"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."

Physical sight is blinded by perception of form. It looks only at the forms of error. It regards form as all that exists. The physical sight is blindness, because it cannot see everywhere, and is easily obscured be meaningless objects.

Form doesn't mean anything. But mind then takes the form and decides that certain forms mean certain things. We make up meanings and project them onto the forms. Now there is a hierarchy of illusions, varying degrees of difficulty, and the form of life seems to mean something different to the form of death.

"Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life."

The form of death is not really death, and the form of life is not really life. We decided that death and decay "means" death and decay, and that living forms are "more alive". Who told you this? The myths of the world told you this. People made this up.

The form of death is not really death at all. It's just one configuration of materials. A kind of state. One possible way that form can appear. And when the same form appears more animated or fresh or vital, or capable of giving rise to more forms, then we say it means life. But these forms are neither alive or dead.

"In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning."

We give all forms all the meaning they have. We decide that a broken object means there's something wrong. We decide that a rotten corpse means something is beyond the hope of living. We look at the form of things and use the form to substitute for meaning, as if the form something takes MEANS something.

But all forms are illusions, and death is not death, and life is not life. They are all just equal images, appearances and illusions. All easily changed into other forms by the power of the mind.

"The miracle is means to demonstrate that ALL appearances can change BECAUSE they are appearances, and CANNOT have the changelessness reality entails. The miracle attests salvation FROM appearances by SHOWING they can change."

When no artificial meaning is given to the forms of the world, and the world's inherent meaninglessness is recognized, we end up with a level playing field. And now miracles can operate, disregarding any orders of difficulty or "reasons why" you can or cannot change one thing into another.

And now the seemingly dead bodies can be resurrected to "the living", to symbolize eternal life. And forms of sickness can be undone, to testify to innocence. And now water turns into wine and bread and fish multiply and who cares about the so-called law of gravity.

"Salvation requires the acceptance of but one thought, you are as God created you, not what you made of yourself."

I'm seeing this is the vital key to salvation. To be saved you merely need to accept that you are in whatever condition God created you to be, you are only that, and you're not anything else.

It's like accepting an "off the shelf" solution. Letting God be the one who is the author of you, is the undoing of the authority problem. It is the acknowledgement that God is your creator and source, and that you have inherited from God. That you are only what he wants you to be.

It's a willingness to stop trying to define yourself, invent yourself, change yourself, establish yourself, or be the one who in any way has any say in who and what you are. It's a willingness to just accept a self, an identity, a nature and a condition, that someone other than you has given.

What you are was GIVEN to you, not made by you. Someone other than you, God, decided what you would be. He is the one who has the privilege of deciding what is true of you. Only he can create you. Only he can cause you. Only he has the authority to cause you to be what you are.

So this means you have to give up ALL efforts in trying to define what is true of you. WHO YOU ARE IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. Who you are is God's business. All you have to do is be willing to just be what you were appointed to be, what you were created to be. To be okay with trusting that God has done a great job of creating you to be perfect and that you're totally happy with that.

This is acceptance of atonement. Simply accepting the self God GAVE you to be. Being of God. Being only what he wants. Being fully wanted by him, and being willing to let yourself be wanted by him. Recognizing that you have never really had any say in who and what you are at all. You've only been denying who and what you are and pretending you can define yourself. Who and what you are has nothing to do with you.

Surrender your drive to keep redefining yourself, trying to convince yourself that you're something you're not. Resign as your own teacher, in this regard. Stop trying to teach yourself what you are and just accept that you are what God created. That you are as he created you to be still, and you have not changed since he created you. You're still the raw original fresh new self that God wills. You ARE THE WILL OF GOD.

All you have to do is find out who you really are, who you were created to be, what your given true nature is like, and simply "know thyself" as God intended. Just be you. Be the divine beautiful soul that God created you to be forever. And drop all efforts to be something else - a body, a separated ego self, a special self, a deprived self, a guilty self, a fearful self, all these other fake identities that you make up. Just be christ. Be what God wants you to be.

We can't really blame the world for being shit. It was designed on purpose to be shit. We wanted a shit world so that we could have a shit life and shit on God and pretend everything is shit. If we hold its shittiness against itself we're just failing to acknowledge that we wanted it to be shit in the first place.

We designed it to be shit and demanded it be shit, and now it's being shit, because that's its function. It was never meant to be shitless. It's just totally shit because we said to God, you are shit, and here's a great big shit world to prove it. And tried to cover up God's nice spotless porcelain reality with our shit streaks.

We put the shit there and made it shit. It is following our shitty design spec perfectly. We can't really blame it for being so shit when we're the ones that told it to be shit in the first place. By recognising that it can't be anything other than shit, and that its total shittiness isn't it's fault, due to being the result of having shit for brains on our part, then we can let it off the hook for its shitness and stop accusing it of hurling sins of shit all over the place.

All that happened is we shittily mis-used our shitless free will to make something shit and we did it on purpose and now we've got a shit world running on shit, behaving like shit and always being shit precisely because that's what we wanted. A nice big festering shit party to keep the nice clean God at arms length.

If we want a world that is not shit we need to first let go of the shit world and recognize its shittiness isn't its fault and it's not shitting on us. We need to realize we are doing the shit to ourselves cus we made the shit. We forgive the world for its shittiness merely by recognising how shit it is without adding to the shit or throwing more shit at it. We let it be free to be shit and free have its fetid stench be flushed down the cosmic toilet where it belongs.

Then we can realize its shitness isn't something we want because we are no longer willing to tolerate shit, and we want something less shit. So then we go off to the shitless land of God and let the shit world flush down the toilet like it's supposed to. We listen to the Holy Spirit Cosmic Plunger and let him do his scrubbing work to erase all sense of the world shitting on us, and make ourselves nice and clean on the inside, and then we can let the shit world gurgle down the drain. Bye bye shit world, hello sparkling fresh reality.

"Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

ACIM says that "I do do not know what anything including this means". It also says that if you let go of everything you ever learned, then you become open to actually learning. In effect, it boils down to that we need to let go of the accumulation of "answers" that we've taught ourselves, becoming ready and willing to be open to something that we "may not know".

Only by being willing to, in effect, be a "beginner", or a "student", are we really receptive. You'll notice that people who are beginners to ACIM are in fact quite open minded, and that in fact many who have been trying to do the course for decades can become very closed-minded and rigid.

This is because we think that we've found all the answers or learned everything there is to learn. But Jesus is really saying that your mind needs to approach an innocent and "new" kind of state, where you are trusting and open to guidance, where you can be told what to do, where you are willing to serve God's will, and where you are not filled with "plans" and "wishes" and "control" and "being right" and the whole accumulation of ego nonsense. To be as if you are only just starting out, all the time.

This takes for you to let go and purge out of yourself all of the past and all of your false beliefs and all of the trying to do everything on your own. To let go of all the sense of gaining and getting and taking and accumulating. To get past the whole intellectual pursuit of amassing more and more concepts and theories. And just get down to being primitive, in a sense, original and innocent and pure.

That's why it's all about purification. Throw that shit out. We're actually in a process of retracing our steps and going BACK to where we came from. That's why atonement is about UNDOING. It's radical, the teaching, that to gain heaven, you need to let go of everything you think you know and give up everything you ever learned. Only be returning to a fresh clean slate can you be ready to accept what is already true. "In gratitude and thankfulness we come, with empty hands and open hearts and minds, asking but what You give."

"Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false or good or bad; of every thought it judges worthy and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God."

"Heaven Itself is reached by empty hands and open minds, which come with nothing to find everything and claim it as their own."

"You would make no ATTEMPT to judge, because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not know WHAT ANYTHING MEANS. You are afraid of this, because you believe that, WITHOUT THE EGO, all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that, without the ego, ALL WOULD BE LOVE."

"What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy."

"Do not be concerned how you can learn a lesson so COMPLETELY different from everything you have taught yourselves. How would you know? Your part is very simple. You need only recognize that everything YOU learned you DO NOT WANT. Ask to BE taught, and do NOT use your experiences to confirm what YOU have learned. When your peace is threatened, or disturbed in ANY way, say to yourself, "I do not know what anything, INCLUDING THIS, means. And so I do NOT know HOW TO RESPOND TO IT. And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now." By this refusal to attempt to teach yourself what you do not know, the Guide Whom God has given you, will speak to you. HE will take His rightful place in your awareness, the instant YOU abandon it, and offer it to Him."

As you heal something about yourself in your mind, you will stop having reactions.

I used to react to the big truckload of fresh live pigs that used to be shipped into the sausage factory across the street. I believed it was awful. It triggered me. I felt angry and guilty. Then I looked at how this was nothing to do with pigs or factories and was about myself. And what I found out was that I felt guilty for catching and killing butterflies when I was younger. And so I did forgiveness on that and reclaimed some real truth about myself, instead of the guilty self I made up. And I was freed from this guilt. And so now when I see the pig truck, there is no reaction. There is nothing TO trigger.

I've also experienced this before where someone would say something to me and it would trigger me. I would feel that what this person said was true, even if I was in denial and claiming it was untrue, and it brought to the surface a reaction of guilt within myself. This feeling of being guilty and wrong and ashamed kept surfacing whenever this thing was said to me. And then I went through some genuine healing and forgiveness and reclaiming of real truth, and this melted some of this guilt away.

The 'guilty identity' that was in me diminished. I stopped BEING the guilt. The sense of 'self' that I had AS the guilty self had transferred more to my true self and I had accepted is at truth. So then when this person came along and said the same things.... ...... ..... nothing happened. No reaction. No feeling that it was even about me. No feeling that it was true. No reaction of guilt. No sense that it could even touch 'me' or do anything to cause me to be upset. Same person, same actions, same statements, no reaction.

So when someone does something to you, or something happens you don't like, it 'triggers' off or shakes up or brings into your awareness an experience of "this makes me feel bad"... in whatever form - generally guilt and shame. And this guilt and shame itself, somehow, by some strange psychological twist, seems like it is associated with YOU, who you are. And so you feel like YOU are this guilty self. You are the guilt. And it comes up inside you and you feel it. And then you're initially like, what the fuck, why did this person just "make me guilty" or "make me afraid". So you blame them for 'causing' this experience to occur, but without noticing that they didn't actually do anything to PUT this experience into you - it was already in you. The guilt-ridden scared self was already in you because you thought that was true about you and was your actual identity.

So all that's happening is your own stuff is coming up into awareness and you're experiencing it and you don't like it so you keep blaming it on someone else. You're particularly annoyed that they keep 'pointing out your flaws' or keep bringing your attention to how guilty you feel. And each time they seem to 'victimize' you it triggers this guilt in you and you feel it and you think that they're doing it to you. They're not. They can't. Only you can experience this guilt as if its what you are. And if you can heal that guilt and stop believing it and stop identifying with it and stop thinking it is true of YOU and that, therefore, it is who you ARE, then you can be free of this guilt. This guilty content. Person comes along and does the same exact action and .... there is no guilt in you to experience... nothing for it to latch onto.... nothing to trigger.... nothing to remind you of how YOU feel about YOURSELF.

This is how you find peace. Undo your guilty ego self and remember who you are in truth and you become invulnerable.

Your body is just a piece of software running in the God Computer.

The brain is a central processing unity (CPU) and is one of many processors in the body. Or you could think of it as a sub-set of the software which performs a particular task.

The brain and all other processors do not do anything other than execute commands. The brain does not create commands.

The body executes all commands exactly and correctly. It does not invent commands itself, has no will of its own, and does not think.

The mind is not a by-product of the brain. That would be as though to say that the CPU of the body computer comes up with it own software programs, or that the software has the power to change itself.

The software programs MUST come from outside of the computer itself., from an actual source of WILL, capable of writing programs in the first place. And that intelligence must be able to function WITHOUT a body and without a brain!

That intelligence must be able to think without needing a body in order to think. It must be creative.

That mind, that intelligence, must also have designed the body computer itself, the CPU (brain) and all other parts. It must have devised all of the software that operates it.

Therefore the body computer is INSIDE of the mind, just as the programs which run on a computer come from OUTSIDE of the computer, created by an operator who tells the computer what to do.

Just because software runs inside the computer does not mean the computer is the source of the software. Similarly just because it SEEMS as though the mind operates inside the body, that the mind is created by the body.

The mind - the programmer - WROTE the body software, WROTE the brain, and WROTE all of the programs which the body/brain executes.

This is why looking for mind or thought within the brain, as though the brain is a "cause", or that the brain has a "will", or that the body has a "mind of its own", is completely a mistake.

The body does not have a mind of its own. It is just a functional machine, a device. YOU as mind put instructions into the device to tell it what to do. And it does that, and only that, exactly and correctly.

No matter what you tell the body computer to do, it will do it. If you tell it to depict health, it will. If you tell it to depict sickness and death, it will. It always produces a correct result because it does not pick and choose what instructions to follow.

YOU are therefore in COMMAND of the body, the world, and all illusions. YOU are the one who is writing the scripts (programs). YOU are the author.

Except that, it goes even further than this. God is really the only author of reality and truth. He is the only author of bug-free programs. He is the only one who can create the perfect program (Christ) which can in turn extend God's design to produce further perfect programs (Christ's creations).

But when you tried to become a SEPARATE PROGRAMMER, you tried to override God's program, shut it out, and replace it with a program of your own. Thus your ego wants to be fully in charge of the dream, to have power of it, and to even perform miracles, PROVIDED it gets to stay separate from God.

Fortunately miracles require sharing with God, so the ego will never be able to access God's power. Therefor the ego will never be able to rewrite the true program of Christ, and will never be able to actually corrupt anything.

Just as all bugs and errors and viruses and rogue programs are WIPED UNCONDITIONALLY from memory when you reboot your computer, when you awaken to enlightenment, God will REBOOT YOU, and after the reboot, all that will be left is the perfect program of Christ. A totally new, fresh system, untainted and undefiled. And you will express love and love will be your only output.

I recently seemed to come full circle with the course. And I mean, right back to the very beginning.

I found myself in states of false perception, looking at the world and its hellish ways. There was "tolerance for pain" and ridiculous stupid things happening. It was like I was back at the very start of course, immersed in the world and identified with suffering. It seemed like I hadn't learned a single thing.

The difference was that this time around I seemed to bring a whole lot of learning and light with me, taking a fresh NEW look at the very first starting steps on the road to awakening but without a ton of clutter and confusion. I've been rediscovering "the basics" in a whole new light, seeing a much greater simplicity and clarity in the course material.

I settled into really looking at the world's ridiculousness, its hopelessness, its meaninglessness. Jesus describes this process in a section called "the real alternative." It speaks of how we must at some point look at the fact of the world's nature and not deny it.

I had to look at the fact that time is death and everything in the world leads to death. That it is a closed system of fear in which everything always fails. It wasn't pretty to look at. But this gives rise to a deep inner rejection of the ridiculous nature of the world, an insistence that this just CANNOT BE God's will.

It was an insight that there has to be a better way, there has to be another world, there has to be another way to see and to live and be happy that has nothing to do with the world. This was a real turning point because without the awareness that the world is completely hopeless and impossible, too much value is placed in it and salvation is sought within its offerings.

I found this interesting because for a very long time I have sought to try to understand the LIGHT, the nature of heaven and God, and to try to get a clear picture of what the truth is. To reach above and beyond with theory and thought so that I could more fully understand the proper perspective of the truth.

And here I was instead taking a really good look at the darkness and finding there was a major treasure there to discover - a use of it that would prove to turn me 180 degrees in the right direction. Just as I thought things could not get much worse, I suddenly found a way out.

So for me this then opened me up to not only the willingness to seek for a better way, and another world, but also the willingness to no longer look for hope in and of the world. It was the end of false hopes and idle wishes. But it was also the birth of a fresh NEW hope, a real hope, a real possibility and a clear path to God.

I turned my back on the world more and sought the light. This also involved a major upheaval to what I thought about the world. I had to realize that much that many people had taught on the subject was wrong, and that the world in and of itself was meaningless.

I had to realize that it was POSSIBLE for there to be another way, a better way, a higher way, to rise above the hell and misery. There had to be another truth, a higher truth, not of this world, which could override the world. And this meant no longer associating hell with the world, no longer believing that it was inherently guilty.

This had required, I think, years of undoing of guilt in myself, because previously I just don't think I could conceive of how the world could not be guilty, or not accuse it all the time, because there was too much of a mountain of guilt to look past. I couldn't get my mind to conceive of a "better way" or a way of looking at the world that wasn't riddled with guilty projections. I couldn't "separate out" the world from what I was turning it into.

I hadn't thought it POSSIBLE that the same meaningless world could be seen in such a way as to even love it or find a reflection of innocence in it. I started seeing all this stuff in the course about the real world and true perceptions and the forgiven world, God loving the world and seeking a different way of seeing everything. Christ vision and so on. And this really "awakened" something in me in terms of being able to understand that the world could be forgiven and seen in a totally different light.

I did actually have several days where I felt like there was literally a light inside me that was shining all the time. Like something had been activated. And this light was entertaining the possibility that "the world I made" could be seen in a more loving way, instead of the rejecting way that is taught by many course teachers. I embraced the idea that the world isn't fundamentally hell, and it's really my interpretation of it that MAKES it so.

This has opened the way for the very simple awareness that there are indeed two ways of looking at, interpreting, giving meaning to, giving purpose to, the same world, and they are very opposite. It has also given rise to an awareness that I actually do have a CHOICE. There IS an alternative. There IS another way and another option. I don't HAVE to just go along with what appears to be an inherent meaning or a judgement that seems to come from the world. I actually can choose HOW to use and experience the world.

This has unlocked a freedom and a sense of looseness about being able to actually ELECT what to "make of" anything. I can see now that things only seem to be bad and wrong if I literally chose that they are. I see that my interpretation of everything is entirely optional and unlimited. I make everything up as I go along. I can choose something else. I have to keep asking myself whether something "really is" what I am thinking it is, or if it only seems that because I'm MAKING it be that. It is constantly revealed that I'm the one who made it into hell, and I could be happier if I would stop doing that. "I can escape the world i see by giving up attack thoughts"

I had to realize per the secret of salvation not only that I was doing it all to myself, but that it was ME who was DECIDING that the happenings in the world were evil and wrong. There's a whole layer of interpretation, judgement, evaluation, deciding and projecting that comes in between me and it. And it's not fixed. I can just as easily THINK and feel in a happier way than in an unhappy way. There is an actual alternative option to choose, a better way, a higher outlook, a more loving viewpoint.

Now I see that my experience of the world is literally like a switch. I can flip channels between the lower ego mind and the higher holy spirit mind. This forms two perspectives, the false perceptions that make everything seem like a fearful hell, and a higher perspective which lights everything up and makes it happy and easy.

"Earth can reflect heaven or hell" because I am the one who decides to believe what I see in it. It is literally nothing other than what I put there to see and I seem to be finally finding the "controls" to operate the machinery of perception. Because I've opened up to realizing there is ANOTHER world, there is a REAL ALTERNATIVE, there is a REAL HOPE, my mind is now able to not be so stuck on a one-track rollercoaster ride.

I've stepped back somehow and found a deeper footing behind the flip-flopping instabilities of perception - gaining an ability to freely stabilize it. Of course it's still a learning process but there is a definite opening and a raised awareness and an increased versatility. I see that thought is powerful and I see that ego is a false function.

I see that I need now to have only higher happier thoughts. It is not enough to just accept suffering, I will now INSIST on a better way. On ONLY seeing with christ/holy spirit and ONLY having uplifting happy thoughts. I see now that these higher-mind thoughts are the source of miracles. "The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness." I can just as easily MAKE UP that something MEANS something good than to make up that it means something is terrible. I can CHOOSE NOT TO SUFFER.

The whole course is taking on new meaning and I keep seeing how the things Jesus has been saying all along suddenly make so much more sense and I see the purpose of them. Without the openness to a better way it was like functioning only on one level. But there ARE two levels, two levels of minds, two ways of seeing, two functions, two mindsets, two perceptions, two qualities of thought, two purposes, two meanings. One is lower, one is higher, and there is nothing stopping me from choosing one or the other.

I just need now to practice focusing on and embracing the higher level truth, the holy spirit's christ vision, and the happier uplifting resurrecting outlook. To have only the thoughts I think with God. To completely turn my back on, deny and reject, the unacceptable lower-level lies. This entails also not listening to the ego, not listening to the world, not listening to the body, and not paying any mind to anything not of God.

There IS a better way. There IS another world. There IS a reality where everything is always happy and everything is perfect. My willingness to trust that and side with it and believe it has really strengthened. It's time to rise!

The passages below are pretty intense (each is from different parts of the course). They're basically saying that EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD IS DESTINED TO DIE. And that isn't an easy thing to comprehend yet alone accept. And if you CAN accept it (the meaninglessness of the world), perhaps you will be willing to go home?

The main reason we don't accept it is because it SEEMS as though, in the short term, some things live. That there can be seeming gaps in the dying, or sometimes paths will seem lighter and easier, even "pleasant" and enjoyable, and yet, NEVERTHELESS, even these brief vacations from death ultimately TURN INTO DEATH.

Even the lovely fresh bouquet of flowers, withers and dies and rots. Even the newborn baby, grows and ages and wrinkles and malfunctions and dies. Even the planet is born in the cosmos and evolved over billions of years only to be destroyed when its sun explodes. No matter what it is, no matter what you look at, ALL the things of this world are DESIGNED TO DIE, sooner or late.

This is the sense of the inevitability of death in this world, that "the world of bodies is the world of sin" and, therefore, since "the wages of sin is death", ALL types of bodies must die. And please note that I am not being negative or pessimistic here. I'm taking a square look at some facts. Facts that we like to avoid and pretend aren't true.

Such as the fact that EVERYTHING in the world eventually breaks down, goes wrong, malfunctions, decays. Yes it might take a while, and in the meantime it may seem that there are signs of life, of positivity, or purpose and meaning, activity, reasons to live, things to do and places to go. Which is sort of temporarily true. But then what happens eventually? It all goes to shit. Bar nothing.

Not one single thing in this world lasts forever. Not one single thing is permanent. This means the world cannot offer you safety, it cannot offer you freedom, it cannot offer you relief from problems, it cannot offer you life, it cannot offer you happiness, and in fact it really cannot truly promise ANYTHING, because ultimately everything is designed to die. Which means the world really has NOTHING TO GIVE. And that is because IT ONLY TAKES AWAY.

This is why, the only real salvation is found by TRANSCENDING THE WORLD, going within, rising above the battlefield, overcoming the world, moving beyond the earth, opening up to another world, returning to heaven, and waving bye bye to the dream of death. You can't find salvation outside of you because outside you there is only death and illusions of life. And this ultimately means, THERE IS NO WORLD. When will we be done playing with lifeless toys and dreams of mortality?

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God. His Love is blotted out in the idea, which holds It from awareness like a shield held to obscure the sun. The grimness of the symbol is enough to show it cannot co-exist with God. It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms, where worms await to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction. Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life." God is insane, and fear alone is real."

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

"I see only the perishable.

I see nothing that will last.

What I see is a form of vengeance."

"The world as YOU perceive it cannot have been created by the Father, for the world is NOT as you see it. God created ONLY the eternal, and everything YOU see is perishable. Therefore, there must be another world which you do NOT see."

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

"For the present IS forgiveness." UrT17D11

This was an eye-opener for me, that you have to be IN THE PRESENT in order to be forgiving. Not only that, but the state of mind that you're in when you're in the present, truly, without a past, is the forgiving state of mind.

There present is where you have no grievances, because all grievances are to do with the past. What someone did or didn't do in the past, past hurts, old arguments, unforgiven conflicts, things which "happened" - past tense. Without a past you cannot have grievances. This is why "the miracle" and the vision of christ ONLY exist in the present.

This also means that when you move into the present, you have to have let go of the past, and brushed it off, and dropped it. So if you had grievances toward a person, you would have to be willing to completely let that go and "forgive" them ie no longer hold it against them as a sin. Because sin is always in the past, along with guilt, and the ego. Only if THERE IS NO PAST is your brother forgiven.

Without a past you see people as they are now, without any history of faults and failures and offences. Being fully and squarely in the present moment of time, with no concern for the future or the past, that's where you find the light. It's where you find the real world, because it means you're taking a look at "reality as it is now", rather than disappearing off into a dream of memory. True accurate perception requires total present attention.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone saying or teaching that forgiveness has to take place in the present moment. And this doesn't mean that when you "do your forgivenesses" you are doing them now in the present. We are not in the present, typically, most of the time, or when we're reciting lessons or quotes or trying to apply the course. Most of the time we're lost in he past and giving lip service to the STATE of forgiveness.

To really forgive, just as Jesus says that miracles are seen in light and the light is in the present and miracles heal only in the present, your mind has to let go of the whole of the past. In fact it has to let go of time, past and future, to experience a holy instant. Being in the "now" is the only way to be actually freed from all forms of suffering, which are always rooted in the past.

You can't really be forgiving toward someone if you still believe they did something, which doesn't just mean writing off what they did and keeping the idea of time. It means actually getting out of time, out of the past, realising the past doesn't even exist, and being in the present. In the present you are taking a fresh new look at a person, immediately and without a history.

"The miracle enables you to see your brother WITHOUT his past, and so perceive him as born again. His errors ARE all past, and by perceiving him WITHOUT them, you are RELEASING him. And since his past is yours, you SHARE in this release. Let no dark cloud out of YOUR past obscure him from you, for truth lies ONLY in the present, and you WILL find it if you seek it there. You have looked for it where it is NOT, and therefore have not found it. Learn, then, to seek it where it IS, and it WILL dawn on eyes that see. Your past was made in anger, and if you use it to ATTACK the present you will NOT SEE the freedom that the present holds. Judgment and condemnation are BEHIND you, and unless you bring them WITH you, you WILL see that you are free of them." UrT12F5

To be in the present is to be forgiving. You can't have any sense of a record of sins people committed, unless you are focused on the past. When you focus on the past you're not really seeing anything at all because you're looking at something that is not there anymore. And so you lose vision. You regain vision, sight, Christ vision, in the light of the present, when you are here now, aligned with the always-now of eternity.

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real."

"Perhaps you think you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came. There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly."

"Your brother thinks he made the world with you. Thus he denies creation. With you, he thinks the world he made, made him. Thus he denies he made it."

"Your mind is capable of creating worlds."

When you sleep at night, you dream, and in the dream you find yourself in a fully-developed environment, where it seems the walls have been weathered, the ground has eroded, things have aged, time has passed, as if all this existed before you arrived and must have taken many years to reach this condition. As though buildings took time to be built and as if creatures took years to grow. The trees are 50 years old and the hills are older still. As if the body merely existed already and you simply "incarnated" into it, electing to join with it, having not made it.

But, the fact is, you only just started dreaming, and since 10:30pm last night you literally just made this whole environment IN this condition, spontaneously, now. You just made an entire world, which LOOKS AS IF, it's been there for a long time. You PUT the erosion there, you PUT the signs of decay there, you MADE the illusions that this is a very old place which took thousands of years to come to its current condition. You did it in an instant. Just because it SEEMS old, does not mean it is. It is a fresh image of time having passed.

Consider this. In your waking life, on Earth, which is a dream also, you seem to arrive in a little body into a world which SEEMS to have been here for billions of years. It has all the hallmarks of time having passed, erosion, decay. In fact so accurate is the depiction of a "great history", that you can even study this history, examine the evidence, and seemingly prove that the world is very old.

But, is that true? Did this tremendous history EXIST before you started dreaming? Did this universe REALLY begin with a big bang, or did we simply BACK-FILL the illusion, invent evidence of time passing, put in place what seem to be effects with causes that SEEM to stretch back billions of years, SO THAT we can, in PRESENT TIME, make this ILLUSION that we're in a world that has existed forever?

What if NOW, your mind is dreaming of an OLD WORLD? What if NOW, you are making up the proof that the universe all leads back to a starting point? What if there was no start? What if the big bang is totally an invention of your mind, made to SEEM as if it occurred, as part of the way that you have DECORATED your present dream? What if there is only the presence and what you are dreaming NOW, and what if you are making this world NOW, and what if this world is an hallucination? What if you are NOW having an hallucination of an OLD-looking world, which literally HAS NO PAST? What if you are forcing it to seem old?

What if the entire history of the universe is being written NOW, to SEEM LIKE it "happened before" chronologically, but is merely you exercising your mind's power to DREAM OF a world that has "signs of aging" in it? What if the world is not even a second old? What if there is no past, or future? What if there is no time, or space? What if you made this all up? What if you're dreaming of a world that doesn't even exist at all, yet alone one that is the end result of billions of years of evolution? What if you made up the laws that seem to imply it all began with a giant explosion? And what if the state you hold it in NOW *causes* the past to be re-written to align with it?

There is evidence arising of objects appearing in places in the world where they should or could not be. As though they have been there far longer than before they were even invented. There are things showing up as if to suggest they were around millions of years ago, and yet were not invented until recently. Why is that? Why are we PUTTING nearer-time objects into the further past? Why are we MAKING UP this stuff? Why are we inventing a past? We are literally RE-WRITING HISTORY in the present moment. We are causing the ILLUSION of a history to be changed.

NONE OF THIS IS REAL.

THERE IS NO TIME.

THERE IS NO HISTORY.

THERE IS NO PAST.

THERE IS NO WORLD.

IT'S A DREAM.

YOU'RE DREAMING IT.

YOU'RE MAKING IT ALL UP AS YOU GO ALONG.

Everything in the world is an illusion. Everything. And this includes the bodies which are seemingly healthy, the bodies which are seemingly sick, and the bodies that seem dead. This also means that trees which have fresh green leaves are as much an illusion as trees whose leaves have fallen and are decaying. Images of a lovely sunset are just as much an illusion as stormy skies. Animals leaping around happily is just as much illusion as carcasses on the side of the road.

In the ego world, there are symbols, because it is a dream. And sometimes these symbols seem to imply that some parts of the world are different to others, or mean something that other parts do not mean. So we are used to the idea that a dead body is the idea of death. But bodies that are walking around are also not really alive either. We can think that when the leaves are falling from the trees, it's death happening, but perhaps we didn't realize when the leaves were on the trees that it was still a dream of death.

So in this world, there is deception all over the place. Things appear to be something they are not. The symbols that look like life only seem to be life, while the ones that look like death are only different in their forms. And it is us who have given meaning to them and decided "this one means death and that one means life". All of the forms, in whatever condition they are, are forms of death. As Jesus tells us:

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. *****In any state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it seems like life; at worst, like death.***** Yet both are judgments on ****what is not life****, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven (e.g. on Earth), only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true. "

So because illusions are forms (objects, shapes, materials, bodies, planets etc), their content is not true. They are illusions of life and death. An illusion of life is not really life. Life actually means ETERNAL LIFE, that which can never perish, that which is not born and does not grow and does not die and has no sickness or transformation. Life means that which never changes because it is permanent. Only in Heaven's reality is there eternal life, and that is the only REAL life there is. The rest of what we call life, the "life forms" of this world, are an illusion of life AT BEST.

"Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible."

Here Jesus is contrasting vertically the two states or levels. In Heaven all things live and cannot die. In illusions, all things die and cannot really live. The world we see is an illusion of a world that God did not create.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

So having been in this world a long time, we are likely very used to the deception that some things in the world are more alive than others. Some people seem to have more health than others. Some bodies seem more dead than others. This is an illusion. All bodies are illusions, and their condition or state does not make them more or less real. One is not really more or less dead than another. Even a dead body in the ground is, in terms of miracle mindedness, no more dead than a living body. This is why for a miracle worker "dead-seeming" bodies can be converted or resurrected into living-seeming bodies as a kind of "translation of form".

"EVERYTHING is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the Mind. The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

Again Jesus is telling us life is to do with mind and heaven, not to do with bodies. And it's reinforced by this idea.

""And the last to be overcome will be death." Of course! ***Without the idea of death there is no world.*** All dreams will end with this one. This is salvation's final goal; the end of all illusions. And in death are all illusions born. What can be born of death and still have life? But what is born of God and still can die? "

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."

So every illusion, every part of the dream, all objects, all bodies, in all states and configurations, are all made of illusions, and ALL illusions are made of death. We have to therefore realize that death does not mean HORIZONTAL death, as in, at the end of the road of time for a given object. Or a state that follows on after another. Rather, the ENTIRE world we made, the universe, is all a dream of death. This whole planet is an idea of death.

VERTICALLY, anything on this level physically is an attempt to remove ourselves away from where eternal life is, away from Heaven. To move down a level. To drop into illusions, to sink into a dream world. And that world is based entirely on the idea that reality, Heaven, is not real. It's the idea of separation or opposition to Eternal Life, that you are exiled and outside of the Kingdom where eternal life is. And so it's the idea of NOT being alive. It's an idea of the opposite to life and permanence. And everything in it, no matter its form or appearance, is an illusion of death or partial life at best.

Even the most vibrant bunch of flowers is actually an illusion of not life. Even a newborn baby, of any species, is not a "new life" but rather a new form of death. Even as the season of spring seems to give life to new fresh growth, it is only later to transition into the season of "dying" and decay simply because both the birthing and dying are built into the system. Anything made of illusions has the mark of death upon it, meaning it already is formed from ideas of death and separation at the moment it is made. Every particle of matter is a separation idea and therefore an idea of opposition or attack upon God.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. ****Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it.*** Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust ****even as you made it.****"

So even at the instant that illusory things are first formed, they are formed FROM the idea of death and separation and limitation. They have it built in. If they are born at all, death is guaranteed and "happening" already. Because all forms are lacking in some way, they are all lacking what the other forms seem to have, and all of them are inherently limited and limiting. None of them are whole, none are complete, and not have eternal life. And every single body is an idea of being little and lacking and less than everywhere.

"This aching world (Earth) has not the power to touch the living world (Heaven) at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world."

So this world is not the living world. The Kingdom of God is the living world, because life means permanent life, not some temporary mockery of life. It is insane to think that real life is a matter of existing a little while and then dying at a bodily level. Life perpetuates and sustains and continues forever and cannot be destroyed. God creates ONLY the eternal.

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

"What God creates is eternal."

A big part of awakening then must entail the re-framing or re-evaluating of everything you see here. We need to realize the dream entails a hierarchy of illusions, and this hierarchy is entirely fictional. And everything it suggest through different FORMS is a deception and a temptation to believe something that isn't true.

Big bodies, small bodies, healthy bodies, dead bodies, are all the same illusion. None of them are more real than another. None of them are really closer to God. Big sickness, small sickness, tiny headache, massive tumor, none of them are any different. The only reason you would believe they are different, or more or less serious, is by looking to the appearance of their form and taking it as evidence or MEANING as to what the thing is. Every single illusion is deceptive. Every appearance is a lie.

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. ***They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see.*** ***They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful.*** Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

When we reach a state of not being deceived by ANY appearance, we are in miracle mindedness. Which is right mindedness. Here the hierarchy of illusions is completely flattened and meaningless. There is no difference between a form in one configuration or another. We are not deceived by physical form, shape or appearance. One type of appearance does not trigger worse reactions than another, or any reactions, nor means something different to the rest. A "dead" appearing body is not regarded as any more dead than a living one. As such raising the dead is seen as NO MORE DIFFICULT than curing a headache, because all illusions are the same and you are not deceived by them. You can raise the dead as easily as heal an upset feeling.

"You who are dedicated to the incorruptible have been given through your acceptance, the power to release from corruption. What better way to teach the first and fundamental principle in a course on miracles than by showing you the one that seems to be the hardest can be accomplished first?"

When you are not deceived by illusions of life and death, forms of sickness, appearances of severity, you cannot be afraid, you can only be miraculous. Miracle mindedness transcends the world of illusions because The Miracle IS the state of Christ Vision which overlooks all forms. There is, from that position, nothing that your holiness cannot do. And it is from this state that you are a miracle worker. Here you are using miracles as demonstrations to PROVE that what appears to be death is not death, and you are under no laws but God's, where miracles break all the illusory laws of the world of appearances.

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world."

"Miracles reflect the laws of eternity, not of time."

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

The ego is sneaky about projecting sin and guilt onto others. If someone else is not really doing anything wrong, it is riskier and perhaps more difficult for you to "unfairly" project your own sin and guilt onto them. If you do, it will appear much more obvious that you are the one doing the attacking, and that it is not called for. This is too "overt". Just picking some random innocent target and attacking it would indeed be vicious, but our ego tends not to do this.

Instead, we lay a trap and lay in wait, trying to find a target. A target is someone who, of their apparent own free will, is sinning on their own. Someone who is digging their own grave. Someone who is hurting, attacking, being at fault, choosing poorly, doing something offensive, believing wrongly, saying harmful words, punishing or whatever. So long as the person is, themselves, seeming to be clearly the one who is sinning.

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt."

Once we see this "proof of sin" in someone else, it becomes a strong temptation. It tempts you to believe it. It almost invites you to agree with it, to see judgement as justified, and to therefore launch an attack which reinforces the person's sinfulness. But this is a slippery slope, even though it's what the ego enjoys as its less overt tactic.

When it's clearly someone else who seems to be wrong, it presents a wonderful opportunity for your own ego. Since all attention is on the other person, and since they appear to be the one who is making things worse for themselves and everyone, your ego takes the "opportunity" to sneak in and USE it for its purposes.

If it can now condemn and accuse the person, based on "what they are doing", it seems completely justified. But the sneaky thing is that you aren't having to "invent" a sin for them to be accused of. They have already provided a nice sin for you to latch onto. All you have to do is "point it out". So now the ego simply seems to be mirroring what the person is already doing, rather than making a "fresh accusation".

By doing this, the attack upon the person becomes disguised. It hides in the darkness of the other person's actions. They were already sinning, so it seems like you're not ADDING anything to them. And so simply by "identifying it" and "pointing it out" and labelling it AS a sin, you appear to be not attacking them at all. But if you step back, you ARE still in fact accusing them of sin still, you are attacking them, you are compounding their own sin, and are being just as judgemental as before.

It's just that, when someone else provides the "material", you seem to not be the one who is "inventing" the sin, so your accusation against them seems invisible. It doesn't stand out from what they are already going. It's like you slip in a little sin of your own hidden by theirs. All the focus is on them, by their own doing, so your ego gets to hide from being the center of attention. It's still attacking but now it seems like you're not doing anything.

This becomes quite risky though, to yourself, because you can become quite blinded by this sleight of hand, even unto yourself as you're doing it. You may not even realize that you have been "tempted" by the sin of another, and that you fell for it, believed in it, and recognized it as a perfect opportunity to condemn without the implication fo yourself. You can then find yourself accusing the other of "doing what they're obviosuly doing", convincing yourself that YOU are not doing anything, and therefore are now are attacking even more unconsciously.

It's one thing to be more aware of your desire to project your own shit onto someone else. It's another to be attacking someone on the basis of what they are seeming to do, and then not even realizing that you're attacking them. When they are the "source" of the sin, you can easily lose sight of how you are contributing to it, or mirroring it. Your own attack becomes invisible to you, and then you believe that you're not even doing anything wrong at all.

Thus you end up in a pattern of not attacking people unless they sin first, and then when they do seem to sin, you take it as an ideal opportunity to scapegoat. Because you think no-one will notice what YOU are doing because they'll be so busy focusing on what THEY are doing. A good decoy goes a long way. Except that you even distract your own attention, and now you much more easily allow your mind to fall into a scapegoating mode.

Overall I personally experience this as "falling for temptation", in that the world is constantly presenting "opportunities" to focus on sin and make it real. It's a constant vigilance to try not to "take a cheap shot", when someone is obviously mistaken in some way. If I don't recognize it as "just a mistake", I will make it real and try to compound it, drawing myself away from myself, trying to displace my own guilt onto someone else. But only if "they started it."

No-one wants to overly be seen as an unjustified attacker, so we wait until someone makes the first move, before we pounce on it. Then the gloves come off and the claws come out, and rightly so, because now the other person has invited us to attack them. They want punishment, and if we agree with that we will give it to them, and benefit from doing so. It's much easier to "fall for" this temptation to "beat someone when they are down" than to look like a total a-hole hurting people for no apparent reason. This is why almost all attacks on others are "justified" as being "called for" based on what we think other people "did wrong first."

Of course, "only the self-accused condemn" and "we but accuse our brother of our own sins."

A Course in Miracles is a teaching us to leave a dream of mortality, and return to a state of immortality. Everything in the course points to this. You are not merely substituting one limited illusion for another. You are literally substituting DEATH for ETERNAL LIFE. That is why the curriculum culminates in RESURRECTION.

Resurrection is the return to ETERNAL life. The atonement is your acceptance of the fact, that you already have eternal life, eternal life is the only thing true of you, and you have always been immortal. Immortality is your natural state of being. God created you to live FOREVER, without ever suffering, being sick, afraid, dead, or unhappy.

Every single part of ACIM is geared towards you disassociating from illusions of death, vulnerability, victimhood, being affected, being hurt, sickness and all forms of suffering, and re-associating yourself with your IMMORTAL SPIRIT.

As the Course states.

1) You are immortal and you cannot die.

2) You already have eternal life, given by God, and it is permanent.

3) You cannot change your immortality.

4) You are always immortal but when you deny your immortality, you PRETEND to be mortal. You dream of being attackable, suffering and dying, but this has NO EFFECT on your immortality.

5) Those who are sane would never use the dream body to demonstrate SYMBOLS of attack, suffering, sickness or death. To do so is a mixed teaching combining PROOF of belief in attack, with an attempt to teach otherwise. The teaching is only PURE when you are demonstrating the immortality of the body, at least as a SYMBOL of immortality. The body can become a symbol of eternal life, a breath of fresh air to those grown sick of the fetid stench of death.

Life is eternal life. There is no life that is not eternal. This is why there is no life outside of heaven, and life "in the dream world" is an illusion of life.

The entire course is trying to get you to own up to being immortal, invulnerable, completely beyond all forms of attack. You are absolutely permanent. And any time that you ACT as if you are not, as if you have been hurt, affected, caused, damaged, made to suffer against your will, you are LYING, you are in denial, and you are PRETENDING that you are not immortal.

You can see this truth throughout all of ACIM's teachings. e.g.

Deny anything not of God the power to affect you (you cannot BE affected, you are immortal)

Nothing in the world can bring oppression or make you ill or sad or weak or afraid (you cannot be ill or weak or afraid or upset because you are immortal)

There is no cause in the world, it is just an effect (the world cannot cause you in any way because you are unchangeable)

You are not a victim of the world you see (you are incapable of being a victim because you are immortal)

Your attack thoughts are attacking your *invulnerability* (your invulnerability cannot BE attacked because you are immortal, but you can pretend it can)

You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself (because you are immortal, and even your hurt of yourself is fake)

You are immortal and cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do (simply, you are immortal)

My self is ruler of the universe. Nothing comes to me unbidden by myself (because you are immortal)

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. (because you are fucking immortal)

It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. (because nothing can CAUSE YOU, because you are NOT AN EFFECT of anything but God, and you are immortal)

If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this. (because the mind has immortality)

He MUST deny the world of pain, the instant he perceives the arms of love around him. (deny the world because it is an attempt to prove you are not immortal, and its a lie)

This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. (you must deny all illusions of death, because you are immortal)

Teachers of God choose to look upon dreams a while... they are not deceived by what they see. (because they are immortal and know "death is the CENTRAL ILLUSION from which is all dreams stem" and you cannot die, because you are immortal)

I am not weak but strong. I am not afraid but all powerful. (because you are immortal, nothing has power over you)

YOU ARE IMMORTAL AND YOU CANNOT DIE. And any attempt you are making to PROVE otherwise, is futile and pointless and a form of self deception. When you stop deceiving yourself and others with this denial, you will stop trying to kill yourself, will stop making the body sick or dead, and will OVERCOME DEATH FOREVER.

Immortality is the only truth about you. Ask yourself, why am I trying to prove I am not immortal? Why am I accusing someone of being ABLE to hurt me? Why am I BELIEVING that I have BEEN hurt? Nothing can affect you. It is your own mis-belief that it CAN, that affects you. You hurt yourself, and nothing in the world can cause you suffering of any kind.

Owning up to your immortality is the key to the atonement, the resurrection and the life. THIS is A Course in Miracles. This is the way home to God. Accept your immortality, live by your immortality, demonstrate your immortality, and deny everything else any reality.

Nothing real can be threatened, and YOU ARE REAL. So YOU CANNOT BE THREATENED. Because you are immortal!

So any attempt you make to act as if you are not immortal, to believe someone affected you, something happened to you, something went against your will, you're victimized, you're suffering, etc... it all you PRETENDING TO SUFFER by pretending you are the body, making *IT* suffer, to try to prove that "you" are suffering. Your immortal is unaffected by suffering, sickness and death.

There is no REAL death. The son of God is FREE. But the Son of God can PRETEND to die, by using ILLUSIONS of things that seem to die, to try to prove he is NOT the son of God and not immortal. It's a lie. Do not believe it. Own your immortality and use it to contrast what you are doing that betrays your immortality. Compare your immortality to your victimhood. Can you REALLY have been affected if you have immortality? Can you be justified in TRYING to prove you can suffer?

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt". "A damaged body is proof the mind has not been healed." ie if the mind believes it is NOT immortal, it uses the body to TRY to prove that "it" is attackable and vulnerable. And this is always a self deception. You hurt yourself on purpose to try to prove you are not yourself. That has to end in order to accept the atonement and live the resurrection. Your return to ETERNAL LIFE is the goal fo this course.

Lately when I read ACIM talking about time, I have a different impression of it. There's because there's "physical" time and "psychological" time, like two layers.

In some parts we're told basically that as soon as the current moment is done, it is gone. That whatever is "here and now" in the physical sense, is all that there remains. Prior configurations, previous states, stuff that seemed to happen before, it's all over the instant it happens. This "physical time", part of spacetime, is a constantly evolving changing world of form.

Then in other parts Jesus talks more about a kind of psychological time. This psychological time is an interpretation of what's happening, in which you can either be very present with whatever is physically here now, or you can be somewhat distanced from it by focusing on beliefs and memories about stuff from "the past".

In our minds we have sort of invented an idea of the past, in which we keep holding onto stuff which is already gone. So the physical "time" of spacetime seems to march onward, in which the states of material objects are gone forever and have been replaced, and in which only the current stuff you are faced with now is all that's left. And then there's an overlay of psychological perception and use of the world, which can be deeply invested in things that have gone by, or present here now.

When the mind is much more present with what it is faced with here and now, it is closer to what seems to be called a "holy instant", or in effect, moments of the current configuration of the world which are squarely focused on the present here and now, seen without looking toward the past or future.

An instant of spacetime, a moment of happenings, present events and arrangements of objects etc, as though keeping pace with it and always focusing on what is current. Jesus seems to call this immediacy of and use of "time", ie being in the present or "now", a string of holy instants. As Jesus says "now is the only time." But of course, in spacetime, the forms constantly change still. But as soon a their state changes, the old state is gone forever.

But if your mind is heavily preoccupied with the past and future, this takes you away from the present. In particular if you believe that someone attacked you at some point in time, and you have not forgiven this, and are holding onto it, you have a grievance which anchors your mind in the past and focuses you on what is not happening anymore.

You can only have grievances based on things that happened in the past. Someone "doing something to you" immediately becomes past-tense, and now you recall it like a wound that keeps reminding you of something that is already over and gone. You won't let it go, so you keep pulling it back up from what seems like a psychological past, to relive it, regurgitating it and trying to keep it going, not letting go of what has already gone.

Without a psychological past it is impossible to retain grievances of any kind because you can only be upset about what someone "did", which is always past tense the instant that is has happened. Without a past you cannot have any unforgiveness.

And as Jesus leads off in the workbook, with "I see only the past", he's talking about how we are so heavily attached to things that happened "before" that we haven't accepted as "gone", that we are living in a kind of haze of hypnotic memory and recall, dwelling on things which are not here anymore.

And because of this, we filter the "present" configuration of the world through a lens of history, of unforgiven grievances, of resistance to God's presence, which causes us to not see anything "as it is now".

There can only be grief over things which once were seemingly here, which have gone, such as physical bodies, and the unwillingness to truly accept that they are not here now. To let go of the past is to let go of lost treasures and special relationships which are over already. We just struggle with the fact of their extinction, because the very instant that they are gone, they are gone.

As we move toward God, who is always present and lives only in the eternal "here and now" or "always and forever", we must move our psyche out of the past and into the present. Not that we're trying to make the world out to be real or anything, because its forms will still change and shift as they always do in illusions. But we are at least trying to get a look at the world through present-tense eyes which are clean and new and forgiving and which are not projecting past sins or ancient hatreds onto it.

Thus "in time", or at least, in the progression of change of form, our view of that form can come from a more centred and present frame of reference, which is a holier state and closer to God. The present "now" of time is symbolic of eternity and it is where we can most fully connect with God. Being "in the past", mentally, is an attempt to create "more spacetime" ie more distance and more delay between us and God, and between us and reality.

So there's a kind of physical spacetime, and there is also a kind of psychological spacetime. When the psychological spacetime completely lets go of the past and future, and becomes fully present, it looks upon the physical spacetime with fresh loving eyes, which do not not use past happenings as condemnations, and does not look to the the past for truth.

Then once the forgiven world is seen and looked past with this present light, we are close enough to "what really is" that we can transcend and overlook the world, and move on to our home in God. God is always here and now, and has always been here and now, and will always be here and now. It is only your mind that has wandered off into a movement away from what remains.

"Release the future. For the past is gone, and what is present, freed from its bequest of grief and misery, of pain and loss, becomes the instant in which time escapes the bondage of illusions where it runs its pitiless, inevitable course. Then is each instant, which was slave to time, transformed into a holy instant when the light that was kept hidden in God's Son is freed to bless the world. Now is he free, and all his glory shines upon a world made free with him, to share his holiness."

"Judgment ALWAYS rests on the past, for PAST experience is the basis on which you judge. Judgment becomes impossible without the past, for WITHOUT it you do NOT understand anything. You would make no ATTEMPT to judge, because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not know WHAT ANYTHING MEANS. You are afraid of this, because you believe that, WITHOUT THE EGO, all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that, without the ego, ALL WOULD BE LOVE."

"The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love."

"When your peace is threatened, or disturbed in ANY way, say to yourself, "I do not know what anything, INCLUDING THIS, means. And so I do NOT know HOW TO RESPOND TO IT. And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now." By this refusal to attempt to teach yourself what you do not know, the Guide Whom God has given you, will speak to you. HE will take His rightful place in your awareness, the instant YOU abandon it, and offer it to Him."

Everyone should love everyone, and be a part of everyone. That is natural. What is unnatural is to be separated off and not share with each other.

The device which we use to separate ourselves off, is the body. Bodies act like little anchors that root you in a little spot of space and time and keep you apart from others. And without a body there cannot be specialness or special relationships.

Within this scenario, all bodies are separate and unrelated. There are no relationships, only separateness. Everyone is alone. The body is like a prison with legs, walking around keeping its occupants inside. The prisoners cannot reach outside of their prisons, but they can shuffle their prison cells around to try to get closer to each other. Usually the prisoners clash and disagree and hate each other for their differences.

Sometimes, when two prisoners find each other and regard each other as similar, sharing common ground, common features, common backgrounds, common interests and beliefs, they see each other as less of a threat. They are less than totally hated for a while, granted special rights and privileges.

To perceive another as being like you, in terms of physicality or form or beliefs etc, creates the illusion that you are less at war with them. There seems to be something that you agree about. When there is a lot of agreement, you might even feel trusting enough to become closer to the person.

You then enter into a special relationship. The relationship, which is really the absence of relationship, and more like two prison cells banging against each other in the darkness, brings two together so that everyone else might be excluded.

"When two INDIVIDUALS seek to become ONE, they are trying to DECREASE their magnitude. Each would DENY his power, for the SEPARATE union EXCLUDES THE UNIVERSE. Far more is LEFT OUTSIDE than would be taken in. For God is left WITHOUT, and NOTHING taken in."

They come together to share on the basis of how they are alike, and therefore how they threaten each other less than others. This mutual illusion of trust seems to open doors and lets the two become more intimate. But their intimacy depends on the rejection of all others.

These chosen ones, the special love interest, the exclusive partner, the one with whom special rules are agreed to, whom has special rights which cannot be shared with anyone else, becomes the idol. They are given special artificial value, not inherent to who they are, but in contrast to what others seem to lack.

And so they experience feelings of closeness, seeming special love, a certain degree of trust, a magicalness in which the whole world seems to disappear, and you wish you could be with this person forever and to hell with everyone else. Coming home to this person feels like a breath of fresh air, as you both lick your wounds and hate the rest together, pointing out their flaws and keeping them at a distance.

The so-called relationship is then a tentative state of mutual partial agreement, or allegiance. Certain terms are made which cannot be broken. The persons are not allowed to become too different or step away or act outside the prison walls, otherwise they are violating the contract. And the contract may even be called a marriage.

If one of the persons strays too far, goes outside the envelope of interests, violates the common ground, breaks the walls, stops being exclusive, tries to become intimate with another, changes in a way which makes then unalike, or steps on their toes, the underlying sense of loneliness, isolation, abandonment and rejection will come flying out, hurled at the other to accuse them of sin.

And so the special love quickly turns to special hate, as those who once were trusted allies turn into enemies, brothers become strangers, lovers become divorcees, and significant others become forgotten.

For as much as they allowed the other to come into their secret circle, they kept everyone else out. They had to in order to make the relationship special. This chosen one was the only one permitted to be loved. This special one was the only one who could gain permission to access secrets and hidden hates. The whole world was against them and they against it. But their conditional love always had conditions from the start.

At some point, a relationship based on bodies, and on such specialness, and illusions of joining, may be brought into question. If there is enough of a movement or willingness towards becoming more unconditional, truly open, or sharing more honestly, a relationship not based on flimsy illusions but on something deeper, then the special relationship will be brought into question.

This questioning of it will reveal that the two did not really come together in love, they came together in hate, and hated together, and thought this was love. And the whole relationship will be seen as unfounded, in which what they thought was a magical kingdom of perfection and bliss was in fact founded on a lie. A lie of loneliness and shared suffering and false empathy and codependency and enabling and justifying attack together.

This can produce a lot of pain and misery and shock, because suddenly what was an illusion of love and magical specialness and special value is suddenly recognized as false, faulty, flawed and fake. You thought you were in a relationship but you really weren't. And so now in order to convert this specialness into a true relationship, a holy relationship, it's going to take some transcendence of its exclusive limitations.

The terms of the relationship will have to change. Who you think you are relating with will have to open up. You will have to become more unconditional and accepting and tolerant. You will have to put aside grievances and unforgivenesses and hatreds. You will have to dig deep to find love even in the face of rejection and attack. And this will also mean having to heal and love yourself so that you are willing to give more than you ever gave before.

If the relationship can tolerate this transition, from a make-believe love affair of idol worship, special love, body worship, physical intimacy, safety in numbers and so on, to a more encompassing inclusiveness, then it can be converted into a holy relationship.

To do this, bodies must be transcended. The other cannot be regarded as a body. Nor can yourself. Special values and beliefs which seemed to apply only to the two of you have to be questioned, and now the interests of others have to be incorporated as well. Others have to be included in the circle which has to expand to include everyone. Exclusivity has to go out the window, and all sense of physical limits has to be uprooted. The whole sense of who and what you are, your identity, is brought into question.

This is where you are learning to truly join, to unconditionally love, to identify beyond the body, to learn to see the other for the first time beyond the body, to truly open up and expose oneself, to join in minds instead of in bodies, and to realize that you ARE each other. Interests become shared, special boundaries become blurred, the world is no longer an enemy, and an equality sets in.

In true equality, the other can no longer be seen as a parent, or a child, or a special one, or someone better or worse than self or others. They have to be seen as God's equal creation, alongside you, in which it is an honor to support and help them in their ascension into the light. To heal with them and to share with them. The two of you have to come into the light of honesty and truth and forgiveness. And then you might find that you are able to actually BE related, because you are part of each other.

The prison doors begin to swing open, true access begins to reveal itself as mind reaches out beyond the body, and now the two can become one. Thus specialness ends, and the unholy become whole again. And now the wholeness incorporates the whole, and all are regarded as included in this whole. One way of relating to every one. One love, one truth, one family of God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is critical to recognize this fundamental truth about the world. It is true of the world, it is true of every part of the world, of every world, every planet, every galaxy, and every part of space and time itself.

Time is change, and change is death.

Space is separation, and separation is death.

Space and time are systems of death.

There is no escaping this. There are no exceptions.

If something can change, it can stop being the way it is. Fundamentally it doesn't matter how perfect something seems to be, how new it is, how long-lasting, how impervious, how hard or solid, how much vitality it has, how much time was put into it, what it's made of, who made it, what brand name is slapped on it, how ancient it is, or how slowly it seems to change.

All things in space and time are constantly in a state of dying. We call "cell division" life. It is SEPARATION. It is death.

ALL THINGS HERE DIE.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven."

That which is immortal lives forever. It remains constantly the same. In order to be immortal it cannot change or be changed. It has to be invulnerable and impervious. It has to last forever. It cannot have any quality of modification, change, alteration or effect. It cannot be influenced, moved, transformed, attacked, made different, or questioned. It has to be always rock solid, the same, permanent, true, real, everlasting, and endless. Reality is ABSOLUTE.

That is true of all things in heaven's reality, in God. It is not true of ANYTHING in this world.

EVERYTHING in this world changes. Time forces it to change. TIME IS CHANGE. Time is a seeming force that takes whatever exists, and does not allow it to be permanent. It takes whatever is there now, and converts it into something else. It does not allow anything to stay the same. It does not permit permanence of any kind. Time is destructive. It is fundamentally a process of making sure NOTHING can last. NOTHING.

Time is death, and it is only a matter of time.

This means all things in space and time will end.

"Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end." "The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

Think not that there is just some small PARTS of the world that do this. Think not that there are some places you can go, people you can meet, body types, vocations, objects or anything at all anywhere in this whole system which escapes this law. It is the law of death. It is the law of NO freedom. It is the law of punishment. It is the law of sin and payment. Everything has a cost. Nothing is without sacrifice. And there is loss everywhere. Welcome to hell.

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

"Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life." God is insane, and fear alone is real."

Time DEVOURS.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

You cannot WANT this. But if you are not willing to look at its nature, you WILL want it, because you will be in denial. You will think the world is not like this. That there is hope. There is NO HOPE in the world. It has NO HOPE of ever succeeding at escaping death. It has NO HOPE of ever ceasing to disappoint.

It always falls short because something always changes. Everything always comes to an end. Every physical form transforms and decays and is no longer like itself. And nothing has any sense of any permanent identity at all, so there is no knowledge or anything trustworthy. You cannot rely on it. You cannot depend on it. It lies to you constantly. It is not your friend. It gives only to take away, and it never really gave in the first place.

You can only want the world if you are not willing to look at this. You can only want it if you think this is not true of the world. If you have the rose-tinted glasses of selective perception, in which you fake a sense of positivity and try to dress the world up as great and valuable. You invest time into it. You assemble its objects into pleasing configurations. You try to make it look new and shiny. You clean it and polish it. You make it appear never before seen as if it has given birth to something utterly fresh and interesting. And every single time it is a decoy to tempt you to stay in hell.

You cannot want the world because it was not MADE with love. It was not made through an act of wanting. It was made of rejection. You made it by rejecting the shit in your mind that you did not want and hated, by projecting it out. And thus your unwanted garbage turned into a dumpster pit filled with lies about external salvation and valuable treasures. You do NOT really want the world, and that is the underlying truth.

You cannot want a world which fails. You would be insane to do so. You cannot want a world which offers nothing of real value. You cannot want a world that does nothing for you and everything against you. You cannot want a world whose offerings are always death wrapped in a picture frame of sparkling jewels and special love. You cannot want a world that fundamentally can only die and can never sustain anything.

"You who feel threatened by this changing world, its twists of fortune and its bitter jests, its brief relationships and all the "gifts" it merely lends to take away again, attend this lesson well. The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus."

You cannot want a world that denies its own existence, hates itself, destroys itself, is completely disinterested in you, and attacks you at every turn. You cannot want a word that does not want you, and instead rejects you and abandons you. You cannot want a world that wants you to be destroyed and ignore who and what you are. How can you love something that is so utterly unloveable? To love it would have to be to completely overlook it.

That's what forgiveness means. "To forgive is to overlook." It means to NOT SEE the world. To look past the bodies and not see them. To look past physical matter and beyond the veil. To NOT SEE the world. That is forgiveness. Because your focus on the truth and the light of God BLINDS you to hell and makes the world of form turn transparent. You cannot look upon hell with love and expect the darkness to remain. Shine upon it and it will be dispelled from your sight.

"Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances. It keeps its steady gaze upon the light that lies beyond them."

"Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins that never were accomplished, healing but removes illusions that have not occurred." "What fear would feed upon, love overlooks."

"For, at its center, Christ has been reborn, to light His home with vision that overlooks the world."

"Forgiveness RECOGNIZED as merited will heal. It gives the miracle its strength to OVERLOOK illusions."

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK. Look, then, BEYOND error, and do not let your perception rest UPON it, for you will believe what your perception HOLDS."

"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."

"It is impossible to overlook what you would see, and fail to see what you have chosen to behold. How surely, therefore, must the real world come to greet the holy sight of anyone who takes the Holy Spirit's purpose as his goal for seeing."

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

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD."

"Is he (Jesus) the Christ? Oh yes, along with you. His little life on earth was not enough to teach the mighty lesson that he learned for all of us. He will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God."

"God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death and see the life beyond."

You can say that death is bad, and everything should be moved towards life. That includes healing the body and mind. There should be resurrection happening, a reversal of aging, an undoing of the effects of space and time. A return to life from death.

But this can also be mixed in with an active avoidance of death, a fear of it happening, and a wish to stop a suffering that seems real. If a person's body is real, and it is sick, you'll be motivated to "perform miracles" to heal and rescue them from death. You just want it to all go away.

This attitude of death avoidance can seem like it is in support of miracles, and even can compel and entail attempts at healing. But it's still the behaviour of an unhealed healer - a mixture of trying to resurrect the dead while still believing death is real. If bodies are real, then fixing them becomes a priority.

I went through this whole phase over the course of many years, presented with an endless supply of pictures of my wife being sick and disabled. It was practically an embarrassment to a budding ACIM miracle-worker, the amount of assistive devices we had to use - lifts and wheelchairs and special beds and medicines.

Here I was, trying to stave off death at all costs, keep the body going, undo the sickness, reverse the symptoms, resurrect the dying and make it all better. But this too was driven by a belief that my wife was a body, constantly mixing her spirit and mind with the physical form, where references to "her" always included the body.

I resisted the sickness and the death. I didn't want it to happen. I wanted to keep the body-person around for as long as possible, and couldn't even conceive of any other way of living. Keeping her ticking over was a constant struggle and a daily effort, thwarting wrong diagnoses and fending off stupid medical staff. Trying to keep the death-mongers at bay.

But eventually it got to a point where it was all exhausted, and it occurred to me that I really should just let her die. And that seemed totally against everything I believed. Not that it was up to me anyway, but I had to stop fighting it. I realised I should stop trying to keep her here, and stop trying to prevent all hell breaking loose. She didn't want to really be here any more and we were both quite done with the daily drudgery of bodily upkeep.

It was within a week of that surrendering that she died. Well, I should say, she went to heaven. Her body for sure died, and she for sure did not. Which presented its own confusing challenges to get my head around. But a few things became super clear to me.

My entire attitude about death being "a really bad thing" was totally bullshit. It was fuelled by a belief that the body was the person and must be kept alive. My fear of it and avoidance of it just attracted it. My belief in the sickness just fuelled it. But all of a sudden she was in a state of extreme freedom and happiness, relieved and grateful, totally stunned yet overjoyed.

All the suffering simply switched off. All the daily grind came to an end. All the resistance to it happening was blown out of the water. And it seemed nothing but wonderful for her. I was really thrilled for her to be free at last, which she exclaimed to me "I'm free!" and "I'm happy".

So death really wasn't that bad, after all. In fact, it appeared like a kind of liberation and mercy, given how much she'd suffered for years. I wouldn't wish her for a second to return to that body, and her joy just made me realise more how cruel the world was in not allowing her to leave sooner. The whole idea of keeping someone in a body for as long as possible was shown to be utter bullshit. A multi-lifetime soul doesn't give a shit about it.

It taught me many things all at once. The bullshit of my anti-death pro-miracle deception. My demonising of death and making it out to be a terrible thing. My resistance to the fact that everything in the world dies. It all just popped the bubble. I stopped fighting against it, and that was liberating in its own right. If you try to stop it happening, you make it happen more. But if you stop resisting it, life can take over.

It's another one of those kind of paradoxes. If you make death out to be a bad thing you will choose it. If you don't make it out to be a bad thing, people will think you're anti-miraculous and a death worshipper. But giving it any reality, importance, meaning or value, even if its negative meanings, is just more ego. Death is supposed to be nothing, nothing whatsoever. Meaningless. It's not supposed to be the opposite end of some spiritual warfare between good and evil.

I still recognize and fully believe that death in any form is not supposed to happen. It is not God's nature. Nothing real ever dies. And pretty much everything in the world does. But we also can use the mind to reverse the world's laws and perform miracles, which does still include raising the dead and healing the sick, even to the extent of bodies recovering. In fact Jesus would like for us to demonstrate bodies so healthy and lovely and filled with life that they become symbols of immortality in the dream.

Still, you're not going to get there by opposing death. And when you decide to stop opposing death, that doesn't mean you condone it. It just means you stop fueling it and stop believing in it. Avoiding it just keeps it around. And believing in it while trying not to resist it just condones it. You have to stop believing in it entirely if you want to raise the dead, and believe only in life.

I have perhaps become more truly miracle-minded now that I am no longer fighting against sickness and death. I've stopped making them my enemies. I've stopped resisting them. Well, at least to some extent. My attitude is kind of, "let it all just die", but that too could sound like some murderous idea. The world is hell-bent on dying anyway, so fighting that is bullshit. But at the same time, in that same attitude of letting it go, we can also step into a power that's able to reverse those laws and undo death.

In effect, you bring an end to death by not making it out to be an ending. You withdraw your belief in it being some terrible tragic thing that everyone must avoid at all costs. So shit dies, so what. Fuck it. Who cares. Souls don't care. They just move on and have more lifetimes with fresh healthy new bodies. And being out of the body is fantastic in comparison to coming into one.

This is not in any way to glorify death or sickness, or to suggest to let people keep suffering and not be helpful. But make it real and you die alone with it. Only the living can raise the dead. We are still called to be miracle workers, to raise the dead and heal the sick where possible. To be truly helpful to everyone, to choose not to die ourselves, and to be an example of resurrection. Even to the extent of having our bodies become incapable of death.

But we don't get there by first believing in death and then trying to forgive or undo it. We're the ones that make death have power over us by believing in it. And having made it out to be a power that we can't prevent, which is a projection and disowning of our own power, all we do is end up fighting with ourselves in turmoil. I'm not interested in trying to come off as having some kind of saviour complex, wanting to heal and save everyone from dying.

Most people are going to snuff it in this lifetime because they'r not ready to go all the way. I spent decades trying to heal my wife and reverse her amputations and paralysis and heart disease and brain damage, but bullshit to that because, as it turns out, that was not the plan anyway. The plan was to use the opportunity to learn that making sickness and death real and then resisting it is not the way to be miraculous. To use the sickness as a way to learn to stop believing in it. The plan was never to radically zap her body into a state of perfection. Not in this life.

I totally failed to raise the dead, and it was a great lesson. It almost couldn't have gone any better. In the big picture, this is what I was ready to learn, not that I was some hero that could just zap away death with miracles all over the place. That heroic rescuer bullshit had to die as well. You're far better off letting shit go sometimes. Just as Jesus kept saying to me, "let her."

So some people are not meant to be resurrected in this life. The bigger plan might not call for it and they might not be willing. The Holy Spirit knows what's best and what's possible or appropriate. Some people don't want healing. Some are not ready for an "undiluted miracle." Some want to die too much and aren't ready to forgive themselves. Some are there to play a role for a while and then leave, perhaps to rejoin at a later encounter and carry on. It doesn't all have to happen in one lifetime, and most of the time doesn't.

So I have a much looser attitude now. I recognise the world is just full of disappointment and death so I get much less attached to the bullshit of temptation. I am no longer so mistaken to get all wound up if someone is sick. I'm not feeling like trying to fix and save and stop it happening out of some inability to let it be. Jesus was forever telling me "it's fine" even as my wife's leg was getting chopped off, even as she had a stroke, even as she was in the ICU twice and on her death bed. "It's fine" he said, because ultimately it doesn't matter whatsoever. Nothing real can be threatened. No-one ever dies. Just the body.

This has shown me that from the soul's perspective this world is just here for us to use temporarily. To repurpose. We go through bodies like water. We take on roles and challenges, lessons to learn and people to meet, and we move on. Probably across countless lifetimes. None of the physical shit really matters. It's not important at all. If people are to come and go and die off and leave, so what, you'll see them again. They were never a body in the first place, and the body is worthless anyway. This whole world will be thrown down the toilet and flushed away eventually "as the world spins into the nothingness from which it came."

So yeah. Be miraculous and overcome death by not believing in death and not resisting it. Gotta not resist it if you want there to be any freedom there. If you want to replace it with life you can't be dimming your light with death-believing thoughts of resistances rooted in a fear of loss. This is why we let the dead (in mind/heart) bury the dead (in body). It doesn't matter. Graveyards aren't even real. All of us are spiritual immortal beings who will live forever, and we will never ever be separate or alone.

When we're ready to surmount death and stop dying entirely, we'll resurrect the body and make it disappear. The body then becomes incapable of being sick or dying, so it can only leave by vanishing. The mind overlooks the illusion of death and recognises it as nothing, and away it goes. Then the body is no more, and never was, and you will never again go through death, or birth for that matter. I'm no longer an anti-death spokesperson. Death doesn't exist.

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

"We call it death, but it is liberty. It does not come in forms that seem to be thrust down in pain upon unwilling flesh, but as a gentle welcome to release. If there has been true healing, this can be the form in which death comes when it is time to rest a while from labor gladly done and gladly ended. Now we go in peace to freer air and gentler climate, where it is not hard to see the gifts we gave were saved for us. For Christ is clearer now; His vision more sustained in us; His Voice, the Word of God, more certainly our own."

Here a beautiful and inspiring collection of short quotes all to do with going BEYOND. Beyond the body, beyond appearances, beyond forms, beyond sin, beyond the world. This is the goal of the course. To return home to Heaven.

"Beyond all idols stands his holy will to be but what he is."

"Beyond the body"

"Beyond this world there is a world I want. I choose to see that world instead of this, For here is nothing that I really want."

"You can only GO BEYOND it, and look back from a point where SANITY exists, and SEE THE CONTRAST."

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

"Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them."

"Understanding IS beyond perception, because it introduces meaning. But it is below knowledge, even though it can grow TOWARDS it."

"Not yet is Heaven quite remembered, for the purpose of forgiveness still remains. Yet everyone is certain he will go beyond forgiveness, and he but remains until it is made perfect in himself."

"The Holy Spirit is the Christ mind that senses the knowledge that lies beyond perception."

"Let us, then, look upon them calmly, that we may look beyond them, understanding what they are, not what they would maintain."

"We go beyond the veil of fear, lighting each other's way. The holiness that leads us is WITHIN us, as is our home."

"I DO go before you, because I am beyond the ego. Reach therefore for my hand because you want to transcend the ego."

"Appearances deceive but can be changed. Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all. And if you fail to see beyond appearances, you ARE deceived. For everything you see will change, and yet you thought it real before, and now you think it real again. Reality is thus reduced to form, and capable of change. Reality is changeless. It is this that makes it real, and keeps it separate from all appearances. It must transcend all form to be itself. It CANNOT change."

"Your brother has a changelessness in him beyond appearance and deception both. It is obscured by changing views of him which you PERCEIVE as his reality."

"Each speaks in time of what is far beyond it. Two voices, raised together, call to the hearts of everyone, and let them beat as one."

"And It must use all learning to transfer illusions TO the truth, taking all FALSE ideas of what you are, and leading you BEYOND them to the truth that IS beyond them."

"Beyond the body, beyond the sun and stars, past everything you see and yet somehow familiar, is an arc of golden light that stretches, as you look, into a great and shining circle. And all the circle fills with light before your eyes. "

"Your destiny and purpose are far beyond them, in the clean place where littleness does not exist."

"You whose hands are joined have begun to reach BEYOND the body, but NOT outside yourselves, to reach your shared identity TOGETHER."

"Desiring to look upon their brothers in holiness, the power of belief and faith goes far beyond the body, SUPPORTING vision, not obstructing it."

"ITS effects are changelessly eternal, BEYOND fear, and PAST the world of sin entirely. "

"NOTHING beyond yourself can make you fearful or loving, because nothing IS beyond you."

"One instant of complete belief in this, and you will go beyond belief to Certainty."

"The holy instant's radiance will light YOUR eyes, and give them sight to see beyond ALL suffering, and see Christ's Face INSTEAD."

"Who stands before a lifeless image when a step away the Holy of the Holies opens up an ancient door that leads beyond the world? You are a stranger here."

"Do not defend this senseless dream, in which God is bereft of what He loves, and you remain beyond salvation."

"Truth is so far beyond time, that ALL of it happens at once. For as it was created one, so its oneness depends not on time at all."

"Sink deep into the peace that waits for you beyond the frantic, riotous thoughts and sounds and sights of this insane world. You do not live there."

"He will enable you to go far beyond the healing YOU would undertake, for beside your small willingness to make whole He will lay His Own COMPLETE Will and make YOURS whole. What can the Son of God NOT accomplish with the Fatherhood of God in him? "

"And now the mind returns to its Creator; the joining of the Father and the Son, the Unity of unities that stands behind all joining but beyond them all."

"But from within me it will reach beyond, and everything I see will but reflect the light that shines in me and in itself. "

"He leads you steadily along the path of freedom, teaching you how to disregard, or look beyond everything that would hold you back."

"It is this that makes it holy and beyond the world. It is its holiness that points to God. It is its holiness that makes you safe."

"This thought has power to wake the sleeping truth in you, whose vision sees beyond appearances to that same truth in everyone and everything there is."

"Now he seeks to go beyond them, recognizing that another dream would offer nothing more than all the others. Dreams are one to him."

"The universe beyond the sun and stars, and all the thoughts of which you can conceive, belong to you."

"How far beyond this world my Self must be, and yet how near to me and close to God!"

"If they understood what is beyond them, they would not BE handicapped. You do NOT know the meaning of love, and this IS your handicap."

"Then turn to one who laid all limits by, and went beyond the farthest reach of learning. He will take you with him, for he did not go alone."

"No-one but must accept this thought as true, if he would leave this world behind and soar beyond its petty scope and little ways."

"Who, then, can say which one can be healed of what, and what must remain beyond God's power to forgive?This is insanity indeed.It is not up to God's teachers"

"Look, then, BEYOND error, and do not let your perception rest UPON it, for you will believe what your perception HOLDS. "

"Otherwise, you still are free to choose a goal that lies beyond the world and every worldly thought, and one which comes to you from an idea relinquished yet remembered, old yet new; an echo of a heritage forgot, yet holding everything you really want."

"He is here because He wills to be, and what He wills is present now beyond the reach of time."

"He gives you vision which can look beyond these grim appearances, and can behold the gentle Face of Christ in all of them."

"But what is that to those who have been given one true relationship, BEYOND the body? Can they be long held back from looking on the face of Christ?"

"Only joy increases forever. Joy and Eternity are INSEPARABLE. God extends outward beyond limits and beyond time, and you, who are co-creators with Him, extend His Kingdom forever and beyond limit. "

"When truth has come it harbors in its wings the gift of perfect constancy, and love which does not falter in the face of pain but looks beyond it, steadily and sure."

"It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that demonstrates you did not do them."

"What lies beyond them cannot BE attacked."

"For His answer is the reference point BEYOND delusions, from which you can look back on them, and see them as insane."

"It comes from far beyond itself, for it reflects Eternal Love and the rebirth of love which never died, but has been kept obscure."

"They choose for all mankind; for all the world and all things in it; for the unchanging and unchangeable beyond appearances; and for the Son of God and his Creator. "

"For power is not seeming strength, and truth is beyond a semblance of any kind."

"NOTHING is beyond His will for you. But signify your will to remember Him, and behold! He will give you everything but for your asking."

"The picture of light, in clear-cut and unmistakable contrast, is transformed into what lies BEYOND the picture."

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

"Its holy purpose stands beyond your little range. When vision has shown you the holiness that lights up the world, you will understand today s idea perfectly."

"The power set in you, in whom the Holy Spirit's goal has been established, is so far beyond your little conception of the infinite, that you have no idea how great the strength that goes with you."

"Yet, for all its might, so great it reaches past the stars and to the universe that lies beyond them, your little faithlessness can make IT useless, if you would use the faithlessness instead. "

"For the words we use are mighty, and they need no thoughts beyond themselves to change the mind of him who uses them."

"You will go far beyond it. Our direction is toward perfect safety and perfect peace."

"Yet this is writ in hell and NOT in Heaven, where you are BEYOND attack, and prove his INNOCENCE. "

"Nothing will be beyond your healing power, because nothing will be denied your simple request."

"Today we will make our first real attempt to get past this dark and heavy cloud, and to go through it to the light beyond."

"The mind that serves the Holy Spirit is unlimited forever, in all ways, beyond the laws of time and space, unbound by any preconceptions, and with strength and power to do whatever it is asked."

"Knowledge is far beyond your individual concern. You who are part of it, and all of it, need only realize that it is of the Father, NOT of you."

"And this will be your concept of YOURSELF, when you have reached the world beyond the sight your eyes alone can offer you to see."

"Today's exercises are an attempt to go beyond these differences in appearance, and recognize a common content where it exists in truth."

"From you salvation radiates with gifts beyond all measure, given and returned. To you, the giver of the gift, does God Himself give thanks."

"And it is given us to look past death and see the light beyond."

"It is the world s most lofty aspiration, for it leads beyond the world entirely."

"It is past the clouds, and in the light beyond. Remember that you will have to go through the clouds before you can reach the light."

"Help him go in peace beyond it, with the light of his own innocence lighting his way to his redemption and release."

"But it begins within the world perceived as different, and leading from this fresh perception to the gate of Heaven and the way beyond."

"Grace is not given to a BODY, but to a MIND. And the mind that RECEIVES it, looks INSTANTLY beyond the body, and sees the holy place where IT was healed."

"Far beyond his dreams is his reality. But he must learn he is a Savior first, before he can remember what he is. And he must save who would BE saved."

"There is no Thought of God that does not go with you to help you reach that instant, and to go beyond it quickly, surely and forever."

"Accept these little gifts of thanks from us, as through Christ's vision we behold a world beyond the one we made, and take that world to be the full replacement of our own."

"You have many times been urged to look beyond the body, for its sight presents the symbol of love s "enemy" Christ s vision does not see."

"And so they need a teacher who perceives their madness, but who still can look beyond illusion to the simple truth in them."

"We go beyond appearances today, and reach the source of healing from which nothing is exempt. "

"The Creator of life, the Source of everything that lives, the Father of the Universe, and of the Universe of universes, and of everything that lies even BEYOND them, would you remember."

"The fourth obstacle to be surmounted, hangs like a heavy veil before the face of Christ. Yet as His face rises beyond it, shining with joy because He is in His Father's Love, peace will lightly brush the veil aside and run to meet Him, and to JOIN with Him at last."

"From BEYOND each of these OBSTACLES to love, Love Itself has called, and each has been surmounted by the power of the attraction of what lies BEYOND. Your WANTING fear SEEMED to be holding them in place. Yet when you heard the voice of love BEYOND them, you answered, and they disappeared."

"No mad desire, no trivial impulse to forget again, no stab of fear, nor the cold sweat of seeming death, CAN stand against your will. And what attracts you from BEYOND the veil, is also deep WITHIN you, unseparated from it, and COMPLETELY One. "

"Communion is another kind of completion, which goes beyond guilt BECAUSE it goes beyond the body."

"This One can teach you how to look on time differently and to see BEYOND it. But NOT while you believe in sin."

"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."

Ok.

If you can FULLY accept what Jesus is saying here, it means very simply that the body has absolutely NO SAY in its own condition. It has no mind and no will. There are no outside causes that determine the body's health or sickness. The body is nothing but a SLAVE to the mind. The body OBEYS the mind at all times. It is the EFFECT of the mind and the mind is the CAUSE of it. This boils down to a simple mechanic which is always in effect:

***** The mind projects the body. *****

The mind is like a movie projector. The body is like a movie. The mind projects the body outward. Jesus confirmed this clearly in this notes about his resurrection:

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

So here, notice particularly Jesus says "THE MIND THAT MADE THE BODY CAN MAKE ANOTHER".

So that means, 100%, the mind is responsible for MAKING the body, PROJECTING it, maintaining it, causing it, defining it, establishing its condition, deciding whether or not it shows up as sick or healthy, and the body is NOTHING but an EFFECT.

This is also why Jesus confirms:

"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."

So once again we are taught there are NO OTHER CAUSES of the body's health - whether it is ill or not - other than YOU and YOUR MIND.

So now you have to realize something important here. The body is *ALWAYS* an outward picture of an inward condition. The body is *ALWAYS* being determined by the mind. And the mind is *ALWAYS* responsible for its condition while it persists.

If the mind, like a movie projector, SWITCHES OFF its projection, the movie disappears. The mind can switch the body on or off at any time. The IMAGE that is the body, is entirely COMING FROM the mind. The mind has POWER OVER it in every way. The movie cannot turn around and determine its own content, nor can it maintain its own stories or keep its own state. The body has no STATE of its own. It has no history. It is NOT the result of "past causes" or past decisions or "things that happens to it 10 years ago".

So you have to realize, the state of the body, and the body showing up AT ALL, is because the mind is PROJECTING A FRESH ONE RIGHT NOW. Whatever configuration the body shows up in, your mind RIGHT NOW is projecting that image. The body is NOT being maintained "through time" nor is it the RESULT of the past. That is "horizontal perception" and is a lie of the ego. "Vertical perception" recognizes that the mind is ABOVE the body and projects it downward. It has full authority over it. Just as mind is the dreamer and body is the dream.

THEREFORE. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE consider this VITAL point...

At no time does the body have ANY ABILITY to determine its own condition. It cannot "stay sick" or "keep disability" or "continue being broken" UNLESS the mind is CONSTANTLY STILL CONTINUING to attack it and MAKE IT BE WHAT IT IS.

The mind never disowns the body's condition. The mind is the ONLY CAUSE of the body's condition. And so that means this very important fact which MANY ACIM folk are in denial of and keep rejecting:

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PROJECT A SICK BODY FROM A HEALTHY MIND.

And similarly this leads to this further realization:

You cannot "transcend sickness" of the body and "not care" about the body's state, CLAIMING that your mind is pure and spiritual and filled with LOVE, WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY MAINTAINING A SICK BODY IMAGE.

A sick mind PROJECTS a sick body.

A healthy mind PROJECTS a healthy body.

This is a "central teaching" according to Jesus. If you use the body to attack, ie your mind wants to attack another, it uses the body as a weapon and the body thus becomes affected by attack thoughts and becomes a PICTURE of attack - SICK, broken, damaged. It SHOWS damage to your brother to accuse him of sin, "brother by your hand I die."

If your mind TRULY, genuinely, honestly, is in a state of love and sanity, it HEALS THE BODY. "The mind, being sane, heals the body." This is because the body doesn't keep its own condition. It CANNOT REFUSE TO BE HEALED. If the mind is flowing love and light through it, the body WILL HEAL and the mind will now project FROM a loving mind, a PICTURE of a "loved body image", which will show up as FREE FROM SICKNESS AND DAMAGE.

"Those who are sick (physically, because body health comes FROM mind health) do not love themselves. For if they loved themselves they would HEAL themselves."

And if they were to LOVE themselves, they would Heal their MIND, and this WOULD PROJECT A HEALED BODY. The sick body will VANISH and be REPLACED with a healthy one. Always, at all times, the body is being PROJECTED OUT from the movie projector mind. Change the movie in the MIND, and the PROJECTION MUST CHANGE.

This is the same principle as "projection makes perception."

There is no escaping this mechanism. WHILE you have a body, IF it is sick, YOUR MIND IS SICK. Since "sickness is a defense against the truth'" and since "a broken body is PROOF the mind has not been healed", if sickness REMAINS in the body, the mind MUST NOT be healthy, and there MUST still be a defense against the truth IN THE MIND.

Therefore it is IMPOSSIBLE to have a sick body at the same time as having a healthy mind!!!!

And because of this fact, even if bodies are not real and don't exist and your awakened mind doesn't even produce a body AT ALL because it no longer believes in illusions, *IF* you ARE producing a body still, its condition DOES REFLECT your mental health. At all times. And therefore it is a "barometer" for determining whether your mind is healthy or not. And it is an indicator of what you think of your brother. "Sick bodies are accusers". You cannot continue having a sick body "with a healthy mind" and NOT BE ACCUSING. If your body is sick, YOU ARE AN ACCUSER, and are trying to be contagious. THAT is not sanity.

If you could see that the body is only an image being projected outward by the mind, like a holographic projection, and if you could see that your mind is able to switch that image on and off at will, and if you could experiment to see that when you hate you project a hateful body with signs of distortion and when you love you project a loving body immaculate and undefiled, you would REALIZE that NEVER can you make a healed body show up WHILE you are angry or attacking, and the ONLY way to make a healthy body show up is to USE IT FOR LOVE.

"Use it to bring the word of God to those who have it not and the body BECOMES holy (is projected as healed/whole). Being holy, it CANNOT BE SICK, NOR CAN IT DIE."

The body then reaches a state where it is a SYMBOL of immortality. It is not immortal ITSELF because, remember, it is a second-hand projected effect from the mind. The MIND becomes immortal and the body image REFLECTS it. The body, ALWAYS a symbol, now shows a symbolic representation of health and wholeness and being healed and free from attack of any kind. It REPRESENTS holiness in the mind. And the holy, sane mind, CAN ONLY project this kind of body. For a "sane mind" to project an "attacked body" is a DOUBLE MESSAGE, and is a split minded teaching. Absolute bullshit, AND impossible.

You then USE this symbol of immortality and health to SHOW OTHERS PROOF that your mind is healed and that your brother is exonerated. "Brother, at your hand I live" is the message it transmits to anyone who encounters it. And in it there are NO SIGNS of attack or sicknesss, PROVING that your brother CANNOT ATTACK IT, is not the cause of it, has no effect on it, CANNOT MAKE IT SICK, and CANNOT KILL IT. It literally is invulerable because the mind simply is TOTALLY responsible for its projection and its condition.

The mind can simply KEEP PROJECTING a healed body, in realtime, live, each moment, to OVERRIDE any attempted affects or attacks that ANYTHING EXTERNAL tries to "do to it." This is a supernatural state of PROTECTION which "sickness is a defense against the truth" mentions.

Jesus even goes on to say that you can relieve the body of the laws you made it serve before, and it is no longer even subject to FOOD, or WEATHER, or TIME (aging) or any other EXTERNAL CAUSALITY. Because now if the mind is in PURE CAUSALITY, the body CAN ONLY BE what the mind wants to show itself as. Therefore the body no longer HAS ANY EXTERNAL NEEDS, which were all fake to begin with. Why would a holographically projected IMAGE need anything from the world, when it's just an IMAGE being PROJECTED like a movie?! The mind now OVERRIDES ALL OF THE EGO'S LAWS and because of ITS transcendence of death, can project a body that CANNOT BE AFFECTED.

It is only then through a sane mind which SHOWS A HEALED BODY, that you can reach atonement in the mind, OR access resurrection. The curriculum ENDS in the resurrection, which is a state of MIND that has TOTAL POWER OVER DEATH, and is PURELY CAUSAL. This is a course in cause, not effect. And for a while, it can project a "perfect body" to represent the mind's resurrected state. When you are done using it, you DISAPPEAR IT, and it literally vanishes into nothingness, because THE MIND WAS PROJECTING IT AS AN IMAGE. When you switch off the projector, the movie disappears!

That is the ONLY WAY to exit the dream of death. You exit THROUGH LIFE. Through immortality. You can NEVER EVER exit through "my body is sick and it died". EVER. Under no conditions. No exceptions. If you are CAUSING your body to be sick or to die, through a CHOICE TO DIE, (and all death is suicide and FAILURE) you are OPPOSING GOD's WILL because your MIND is opposing LIFE and is using the body to ATTACK, not only yourself but your brother. Sick and dead bodies are accusers and they COME FROM sick minds.

You cannot leave this dream through death or sickness. And since the body's condition COMES FROM the MINDS CONDITION, they are TIED TOGETHER, and that means the ONLY WAY to exit the dream is to FIRST ACHIEVE perfect physical health as an out-picturing of a SANE MIND - a "healed body", AND THEN to disappear the body purely by the power of the mind. If the body is still sick, YOU CANNOT BE AWAKE. "A broken body is PROOF the mind HAS NOT been healed."

"That the body cannot heal the mind but the mind can heal the body, proves the mind must be stronger than the body. Even miracle demonstrates this." Therefore a MIRACLE is supposed to produce BODY HEALING. To SHOW that the mind is MORE POWERFUL THAN FORM and more powerful than matter and the world and any external causes. Miracles REVEAL that the mind IS THE CAUSE OF THE BODY, and that the mind has power over sickness and death. And EXERCISES THAT POWER to reverse sickness and death and to make sickness and death IMPOSSIBLE.

You must demonstrate LIFE.

You must NOT demonstrate sickness or death.

Miracles restore life to what was sick and dead. Miracles are the means of the resurrection. Miracles can raise the dead and RETURN TO LIFE that which was less alive before. If there is still sickness in the body, THERE HAS NOT BEEN RESURRECTION.

Only when you can embrace a doctrine of "ONLY LIFE EXISTS" can you finish the curriculum and go home. Because in Heaven, in reality, only life exists. There is no death. You cannot be PROVING that there IS DEATH and BELIEVE that there is NOT death. You HAVE to demonstrate that you REALLY believe it by SHOWING IT through your body. Otherwise if your body has a DIFFERENT state to your mind (which is impossible) you are in deception, denial, and death.

Only life is real. Only life is true. Only life is the way out of death. "Only life" is the entire teaching of A Course in Miracles.

"Swear not to die, you holy son of God!!!"

Jesus left the dream through a FULLY HEALED SICK-FREE BODY. So must you.

When you're having an emotional reaction to anything, you usually believe it's because something outside of you is causing it.

But more accurately, you previously created a self condemnation within yourself and this is rising to the surface of your awareness. It's like a bruise which it *seems* like someone else is activating or triggering.Its your guilt about separating from God - your sin.

Our reactions are often so quick to happen that it seems like someone or something outside of you 'causes' the feeling.

So I'm sitting here, and if someone comes along and pokes me with a stick, if I suddenly feel angry and annoyed, initially it might look like I've been made to feel this way BY that person. Or that I'm only feeling this way because of that person. Its an illusion of cause and effect.

But what's really happening is, my mind already contained guilt and anger and upset which was buried unconsciously, and being poked with the stick has somehow triggered it off, like a memory or an association, and its come up in my mind quickly and now I'm experiencing it. It's easy to bridge the gap and say, well this person has inflicted a 'fresh wound' upon me, but really it's something that was already in me.

Remember as ACIM says, "we but accuse our brother of our OWN sins." - meaning that our brother does not HAVE any sins that we can accuse them of - its all your own stuff that you project onto them.

The only reason we are here in bodies is because we tried to separate from God by condemning ourselves, attempting to destroy ourselves and to punish ourselves. WE are the ones who believe in our own sinfulness and our own guilt. It's got nothing to do with anyone else and nobody else put it there. And it is this inner self-guilt that becomes 'activated' in EVERY situation where we think someone or something else does 'something' to us to 'make us' unhappy. We simply 'recall' our own guilt and re-suffer.

So instead we hire people to come along and to seem like they are the cause of our suffering, because this triggers off our AGREEMENT that what they're insinuating about us is true (that we deserve punishment or mistreatment), even if we protest violently that this is uncalled for. We cannot get upset UNLESS we agree with the person, and we cannot get upset UNLESS we already believe deep down that we deserve this treatment.

Its not other people that take our power away. We are the ones who keep trying to GIVE it to other people, to give them our own self-responsibility in an attempt to ask them to take over the rights and responsibilities that WE have for ourselves and for our own feelings. We want someone else to be to blame for the separation from God because we have blamed ourselves heavily and can't bear the burden. But OUR suffering has NOTHING to do with anyone else.

So its extremely convenient when someone comes along and triggers you or pushes your buttons. And even though you will react in such a way as to suggest your entire reaction is their fault, or you were just sitting there innocently minding your own business, the fact is they would not be ABLE to upset you if you were truly free of your own guilt. So all they are really doing is helping you to become aware of what you are hiding from, and your hidden unconscious self-hate is actually calling for you to be punished, which is why you hire and attract people to do it to you, for you, even if you fight with them about it consciously.

Ok so, this is really all about taking responsibility for who you are and what you feel and what you believe is true about yourself. You need to learn to decouple and detach the lie, that how you feel is caused by someone else. How you feel is NEVER caused by someone else. Whoever is in your life that is pissing you off, ITS NOT THEM... its not their fault, they're just helping you to see that you pissed yourself off. You HAVE to stop blaming other people for what you are feeling. Fully. Totally. "You are never upset for the reason you think" and "anger is never justified" (ie blaming another).

I have been finding that I am so incredibly used to being a victim, that whenever someone does or says something to 'upset me', and I experience a reaction (which is really just my own self-attack surfacing in my awareness) I immediately add two-and-two together and find the other person to be 'guilty of' upsetting me. It seems like they caused the upset, and its all their fault. I actually buy into this really quickly. And it totally glosses over the fact that I am only experiencing what is already in me, what I already believe it true about myself, and I am only reminded of my own self condemnation.

So what I have to learn to do, which I am experimenting with now, is to remember to remind myself... "I am completely responsible for these feelings". Whatever my reaction is, I have to stop blaming the cause of it on other people. I have to stop seeing myself as having been at the 'effect' of anyone or anything other than myself. If anyone else has 'done this to me', then I am a victim. If I am a victim I can't find peace, no matter how much I protest. No matter what my feeling is, or how much it seems justified or unjustified, or how much it *seems* to have been activated by another person, I HAVE to get to where I admit honestly that EVEN THIS FEELING is not there 'because of' that other person, it's there because *I* put it there because its MY self-attack. "The secret to salvation is this - that you but did this to yourself."

To stop being a victim, or seeing yourself as victimized, you MUST own up to the fact that everything you are experiencing is YOURS. It is your own inner experience. It is not someone else's. It is not something that anyone else put there or created or caused or made happen or reinforced in any way. Its yours. This is your shit.

You have plenty of your own shit in your own mind which you put there to cover and explain absolutely all of your reactions and upset feelings and unhappiness, without needing even one other person to explain why you feel this way. You're doing a fine job of condemning yourself without needing to resort to trying to claim that someone else has 'added to' your load.

Nobody else has ever done anything to you. Period. Let that soak in for a minute. Nobody else has EVER done anything to you, and ALL of your reactions and feelings and experiences are INSIDE YOU, because you put them there. They're YOURS.

You are completely responsible for everything you experience and everything you feel and you are NOT at the effect of anyone else, ever.

Now, this is very tempting for the ego/hurt parts of yourself to want to skapegoat and this happens very rapidly and automatically when you are not being truly honest or observant. And you are so used to this happening that every single time someone or something outside of you 'goes wrong' or 'offends you' or 'attacks you' or 'does something to you' or whatever... you immediately launch into the mistaken perception that this OTHER has 'caused you'. Caused-you, in general... ie... they are the cause, you are their effect, you have no say in who you are, and you must change to match what they say you should be feeling. Victimhood.

So.... now your job is different. Your job is to notice whenever you are in the midst of an 'interaction' with someone or something, in which it has triggered off some feelings. Some upset. Some hurt or anger or whatever it is. If you are not happy, then chances are you are currently `holding a grievance` which you THINK is a grievance against someone else. You blame them for it.

BUT... your job now is this.... you MUST CLAIM OWNERSHIP of every part of what you are experiencing. All of your feelings of hurt, anger, rejection, pain, loss, suffering, sadness, offense, frustration, unfairness, etc... all of it... it is YOURS. It's inside you. And the ONLY reason you are experiencing it is BECAUSE YOU PUT IT THERE. We have to learn that it is NEVER about the other person, you are NEVER affected by someone else, you are NEVER at the effect of the world you see, you are NEVER experiencing something as the effect/result of someone or something else, and nobody has EVER done anything whatsoever to change who you are.

It's actually completely true that nobody has ever done anything to you. As in my quote yesterday - "you are completely harmless and you cannot be hurt." Only you can do this stuff to yourself. Only you can STOP doing this to yourself. This doesn't require a crazy mental somersault or perceptual trampolining in order to see it this way. It's actually the way it IS. You're just allowing yourself to acknowledge things for how they really ARE instead of making up the story that someone else is to blame.

When owned up to with responsibility, you have ONLY done this to yourself. Everyone else is innocent. You have never been hurt by anyone. You ARE immortal and invulnerable. Admitting to this and seeing this is simply the truth. There is no distortion in it and no fairytale needed to paint a picture to make it believable. The truth is that everything you're feeling, you are choosing to feel, on your own, without any help from anyone else.

As you learn to OWN what you are feeling, something really interesting happens. Or at least this is what I am finding. If someone does something that usually I'd say "they caused me to feel xyz"... if I say to myself, ok, I'm upset and feeling hurt and angry... but its NOT because of them... these are MY feelings, ALL of this experience is MINE and has nothing to do with them.... this ownership/responsibility does two things. 1) It completely detatches from the other person and withdraws all blame from them and correctly identifies WHERE the problem is (its in me, in my mind, not in the other person), and 2) It puts me in touch with what is MINE and who I AM.

What I'm finding is that as I own my feelings and stop blaming them on other people, ALL of them... I am owning up to being MYSELF. My 'personality' is coming out. I am feeling freer and happier. My unhappy feelings are dissolving away very quickly and I remain in the victim role for FAR less time. Taking this responsibility immediately detaches me from the other person, and severs the 'tie' that was trying to pin my feelings on someone else. The door is closed, and now I'm within myself. And as I sit with my own feelings in awareness that these are MY own feelings, no matter what seemed to happen, it shines a LIGHT which dispels them. It makes me laugh. I end up laughing rather than crying.

Owning my feelings completely undoes the foundation of victimhood and completely removes victimhood from my perception, which means I now see myself as NOT victimized which means whatever I'm feeling is my OWN creation which means it's really quite hilariously silly that I've chosen to create this feeling. It shows me how ridiculous it is to choose to feel this way. Why would I choose to deliberately feel upset? I am recognizing it is not TRUE that its someone else's fault and its not TRUE that I have been attacked, and this therefore (through oneness) reminds me that I can't have been attacked therefore there CAN'T have been any effects, and therefore I have no reason to be upset. So I can let it go much more quickly and return to happiness.

I'm finding my 'personality' is coming out a lot more, my persona is diminishing, my happiness is increasing and I see myself as much less victimized. I have less reason to be afraid because I'm starting to believe that nobody else is doing anything to me, and that they can't. And by owning my own feelings I am owning BEING ME which means I am allowing myself to be myself freely without all this conditionality of my fake ego victim self. Yay.

Good times. Freedom.

(and you must!)

The "sickness is a defense against the truth" section says a lot about how we make sickness AND reverse it.

Basically, sickness doesn’t just mean bodily sickness it means any kind of belief that separation is real. That belief is in the mind. The mind is projecting the body currently, because the mind sees itself as an illusion not a reality. When the mind sees itself as being "made of" something ego, it manifests the very thing it sees itself as, like a body.

Sickness is "made" or put in place, by the mind, by using the body without love, or rather, by using it for attack. That means you’re believing that you really did sin against God, are really separate, and are now trying to get rid of that sin by denying and projecting it. That means you’ll try to project it through, and onto, the body, or rather you’ll project a body which appears sick, which makes the body show up with sickness. When you attempt to therefore get rid of the sin by accusing someone else of being the one to sin, instead of them receiving the consequences or effects, you do. You do it to yourself.

This is because there is a law of the mind, to do with how a mind of oneness and wholeness works. That law is, that what you do to another, you directly do to yourself. It sort of along the lines of "do unto others as you’d have them do unto you" except that version does not work because it leaves open the possibility that someone else might not reciprocate. Instead, the law says, a mind that is one with another mind, WILL experience directly the effects of its causes. So if you were to attack that other mind, you WILL attack your own, because your are one with them. You therefore have a vested interest in ONLY loving your brother and yourself, otherwise you will make yourself suffer. This is the meaning of having SHARED INTERESTS.

When we then get into the ego, that law STILL applies at all times, but the ego goes into denial about it. Then it believes it can get away with murder by being able to attack/cause another person without experiencing the effects/consequences. So the ego will then attack trying to get rid of sin, but the law kicks in, and all the effects/consequences you have attempted to "give" to the other person, you DIRECTLY give them to yourself. So suddenly your body will become sick because you have attacked yourself. This is the secret to salvation, that you are the one who is giving yourself ALL the sickness and suffering and death that you imagine is caused by other sinful people or things in the world.

Sickness, as a belief in separation from God, and thus a belief that sin is real, is basically DENIAL. It is a way of trying to defend against God, to block God, to shut off access to Life. Obviously if you shut yourself off from that which gives Life, you will suffer and become weak and sick and die. So denial is the ego’s device for pretending that the truth is not true. Denial causes projection because it puts you into a state of mind where it seems *possible* to get rid of your sin without having to deal with the consequences. All death is suicide and no one dies without their own consent.

That means that if there is any sickness showing up in the body at all, or the person dies, it is PROOF, that the person believed in sin and separation somewhere in their mind. Their mind was not healed. This is absolutely rock solid bullet-proof cause and effect. Anyone who believes in separation will become sick in some way and they will attack their body and it will become sick and eventually die. And that will be a CHOICE. AND it will be implemented entirely personally BY that person who believes that. Hence "a broken body is PROOF the mind has not been healed."

Jesus describes it in that section about defenses against truth, that basically in the ego, having sided with it, we misperceive through it, we look at the truth and believe that the truth is not the truth. We see in it something false that we put there - sin. And make it out to be an attacker. This seems to "logically" then make sense that we need to DEFEND our life against this perceived attacker, and the seemingly sensible thing to do is to put up a defense against it. This defense is implemented by increasing the sense of separation between you and God/attacker, in your mind, psychologically. You put illusions of walls and defenses in place.

The problem is, that by doing that you inadvertently attack yourself, separate yourself from life, make yourself go unconscious, believe you have been attacked by God, believe that it’s God’s will that you die, and so SICKNESS or symptoms of sickness start to show up in your body. The ego’s advice, or its solution to the problem it perceives, always SEEMS like it will make things better for you, but actually makes it worse. So in an act of what seems like "self defense", you end up actually attacking yourself and hurting yourself. Then you get sick, then you die, and you did it to yourself. There IS no other CAUSE of sickness in the entire world.

Once you know this, you’ll realize as Jesus says, that there is a PURPOSE to your sickness. It was put there to deny God and defend your EGO-identified self against what it thinks is an attack. The key then, is recognizing that you only thought you NEEDED the defense, because you mis-perceive what the truth IMPLIED, because you were interpreting its meaning with the EGO, and the ego had a REACTION based on a false perception.

You can then become WILLING, to recognize that what you thought was some kind of sin or evil "IN" the truth, or in God, or some kind of malicious intent, WAS NOT THERE, that the truth really DID NOT mean you were going to stop existing, you had a misperception as a result of seeing the truth through the ego, the truth is NOT trying to hurt you, and therefore you do not NEED "protection". ALL sickness is an attempt to PROTECT yourself, and so it’s paradoxically hilarious that doing so REMOVES the natural protection that love would offer you. The ego’s protection is attack!

When you can realize you had this PURPOSE for your sickness, your defenses, and that you do not NEED them, because you can see clearly (with corrected perception) that the truth is actually supporting you, loving you, is on your side, and it was your alignment with EGO that was hurting you.... you are correctly RECOGNIZING the ego‘s illusory conclusions for what they are. You recognize the truth as TRUE, and you recognize the false as FALSE.

This makes it really OBVIOUS to you that you have no need for the defense whatsoever, and that KEEPING it would only mean that you are continuing to believe the truth is attacking you. You recognize how pointless that is, how meaningless and useless, and so you no longer have a NEED or a PURPOSE for the sickness. The sickness itself then will simply be DROPPED by you, you will stop USING it, you will stop attacking yourself with it, you will recognize it is futile and absolutely not working, is only making things worse for you, and that you have no further use for it.

You will also recognize that the ONLY reason it is there, the only CAUSE of it, IS YOU! It is only there because you WANT it to be, you put it there, you made it, it HAS no other cause keeping it in place, and if you do not WANT it, IT CANNOT STAY. Once you do this, you are withdrawing your belief from it, and IT WILL DISAPPEAR!!!!!! "Illusions recognized must disappear." It disappears because you SEE THROUGH the illusion, you no longer believe there is truth in the sickness, you recognize it was never real, you don’t believe in it, you know you made it up and it is a fantasy, and then it is EFFORTLESS to let it go. Recognizing it is ALREADY GONE, and WAS NEVER REALLY THERE, makes it vanish!!! Belief that God is truth, puts truth where it belongs and vanishes untruth. Belief that ego is truth, puts truth where it doesn’t belong and turns sickness and death into reality.

The sickness was ONLY there because your mind was maintaining it and thinking it needed it. That’s the ONLY cause of any sickness ever. It’s not caused by the environment or the body or other people or food or liquids or events or objects or anything outside of your mind whatsoever. It is cause solely by YOUR misperception of the truth through the ego. And since you MADE the sickness, you therefore can UNMAKE IT. "You made sickness and death and therefore can ABOLISH both". Jesus is absolutely 100% literally meaning that..... there is no sickness that will not disappear INSTANTLY if you no longer have a purpose for it and do not believe in it as being the truth.

This is also why a broken body proves the mind CANNOT be healed. And this is also why, when a healed body shows up, IT IS PROOF that the mind HAS been healed. Sickness, if it’s showing up In the body, always confirms that the mind MUST be believing it needs a defense against truth. And that means it is NOT in acceptance of the atonement. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for the mind to accept the atonement and for the body to remain sick. The body HAS TO show up as healed, because the mind no longer has the guilt in it that the sickness was MADE OF. It also no longer has defenses against the truth, so simply those "defenses", which project as PHYSICAL DEFENSES, are GONE from the mind and therefore from the body also.

When you stop using the body for attack and stop believing in sin and stop misperceiving truth, the body BECOMES INVULNERABLE, because the mind no longer believes in attack or defense. IT needs no defense. Therefore it does not MAKE or support any, and so they do not show up. Recognize the mind is re-projecting an entirely fresh IMAGE of a body every instant. The "past body" has not properties of its own or ability to keep sickness in place. It has no will or power or conitnuity whatsoever. If the mind accepts the truth, it WILL project instantly a healed body which is not only "holy" it CANNOT BE SICK, and IT CANNOT DIE.

There IS absolutely a direct correlation between the mind’s belief and how the body appears. And there is no other cause for how the body appears. Healed mind, healed body. Sick mind, sick body. Cause and effect. Absolute mind over matter. You cannot be at peace and be sick. You cannot be at peace and die. Death is the opposite of a belief in God. There is no form of sickness that cannot be reversed if the mind accepts the truth and becomes clear about what is true and what is false.

We are supposed to not only demonstrate that there is NO CAUSE outside of us that justifies keeping the body in sickness or damaged or broken, that our brother HAS NOT attacked us, that we CANNOT be hurt, that we are NOT at the effect of the world, that MIND has power over the body (which every miracle demonstrates), and that the Son of God CANNOT BE KILLED. And we are supposed to demonstrate that IN THE FLESH. To use the body as a symbol of IMMORTALITY. For as long as it is useful to do so. Then we lay it aside by making it disappear entirely.

The body itself was a form of sickness. It was made from a belief in sin. "The body is the belief in sin made flesh and projected outwards." When we finally let go of ALL needs to defend against God, we will DISAPPEAR THE BODY - it will vanish, and then we will be entirely Spirit-identified.

The secret to salvation is.... you are doing this all to yourself. So if you don’t like what shit you made for yourself, STOP MAKING IT.

This is why you have to be 100% responsible for every single thing you experience and put in place. YOU HAVE THE POWER TO REVERSE DEATH AND TO MAKE DEATH IMPOSSIBLE. No-one needs to find a way to tolerate sickness, to put up with it, to suffer justifiably, to make do, to live in pain and fear, to suffer, or to die. No-one is supposed to be DYING ever! Use the body with love and, while it shows up, it cannot die. It will become a sign of immortality.

YOU HAVE TO GIVE LOVE FIRST TO RECEIVE LOVE

Love is in you, it is you, it is God given. God put love and light and power into you. You did not put it there and cannot produce it on your own. But if you believe love is not in you, you are unlovable, unworthy, are denying your real self, etc, love will be blocked. Love does not enter where it is not welcome.

Believing the love is not in you, you will see yourself as lacking love, and "in need". You will believe the love is separate from you and external to you. So you will go seeking for it. You will try to GET IT from anywhere other than inside yourself. That is, you'll try to acquire it, without undoing your belief that you don't have it.

The problem is even IF people give it, you will not allow yourself to truly receive it. Openness to receiving love requires that you NOT believe you're lacking it, and requires to TO believe that love IS IN YOU ALREADY.

It's not that you need to find a way to get the love you are lacking, it's that you need to learn that unless you GIVE or EXTEND it, you WILL NOT receive it. And this also means, no-one else can give you the love that you are unwilling to give yourself or to others.

If you fail to give love to others, ie you deny them love, what happens is you deny yourself love. In other words, if you find that you cannot love or aren't willing to, your "unloving attitude" towards others will also be experienced by yourself. You will find yourself lacking and needy and dependent on external sources.

How love really works, is that it must extend. It must be given. In order to have the love, you have to give the love. In order to receive the love, you must express the love. You must flow it, extend it. It's given to you BY GOD, and your natural function (when sane) is to extend it or "pass it on" to everyone else (and God).

When you do that, you acknowledge the love is in you, it's already being supplied to you, you are NOT lacking it, and therefore you HAVE it to give. If you feel like you're lacking it, you will also feel like you cannot give any more. The remedy for that is not to try to get more love from others, but to become more willing TO love. To give more love.

When you give more love, YOUR lack is supplied from within, and by giving your love away to others you RECEIVE it from God. This is the only way it works. This is how you love naturally. And that also means you MUST acknowledge that God loves you in order for you to be willing and able to love yourself and others. If you can't acknowledge God as the source of ALL love, it is impossible to experience real love at all. Sorry atheists but if you deny God you deny love.

Unless you are choosing to express love, you will not receive it. What applies to you applies to others. This is the Golden Rule in action. Love others to love yourself. If you unlove them you will unlove yourself. If you attack them you will attack yourself. If you are unforgiving in your attitude towards them you will find yourself guilty. If you love them you will love yourself. It's a rule of equality.

This also does not mean sacrifice. By giving love, you should not aim to only cause others to receive love, and omit yourself from receiving it. That too is egocentric. It's a form of sacrifice in which you believe others deserve love and you do not, so you try to give love but only in a way or form that ensures you do not receive or experience it yourself. You "burn out" that way because you are not getting fresh love input from God. You're trying to give yourself away and actually get rid of yourself. It's suicidal.

People who SEEM very giving and selfless can be the most denying of self love and unwilling to receive. This is the ego's illusion of love. Appearing to be loving or sacrificial in an attempt to look loving, when in fact all you're doing is creating a hole in yourself and denying yourself what little you have. This happens when you try to be the SOURCE of love, as an ego, rather than getting the love from God. Sacrificial selflessness is NOT unconditionally loving.

Similarly, if you are afraid, it is because you are failing to love. You are not fulfilling your function of extending God's being. Fear is what you experience as the absence of love. All suffering comes from that sense of lack or denial. You'll think, you are too afraid to love, you have nothing to give, you are empty, and this is terrifying you because you have no strength, nothing to stand up to others with, people are walking all over you and you have no confidence.

But what happens is, surprisingly, if you can will yourself to love, to express and extend genuine love, unconditional love, it immediately dissolves that fear. It gives you strength, it empowers you, it sets you up in the correct arrangement of being an extender of God's power in which He takes care of you, it protects you, it makes you sane, and it shines away all darkness. The ONLY way to make that happen is to extend love.

By giving it, even if you don't THINK you have it TO give, you INCREASE how much you HAVE and find yourself in a better position. It seems counterintuitive because you think you can only give what you seem to have already. But if you give and extend willingly, it simultaneously instantly increases your supply. You can ride that wave and become much "higher" on that love. But you must initiate the giving of the love in order to break out of the sense of lacking it. As soon as you get into the flowing of it, your situation improves.

To love everyone equally and fully is the goal. EVERYONE. And that means no exceptions. And that is not easy for us ego people. People who are conditional in their love. Who don't want to love everyone. And who find some people to be sinful. This also indicates that you are unwilling to love because you are unwilling to love yourself. If you reach the limits of how much you can love someone and you feel like you just can't love them anymore, or enough, it's because you do not love yourself. You are blocking love from being received because you don't think you deserve or want it. And that makes it impossible to give it.

Yet you have to move past those blocks, those beliefs in negativity towards yourself, so that you can come to recognize that you DESERVE God's love. And this is what forgiveness and the atonement are around. Learning to recognize the truth about you, that you never sinned and all is forgiven, such that you utterly deserve God's total undivided love forever. Accepting that you are innocent and there is no reason NOT to love yourself. Or others.

You can only give the love you have received. You can only give the miracles you have received. But once you receive it and accept it as true of you, you accept it as true of others, and become willing to love BOTH you and others all the more. Which also means willing to give miracles to others. That's the path towards enlightenment. Towards the recognition that there is only love. And that nothing else exists to block it. Nor would you want to. In your right mind, there is no reason to do anything other than love fully and maximally. All expressions of true love are maximal.

Give to receive. Give first, receive next. If you receive first before giving, that is conditional and blocks the receiving, leaving you empty handed, especially if you fail to get it from someone. You must "give away" the love that you want to keep, then it will increase, and you will not lose it. This breaks all the ego's laws of lack. Ideas are increased by being given away. Miracles benefit both the giver and the receiver. If you want more love, love more. Find out the barriers you've placed against love and remove them. Become willing to love everyone, all the time, without exception. Then you're ready for God.

When everyone is willing to extend God's love, they share in that love together, but you don't give love due to other people lacking it, nor do you seek for people to love you on the basis that you lack the love yourself. Imagine if everyone already is full of love and everyone is extending love to everyone. The extension isn't done at this point in order to uplift those who are lacking (which is what miracles are for) but simply as a communication, an expression, a natural way of existing. You love the love that is already in everyone, not because it's not there, but because you acknowledge everyone is already love. Love then moves beyond its healing function and become simply a way of relating forever.

It is not your task to necessarily learn to "love more", however, because God has already in fact created you WITH love and AS love. Extending love is totally natural to you as a son of God and you are unlimited in your ability to do so. The only issue are your blocks to the awareness of love, your denial, which stops you from receiving unlimited love and stops you from expressing it. You should not be trying to KEEP your blocks and INCREASE the love. That will not really work. Keeping blocks while "trying to love more" will reach a limit fast. Instead, your job is to seek out the blocks you've made AGAINST love, remove them, and then love NATURALLY will flow at an increased rate. Effortlessly.

Because the fact is, if you didn't have insanity or blocks or denials, love would NATURALLY go out on its own because of what it is. "Love goes out because of what it is, but you are needed that it can begin." If you don't interfere with it, love maximally extends through you all the time and its so natural and joyful that it's all you want to do. But when you erect barriers against it, in preventing yourself from being loved by God, you block the receipt, and try to cut off your mind from spirit. That SEEMS to reduce the love. It doesn't reduce love at its SOURCE (God), it only reduces your willingness to RECEIVE and flow it.

That's similar to the idea that you have a pipe, and God is flowing maximum love through the pipe, through you, and your tap is fully switched on so that the love just flows right through you and on to others (extension of creation). But when you turn the tap OFF, you reduce the flow to a trickle. Not because the source is limited but because YOU are limiting it. All you have to do is OPEN UP the flow and let love in and through you and be willing to love. Because actually it takes effort to not love. It takes effort to be unwilling. To resist. To deny. It takes deliberate belief and energy to PREVENT love. So when you stop all that effort (ego doing), you open up and the love just flows full-force on its own and it is effortless and very natural.

Be a channel for God, basically. Let him move through you. Let the Holy Spirit perform miracles through you. "What the holy spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world" "Do his works". Obviously you cannot do his works on your own, you do his works by working with him to extend HIS healing power THROUGH you TO others. Which means cooperating in not resisting, not getting in the way of, not putting up blocks against, His power through you. This is a miracle working principle. This doesn't mean you become uninvolved and "sit on the sidelines" in your ego. It means you become an EXTENDER OF LOVE, a relay, a device which forwards the love through WILL, and in that you and the Holy Spirit team up and you become part of the machinery of miracle working. You MUST ACTIVELY EXPRESS LOVE YOURSELF in order to perform miracles, but you get that love from God.

You're basically learning to plug yourself back into God. Plug yourself into love. Allow yourself to depend on God as the SOURCE of everything you are and have. By being willing to extend what you are given (your inheritance) to others, to share it equally with everyone. This entails learning to TRUST the Holy Spirit, learning to DEPEND on God, learning to make decisions WITH him (not just him, and not just you). Letting go and letting God. And fulfilling your function as spirit. "The only function of spirit is to extend God's being." Then you are being your natural self. You're being as God created you. And God created you to be an extender and expresser of miraculous powerful unconditional love all the time.

A major theme in ACIM is that you are supposed to come out of the PAST into the PRESENT. Basically it's saying that in the separation from God, we made time, by inventing a sense of the past being different to what is here now. Or as an attempt to change what is here now into something it is not, resulting in a different future. Time was an attempt to destroy or deny what exists, by claiming that it has changed, being no longer like it was.

In doing this we kind of avoided the eternal always now of the present in ETERNITY, which is timeless. And instead we positioned ourselves separate and distanced from that sense of now-ness, inventing the past and the future which are both avoidances of the now. The past is also the idea of sin, suggesting that your past sin caused a guilty present and will be punished in the future, as a kind of chain of cause and effect.

So we literally invented time displacement, which is also distance, and is thus also space. We invented spacetime, a belief in not being now or of being distanced from what is. The "now" moment in time, while still being IN time, is actually symbolic of eternity. It is the holy instant. It is not eternity but it is very close to it because it centers time on a rejection of "past and future", and therefore invites the end of time.

In ACIM therefore we are literally being asked to bring about the END OF TIME AND SPACE, by moving out of the past and future into the present. Because it's only in the present that you can be forgiving, and have vision, and be healed. Love is present, God is present.

We are told that "I see only the past", and to then gradually learn to come out of the past into the present so that "I see only the present." To see relationships in terms of what your brother is NOW without his past, which is forgiveness, laying the basis for holy-relating.

This is rather similar to the "Power of Now" that Eckhart Tolle has touted. ACIM is actually asking us to stop believing in the past and the future and to become very focused and centered in the present, so that we can align our mind with the eternal now. Heaven is always in a state of "now is always and forever", unchanging and never moving away from what is here now - never avoiding God.

Avoiding the present is the avoidance of God. Which is why the ego is dedicated to the past, and to maintaining time - or a gap between what is and where you are. We are literally being asked to come out of time, out of the sense of history or future, and into a pristine, clean, "new", fresh look at what is here NOW, so that we can truly see what is here now, which allows us to see the real world, and thereby forgive the world.

All condemnation of sin is always about the past. All projections of guilt and blame are based on past doings. Even in the moment that someone sins, it is already old. Holding it against them is holding the past against them and against ourselves. PRESENCE, therefore, is a major central pillar in ACIM's teaching.

We are being asked to be fully present, fully aware, fully attentive to what is, fully wholly undivided in our dedication to the immediacy of reality. This leads to holy instants, to the real world, and lays the path back to heaven. By coming out of the past and future we literally are undoing the gap of separation, and are therefore collapsing both time and space.

The present is the key to the disappearing of spacetime and everything it. And it is the doorway to resurrection and to miracles. It is in the PRESENT that we become a "born again Christ-ian."

"To be born again is to let the PAST go, and LOOK WITHOUT CONDEMNATION UPON THE PRESENT. For the cloud which obscures God's Son to you IS the past, and if you would have it past AND GONE, you must NOT SEE IT NOW."

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

"The miracle enables you to see your brother WITHOUT his past, and so perceive him as born again. His errors ARE all past, and by perceiving him WITHOUT them, you are RELEASING him. And since his past is yours, you SHARE in this release."

"His past has NO reality in the present, and you CANNOT see it."

"Your past was made in anger, and if you use it to ATTACK the present you will NOT SEE the freedom that the present holds."

"Look lovingly upon the present, for it holds the ONLY things that are forever true."

"The present is before time WAS, and WILL BE when time is no more. In it is everything that is eternal, and they ARE one."

"The ego invests heavily in the past, and in the end, believes that the past is the ONLY aspect of time that is meaningful. You will remember that we said its emphasis on guilt enables it to ensure its continuity, by MAKING THE FUTURE LIKE THE PAST, and thus AVOIDING the present."

"For the ego uses the present ONLY as a brief transition TO the future, in which it brings the past TO the future, BY INTERPRETING THE PRESENT IN PAST TERMS."

"NOW has no meaning to the ego. The present merely reminds it of PAST hurts, and it reacts to the present AS IF it were past."

"The ego teaches that you always encounter your PAST, and because your dreams WERE not holy, the future CANNOT be, and the present is without meaning."

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

"For healing CANNOT be accomplished in the past, and MUST be accomplished in the present to RELEASE the future. THIS interpretation ties the future to the present, and EXTENDS THE PRESENT, rather than the past. But if you interpret your function as DESTRUCTION, you will lose sight of the present, and hold on to the past TO ENSURE A DESTRUCTIVE FUTURE."

"Who can grieve or suffer, when the present has been freed, extending its security and peace into a quiet future filled with hope?"

"Father, we were mistaken in the past, and choose to use the present to be free. Now do we leave the future in Your hands, leaving behind our past mistakes, and sure that You will keep Your present Promises, and guide the future in their holy light."

"There is a real world which the present holds safe from all past mistakes." "The Holy Spirit teaches thus: There IS no hell. Hell is only what the ego has made OF THE PRESENT."

"Fear is NOT of the present, but ONLY of the past and future, which do not exist."

"The choice is not whether to see the past or the present: it is merely whether to see or not."

"For the present IS forgiveness."

"The special relationship TAKES VENGEANCE ON THE PAST. By seeking to remove suffering IN THE PAST, it OVERLOOKS the present, in its preoccupation with the past, and its TOTAL COMMITMENT to it. NO SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP IS EXPERIENCED IN THE PRESENT."

"Your mind cannot grasp the present, which is the only time there is. It therefore cannot understand time, and cannot, in fact, understand anything." "Sometimes the past seems real, as if it WERE the present. Voices FROM the past are heard, and then are doubted."

"The aim of prayer is to release the present from its chains of past illusions; to let it be a freely chosen remedy from every choice that stood for a mistake."

"Your learning gives the present NO MEANING AT ALL. Nothing you have ever learned can help you understand the present, or teach you how to undo the past. Your past IS what you have taught yourselves."

"The present now remains the only time."

"A miracle is a beginning and an end(ing). It thus abolishes time. It is always an affirmation of re-birth, which seems to go back, but really goes forward. It undoes the past in the present, and thus releases the future."

"We look neither ahead nor backwards. We look straight into the present. And we give our trust to the experience we ask for now."

"What time but now can truth be recognized? The present is the only time there is."

"The making of time, to TAKE THE PLACE of timelessness, lay in the decision to BE NOT as you WERE. Thus, truth was made past, and the present was dedicated to illusion. And the past, too, was changed, and INTERPOSED between what ALWAYS was, and NOW. The past that YOU remember NEVER was, and represents only denial of what ALWAYS was."

"the Son of God is risen from the past, and has awakened to the present. Now is he free, unlimited in his communion with all that is within him."

"In the holy instant, you see, in each relationship, what it WILL be, when you perceive ONLY the present."

"He is as safe in the present as he was before illusions were accepted into his mind, and as he will be when he has let them go."

"The real world signifies the end of time, for its perception makes time purposeless."

"Today the light has come. And you will see the world that has been promised you since time began, and in which is the end of time ensured."

"So do the parts of God's Son gradually join in time, and with each joining is the end of time brought nearer. Each miracle of joining is a mighty herald of eternity."

"Everyone seen WITHOUT the past thus brings you nearer to the end of time, by bringing healed and healing sight into the darkness, and ENABLING THE WORLD TO SEE."

"And it is given you to be the means

Through which His Voice is heard around the world

To close all things of time, to end the sight

Of all things visible; and to undo

All things that change. Through you is ushered in

A world unseen, unheard, yet truly there."

"I do not know what anything, INCLUDING THIS, means. And so I do NOT know HOW TO RESPOND TO IT. And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now."

I wasn't intending for this post to be elaborate but I LOVE how this analogy unfolded to explain the body, sickness, death, miracles, and awakening.....I think that I might even write a whole book based on this analogy alone, it's so clear and exact.... Thanks to Holy Spirit for the nudges and corrections.

...

Computers are strangely similar in their following of rules as we are in our responsibility for choice. And similarly, our bodies do exactly what we tell them to and nothing else.

A computer doesn't do anything whatsoever without a decision being made. When a decision is made, when the computer is told what you want, it produces exactly that result. The language used to tell it what to do is absolutely specific. And it only produces the exact result that was asked for. It is almost annoyingly specific in its requirement for precise instruction.

The computer doesn't really decide on its own to do anything else. It is very true to the programmer's instructions. If it seems to be doing something else, some illusion of a higher-level functioning has arisen. It's really still just processing binary data, 1's and 0s', yet produces what looks to be much more sophisticated results. Images on a screen, objects moving around, sounds happening, it's all an ILLUSION.

When the computer seems to do something it was not supposed to do, this is actually impossible. If there is a bug in the software, the computer still does what the bug tells it to do. It doesn't decide not to do bugs, and it doesn't decide to do bugs on its own. It faithfully follows instructions. That's all it can do. It has no real intelligence. It is just a machine. You get out what you put in.

The body is similar in that it is your faithful machine, and it literally only does what your mind tells it to do. It does not have a will of its own. It does not invent bugs on its own. It doesn't malfunction on its own. It only follows the program that is given to it. It is always 100% correct in carrying out orders. It does not complain or have an opinion or make judgement about rightness or wrongness of the program. It just EXECUTES.

It is a device, that you use for various purposes. Some of those purposes are malicious and as a result, they lead to the body seeming to produce malicious states of being. But regardless of these states looking like a high-level sophisticated problem, it is still just the body following orders. In this way, the body (like a computer) is completely neutral. It is your servant and you are the one operating it.

This is also exactly the same as the fact that, as Jesus tells us in the Course, you always get exactly what you ask for, you only ever get what you ask for, and you never get anything that you do not ask for. Therefore what you get and what happens is 100% your responsibility. If the body seems to go wrong or do bad things, it is because the programmer told it to.

Just as it is the responsibility of a computer programmer to give it the exact-right specific instructions for behavior, so too do you give your body exact instructions for behavior. This is why as Jesus says, if the body is exhibiting signs of sickness or disease, it must mean that the mind has given it a program where you've asked it to be sick and diseased. It is just following your request, to the letter. A sick body is a sign of a sick mind, because the programmer of the body has to be sick in order for sickness to show in the body.

This also shows us the way out of the illusion of stuff happening that allegedly shouldn't be happening. There is not ANYTHING happening in the entire world that has not been asked for by a mind. There is nothing happening in your body that you have not asked for in your mind. You put it there yourself through your instructions - your creative power and freedom. And you have received exactly what you asked for. It is a TOTALLY reliable system.

"Ask and you shall recieve" does not mean that sometimes you ask and sometimes you receive, it means you are always asking and you are always receiving and it is not even possible to not receive what you've asked for. There also therefore is never a situation where you might not receive what you've asked for, where you are in doubt, or thinking that you have asked the wrong question or don't know how to ask etc. You ask nevertheless, and everything you are experiencing right this very second, you have asked for. You can't blame the RESULTS for being something you do not want. YOU need to find out how and why you are programming the system to produce an output of suffering.

If stuff seems to be happening in the body which you don't prefer, you cannot blame the body for it, and you cannot look to outside causes to find out where the symptoms came from. There is only one program and you wrote it. Symptoms are just correct outputs, based on the program you have given the body and the request you have made.

Sickness is a correct output! Death is a correct output! If you ask for it, you shall receive it. If you say, body, you will die, it will die. If you say body you will live, it will live. This is why the illusion of things being right or wrong is 100% bullshit delusion, because there is nothing BROKEN about this system. You are giving it instructions unconsciously to produce HELL, and if that's not what you want, you need to program something else.

As explained in the Song of Prayer, you are constantly praying, constantly asking, and constantly receiving what you are asking for. Therefore, learn to pray a higher prayer. Prayer is PROGRAMMING! As Jesus says, prayer is the medium of miracles, because prayer is the act of CHANGING THE SOFTWARE! This also means that in the prayer you do not beg or request or have fear about what you are asking, you CHOOSE the results you would receive with total certainty that the system MUST produce what you have requested, and therefore you believe 100% that you MUST receive it, and YOU SHALL RECEIVE THE MIRACLE!

This also explains why really nothing has gone wrong and nothing is really happening at all. If the computer is just faithfully doing what you TOLD IT TO, nothing has gone wrong, even if what you told it to do (express a world of separation) was a pretty wacky idea for a program. This also shows why you have not gone off the path, plus there is no reason to be afraid that you cannot get back Home, because it is ALWAYS true that you are receiving what you're asking for and you can always choose again. Therefore, by choosing God's "program", you need not produce programs of suffering and death. NOTHING CAN STOP YOU FROM CHOOSING NOT TO PROGRAM DEATH! All death is a choice. All death is suicide.

This is why there is never anything out of place, there are no accidents, nobody dies without their own consent, and nothing happens without you making it happen. You are causal. You cause things. You produce. You direct. It is all extremely specific, 100% specific. Every single thing that seems to happen in illusions is put there on purpose. There are absolutely no victims whatsoever. Every notion of victimization, accidents, right/wrong, good/bad, should have happened or not, things unwanted, events you resist, etc.. it's all an effort by an unconscious programmer to fix the program by fighting with the output, instead of changing the program!

You have dominion over the body and over the Earth. You have power over all sickness and death because you MADE THEM with your programming, and you can UNMAKE them just as easily. If stuff is happening which, when you look at the results, you do not want, then you need to change your programming. You need to erase the instructions that you keep giving (false beliefs, delusions, ego), and replace it with a higher, more orderly program (Holy Spirit's mind, right-mindedness, sanity, truth).

Your body does not have bugs. Your programming of the body has bugs. Your life does not have bugs. Your programming of your life has bugs. You need to go fix your errors, your mistakes in thinking, which are producing exactly the correct output given the input. If you don't like the output, change the input, don't fight with the output like some victim that has no power to choose again.

You cannot keep looking at the output and saying, this output is not supposed to be happening, this output is wrong, this output is not what I asked for. That's a victim, which is a mind who has forgotten that they are the instructor and the INPUT to the system, and they are the ones who are causing the OUTPUT from the system, but they've forgotten that they're doing this. It's like they fed in a program (the script), walked away from the control system/terminal, and looked at the screen to see what results were coming out, saw something crazy coming out, and then having forgotten that they ASKED FOR IT, start freaking out and blaming the problem on 50 billion other reasons why the output is wrong.

The output is ALWAYS CORRECT based on the input, even if its an output of death. So who is really RESPONSIBLE for writing dodgy programs?! You are.

What you put in, you get out. If your mind is feeding input to your body and your life with unloving, unforgiving intentions, then you are going to be writing scripts which are filled with chosen suffering. You're going to be writing scripts, programs, which contain outputs that are unpleasant. You're going to even write scripts which create illusions that you're not the script-writer and that you did not ask for the output. You can even produce outputs which disguise the fact that there was ever a programmer!

So once you start getting SHIT come out of your printer, you probably can tell that shit was fed INTO the printer and you need to correct that. It's not the printer's fault. It's not the body-computer's fault. It's not other people's fault or life's fault or the environments fault or food's fault or anything's fault.

This is just a simple cause-and-effect system. It functions like a computer. There are decisions being made, there are inputs being given to the system, and it is producing exactly the output that was requested. There is not even a single interference with that. There is no corruption on the disk drive, there are no viruses infecting things, it's all running perfectly. EVERY prayer is being answered. EVERY request is being granted. You just keep making stupid-ass requests!

This is why if you really want to change the output, i.e. change the world or the body or any other effects, the ONLY real way to do that is to get back to the mind - to the programmer, get the programmer's mind corrected so they're not writing ridiculous programs, and then feed a new program into the system. A more truthful, orderly program. And this MUST (not sometimes, not maybe, but MUST) produce a corrected OUTPUT in the form of the "symptoms" or "effects" seen as the body. Remember Jesus's principle, "If miracles are not happening, something has gone wrong" - meaning, there is NEVER a wrong output given the input, so if you are not seeing a miracle, YOU CORRECTLY ASKED FOR SOMETHING OTHER THAN WHAT YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE ASKING FOR! And you WILL receive it.

Even in the bible it says that if you ask, and believe that you have received it, you will receive it. This suggests it's possible to not receive if you do not believe enough, which is not true. The correction for this is to realize, YOU MUST and ARE receiving exactly what you actually are asking for, so if it "looks like" you are not receiving what you want, you MUST be the one who is out of touch with what you want, and you're asking for stuff unconsciously that your conscious mind is in denial of.

Attempting to mess with what output you got, or what your body state is, or what your life looks like, from the end of the system that is the output of instructions, you are hitting your head against a wall and are attempting to perform magic. Magic means that you are believing that the output came from a non-obvious source, that the system is broken, and that you need to "patch it up" with some kind of bypass that messes with the output and mangles it to make it look like what you thought should have come out. That, however, does not fix the faulty PROGRAM, or the programmer that's nuts who is writing the faulty program, and so it will likely still keep producing the same output eventually. You can actually remove the effects of "sin" but if the person continues to "sin", i.e. write programs of separation, they will keep reproducing the same effects and symptoms.

A miracle, is simply the mind choosing to cause a different output. Writing a different program. Fixing bugs in its own software. When these changes show up in the output, it's amazing, like someone just rewrote all the rules, all of the old rules were broken, and the design of the whole system has been overridden. We call this miraculous. Some "super-natural" power from outside of the entire "matrix" of the system has just flipped some switches and changed the INPUT, and therefor the output has to fall into line.

Another way this can show up as miracles is that the programmer of the system can decide to rearrange space or time, can insert and remove objects from the scenery, can manipulate any piece of 'data' in the system, can modify absolutely anything in the system, and can convert anything into anything else. These are the powers that Jesus has demonstrated through miracles. He got in touch with the programmer's chair, sat down and started rewriting the programs. Everyone has the freedom to do this, we just have to get back into the chair and write programs from love!

We are not getting anything out of this system that wasn't put in, or that wasn't asked for. The computer is not broken. The hardware is not broken. We have a software problem. We keep writing faulty software. Software is PERCEPTION. The content of spacetime is DATA. Software operates on the data. True perception means seeing the program clearly and being able to do anything to modify it at will, producing different data - a different output.

We need, therefore, to tap into the assistance of a superior software writer, aka Holy Spirit, Jesus, God, who are capable of not only writing or changing portions of our program for us (collapsing time, rearranging space, etc), but can also guide and assist us with "correction" of our programming expressions. Thus we gradually can write a happier dream, leading up to a final climax.

The ultimate release from this whole CLOSED SYSTEM (it's closed because it's all happening inside of God and there are no hidden rules or secret wills and everything is very exact), is when you decide to ERASE ALL PROGRAMS. A complete reboot. A total fresh start. A renewing of everything. Not just a correction of all software bugs, but a complete realignment of the state of the system with God's truth. When this happens, basically the hard drive (body) is erased, the memory (ego) is erased, and all that is left is the hardware.

Then, the only thing running is the operating system - GOD, who has programmed Christ - the perfect program, to produce the perfect output - Heaven.

Ok. Let's take a fresh look at miracles.

Your task is to correct your perception, but this does not take place in isolation. What applies to you, applies to others. The Golden Rule is always in effect.

If you extend love to others and be loving toward them, you will open yourself to receive love and share in love. If you do not extend love to others, you will shut down your extension and block your own receipt of love. You will either love yourself AND your brothers equally, OR you will hate both of you. This is inescapable law with no exceptions.

Your task isn't just to fix yourself. Your task is to REJOIN in Holy Relationship with your brothers and to HEAL BOTH OF YOU, by allowing the love in you to go out to them. Your task is to repair your connection with them and restore communication of love and sharing. You have to learn to love other people so that you will also be loved. And that is an outward expression or extension. It's reaching out with love and embracing others "as yourself".

The Holy Spirit is a gift from God. The Holy Spirit provides accurate perception of the "real world", forgiven and innocent. He is in you and in your brother, regardless of whether your brother is aware of this. In order for you to see your brother correctly with love, you have to look WITH the Holy Spirit. You will see the Holy Spirit IN your brother when you are looking at Him WITH the Holy Spirit in you fully.

Now, you of yourself cannot perform miracles or heal anyone. The light in you is healing, but you did not put the light there. God did. The love that is in you, which extends through you to others, is God's love. You can share in it, but not take possession of it. If you control it or block it or stand in its way, you hurt yourself and others. When you allow it to extend, IT provides healing. "Miracles are the Holy Spirit's gifts."

The Holy Spirit, being the idea of healing, isn't merely a static state of mind. It is a mind of love. It extends, and it HEALS. It can correct perception, dissolve error, shine away darkness, reverse sickness and death, and provide LIFE where it was lacking. When you become a "window" for the Holy Spirit to move THROUGH, this healing POWER goes out to the mind of another and heals them miraculously, which also restores health.

If your brother is lacking in some way, and calling for love, they have blocked their own ability to heal themselves. The light IN you is the same as the light IN them, being of God. This light is capable of healing them if you SUPPLY IT. The Holy Spirit is capable of SUPPLYING LIFE to others through you. You GIVE the Holy Spirit TO your brother, and HE supplies what is lacking, and they are healed. This is how miracles are performed. Miracle working is always about sharing love with others AND with yourself.

Miracles are given by those who temporarily have more, for those who temporarily have less. That means if your brother is weak and you are strong, or he is deluded and you are more sane, the Holy Spirit in you shines on him and brings him up to your level. This is also why Jesus says "forgiveness is not complete unless both of you have been corrected" (paraphrase).

Miracles are not something that you do in isolation. Nor are miracles "just for you", like where your own perception undergoes a shift. They are a means of repairing and restoring your Holy Relationship with others. They undo the separation that keeps you and others apart. They benefit BOTH OF YOU. This is why they are a maximal service you can render another. "I am not healed alone".

Miracles are ENTIRELY about what you SHARE WITH other people. The amount of love you are willing to see in others, also establishes the amount of love you will see in yourself. When you "shine" toward others, heartfelt, loving past their body, and recognizing the holiness in them, you are extending love and "connecting" your mind to theirs. Minds can only be joined in love. When minds connect, separation is erased, illusions vanish, and there is healing. The power of love from the Holy Spirit moves THROUGH you and actively HEALS you AND the other.

Recently when I have been attempting to pray for someone "in isolation", and would ask that God heal them or a certain part of the body etc, I would keep experiencing healing in my own self. I kept thinking this was some crazy mistake, that I wasn't asking correctly or focusing my mind properly. But truth is, miracles heal BOTH you and others equally. So if you are to be a miracle worker, you better be ready to start getting healed.

This is also why you can only give the miracles you have received, which means you are only WILLING to see a certain degree of love in others, corresponding to how much you are wiling to see in yourself. To love others more you MUST love yourself more, which is why you are supposed to accept the atonement for YOURSELF, SO THAT you can GIVE the miracles (perceptual blessings, mind healing) you have received from that acceptance/receiving of truth/love.

"Miracles make minds one in God." "Miracles unite you with your brother". "Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad." All of these speak to miracle working by erasing the separation BETWEEN you and OTHERS. Separation is double-sided, it applies to you AND others. Healing therefore heals BOTH of you. *ALL MIRACLES* unite you with your brother, therefore ALL miracles are devices for undoing the separation BETWEEN YOU and healing your relationship/communion. They are applied to BOTH of you.

Now, the Holy Spirit is the only "cause" of miracles, although Jesus is also involved "miracles are corrections introduced into false thinking by ME". He and HS are One. But what makes YOU one of "God's miracle workers", is your willingness to ALLOW God's healing to be in you and through you. "Love goes out because of what it is, but you are needed that it can begin." Meaning you have to learn to allow love to shine onto your brothers, through you, in order to stop blocking love's extension. Your willingness, which makes you a co-creator, allows you to "do His works".

What about miracles such as moving mountains? The Holy Spirit can do that. You, if you are willing enough "do not limit what I can do through you or you will limit what I can do FOR you", He CAN do extraordinary things. You "work" the miracle by allowing Him to move on God's behalf, which requires that you be a "perceiver of love" in order to make a pure enough request. Prayer is the medium of miracles and we do have to be in a "high" state of mind - a loving mind of miracle readiness - in order for miracles to be performed of this kind.

Just as it's not merely your perception of others that heals, but rather the Holy Spirit IN YOU that moves through you and heals FOR you (you are a medium, not an isolated thing), when you are perceiving correctly there is NO LIMIT to what "you and HE" can do together. It's teamwork. It requires you to have the right perceptual content - "wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles", while also being free enough of ego and fear to let love extend ITSELF. *IT* does the healing. You, plus the power of God, can bring healing to the world.

"You have been told that your function in this world is healing, and your function in Heaven is creating." --- "you share His function on Earth" ... " do His works".

So miracle working is entirely to do with upholding the Golden Rule, it applies bi-directionally to you and others at the same time, they heal both of you (unless you are already healed), and they ALWAYS involve OTHERS.

Here is a selection of pertinent quotes....

"The miracle-worker begins by PERCEIVING light, and translates HIS perception into sureness by continually extending it, and ACCEPTING ITS ACKNOWLEDGMENT. Its EFFECTS assure him IT IS THERE. The therapist does not heal; he LETS HEALING BE. HE can point to darkness, but he CANNOT bring light OF HIMSELF, for light is NOT of him. But being FOR him, it MUST be for his patient. ... The Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist. He makes healing PERFECTLY clear in ANY situation in which He is the Guide."

-&-

"The Holy Spirit CANNOT fail to undo FOR you everything you have learned" ... "The little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit for which He gives you everything."

"The Holy Spirit does NOT work by chance, and healing that is of Him ALWAYS works. And unless the healer ALWAYS heals BY Him, the results WILL vary."

"I will heal as I let Him teach me to heal" ... "He will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision if I WILL LET HIM."

-&-

"Healing ONLY STRENGTHENS."

"Miracles are ENERGIZERS."

-&-

"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. "

-&-

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world."

"Miracles violate every law of reality as this world judges it."

"Miracles are not of this world.

-&-

"The Spiritual eye is the mechanism of miracles, because what the Spiritual eye perceives IS truth"

-&-

"The Holy Spirit's temple is not a body, but a relationship."

-&-

"What you acknowledge in your brother, you ARE acknowledging in yourself. What you share you STRENGTHEN."

-&-

"Fear is a symptom of your deep sense of loss. If, when you perceive it in others, you learn to SUPPLY the loss, the basic CAUSE of fear is removed."

-&-

"The aim of the teacher is to give them more of what is temporarily his. This process has all of the miracle conditions we referred to at the beginning. The teacher (or miracle worker) gives more to those who have less, bringing them closer to equality with him, at the same time gaining for himself."

-&-

"Miracles are healing because they supply a lack; they are performed by those who temporarily have more for those who temporarily have less."

-&-

"Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love."

-&-

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service you can render to another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. You recognize your own and your neighbor's worth simultaneously."

-&-

"Miracles are natural signs of forgiveness. Through miracles you accept God's forgiveness by extending it to others."

-&-

"Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death yourself, and can therefore abolish both."

-&-

"A miracle is a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive."

-&-

"Our brothers ARE forgetful. That is why they need your remembrance of Me and Him who created Me. Through this remembrance you can change THEIR minds about themselves, as I can change YOURS. Your minds are so powerful a light that you can look into theirs and enlighten them, as I can enlighten yours."

-&-

"Would you cut a brother off from the Light that is yours? You could not do so, if you realized that YOU CAN ONLY DARKEN YOUR OWN MIND. As you bring HIM back, so will YOUR mind return. That is the law of God, for the protection of the wholeness of His Son."

-&-

"The present offers you your brothers in the light that would unite you WITH them, and free YOU from the past. Would you, then, hold the past AGAINST them?"

-&-

"And you will know you have forgiven me if you behold your brother in the light of holiness. He cannot be less holy than can I, and you can not be holier than he."

-&-

"The light of joy is so strong that it radiates throughout the Sonship and returns ... That is why the healer's prayer is, "let me know this brother as I know myself."."

-&-

"Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist IN YOU, for you have in YOURSELF, the means for removing it, and have DEMONSTRATED this by GIVING it."

-&-

"But he can let HIMSELF be healed, and thus offer the other what he has received."

-&-

"I give the miracles I have received." ... "No-one can give what he has not received. To give a thing requires first you have it in your own possession."

-&-

"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth. If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES. If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick. The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH The sick must heal THEMSELVES, for the truth is IN them. But, having OBSCURED it, the light in ANOTHER mind must shine into theirs, because that light IS theirs.

The light in them shines as brightly, REGARDLESS of the density of the fog that obscures it. If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP. Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN. To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember.

Perceive in sickness but another call for love, and offer your brother what he believes he cannot offer himself. 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. And to give a brother what he REALLY wants, is to offer it unto yourself. For your Father wills you to know your brother AS yourself. Answer HIS call for love, and YOURS is answered. Healing is the love of Christ for His Father, and for HIMSELF."

"Christ vision" ... "beholds a light beyond the body" ... "looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

Christ Vision is an all inclusive way to see. It's as if to say, you are able to see the entire picture without anything being hidden. You are able to look and recognize what is there, seeing everything as it is, without adding anything or denying anything. Nothing is blocked from view. It is perfect, accurate perception, showing you everything exactly as it is. Everything is included, and nothing is left out.

Let's say that the scene contains two rooms, connected by a door. The rooms have no windows and the door is locked. Inside each room there is a person. Neither person knows what is outside the room, because having been isolated they are unaware of the whole picture.

Now let's imagine that the scene depicts one person trying to open the door, and the person in the other room hears noises and starts freaking out. And now they wrestle with the doorhandle, from either side, in a state of fear and panic, imagining an evil enemy is trying to enter the room.

This would seem to be a valid experience for them given that their vision is blocked, they cannot see the whole picture, and they have been kept in the dark. But what if the ceiling of the rooms was suddenly lifted away, revealing the sky. And what if the floor raised up to position the two people above the walls, so that they can see each other. And what if then they look down and see they were both in the same boat, neither of them is an enemy, both are just afraid of each other, and there is no reason to be afraid any more? And then after a moment's shock, they laugh.

It was the exclusion of information from their awareness that resulted in fear and darkness. It was blocks to awareness which prevented them from recognizing that the person in the other room was their beloved brother. It was the inability to see, which resulted in hallucinations of panic and terror as if under attack by an unknown invader.

This is what happens with the body's eyes. This is what happens with body vision. Because the body's sight STOPS at the surface of objects. It shows you what seems to be there, but NOT what is also beyond it. The body's eyes cannot see past or through anything, and so cannot see the whole scene. This produces a narrower context in which everything is taken out of context. And on the basis of the illusions produced by a lack of information, they hallucinate insane conclusions.

Body sight excludes, as part of specialness and the isolation of identifying with the body. It confines, limits, narrows, restricts, blocks, denies, rejects, and does not see, aspects of the scene which NEED to be seen in order to realize things are not what they seem. That appearances are deceptive. That when you don't have the big picture in mind, illusions form, which seem to suggest things which are not true. The illusions seem true and real because the larger truth is unseen and you don't have all the facts.

So in this world, we start out in false perception (ego body perception) by regarding the world ITSELF, which is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son, as though its appearance is true and real. We fall for temptation. We believe in it, and so we see it this way. We believe physical objects really are there. We look upon bodies. We see sins occurring. We witness attack and are threatened.

This kind of perception is only happening because something has been excluded. Some information is blocked and missing. The whole scene is NOT being seen. There is something present which seems invisible, because it is being blocked out of awareness. There is something HERE, which the body is blind to. It cannot see the real world, and it cannot see Christ.

There is a "fuller" way to see, which is Christ Vision. It is aware of the whole picture. It does not arrive at false conclusions and it does not experience hallucinated beliefs that sin is happening. It sees the pictures of the forms, seeming to do what they do, but it is not deceived by them. It sees people seeming to have sick and dead bodies but it does not give them the meaning of "actually sick" or "real death". It doesn't recoil in horror at what is depicted. It has no reactions. It is not upset. The scene is not disturbing its peace.

You could say, the world you made, the physical world, which is a picture of crucifixion, is a lovely beautiful picture of crucifixion. You could say, it is like a painting, articulated beautifully be a professional artist. The brush strokes depicting the dead bodies are masterfully presented. The arrangement of the sick bodies is eloquent and delightful. Because really, seen in the proper light, this IS nothing but a PICTURE. It isn't an ACTUAL place where actual real bodies are actually suffering. It's all just an image. A flat image of a 3d world.

Christ Vision looks upon this world you made without judging it. Without being horrified by it. Without reacting to it. It does not go INTO the image, trying to "experience" what seems to be happening there. It does not IDENTIFY WITH the bodies that are depicted, or lose sight of identity as Christ. It just looks and judges not, and recognizes this FALSE picture, in which nothing is real or true, and is able to be unmoved by it. To even laugh it away.

It sees not only the writhing bodies and the suffering, it sees also the props and the costumes and the performance. Rather than buying that the "show", the pantomime, is actually a real story, it instead sees the actors, the robes, the lights, the audience, the fabricated scenery propped up by wooden beams, recognizing that this is nothing but a staged and entirely fabricated scenario. When the main character seems to die at the end, Christ Vision recognizes the death is fake. The reality of the actor is not dying. Nothing real is occurring.

It is not deceived by what is seeming to occur, because it does not see it in a way that makes it all seem like a giant cess pool of horrible vents. It does not go down into the battlefield, where walls and barriers seem to block your sight, where bodies are strewn and there are screams of suffering. It doesn't believe anything can be attacked or harmed, so it does not EXPERIENCE these things happening, even if the picture seems to show it.

On the battlefield is where the body's eyes are blinded by perceptions of forms, doing their business. There it appears, as a result of illusions, produced by a lack of perspective, that something is true which isn't really true. Where context has been lost, sight of the truth is missing, deception is happening, temptation has occurred, and things as being believed which are a mistake.

The body is noter showing you the whole picture. It claims to see the whole world, but it does not. It does not see the props back-stage. It does not see the real cause of what is happening. It does not see the mind writing the scripts. It does not see the actors electing to play roles to pretend they are suffering, victimizing or victims. It cannot see past the illusion of the end result of all the arranging of space and time as a deliberate attempt to distract, deceive and delude. It takes the final production-ready, carefully filmed movie verbatim at face value, totally deceived and totally delusional, hanging off every act as it it's happening to real people.

This is the same thing that happens when you watch a tv show or movie. If you are sane, you should recognize that there are no people on the screen, nothing is happening. Its just pixels, or projected light. There aren't any people inside the television set.

But as you watch with the body's eyes, and as you begin to "get into" or "get lost in" the show, which is a deliberately deceptive series of illusions, you lose sight of reality. Your mind literally halucinates and believes that real things are happening to real people. That you are LOOKING AT a person. You start having emotional reactions. You become angry at what's happening, then upset, then relieved. Because you are insane, lost inside a fictional story, believing it's happening to something real. Deceived by the television temptation.

A moment may come where you snap out of it and remember, you are sitting in a room just looking at the tv. Or that moment where you pull out of the movie and start looking at the audience and the surroundings. You remember where you are and what is actually happening. It's just a film. It was made to deceive. You bought into it for a while and went on a journey of suffering with it, where the whole room seemed not to exist. And while you forgot where you were, it seemed real and exciting or upsetting.

The return to sanity, the regaining of the ability to SEE what is really there, the recognition of what it IS and what it is NOT, without your delusions, without your believing that it is real, without taking it seriously, restores you to Christ Vision. This vision is forgiving. It overlooks the image. It does not BELIEVE what the image TRIES to depict. It does not fall for the temptation. It is not deceived. It recognizes the picture of the crucifixion of God's son, which is the world you made, Earth, is false. And really, it is nothing.

Having then withdrawn your false imagined meanings from it, it is now neutral. Just a picture. It doesn't mean anything. It is a meaningless world that God did not create. It is not hated. It is not attacked. It is not offensive. It is known not to be showing anything real. It is very strange, but it is not anything to be upset by. It depicts an opposite to heaven. It is an image of hell, but it is not an image of real hell. And in fact, it's a very lovely image of hell.

Seen correctly, this world of hell does not have qualities of drama. It does not have upset. It does not have guilt. The way you EXPERIENCE it is different. The way you perceive it is different. You don't have a body encounter-suit experience of it, like it's some kind of 3d virtual world, full of threats and dangers. The perception of threat is only experienced in the body's eyes as a result of believing that illusions (a lack of information) are showing you the WHOLE information.

Imagine someone in a dark maze of corridors. There is little light to see. Strange sounds come from nowhere. There are movements in the shadows. The person is screaming in fright and running for their life. They imagine there to be dark monsters lurking. Their life seems in danger. They are insane, because they have lost all sense of context, they cannot see, and they have no way to know what's really happening. They think things are what they are not, and hallucinate what they think is there.

But then suddenly the lights switch on. The whole place is illuminated. The darkness is gone. And they suddenly realize where they are. They can now recognize they were in a restaurant, it's a lovely place, with good food and pleasant decor. And the sounds in the shadows was merely the coffee dispenser. Now that they can SEE everything that is present, they laugh hilariously at having believed what seemed to be a nightmare. Now with all the information at hand, there is no call for terror or threat.

All is well. It's just a room.

The world we made, the physical universe, comprising matter and bodies and walls and blocks of sin, was made WITH the Holy Spirit as merely a harmless picture. A simple dream, an illusory world, where nothing real happens. And His influence made it not simply as a picture of hell but as a beautiful, healed, forgiven, sparkling, fresh, lovely picture, which INCLUDES both an IMAGE of THE LIGHT (symbolic reflection), and the dark. Because it is a picture of opposites. Your contribution in its making was ONLY the dark and narrow.

As if to say, the Holy Spirit supplied ALL of the paint colors, but you chose only to use the darkest ones. And you chose to only look at the darkest ones. And you wanted the darkest ones to be worshipped and emphasized, to blot out the rest. You didn't want to see the whole picture, because in the whole picture it's obvious that the dark parts are no different to the light parts. It's all just as illusion and there's nothing special about the dark colors. But you gave them extra meaning, you blew them out of proportion, and you excluded sight of the rest of the picture. And you made the body to fixate only on the darkness and not see the rest, SO THAT it would seem the world is dark.

The twisted VERSION OF, or false perception of, or exclusive ideas about, or excluding way of looking at the world, the world you made, renders it to you as hell. It causes you to misperceive it, to hallucinate and to experience it like a nightmarish hell. But this perception, these visions, this appearance, which takes on the form of error, which is physical matter being believed as real, is the result of NOT seeing everything that is present. And so it is not really seeing at all. Without seeing the light of Christ, something crucial is missing. Facts are obscure.

To move towards true perception ie christ vision, blocks to awareness have to be removed, false beliefs have to be undone, the belief in real sin has to be removed, and illusions have to be seen through. The world has to be NOT believed for how it appears in the dark, and reinterpreted and seen in the light. The temptation for vision to stop at physical matter has to be transcended. Sight has to go BEYOND the world to the light. To the big picture. Beyond bodies. Beyond surface appearances. Beyond form. Otherwise you cannot REALLY see what is here, and everything will appear to be hell.

Only by overlooking the illusory picture, can you SEE the illusory picture correctly. If vision STOPS AT the picture, it is blocked, and it will not see correctly, and will see hell. Only when vision can MOVE PAST the illusions of limitation, to move THROUGH the body, PAST the body, PAST matter, only then can it properly be IN THE LIGHT, and therefore see the whole picture as it really is. By looking beyond the physical world ("the world of bodies is the world of sin"), to INCLUDE the parts of the picture that were NOT seen in false perception, and without being deceived BY the picture, Christ Vision can recognize the picture of crucifixion as a beautiful artistic image of a fantasy world, and nothing more.

If in the picture there was a scene of utter cruelty, which was your intention in its making, it is now clear that because the cruelty is NOT REAL, it is not seen AS cruel. Love looks upon it and does not buy the temptation. It IS still a picture that contains portions which look like cruelty, with bodies suffering, but there is ALSO MORE besides this, and the MORE reveals that the cruelty is not "real cruelty". Because there isn't simply "one hellish world" here, there are two VIEWPOINTS looking at a single illusory IMAGE, and each SHOWS something different.

True perception shows the whole picture, while false perception only wants to see certain out-of-context aspects, which, taken out of context, appear to be horrors. True perception reveals that even the horrors have a touch of holiness to them, a slight sparkle, a tiny fleck of light which could not be entirely eradicated. And once this light becomes brighter, strange illusions of death begin to look like nothing more than "happy sights".

Blades of grass seem to take on a sheen as though reflecting heaven's perfection. Light begins to sparkle around the edges of objects. Hell starts to be transformed into a reflection of heaven as sights of murder are transformed into visions of harmlessness, due to the REVEALING of information previously unseen. Death is now not death, it is merely images surrounded with sparkles, and only loveliness is seen there.

To Christ Vision, a warzone does not appear in the way it would appear to a terrified soldier. The soldier is having a nightmare. Christ Vision does not see the causality in the bodies. It sees no real death. It recognizes there is simply a bunch of images of a fictional scene. And because it is free from all the baggage of ego interpretation, it isn't seeing the "real bodies" "really suffering". It sees just a transparent veil of illusions, seeming to hang in front of the face of christ. Barely there and easily dispelled. Just a light picture of death, sparkling and shining, free from sin and guilt and wholly unreal.

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant."

Christ vision is Christ, looking at Christ, overlooking that which seems to be IN BETWEEN Christ and itself. The veil of matter, the picture of hell, tries to come between Christ and itself. The veil is the gap of separation. If vision stops at the picture it does not see past it, and instead buys into the temptation that hellish things are happening. This makes the picture real. But as it looks beyond the picture, to the light of Itself, Christ Vision has forgiven the picture and does not fall for its temptations, illusions, or suggestions of what is real.

Christ Vision has to look PAST the veil, in order NOT to be deceived. If it buys into anything within the veil, and becomes distracted by it, it loses sight of the light beyond, which loses perspective, and the veil turns into hell, because light is obscure and a picture of harmlessness seems to take on nightmarish qualities. "To forgive is to OVERLOOK". It is by NOT SEEING or not going INTO or being lost in the veil of physical matter, that it is forgiven. Sight MUST see through it and past it, otherwise it is blocked BY it. Christ Vision is like x-ray vision, seeing THROUGH the forms of error (objects), seeing sense, with reason.

In this light, fixated on the light of Christ, with a vision which moves entirely past the world, this bigger context frames the picture correctly. Essentially, and ultimately, the picture is forgiven by NOT seeing it. By looking beyond it to something else. And only by looking beyond it is the mind perfectly clear about what is true and what is false. As soon as you attempt to look AT the world, which means to NOT SEE what lies beyond, temptation has set in, vision is blocked, context is lost, sanity is interrupted, sight has ended, and you will return to seeing the world of sin. And then you will see sinful bodies, which are the only kind of bodies there are.

"To see a sinless body is impossible."

"Forgiveness does not look upon bodies."

"A world forgiven cannot last."

As you see "the real world", which is the world you made without any judgement on it, you overlook it. Your dream world is seen WITH holiness and love. Holiness looks upon it and sees no sin there. Its differences and forms and appearances have so dissolved into nothing that there are no buildings, streets or bodies walking around. The WHOLE PICTURE is recognized as containing NOTHING of the illusions of hell that you made, and all its forms have vanished. The Holy Spirit has shown you that the forgiven world is UNDONE, and has no reality. All that's left are the sparkles of love that you added unto it.

To forgive it is to not see it. To forgive it is to forget it. The veil must part, to reveal the light of Christ. And when the face of Christ is seen at last, the world is FORGOTTEN. The veil is no more. This means you have not interposed ANYTHING in between Christ and Himself. When Christ is recognizing Christ, there is no world. Without a veil, without bodies, without space or time, Earth does not exist. "Only the body makes the world seem real." Nor is there any dream without it.This perfect vision is true perception, and when perfected it has no further purpose. Its purpose was to lead you home, to return to awarness of Christ as yourself. And now you stand at the gates of Heaven, and are ready to enter, to return to where you never left. Bodies cannot come with you, because they were the veil, and do not exist. The world cannot join you because it has no reality beyond the veil that depicts its picture. Space and time have ended. The world spins into the nothingness from which it came, as you awaken into the Kingdom of God, recognizing that noting has ever happened to anything real. You are safe in God, because you were just dreaming of exile.

To understand the separation from God, consider the relationship between light and darkness.

At first, light is everywhere in heaven. Then in the separation, the presence of light is resisted by trying not to will that there be light. This "puts the brakes" on creation, as an unwillingness to extend love, and a selfish attempt to retain everything for yourself. This is kind of like a light bulb that does not want to let its light shine because it wants to keep the light for itself.

When the light is shining, all is well. When there is a blockage or a denial of the light, the light SEEMS to dim. And now a seeming shadow or darkness forms. The shadow appears darker, as though there is less light there. As if light has gone away.

If you look carefully, you may notice that the shadow totally DEPENDS on the light being blocked. When the light is not blocked, there is no shadow. When the block appears, the shadow appears. And the shadow has no say in this.

On the one hand, a discerning mind should recognize that the shadow itself doesn't really have ability to assert its own existence. It can't decide to stay on its own. It can't resist the light. Nor can it cause light to go away.

Really, the darkness isn't ACTUALLY darkness. It's the absence of light. These are not the same thing. Light being absent, and darkness being "present" are different. If darkness is truly present, then darkness actually removes light as light's equal and causes light to go away, or can resist it.

In the separation, all that we really did was block the light. We blocked it with blocks to awareness, which are forms of denial, unwillingness and resistance. By being unwilling to will with God, we were unwilling to extend light. These are attempts to stop light from shining, to hold back the extension of love, and to INDUCE darkness.

Having done this, it seems like we go into a darkened state of mind. What we're going into is the appearance of a "lack of light" or "absence of light". We don't actually go into an "actual" darkness. There is in fact no such thing as an actual darkness. Similarly to how there isn't really evil or hell.

"Just because "nature abhors a vacuum," which is true enough, it does NOT follow that "a vacuum is filled with hellfire."

"Those who have not yet "changed their minds" have entered the "hellfire" concept into it."

The sane recognition that darkness is only the seeming absence of light, produced by a blockage, cast as a shadow, is what it means to recognize that this blockage is just a MISTAKE or error. There is no real darkness there at all, ONLY an illusion that makes it appear light is absent.

When you fail to recognize that the blockage is just an illusion, you start to believe that the darkness is, itself, a "positive creation", something which can cause light to go away, some kind of "actual real evil".

This is also the difference between mistakes/errors and sins. A mistake is recognized as simply a "lack of light", whereas when the appearance of light lacking is given artificial attributes of reality, it is considered to be "real darkness."

We lend it the darkness reality, truth, power, causation, will, a mind of its own, etc... and now what is really only the ILLUSION of light being absent, is now interpreted as the PRESENCE of active living darkness. And now we believe that this darkness has the power TO HIDE something, to actually blot it out.

This is the insane egoic belief that darkness has power over the light, and can cause light to go away. That darkness shines away light. It is the belief in evil and in sin and of having POWER OVER GOD. It is the authority problem and is level confusion. It is the belief that separation is real, and that guilt is true. And it is also fear. And believing that darkness can hide stuff induces fear that something evil IS hiding in the dark, which you cannot see.

"Miracles are associated with fear only because of the fallacy that darkness can hide."

"It is only in darkness and in ignorance that you perceive the frightening, and you shrink away from it to further darkness. And yet, it is only the hidden that CAN terrify, NOT for what it IS, but FOR its hiddenness."

By believing that what actually is only an ILLUSION OF light's absence, is actually the PRESENCE OF a "real darkness", is the entire ego thought system. It is the belief that sin is real and death is happening and impossible suffering can occur and that hell is evil and real. That the boogie man is hiding in the dark shadows. It's the stuff of nightmares.

When we denied the light of heaven, we pushed our mind into a darkened state. A state of the appearance of the lack of love and light and life. This was only really a state of the ILLUSION that light CAN be absent.

It's an illusion because light is actually permanent and can never be destroyed, and so DENIAL is the belief that it's not there, even though it is. Believing that light is not present, when it is, must mean that you believe something is true which is not. This is an ILLUSION. There is deception and temptation because something impossible seems possible.

This means also that so long as there is a state where light seems absent at all, there IS illusion. The state of light's absence is ITSELF an illusion, because it's not true that light can really be absent anywhere. So when it APPEARS that light is not present, in any way, this can't be TRUE, but it SEEMS true to insane minds.

The really big thing is this. WE MADE A WORLD OUT OF THIS DARKNESS - WITHIN the illusion of the lack of light. It is in fact THE lack of light. Another term for a lack or light or love, in ACIM, is error. The seeming lack of light appears to be an erroneous world.

"For it was made out of what you do NOT want, projected FROM your mind, because you were AFRAID of it."

Then, if this erroneous world is believed to be REAL, it is converted from the ILLUSION of light's absence, to the belief that it is REAL DARKNESS. That this world is in fact, the PRESENCE of a world. That there really is a world there, alive and willfull and with mind and power and causation. A world which has OVERTHROWN the Kingdom. This belief is a misperception of the illusion of the lack of light, and nothing more.

What this means is, the world we made, which includes the planet Earth, originally was simply the illusion of light seeming to be lacking. It WAS the 'absence'. It was a mis-creation, or a sort of failed creation. A limited expression, infused with unwillingness and denial. It was made in the thought of the denial of God, and as an attack on God. An attack on light, if interpreted as "actual darkness".

Then as we moved further into believing in it, we invested this illusion of light's absence with the qualities of God, such as reality and truth and power and life and will and causation. And now what merely was **IN TRUTH** an ILLUSORY WORLD, in the shape of the ABSENCE of light, was converted by our belief in it as "REAL DARKNESS" to a WORLD OF SIN.

"The body is the idea of sin made flesh"

What this means is, a world which is in fact ONLY an illusion of light's absence, and exists ONLY so long as the light REMAINS blocked, NOT made of light, was invested with greater belief in order to ASSERT that it is in fact a REAL DARK PLACE - a real living hell.

The physical world is this world, a world made of shadows cast from blockages in the mind, invested with belief and given reality, to try to convince ourselves that hell exists instead of heaven. This is the world of bodies and of forms and planets and other objects. And this world exists ONLY WITHIN our false perception. ONLY IN THE LACK OF LIGHT.

"The world is false perception."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin. For only if there were a body is sin possible."

"From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it. And these messages bear witness to this world, pronouncing it as true."

Note that another word for sin is insanity. "Sin is insanity." Which means that investing darkness with the belief that it is reality, is insane. This is because darkness is NOT the presence of evil, or of ANYTHING. Nor is it s REAL darkness. Just as planet Earth is not really hell. But believing that the earth is real, IS a belief in sin, and DOES cause you to experience the Earth as though it is a REAL hell.

What we're now describing here is false perception, which really is the false BELIEF that an illusory world made of darkness is reality. It is the kind of perception which takes the physical world to be real and true and valid. It is a deceptive perception, in which something which IS an illusion is MIS-PERCEIVED AS a reality. Just as darkness ie lack of light is mis-perceived as the real presence of evil.

The Earth, in its original construction, was born of error, and projected outward, and believed in by insane twisted minds, which both produced it through their denial of light, and reinforced it through their belief in evil. This is why ACIM refers to it as "the hell you made."

"That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth."

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

"The learning of the world is built upon a concept of the self adjusted to the world's reality. It fits it well. For this an image is that suits a world of shadows and illusions."

The body was also made as part of the illusion of light's absence, masquerading as the PRESENCE of a "real something". But the body is really nothing at all, just as Earth is nothing at all. This is why there is no world and the body is not an actual positive creation. The body and the world DO NOT REALLY EXIST.

The body is given senses designed to reinforce the world of apparent SIN, ie Earth believed to be "real darkness", to give it reality, to make it seem real, and to give it all the meaning it has. This is in order to reinforce the idea that real darkness exists. This was its original evil purpose. This is why we "made it" by NOT creating reality.

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"Temptation has ONE lesson it would teach, in ALL its forms, WHEREVER it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty, and bound by what it orders him to feel."

To the ego, creation means taking something that does not exist and trying to give it life, in terms of taking the ILLUSION that light can be absent and reinforcing it to the point where it seems darkness has CAUSED light to disappear.

As such, Earth was made by us to seem to REPLACE the world of light that is Heaven, to blot it out and hide it and destroy it. Indeed to destroy the light of God and his children. "The world was made as an attack on God. A place where God (light) could enter not" etc. It was born from an evil thought - a mad idea.

What then needs to happen, is the UNDOING of all this distortion and lies. This confusion and hallucination and the belief that Earth (darkness) really exists. What we need is forgiveness. We have to re-trace the steps. This means that first of all, we need to recognize (as described) how we got into this mess, and what the mess IS.

The mess is, that we have denied God's light, which has produced the UNTRUE ILLUSION that light is indeed absent, which has taken the shape of A WORLD OF BODIES, and which has then been invested with reality and fear and evil thought to try to GIVE IT immortality and reality. To make it permanently replace heaven. However, this is not possible.

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that"

"Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

What we then need to do is recognize the facts. If we have belief in the world as "real", or existing, or causing, or happening, or being valuable, or having power over the light, or able to kill immortal beings, or capable in any way of enforcing darkness and suffering, then we DO believe that darkness can make light go away. And as such Earth is interpreted as REAL hell.

This is the belief that the world of bodies ***IS NOT an illusion***. Believing it IS NOT an illusion, IS A DENIAL of the FACT that it is. It's an inability to see and recognize that the world is made of light's absence, and CAN ONLY last so long as the light remains absent. It's even more heavily the belief that the world is actually real and has REPLACED the reality of Heaven.

If we believe this in any way, we need to look at this and undo this belief. We need to stop believing that the world IS real. That belief IS FALSE PERCEPTION and is a belief in evil. What we've put ONTO the world, given it is ONLY an illusion of light's absence, is the heaviness of sin and guilt and value and meaning. We've tried to turn an ILLUSION of a world into a reality, to convert "lights absence" into "darkness's presence."

All this projected meaning, the "perceptions about the world", the sin and hate and guilt we throw onto it, the condemnation of it, the false beliefs about it, is all part of our attempt to reinforce the idea that the world IS real and DOES have power over God and his Son. If you believe it REALLY IS sinful, then you are using it to stay in the illusion that darkness really exists. Which also means that to NOT do that, you have to STOP believing the world is real.

So then we set about withdrawing these projections of "real sin", and of reality, and of rebellion, and of attack and harm, and of guilt and fear, which we have put ONTO AN ILLUSION OF A WORLD. We have in fact laid illusions ON TOP OF ILLUSION, in an attempt to DENY that the world IS an illusion, so that we can MAKE IT REAL to us. This is a DOUBLE DENIAL.

"But what you have forgot can be remembered, given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion."

"It adds illusions to illusions, thus making correction doubly difficult."

When, through forgiveness, we lift away from the world our belief in sin and guilt, we in fact lifting away REALITY from it. We are withdrawing BELIEF in it. We are stripping it of value, and meaning, and all the heavy dark USES of the world to victimize and to attack. We are taking back our FUTILE attempt to PROVE that darkness can destroy the light, that death trumphs over life, and that the Son of God can be killed in the flesh.

Once we stop doing this, the world that we have been "attacking", in an effort to LEND IT reality, in order to keep it, begins to be RECOGNIZED FOR WHAT IT REALLY IS. Since a false perception of the world makes it seem REAL - because false perception is a CONFUSED perception, a true perception of it does THE OPPOSITE. It takes AWAY its reality. It strips it of its causal power. It diminishes it in your sight. And it reduces its value to you. It removes what it is NOT, and reveals what it IS.

At the end of this process, the world which lives in and is made OF the illusion of light's absence, is seen NOT as a world capable of destroying life, or of sinning, or of inducing guilt, or of making life into suffering, but instead it is RECOGNIZED as ONLY AN ILLUSION OF LIGHT'S ABSENCE. In effect, its TRUE nature, is not that it is real, but that it IS NOT REAL.

"Enlightenment is but a recognition and not a change at all."

"LOVE ALWAYS ANSWERS, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made, but do not want. The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

Recognizing the world for what it IS - a FALSE appearance of the absence of God, does not mean recognizing that it IS real or true. Recognizing the truth ABOUT the world, does not necessarily imply that the world IS true. Only that we are looking at it WITH truth and seeing it "truly", to find out ***IF*** it is true. Seeing what IS ACTUALLY there. But it is entirely possible that what is ACTUALLY there, IS AN ILLUSION, and NOT a reality.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

The world in fact ONLY exists as an illusory world. It is like a veil of shadows and darkness. It PRETENDS to be a world - a something. It is really, in truth, THE ABSENCE OF A WORLD. It is the seeming form that shadows take when light is blocked. It is ONLY the interior seeming contents and shifting patterns of the SHADOW cast by light's blockage. And as a result, the dark world is really ONLY an illusion. Believing it is real sin is a SECOND error designed to convert illusions into reality. This is like 3 levels.

1) Heaven/reality (no illusory world, only the world of light).

2) Illusory world regarded as unreal (true perception).

3) Illusory world regarded as real (false perception).

More to the point, the world is in fact, in its "true form", seen clearly and accurately, NOT a world made of "real sin", NOT a world that can cause anything to be threatened, but ONLY a world that IS FICTION. It is smoke and mirrors. It is the illusion that there is no light. It is MADE OF denial. It is the denial of existence, and so it denies ITS OWN existence.

"What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

When the "lack of light", which can at most be an ILLUSION OF a lack of light, since light cannot be really lacking, is recognized for what it IS, it is NOT regarded as a "real" anything. It is not a real world, or a real darkness, or a real sin. Its TRUE nature is that it is an ABSENCE of anything real, and an illusion of LACK.

Like a shadow, the world then CANNOT LAST, IF the blocks to the awareness of light are removed. The world DEPENDS ON this "separation" in order to maintain its seeming existence. If you lift away the dark blockages and the denial, and the light comes in, the darkness IS GONE. This is because darkness can ONLY SEEM to exist PROVIDED light seems to be absent. It is a lack, and not a presence. Forgiving it brings light in, and makes the world GO AWAY.

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies."

The darkness does not TURN INTO light either. Light shines it AWAY, because darkness is just a sort of fictional label we give to "the part that seems lacking". A name for the lack ITSELF. But lack is not a positive creation, it is more like a "hole" in creation. A seeming place where light was not allowed to enter. A place where God was not allowed to dwell. Where life was denied.

When the light comes, that which is the absence of light and not the presence of darkness, SIMPLY DISAPPEARS. It at first appears to become lighter, because light is beginning to REPLACE it. It seems to be a mixture of darkness and light. It brightens and sparkles and seems fresh and new. Sin is lifted from it, guilt is removed from it, and REALITY IS WITHDRAWN from it.

"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."

BUT, at the same time, the presence of the darkness is decreasing, BECAUSE the light is increasing. The LACK of light is going away. "Miracles supply a lack." As such, anything "made of darkness", or which was really merely the ILLUSION that darkness was present, is now shown to have been really NOT the presence of ANYTHING. Like it was just some dream that passed by. And so the shadow world now simply FADES OUT and vanishes and disappears and is gone forever, leaving NO TRACE. In truth, it WAS NEVER REALLY ANYTHING.

"The old one has left no trace upon it in its passing."

"An unremembered world will leave no trace behind its going, when God's gifts have been accepted as the only thing you want."

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

This is why ACIM teaches that "there is no world." The world, Earth, this planet, this physicality, is NOTHING pretending to be something. It is nothing other than a ILLUSION of a world, made of the LACK OF A WORLD, due to the REJECTION of heaven, masquerading as existence. It is what you end up with, limited and withering and half dead, when you try to BLOCK LIFE. It is a world of DEATH. It is made OF death and HAS no life.

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

"There IS no life outside of Heaven."

"Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is NOT in Heaven is not ANYWHERE. Outside of Heaven (in the "darkness"), only the conflict of illusions stands (illusion of light being absent); senseless, ***impossible***, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven (interpreting the illusion of the lack of a world AS a SOLID world). Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

"In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is NOT in Heaven is not ANYWHERE."

"it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere.

There is no world, ie there is no Earth, because at MOST it is comprised of and DEPENDS ON maintaining heaven's ABSENCE. It REJECTS reality. It is not compatible with life. And it has NO REAL PROPERTIES of its own. It is utterly slave to the shadow projection, dependent on the maintenance of blockages, and dwells SOLELY in denial. It cannot exist WHERE there is light.

"Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. "

As the awareness of the light increases, the LACK of light decreases. The illusion that light is not HERE lifts, like a veil. The veil of a "solid world" becomes transparent. Heavy sin and causation and evil are lifted FROM the illusory world, SO THAT it is not believed to be real. And the more light infuses where it seems to be, the LESS it can be seen. The world fade OUT, and heaven fades IN.

Eventually, upon opening up to the FULL experience of the light, the face of Christ appears, "Gone are bodies in the blazing light on the altar to the son of God.", the Earth is literally SHONE AWAY by the light and REPLACED AND UNDONE FOREVER, it literally DISAPPEARS, and its NOTHINGNESS is truly apparent. There then IS no world. There is ONLY light, and "Heaven is all that remains."

"Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does so."

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

Earth is the ABSENCE of reality and the ABSENCE of heaven. It remains only so long as heaven is blocked. And once heaven shines, the world is shone away forever. When believing in real sin, earth reflects hell. When NOT believing in real sin, earth is recognized as a meaningless MIRROR in which heaven's LIGHT is temporarily reflected. And then the world VANISHES just as eternity is finally permitted its full expression, and where there was darkness now there is only light, and the world cannot be found.

This is why we are to be THE LIGHT of the world. This is why we are to see the REFLECTION of heaven's light ACROSS the CHAOS of the illusion of light's absence. And this is why ultimately the light itself will shine the world away completely.

"What SEEMS eternal all will have an end. The stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All things that come and go, the tides, the seasons, and the lives of man; all things that change with time and bloom and fade, will not return."

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish. Perception will be meaningless, when it has been perfected. For everything that has been used for learning, will have no function. Nothing will ever change; no shifts nor shadings, no differences, no variations that made perception possible, will occur. The perception of the real world will be so short, that you will barely have time to thank God for it. For God will take the last step swiftly, when you have reached the real world, and have been made ready for Him."