live in an objective world where we are "okay with" whatever happens, but that in fact LITERALLY we actually CAUSE EVENTS TO HAPPEN. That we begin to orchestrate the dream, consciously. Perhaps we can call it "lucid dreaming" in a sense. Indeed the mind certainly seems to have an INFLUENCE.

What this suggests then is this quite profound idea.... As you awaken more, your mind becomes more powerful. It becomes more causal, or more focused or "in control" of more DELIBERATELY CHOOSING. And this results in actual effects. It causes the dream to change. Your mind actually dreams of a different world. Not simply that you dream of the same world in a different way, or interpret the world differently, but that you PRODUCE a different world. The so-called "physical world" literally turns into a different configuration.

This would mean that the mind actually has the power to change the dream world directly, to manipulate events, to cause objects to show up and disappear, to have power OVER matter, to quite literally manipulate the world through direct effects. This would mean that, for example, for a person of enough power, they do not merely walk "the world", they walk whichever kind of world they want to emanate.

They literally can cause events, and prevent events. Nothing happens without their consent. They begin to have control over the dream world, over objects, over what transpires and what doesn't. And perhaps they can even literally force death and attack not to happen. They can cause events to steer away from destruction and death. Just as ACIM states that the Holy Spirit can clear a path for you so that you are free from obstacles...

"He will go before you, making straight your path, and leaving in your way no stones to trip on, and no obstacles to bar your way. NOTHING you need will be denied you. ***Not one seeming difficulty but will melt away BEFORE you reach it.*** You need take thought for nothing, careless of everything except the only purpose that you would fulfill. As THAT was given you, so will its fulfillment be. God's guarantee will hold against ALL obstacles, for it rests on certainty, and NOT contingency. IT RESTS ON YOU. And what can be more certain than the Son of God?"

That is quite a radical interpretation of the course because it suggests we don't just "re-perceive" the world in a better way, but that in fact the world literally is OUR DREAM, our mind is literally THE CAUSE of it, and we literally can dream of something else, CAUSING literal physical-seeming things to change. Why would this NOT be the case, when the mind has the power to actually cause bodies to heal, and the dead to resurrect, and mountains to move, and storms to calm? Such a mind can, let's say, ALTER REALITY. And that's quite exciting and interesting. And it means MIRACLES CAN MODIFY DREAM CONTENT DIRECTLY.

Obviously someone would need to become very vigilant about heir mind, very careful NOT to mis-create, very careful not to deliberately cause "bad situations", very careful not to CHOOSE events in which there is suffering etc, and to only induce dream environments which are conducive to healing etc. But this doesn't mean they can't choose anything they want. Imagine that Jesus could manifest any object he wanted out of thin air. Imagine that Jesus could make things multiply out of nowhere, he could turn bodies into other bodies, and could make things disappear. Why not, when he was "ruler of the universe"?

Not a mere passive traveler in a foreign land, but an ACTIVE DREAMER. Indeed, a "miracle worker", someone who can literally transform ANY APPEARANCE into any other, manipulating space and time and matter as if it's something to play with. In which the laws of reality as the world knows it are violated, any there is NOTHING your holiness cannot do.

"There is no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source, and you maintain the world within your mind in thought."

"But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. "

"The idea for today is a beginning step in dispelling the belief that your thoughts have no effect. Everything you see is the result of your thoughts. There is no exception to this fact."

"There is no point in lamenting the world. There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause. The effects will change automatically."

"Neutral thoughts are impossible because all thoughts have power. They will either make a false world or lead me to the real one. But thoughts cannot be without effects. As the world I see arises from my thinking errors, so will the real world rise before my eyes as I let my errors be corrected."

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

"I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body AND the power of the mind, by uniting MY will with that of my Creator, which naturally remembered the Soul and its own real purpose."

"Very few people appreciate the real power of the mind. Nobody remains fully aware of it all the time. This is inevitable in this world, because the human being has many things he must do, and cannot engage in constant thought-watching. However, if he hopes to spare himself from fear, there are some things he must realize, and realize them fully, at least some of the time."

"The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will."

"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."

"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."

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do."

In the separation from God, we introduced an idea of "separateness" into wholeness. We believed it was possible for there to be a lack of wholeness. This produced the idea of "over here" and "over there", each distinct and different and seeming to lack the some part of the whole, setting them apart.

This laid the foundation for both space and time - notions that what is here is not there, or what is there lacks what is here. And so each seeming part of it seems to have a different form, a partial collection of attributes which sets them apart from each other. And neither has everything.

"You who believe that God is fear made but ONE substitution. It has taken many forms, because it was the substitution of fragmentation for wholeness." And then we continued to subdivide and split the mind. We tried to assign certain collections of properties, aspects, characteristics, to some parts, and others to the rest. To break wholeness into seeming isolated chunks of form.

Each part took on a different form and meaning. Various forms or examples or versions of the same one error of separateness. This caused a multitude of differences to seem to appear, each held apart from the rest and separated out as if many things.

This inevitably produced an entire universe of many "forms of error", where each object or body is different to the rest. Each lacks what the others have, rooted in sacrifice and limitation. Not one is whole, and every one is partial.

And so each form appears to comprise different materials, shapes, structures, behaviors, colors, textures and appearances. From these scattered fragments of illusion, entire worlds seemed to arise, each unlike the others and unique in its appearance. Including every human body and every atom.

An illusion is the appearance that something is other than what it actually is - seeming to be something it is not. The single idea of separation, the one problem, shows up as multiple things and multiple problems. It is really one thing, but separateness leads to many forms. And every form is an illusion that the one error is many errors.

Each form says, "look at the ways I am not the same as the rest". And so as one form pulls itself away from sameness, another form does the same. And the two forms try to disguise the fact they are one thing.

And now each form seems to vie for attention. Every form is different, and therefore in conflict and competition. Some are larger, smaller, more or less important, more or less valuable, more or less serious, more or less difficult to deal with.

And now we have an entire hierarchy of illusions, from the gigantic to the tiny, and everything in between. The form that each form takes deceives by distracting you with its claim that it is not like the rest. My car is not a house. My boat is not an airplane. My trousers are not shoes. My ice cream is not a burger.

Every form is designed to assert a deception, a temptation, an illusion, that if its form is real and true, then it IS NOT the other things. This was founded in the simple premise that this world is NOT reality, or the negation of God, and so everything appears to be NOT the rest.

If you believe it, you are deceived. Because every form is a form of deception, an illusion that a singular idea of separation is many things.

One part says, I am not like the other part. Look at how I am different. Look at my different shape, color, size and makeup. Look at what sets me apart. Look at what I have which the other lacks. Look at our differences. Look how we are separate and not the same at all.

And to believe this is to be completely blinded to the the truth. Because if you fall for this and take sides, if you come to prefer one form over another, or think they are truthfully unique and valuable, then you have fallen for the ONE temptation of the world.

Every form is a lie. Every physical object and every body is a lie. Every planet and every star and galaxy is a lie. They are all designed to hide and disguise the one single illusion of separation.

So long as you are caught up in a life where the worshipping of DIFFERENCES prevails, where you prefer some forms over others, where you think that two things are not THE SAME, you are deceived and blinded. There is nothing so blinding as to fixate your vision on the perception of FORM, making the separation real.

The body's eyes look only upon the forms of error. Only the body makes the world seem real. Its fixation on differences, changes, inequalities and comparisons, blinds you to seeing any kind of singular truth. It sees a world of a billion truths, none making any sense or meaning anything at all. The whole message of ACIM is that we need to transition AWAY from a world of differences, towards wholeness. To repair the sense of fragmentation in the mind and restore singular oneness.

This requires seeing THROUGH the deception of form, and not believing it. Not believing that a car and a house are real differences. Not believing that a living body and a dead body are real differences. Not believing that some objects are more important or valuable than others. Realizing that we gave the world of forms ALL the meanings that they have.

To flatten the hierarchy of illusions is to recognize that ALL illusions are one illusion. A single error presents itself to you in every conceivable form of deception. If you buy into it, you think there is an order of difficulty, where some things are harder to deal with or change than others.

To recognize there IS no hierarchy, is to recognize that all forms are the SAME. That every form of suffering is the SAME. That every form of sickness and death and life is the SAME. That there is ONE thing here, not many. That the manyness and the differences are entirely untrue. That one thing is sneakily showing up as a massive multitude to HIDE its true nature of being just one thing.

This is why there is really only one lesson the Holy Spirit teaches, that ALL FORMS of suffering have a SINGLE cause. This is why the workbook lessons have us NOT be selective in which forms we apply things to, so that we will learn that forms are meaningless decoys. This is why we are to recognize there is ONE problem not many. And this is why there is ONE truth and ONE law and ONE atonement.

Every form that the world takes is a lie. Every time it says you should want this form or that form, it is trying to get you to take sides. Every time you take sides there is war. Every difference of form IS conflict. Everything you see with the body IS conflicted, with objects vying for attention, some nearer some further, some louder some quieter, some more "appealing" than others.

All of this is ONE thing, one effort, one scheme, to TEMPT you to believe in the differences so that you will not recognize they are ALL THE SAME. That this whole world is entirely unreal. That not one form is more real or important or valuable than another. That there aren't billions of choices, there is only one choice.

ALL illusory forms are like two characters who act and speak and present themselves differently to try to create the illusion that they are not ONE actor. The mind is ONE actor, taking on the role of multiple simultaneous parts, pitted against each other. So long as you do not recognize that ONE mind is playing ALL the roles, of both victim and victimizer, you will be deceived by form.

In a world of forms, all the forms are untrue. Not one of them IS reality. And none of them show you what is true. To see only physical form is to see nothing but error and sin. True vision will show you that their many appearances are lies, and that there is a singular truth behind them. We are addicted to a world of forms, believing in specialness and made-up values. Made-up worth. Made-up importance. Goals and toys and special jobs and relationships and things you want and things you don't want.

All designed to keep you locked into a hell of form and separation. To keep you tempted that the next big thing will save you. That the next form the illusion takes will be the one you've always wanted. So that you never realize NONE of them are true, NONE of them are real, and NONE of them are what you really want.

That without deception, lies, falsehood and temptation, there is NO WORLD HERE AT ALL. Without form, there is no planet and no body. And behind all forms is the one lie that started it all, which the world of forms was made to hide - that separation is even possibe.

"A problem can appear in MANY forms, and it will do so while the problem lasts."

"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."

"For how can one illusion differ from another but in attributes which have no substance, no reality, no core, and nothing that is truly different?"

"Today's idea is another giant stride in the perception of the same as the same, and the different as different. On one side stand all illusions. All truth stands on the other."

"Illusions battle ONLY with themselves. Being fragmented, they fragment."

"Illusions CAN conflict, because their forms ARE different. And they do battle ONLY to establish which FORM is true."

"The meeting of illusions leads to war."

"EVERY illusion is an assault on truth."

"Bodies may battle, but the clash of forms is meaningless."

"The gap is carefully concealed in fog, and misty pictures rise to cover it with vague, uncertain forms and changing shapes, forever unsubstantial and unsure. Yet in the gap is NOTHING."

"The thought of sacrifice gives rise to all the forms that suffering appears to take."

"Sickness takes many forms, and so does unforgiveness. The forms of one but reproduce the forms of the other, for they are the same illusion."

"For time and space are ONE illusion, which takes different forms."

"The dream is but illusion in the mind."

"The forms the broken pieces seem to take mean nothing."

"Your sleeping and waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. THEIR CONTENT IS THE SAME. They are your protest AGAINST reality, and your fixed and insane wish to CHANGE it."

"You are so used to choosing between dreams, you do not see that you have made, at last, the choice between the truth and ALL ILLUSIONS."

"This course attempts to teach no more than that the power of decision cannot lie in choosing different forms of what is still the SAME illusion and the SAME mistake."

"Death is a thought which takes on many forms, often unrecognized."

"Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion."

"Those who are special MUST defend illusions against the truth."

"Guilt ASKS FOR punishment, and its request is granted. NOT in truth, but in the world of shadows and illusions BUILT on sin."

"What is perceived takes many forms, but NONE has meaning. Brought to truth, its senselessness is quite apparent."

"Yet has God given Answer to the world of sickness, Which applies to ALL its forms."

"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."

"What relevance has preference to the truth? Illusions are illusions, and are false."

"Illusions HAVE no witnesses, and no effects. Who looks on them is but deceived."

"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."

"For this establishes degrees of TRUTH among illusions, making it appear that some are HARDER to be overcome than others."

"Outside of Heaven, 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."

"The laws of chaos govern ALL illusions. Their forms conflict, making it SEEM quite possible to value some above the others."

"This illusion can take many forms."

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth.""

"The strength of pardon is its honesty, which is so uncorrupted that it sees illusions as illusions, not as truth."

"The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to PROVE it is autonomous and real."

"Though the dream itself takes many forms, and SEEMS to show a great variety of places and events wherein its "hero" finds itself, the dream has but ONE purpose, taught in many ways."

"Bring, then, all forms of suffering to Him Who knows that every one is like the rest. He sees NO differences where none exist, and He will teach you how each one is CAUSED. None has a DIFFERENT cause from all the rest, and ALL of them are easily undone by but a SINGLE lesson truly learned."

"Not once do the advanced teachers of God consider the forms of sickness in which their brother believes."

"The gap that is not there is filled with toys in countless forms."

"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see BEYOND what they were MADE to see. 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."

"Only MISTAKES have different forms, and so they CAN deceive. You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is NOT reality, it MUST be an illusion. And is Not THERE to see. And, IF you see it, you MUST be mistaken, for you are seeing what can NOT be real, as if it WERE. What cannot see BEYOND what is not there, MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions AS THE TRUTH. Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth?"

"You are advancing to love's MEANING, and away from ALL illusions in which you have surrounded it."

"You who believe that God is fear made but ONE substitution. It has taken many forms, because it was the substitution of fragmentation for wholeness. It has become splintered and subdivided and divided again, over and over, that it is now almost impossible to perceive it once was one, and still IS what it was. That ONE error, which brought truth to illusion, infinity to time, and life to death, was all you ever made. Your whole world rests upon it. Everything you see reflects it. And every special relationship you ever made is PART of it."

"Temptation has ONE lesson it would teach, in ALL its forms, WHEREVER it occurs."

"Elusive happiness, or happiness in changing forms that shift with time and place, is an illusion that has no meaning."

"Never foster this illusion in yourself, or encourage it in others. An "object" is incapable of release, because it is a concept which is deprived of creative power."

"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."

"All that a hierarchy of illusions can show is PREFERENCE, NOT reality."

"Fear is the emotion of the world. It has but one. Its forms are many - call them what you will - but it is one in content."

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning. ... Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form MEANS understanding HAS BEEN obscured."

"Before a holy relationship, there IS no sin. The FORM of error is no longer seen."

"A major step in the Atonement plan is to undo error at ALL levels. Illness, which is really "not Right Mindedness", is the result of level confusion in the sense that it always entails the misbelief that what is amiss in one level can adversely affect another."

"All physical illness represents a belief in magic. The whole distortion which created magic rested on the belief that there is a creative ability in matter, which can control the mind."

"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."

"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. ... To use a medium of communication as a medium of attack is an obvious confusion in purpose. To communicate is to join and to attack is to separate. How can you do both simultaneously WITH THE SAME THING, and NOT suffer?"

"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."

"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."

"All sickness comes from a confusion of the levels."

"Sickness is but another form of guilt."

"Do not allow yourselves to suffer from the results of what is not true. Free your minds from the belief that this is possible. In its complete impossibility, and your full awareness of its complete impossibility, lies your only hope for release."

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

"Sickness is a defense against the truth."

"Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make, a plan you lay when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick that truth may go away, and threaten your establishments no more."

"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."

"The ego SEPARATES through the body. The Holy Spirit reaches THROUGH it to others. You do not perceive your brothers as the Holy Spirit does because you do not interpret their bodies AND YOURS solely as a means of JOINING THEIR MINDS and uniting them with yours and mine. This interpretation of the body will change your mind entirely about its value. Of itself it has NONE. If you use it for attack it is harmful to you. But if you use it ONLY to reach the minds of those who believe they ARE bodies and teach them THROUGH the body that THIS IS NOT SO, you will begin to understand the power of the mind that is in both of you. If you use the body for this, and ONLY for this, you CANNOT use it for attack. In the service of uniting, it becomes a beautiful lesson in communion, which has value until communion IS. "

"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."

"The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it, MAKING it sick because of its identification WITH it. ... "You THINK you are PROTECTING the body by HIDING this connection. For this concealment SEEMS to keep your identification safe from the "attack" of truth. If you but understood how much this strange concealment has hurt your mind, and how confused your own identification has become to you, BECAUSE of it! You do not see how great the devastation wrought by your faithlessness. For faithlessness is an attack, which SEEMS to be justified by its RESULTS. For, by withholding faith, you see only what IS unworthy of it, and cannot look BEYOND the barrier to what is joined with you."

"Sickness is but another name for sin. Healing is but another Name for God. The miracle is thus a call to Him."

"Thus are you JOINED in sickness, to preserve the little gap unhealed, where sickness is kept carefully protected, cherished, and upheld by firm belief, lest God should come to bridge the little gap that leads to Him."

"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. "

"Sickness is isolation. For it seems to keep one self apart from all the rest, to suffer what the others do not feel. It gives the body final power to make the separation real and keep the mind in solitary prison, split apart and held in pieces by a solid wall of sickened flesh which it can not surmount."

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

"What you behold as sickness and as pain, as weakness and as suffering and loss, is but temptation to perceive yourself defenseless and in hell. Yield not to this, and you will see all pain in every form wherever it occurs but disappear as mists before the sun."

"Only the wholly insane could look on death and suffering, sickness and despair, and see it thus. What guilt has wrought is ugly, fearful, and very dangerous. See no illusion of truth and beauty there."

"Illusions carry only guilt and suffering, sickness and death, to their believers. The form in which they are accepted is irrelevant. No form of misery, in reason's eyes, can be confused with joy."

"Any form of mental illness can truthfully be described as an expression of viciousness. We said before that those who are afraid are apt to be vicious. If we were willing to forgive other people's misperceptions of us, they could not possibly affect us at all."

"Pain, illness, loss, age and death seem to threaten me. All my hopes and wishes and plans appear to be at the mercy of a world I cannot control. Yet perfect security and complete fulfillment are my inheritance. I have tried to give my inheritance away in exchange for the world I see. But God has kept my inheritance safe for me."

"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."

"For example, do not say, 'God did not create illness', but, 'God did not create cancer,' or heart attacks, or whatever may arouse fear in you. ... This is your personal repertory of horrors at which you are looking.These things are part of the world you see. Some of them are shared illusions, and others are part of your personal hell. It does not matter.What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His. Therefore, it has no meaning."

"The gap IS little. Yet it holds the seeds of pestilence and every form of ill, because it is a WISH to keep apart, and NOT to join. And thus it seems to give a CAUSE to sickness which is NOT its cause. The PURPOSE of the gap is all the cause that sickness has. For it was made to keep you separated in a body which you see as if it were the CAUSE of pain. The cause of pain is separation, NOT the body, which is only its EFFECT."

"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. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness."

"Pain is the thought of evil taking form, and working havoc in your holy mind. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free. In pain is God denied the Son He loves. In pain does fear appear to triumph over love, and time replace eternity and Heaven. And the world becomes a cruel and a bitter place, where sorrow rules and little joys give way before the onslaught of the savage pain that waits to end all joy in misery."

"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. What shares a common purpose IS the same. This is the law of purpose, which unites all those who share in it within itself. Pleasure and pain are EQUALLY unreal, because their purpose CANNOT be achieved. Thus are they means for nothing, for they have a goal without a meaning. And they share the lack of meaning that their PURPOSE has. "

"Sin shifts from pain to pleasure, and again to pain. For EITHER witness is the same, and carries but one message, "You are here, WITHIN this body, and you CAN be hurt. You can have pleasure, too, but ONLY at the cost of pain."

"Pain is a wrong perspective. When it is experienced in any form, it is a proof of self-deception. It is not a fact at all. There is no form it takes which will not disappear if seen aright. For pain proclaims God cruel. How could it be real in any form? It witnesses to God the Father's hatred of His Son; the sinfulness He sees in him, and His insane desire for revenge and death. Can such projections be attested to? Can they be anything but wholly false?"

"Pain is but witness to the Son's mistakes in what he thinks he is. It is a dream of fierce retaliation for a crime that could not be committed; for attack on what is wholly unassailable. It is a nightmare of abandonment by an Eternal Love Which could not leave the Son whom It created out of love."

"If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. But to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father IS the acknowledgment of yourself as you ARE. 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."

"Of one thing you were sure; of all the many causes you perceived as bringing pain and suffering to you, your guilt was NOT among them. Nor did you, in ANY way, REQUEST them for yourself. This is how ALL illusions come about. The one who makes them does NOT see himself as making them, and their reality does NOT depend on him. Whatever cause they have is something quite APART from him, and what he sees is SEPARATE from his mind. "

"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. "

"Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you. "

"Delay will hurt you now MORE THAN BEFORE, ONLY because you realize it IS delay, and that escape from pain IS REALLY POSSIBLE. Find hope and comfort, rather than despair, in this. You could no longer find even the ILLUSION of love in ANY special relationship here."

"This makes it an end and not a means in your interpretation, and this ALWAYS means YOU STILL FIND SIN ATTRACTIVE. No-one accepts Atonement for himself who still accepts sin as his goal. You have thus not met your one responsibility. Atonement is not welcomed by those who PREFER pain and destruction."

"You are accustomed to the notion that the mind can see the source of pain where it is not. The doubtful service of displacement is to hide the REAL source of your guilt, and KEEP from your awareness the full perception THAT IT IS INSANE."

"This is the only thing that you need do for vision, happiness, release from pain, and the complete escape from sin, all to be given you. Say only this, but mean it with no reservations, for here the power of salvation lies: "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."

"I cannot suffer any loss or deprivation or pain because of who I am. My Father supports me, protects me, and directs me in all things. His care for me is infinite, and is with me forever. I am eternally blessed as His Son."

"Every illusion carries pain and suffering in the dark folds of the heavy garments with which it hides its nothingness. Yet, in these dark and heavy garments, are those who seek illusions covered, and hidden from the joy of truth. Truth is the opposite of illusions, because it offers joy."

"No risk is possible throughout the day except to put your trust in magic, for it is only this that leads to pain. There is no will but God's."

"And to realize that pain is purposeless, without a cause, and with no power to accomplish anything. It cannot purchase anything at all. It offers nothing, and does not exist. And everything you think it offers you is lacking in existence like itself. You have been slave to nothing. Be you free today to join the happy Will of God."

"To the ego, the body IS TO ATTACK WITH Equating YOU with the body, it teaches that YOU are to attack with, because THIS IS WHAT IT BELIEVES. The body, then, is not the source of its own health. Its condition lies solely in your interpretation of its function. "

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

"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."

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible. Yet THIS PROTECTION needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgement or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick. "

And let us also remember from the manual for teachers:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies.

Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. THE MIND MAKES THIS DECISION, AS IT MAKES ALL DECISIONS THAT ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BODY'S CONDITION. ...Sickness is now impossible to him. ....Oneness and sickness cannot coexist."

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

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

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

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

"One thing is sure; God, Who created neither sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. He knows of neither sin NOR its result. The shrouded figures in the funeral procession march not in honor of their Creator, Whose Will it is they LIVE. They are not FOLLOWING it; they are OPPOSING it. And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body THEY dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, OFFERED to sin to feed upon, and keep ITSELF alive. A thing condemned, damned by its maker, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself.

You who believe you can condemn the Son of God to this ARE arrogant. But you who would RELEASE him are but honoring the Will of his Creator. The arrogance of sin, the pride of guilt, the sepulchre of separation, all are part of your unrecognized dedication to death. The glitter of guilt you laid upon the body would KILL it. For what the ego loves, it kills for its obedience. But what obeys it not, it CANNOT kill. You have ANOTHER dedication which would keep the body incorruptible and perfect as long as it is useful for your holy purpose."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

The power of witness is beyond belief, because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness is believed BECAUSE he points beyond himself, to what he REPRESENTS. A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins.

Sickness is but a "little" death; a form of vengeance not yet total. Yet it speaks with certainty for what it represents. The bleak and bitter picture you have sent your brother, YOU have looked upon in grief. And everything that it has shown to him have you believed, BECAUSE it witnessed to the guilt in him, which you perceived and loved. Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS.

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

It is not Will for Life, but wish for death, that is the motivation for this world. Its ONLY purpose is TO PROVE GUILT REAL. No worldly thought or act or feeling has a motivation other than this one. These are the witnesses that are called forth to be believed, and lend conviction to the system they speak for and represent. And each has many voices, speaking to your brother and yourself in different tongues. And yet to both the message is the same. Adornment of the body seeks to show how lovely are the witnesses for guilt. Concerns about the body demonstrate how frail and vulnerable is your life; how easily destroyed is what you love. Depression speaks of death and vanity of real concern with anything at all.

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

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

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

Into this empty space, from which the GOAL of sin has been removed, is Heaven free to be remembered. Here its peace can come, and perfect healing take the place of death. The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live."

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