If someone is afraid, reassuring them won't help remove the fear at all unless you can remove their belief that they are guilty. Trying to tell them that the punishment isn't going to happen will be hard to believe if they still think they deserve it.

Only if they are guilty do they have any reason to fear punishment. If they are not guilty, they can be reassured in knowing that they do not deserve punishment, and therefore will not believe in punishment, and therefore will stop scaring themselves.

The person is not afraid because of what is going to happen to them, they are afraid because they BELIEVE that it is going to happen to them, because they believe they deserve it. Having believing they are guilty, they actually believe in their own deserving of punishment, and so they KNOW it is going to come, because they themselves are going to MAKE it come, and they therefore see the punishment as inevitable. They cannot escape their OWN belief in self punishment, and so are frightened by their very own will and determination to harm themselves!

They are really afraid of their own punishment. This must be undone at the cause which is guilt, and not the effect, which is a projected cause of fear.

Beyond this, if someone is feeling guilty, you can't reassure them that they're not guilty either. Instead, you need to reassure them that they did not really sin at all. Sin produces guilt and the belief in sinfulness makes a person feel guilty. Undo the belief that they are sinful and there can be no need for guilt. Only the sinful will feel guilty.

If the person believes they sinned, they will attack themselves and condemn themselves with guilt. The condemnation is coming from themselves, not from anyone else. Even if it seems like shame or misplaced causes for guilt, the decision to be guilty is their own, based on their own belief in their own sinfulness. They themselves WANT to find themselves guilty, and so cannot help but feel that way, because they don't want to undo the belief that they sinned at all. Sin is not real. Nobody sinned. Hey presto, no guilt.

"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."

If someone appears to do something wrong, perhaps they're angry and they're attacking, you focusing on this "surface appearance" is what it means to "make sin real." You judge based on the appearance of form and the form of what they do dictates what it seems to mean. You hold their physical behaviors etc against them and accuse them of what they are doing, as if to say that what you see in this judgement is all that there is to see. In this state there is no compassion or deeper insight into why they're behaving this way or any sense of a call for love. Or better yet, a call for help.

When someone is hurting and afraid and so on they tend to lash out and project and blame and attack. But in order to be forgiving, the surface appearance of what they're doing has to be looked past. Essentially this means you have to realize that their outward appearance is an EFFECT, not a cause. And therefore there is a deeper cause behind it. When you focus solely on the appearance of what they're doing, you are believing that the appearance is a CAUSE, and in particular that YOU are at the effect of it.

This means that cause and effect have kind of "shifted". The cause is in them, and their behavior is an effect of it. But now you're believing that their effects are the cause, and the effect has shifted out of them completely and into you. This is a belief that physical form is the only reality, that what the body is seeing is the truth. When the body's senses are trusted, and given the body can only see form and surfaces, this produces a suggestion that the world is primary reality. That it is the starting point of everything, and therefore causal and not an effect. It is necessary to displace the effect onto yourself or others then because this "causal form" cannot be both cause and effect.

This is the unforgiving attitude. That the dream world is real and is the cause of suffering. That surface appearances are true. That sin is real. That death is real. That sickness and suffering are happening and making more things happen in turn. In order to forgive, causation has to be pushed back into the mind or source within the person. Their behavior has to be seen as a facade and as only an effect, something to be pushed past and seen beyond. There has to be something going on with them that's deeper than just the outward expression of their pain.

When you are unforgiving you will accuse them of sin and put up a wall and use the surface appearance as a barricade to separate you off from them. The body will be emphasized and its activities will become the proof of sin. The person will be relegated to being a body only and only what you can see and sense will be given reality. This shuts you off from the person and treats them like an object. It's is a cold-hearted and vicious state of perception.

As you peer beyond this surface veil, beyond what they appear to be doing, and look deeper into the person, you're opening your heart. This is because you necessarily are opening up to a deeper truth, a higher truth. The higher truth is that beyond the layers of suffering, the obstacles to peace, the protest against reality, and their seeming attacks, there is a seemingly wounded frightened person inside longing for help. To see that they are only acting this way "because of" something else is a step in the right direction.

There is always something deeper behind the surface, just as there is another world beyond the surface of this one. To see that someone is in need of help is to shift your vantage point. You begin to see from their perspective, what they are going through and where they are coming from. You see behind the wall of sin, which also means seeing beyond the body, and acknowledge that they need help. This is a much more loving point of view. It's a compassionate point of view. It causes you to side with the person, which is part of becoming one with them. The part of you that is in them, or is them, now is included in who and what you are, and your love for them is now a shared love for yourself.

Not taking anything personally, not using what people appear to do against them, not holding events and happenings against the world, and seeing behind it to the deeper causes, is what forgiveness entails. And beyond all the deeper causes is the light of Christ which is the true nature of each person. No-one is evil and no one in their right mind would ever do anything unloving. People are just confused and mistaken. This is the movement away from making sin real, towards the forgiveness that confirms that people are simply mistaken and lost and in need of help.

Someone isn't sinful for attacking. People attack when they're hurt. Someone isn't evil just because they're being vicious and cruel. They obviously have experienced some major hurt or rejection or abuse or something that has led to this expression. We need to recognize that whenever we think the world, or bodies, or people, or events, are what they are based on the surface appearance, we're forgetting that the world is an effect and not a cause. By making it into a cause you shield the cause and hide it, and now the effect becomes the cause, with a seeming power to put the effects into you.

All of these violent expressions, all attacks and murders, all conflict and arguments, all destruction and viciousness, it all has to be seen as symptoms or side effects of something beyond it. Something in people that is in need of help. A call for love. A state of being lost and alone and frightened and guilty, that needs healing. People act out only as projections of what they have inside of them. What they are lacking is love and what they need is love and compassion. To see this need you must find a way to look deeper than the surface and see where the person is coming from, what's behind this expression, where it started, and get to the root of it. Because at the root of it is the reality of their real worth and innocence.

"That is the ultimate value TO YOU in learning to perceive attack as a call for love."

"For fear IS a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied."

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

"The only judgment involved at all is in the Holy Spirit's one division into two categories; one of love, and the other, the call for love."

"What calls for punishment, must call for NOTHING. Yet every mistake MUST be a call for love. What, then, is sin? What COULD it be but a mistake you would keep hidden; a call for help that you would keep UNHEARD, and thus UNANSWERED?"

There's the truth, and then there's trying to decide on your own what the truth is.

The truth really can only be surrendered to and accepted, not made.

In your attempt to learn the truth, you will divert away from the truth and try to interpret it your way. Your version of it will pass for what you believe the truth is, because you want to be the one who makes it true.

But the truth is stone-cold factual. Verbatim. As is. We don't get to manipulate it or change it.

We knew before the separation that the truth could not be changed. The separation was an attempt to DENY that it could not be changed, which would seem to give us the perception that it COULD be changed.

The truth still has not been changed. We are just in denial. Sleeping. Unaware of what it means. Believing it says something else.

It is only our misinterpretation of the truth that has led to the nightmare we're having. The dream of separation, seeming to be real and containing things which seem like truth.

We've tried to make true what is inherently impossibly false. We've tried to turn illusions into realities. We've tried to give meaning to the meaningless.

This is the only reason why we are upset and frightened, because we believe there is truth to things which are not true or real.

Thankfully, all of these untrue things are still not true and NEVER will be. All you need is "a little willingness" to surrender to reality.

Your truth has to be given up. You can't keep being a truth-maker. Being a seeker of the truth has turned you into a dreamer about what the truth is. You're trying to find it, which is an attempt to move away from it.

Surrender your willingness to have truth be something other than God Created. Accepting the truth about yourself is healing and life-giving. It is the freedom you've been seeking. It is love.

Truth is the Word of God, and it is permanent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you know what the secret to the magic trick is, you know that there is not really any magic happening. But if something is hidden, if there is information missing, it becomes possible to enter into an alternative state of awareness - a state of deception and misperception.

In that state, where you don't know that information is missing, or that something is hidden, you believe that you're seeing the whole truth. You therefore make sense of it, and it seems to be what it is, based on its appearance. You think you're seeing the truth because you think you are seeing fully.

But if you are not seeing the whole of the information, and some information is hidden, you aren't seeing the real truth. So when you then believe that you are, you're inside a hallucination.

In other words, you're seeing meaning where there is none, you're convinced you're awake but you're not, you're certain you are making complete sane sense out of what's happening but you're mistaken, and you don't even realize that you're nuts.

This state of insanity is automatically a state of imagining truth where there is none - a hallucination of the truth, which is a state of believing the truth is something it is not.

Puzzles are another good example. When you first encounter a new puzzle, you do not see the answer. It seems obscure, hidden. At first you are confused, and you don't understand it, and it makes no sense, and you can't "see" how it is possible. And yet it seems to be possible that the unsolved state of the puzzle is truth, because you see no way to solve it or see additional truth beyond that. But over time, as you question your perception, you gradually might realize that by undoing your own assumptions and reversing your own conclusions, i.e. collapsing the hallucination, the answer suddenly becomes obvious.

Once you have solved the puzzle, it's because you've seen some information, really a state of greater awareness, which has burst the illusion and suddenly you are seeing outside of it. You are no longer fooled, you've found the answer, it seems clear as day and now you kick yourself for the apparent stupidity of having not seen it earlier. In other words, you realize you were mistaken the whole time and its pretty embarrassing.

Bringing this around to A Course in Miracles, it is the same with the "illusion" that this world is a reality. There is an illusion here, in front of your face, which if you were able to see ALL of it clearly, you'd see past the hallucinations and the misinterpretations and the misunderstandings, and suddenly realize, in a state of greater awareness, that what you THOUGHT was true before, was actually false. And you'll understand why. Because now you have revealed some kind of awareness of information that was hidden before, and this information is vital to being able to see the illusion correctly. Ie to overlook the deception, to overlook the delusion and insanity, which was telling you that all kinds of other stuff was true.

So right now, unless you're in full awareness, you're still inside what seems to be a puzzle. And because there's some stuff you are blocking from awareness, there's some information you are not privy to. And because of that limitation, and because you don't even know that the extra information exists yet, you believe that you're seeing the entire truth as it appears to you. That's in spite of the fact that you're only seeing part of a scene, are coming to false conclusions, are seeing "truths" which actually aren't quite true, and are therefore having hallucinations about the meaning of what you see.

You see a dark shadow behind a door, and because you lack information - awareness of "God facts" - in your belief that you are seeing correctly you believe that "its true" that there is a scary monster behind the door. However, if you turn on the light, which reveals to your awareness extra information, now it becomes obvious it was just clothing, and you once again kick yourself for falling for the silly belief that there was a real monster there. But before that, you really believed there was a real monster, and you were therefore frightened. Frightened by an hallucination - a false belief about the truth.

When there is enough awareness of "what is here", of what this illusion IS, its structure and purpose and functioning, and the ways that it deceives, it is no longer possible to believe the magic trick. You've seen through and past all of the mistaken perceptions which you thought were showing you reality.

All of the horrifying mis-truths that you believed in, such as that sin and death were real, are revealed to be completely false. All of the reasons you ever had to be afraid, suddenly have no foundation whatsoever because the truth emerges and shows you that the things you thought were frightening were not TRUE, they were delusions and hallucinated meanings, and thankfully there is a larger explanation for them. When you don't understand what is happening or why its happening, it will scare you, because the illusory truth it presents makes it seem real. When a correct explanation is given, you're like, oh... okay then. Then you drop the false belief, with relief that you no longer have a valid reason to be afraid.

So a blockage placed on awareness leads you to believing that the meaning of reality is obscured, the truth no longer quite makes sense but still seems true, you see things IN and ON TOP OF the illusion that are not even really there (thereby hallucinating), and the sense that you make of it is actually a deception. When the blockage to awareness is lifted, you can no longer be deceived. It's like hearing the punchline to the joke, and never again can you hear the joke and have quite as much of a laugh because you know the answer. Knowing the real answer, the real truth, is revealed by awareness.

So here's a question. If there is a grand illusion of a physical universe, a world, and a body, and if the only reason that you believe you're even seeing them is because you are lacking awareness, then doesn't it suggest that if you had enough awareness, you might suddenly see past that illusion and realize the world does not even really exist? It was just a kind of twisting of consciousness, a distortion, which you could only experience while insane and hallucinating? Maybe the world you thought existed was your misinterpretation of reality, and only existed as a hallucination based on a lack of awareness. Maybe there is no world.

Jesus said in relation to seeing through illusions, "What is understood as nothing must disappear."

and

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. "!!

It's not just that there really is an illusion. It's only even an illusion because you believe there is one. Really, you are just misperceiving reality. That misperception shows you an illusion that there is a world. Once the puzzle is seen through and the truth is revealed, you will no longer be able to perceive that there really is a world. You will not believe it. You will recognize it was just an illusion, and nothing about it was ever really true. Like a dream. Not a real dream, but a dream-dream.

Form, matter, bodies, the universe, events, people, places, sins, guilts, death, sickness, it's all an illusion, a deception that APPEARS TO MAKE SENSE or appears to be real and true, ONLY because we lack awareness, and ONLY be cause there is some hidden information. When all is revealed, all of these illusions must disappear into the perfect omnipresent light of God, in which they DO NOT EXIST.

In reality, the world does not exist. We're dreaming it, hallucinating it, imagining it, reading into it, and are TRYING to make it a reality. It's just what you get when you haven't solved the puzzle yet, because the truth is obscured. When the truth is revealed, it will be obvious that there isn't really a world there. It was part of the puzzle while you fell for it. And now that the light has come, it is gone.

Lesson 75, "The light has come":

"The light has come. You are healed and you can heal. The light has come. You are saved and you can save. You are at peace, and you bring peace with you wherever you go. Darkness and turmoil and death have disappeared. The light has come. Today we celebrate the happy ending to your long dream of disaster. There are no dark dreams now. The light has come. Today the time of light begins for you and everyone. " - ACIM

The body is very much the opposite of your reality as an immortal being. Your real self can never be changed, attacked, hurt or destroyed. But the body is defenseless, exposed and vulnerable, capable of destruction and utterly unsafe in a dangerous world.

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

Having lived your life in a body, you've had to deal with all kinds of vulnerabilities. And this has taught you that you are a target for destruction. Weak, susceptible, fragile, attackable and unsafe. That you can be destroyed and should take great care to avoid all possible threats. Wary of every passing car, frightened of every stranger, upset by the mere presence of something moving.

The body has endured suffering, pain, breakage, malfunction and damage. It has been influenced by the weather and the environment. It has been attacked and hurt, bullied and hit, poked and prodded, maybe even assaulted surgically. Maybe the body has been mutilated, perhaps parts of it are missing, perhaps it is ugly and deformed and lacking, and maybe it was never whole to begin with.

Because of this, and because you believe you are your body, you must have thought this about yourself. You believed you'd lost parts of yourself, that you were under attack, that you have to be constantly vigilant when crossing roads and stepping on cracks and turning corners just in case it is your day to die - hoping to alert you early that you might avoid more suffering. You've put considerable effort into securing your body, making a home for it, protecting it with walls upon walls and layers upon layers, trying to shield it from your enemies.

All of this has told you that you are weak and fragile, vulnerable and attackable, defenseless and exposed. It has caused you to feel frightened and threatened all the time. It has given you constant anxiety and nervousness, constant stress and concern. You never feel fully safe anywhere, you are always on alert and wary of the next biting teeth or hammering nails or sharp pointy objects, trying constantly to avoid the body's death.

"In the brief time allotted it to live, it seeks for other bodies as its friends and enemies. Its safety is its main concern. Its comfort is its guiding rule. It tries to look for pleasure, and avoid the things that would be hurtful."

This can have done nothing but undermine your peace of mind, your sense of safety, your confidence and your happiness. Having to be constantly on the lookout for danger like some kind of animal in dangerous territory. You avoid the places you don't like to go, you avoid the people who bother you, you steer clear of the brand names you don't trust, and you only expose yourself with select few. And you reason that better the devil you know than the ones you don't.

This all comes about by confusing your identity with the body, believing you are a body, that you are body-like or of a physical nature. It comes with the territory. You cannot believe you are a physical body without being afraid of death, because you know the body can die. You cannot believe the body is your self, without being traumatized when you clip your nails or cut your hair. If you are a body, you are literally as susceptible and vulnerable as the body is, even if you take measures to defend yourself or ward off attackers.

It is not possible to believe you are a body and to feel confident. It is not possible to believe you are a body and be sane. It is not possible to believe you are a body and have real relationships with anyone, because the body literally cuts you off from them. It is not possible to believe you are a body and feel a sense of true safety and peace, or happiness and love. "the body CANNOT be used for purposes of union"

The body is separate in a separated world. It stands apart and alone. By the mere fact that it does not share with others, separate by space and time, it is lonely and isolated. Believing you are a body brings with it a fundamental loneliness and sense of exclusion, of conflict and disagreement, and even constant war. Bodies can never be equal because they rely on inequality and difference to make them distinct. And so there is no peace available when bodies are your truth.

Believing you are a body deceives you and sets you up for failure. It guarantees death and sickness and ensures a breakdown in communication. Being a body means putting a death sentence on your head and limiting yourself to a small span of time, riddled with obstacles and difficulties and suffering. If you are a body you cannot be a mind, or an idea, or a thought of God. You are parentless and orphaned and alone.

The body is essentially a blasphemy against God, because it suggests things about you which cannot be true in reality. You are actually an immortal, permanent, absolute, unchangeable, endless being, given eternal life and incapable of ever being hurt in any way. If you believe you are a body, you do not believe in yourself. If you believe you are a body, you are shutting yourself off from who you are in reality, and are guaranteeing suffering.

Your real self is immortal, it cannot be hurt or attacked, it cannot be affected or altered, it is utterly invulnerable, it is impervious and unassailable. It cannot be attacked or threatened, it cannot be hurt or made to be sick, it cannot be poisoned or traumatized, and it cannot die. Your real self is permanently happy, constantly joyful, and utterly at peace. Its peace can never be disturbed because nothing can ever threaten it, just as it is always free from all fear and anxiety because it knows that it is perfectly safe from all harm.

To identify with who you really are as God created you is to escape from the torment of being a body. It is to free you from all potential for suffering, attack, sickness and death. Identifying with your spirit/soul lifts you out of hell and into heaven. It lifts you away from danger and out of harm's way. It gives you real protection and permanent peace. It guarantees you are sinless and guiltless, incapable of being evil, unable to attack or be attacked, harmless and unharmed forever.

Only by not being a body can you be as God created you, because God did not create bodies. Only by not being a body can you laugh in the face of death and overcome the world. It is the body that becomes a target for attack and destruction, and not your real self. Your real self is beyond the world and beyond space and time and beyond the laws of physics. It is not of this world because you were created in another world, in the Kingdom of God, where everything is eternal.

"You can never suffer because the Source of all joy goes with you wherever you go."

Your eternal self can never suffer pain, can never be hurt by another, can never be upset or offended, can have no reason to ever be afraid, can never have its peace disturbed, can never become sick or suffer, can never experience pain, can never malfunction or break down or degrade, can never become old or tired, can never lose anything, and can never die. Surely you would rather identify with your real self and be free from hell forever, than to regard yourself as a lump of flesh and bones stalking the earth like a zombie waiting to finish dying.

Only by associating yourself with the properties of immortality can you be set free from the mortal body and all its limitations. Only by identifying as permanent and unchangeable can you have no grounds for upset. Only by recognizing you can never be changed can you free yourself from the blame and tyranny of other people's actions. Only by knowing yourself as the eternal life God gave you can you utterly disregard anything the world seems to do or cause.

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

"To be without a body is to be in your natural state."

"This is accomplished very simply, as you instruct yourself that you are not a body."

"But I am not a body. What am I?"

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

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body."

"But I am not a body. And my mind cannot attack. So I can not be sick."

"A mind and body cannot both exist. Make no attempt to reconcile the two, for one denies the other can be real. If you are physical your mind is gone from your self-concept, for it has no place in which it could be really part of you. If you are Spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality."

The separation from God, we did a big switcheroo. We swapped everything true for everything false, and vice versa. That makes our mind insane, because it means we no longer recognize what anything actually is.

To our insane mind, we see everything opposite to what it is, because the mind is trying to oppose reality.

God is regarded as evil, the Holy Spirit as an enemy, heaven as hell, eternal life as death.

Similarly evil is regarded as benevolence, death is thought to be life, suffering is atonement, and sickness is a way to exist longer.

The mind in this insane twisted state is very confused.

"You HAVE carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is TOTAL CONFUSION ABOUT EVERYTHING." UrT7J9

If you can imagine then, if you believed that God is murderous and an enemy, and you tried to go towards God, your "egoic" insane mind would see this as a dangerous encounter. It would become threatened and adversarial, it would try to fight against it and go into fear. Just as you as a 'sane' person would go into fear if you thought an evil enemy were coming closer to attack you.

God obviously isn't actually attacking or evil or murderous, but the ego does perceive him that way. And so it makes "total sense" to the egoic insane mind that, for the sake of preserving existence and "sanity", you should stay away from God.

As you - your mind - starts trying to wake up from the insanity and move towards God, you're going to find that the insanity itself will interpret reality incorrectly. It will perceive that you're moving towards your death, moving towards evil, moving towards the very thing you fear and do not want. As if you're going in the wrong direction.

If you were to lurch closer to God all of a sudden, and saw his beauty and loveliness, your egoic mind would quickly project sin and guilt onto it, and become deeply suspicious that nothing can possibly be that lovely and be real. And it might thus read into it that God is actually a deceiver and the beauty is some kind of insane trick or a trap. And then it would go into fear as a defense.

Obviously this is where "sickness is a defense against the truth" comes in, because the insane mind reasons that in order to be safer, more alive, exist longer, and be protected, it must move AWAY from the threatening God (truth) it perceives. It does this by inducing more separation, reasoning that it makes total sense to get away from the vile enemy.

"Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them." UrW136L3

What the insane mind doesn't realize is that while it BELIEVES that it is moving away from evil, it is moving toward it. While it believes it is moving away from death (as God), it is moving further toward actual death, because God is really life. Inducing more separation induces all forms of illness, suffering and death, but in the name of self preservation.

So in fact we don't actually recognize suffering as suffering. We don't believe that pain is actually a bad thing. We don't think that sickness is terrible. And we even want to cozy up with death, as though it will protect us from God.

The course is trying to get us to reverse our entire thought system so that we begin to RECOGNIZE that evil is evil, suffering is suffering, pain is something you do not want, false things are false, etc... so that you realize in your sanity that it makes no sense to choose them. You would drop all of this misery in an instant if you actually realised that it IS misery and not love.

This is the state we're in. We're backwards and lost, not recognizing true things as true, or false things as false. We believe a whole host of awful stuff like pain, suffering, sickness, death, is actually "good stuff that we want more of". And we will happily choose it and side with it and protect it, believing it is saving us from a fate worse than death.

Each time we try awaken from this and move toward actual eternal life, toward God or reality or truth, the insanity in the mind is going to be suspicious of it, misinterpret it, read into it, and resist it. All based on a misperception of it. In effect, it may seem like you're trying to drag the ego kicking and screaming toward its demise - at least that's how it sees it.

The ego though can't enter a state of sanity because it's really just a label for being insane. It can't "exist" in the light of truth or in God. It requires the denial of God and it requires separateness rather than oneness. You, as the soul/mind, have to find a way to step out of the insanity and dis-associate, dis-identify, from being the insane person, and shift your allegiance to being the sanity of spirit. Or as the course calls it, reason.

You can be sure though that if you go too fast, your insane egoic tendencies will kick in and become frightened by the truth. It will resist and kick and scream. It will find ways to avoid it and deny it and not want it. It will feel offended and threatened by it. Because it does not understand what it's really going toward.

What then could seem like a passage down a dark tunnel into hell, to the ego, could actually be the stairway to heaven. But you have to be gentle with yourself. As the course says, time keeps gentle pace with you. The Holy Spirit gently plans events to help lead you to eternal life. You have a curriculum to go through piece by piece, when you are ready, as you are willing, and not before.

You don't have to rush or go fast, or try to skip steps, or race to the end. This is supposed to be a gentle awakening process, moving first into a happier dream and then onward.

If you try to expose your ego-identified ie insane mind to the sanity of God when it isn't ready, it will just be frightened by it. So go easy on yourself. This is where it becomes 'ok' in the short term, to carry on with your insane ego-serving human nonsense. So go grab some more ice cream and binge watch some favourite shows for a while, because you're probably not going to be waking up quite yet.

"This is because the last thing that can help the non-Right-Minded (or the sick) is an increase in fear. They are already in a fear-weakened state. If they are inappropriately exposed to a straight and undiluted miracle, they may be precipitated into panic. This is particularly likely to occur when upside down perception has induced the belief that miracles are frightening." UrT2C9

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell. Love is no longer feared but gladly welcomed. Idols have disappeared, and the remembrance of God shines unimpeded across the world. Christ's face is seen in every living thing, and nothing is held in darkness apart from the light of forgiveness. There is no sorrow still upon the earth. The joy of Heaven has come upon it." UrM29A2

Before the ego existed, you had a self, created by God. Just as everyone did. In the separation, you denied your self. The denial of self, was an attempt to destroy your self. But you had to have something to identify with. So you shifted your sense of "what am I" away from your soul, towards an ego that you invented.

The ego is really the idea of the denial of life, of God, and of your soul. It is the attempt to eradicate you, which is why all its efforts lead to death. While the ego seems to be a self, it really is a lack of self. It is the absence of you and the rejection of mind. It masquerades as a self, when in fact it is the opposite of having a self.

Having identified with it, when people talk about oneness and non-duality you might feel frightened, as if it means that YOU are going to end. So long as you are identified with your ego, which is a false and second self, you will interpret any movement towards God as threatening.

The ego does not understand union or oneness and interprets it as death. This is also why you have ego rebounds and feel afraid and offended when you try to move into the truth. It's not really that YOU are under threat, it's that the ego is. But having identified WITH it and believing it to be what you are, you interpret ITS fear as your own.

So then the idea of returning to oneness, seems threatening to your ego, because your ego indeed cannot exist in oneness. And if you think that your ego is your self, YOU WILL not want to wake up. It will seem to threaten you. Especially the idea that the ego does not exist at all, is taken by the ego as an attack, and YOU will experience this as an attack upon your very existence. But only IF you believe the ego is your self.

The truth is that when the ego is undone, this happens as a result of YOU dis-identifying with it. Or to put it another way, you reintegrate yourself, identifying with your soul/spirit, reclaiming your mind, and dis-associating from the ego. This means you stop believing that the ego is your self, or that you even have an ego. Once you can recognize that your self, and your ego, are two different things, you are no longer threatened by the idea of undoing it.

A return to heaven is not really a return to no self. In fact, the ego is the state of no self. It is the state of self denial. It is a denial of life and a denial of existence and of identity in Christ. Returning to heaven is a REUNION with your real self, a re-identifying as a soul or Son of God in the Sonship, and a reclaiming of your true nature. You actually are returning to HAVING a self. That's why this is all about RESURRECTION.

The self God created you to be is permanent and will always exist in reality. Your Holy Self is God-given and cannot ever be destroyed. It's only your identification or sense of "who am I" that has become confused. Shifting your "who am I" from the non-existent ego to the permanent soul, can be nothing but reassuring and authentic.

Some people interpret the course to mean there is either a oneness or a duality, either God alone or many egos. And that undoing egos results in God being alone again. But this is not sufficient or accurate. God created you as a real living being, and it is you IDENTIFYING WITH ego that produces the ego and the separation, NOT the creation of an individual identity. You were an individual (who also shared everything) before this all happened.

Returning to God is not the annihilation of your individuality, it is the reclaiming of your individuality. The ego is NOT individuality, it is the rejection of having any real identity at all.

"God who encompasses all being nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy."

Whatever you are perceiving, whatever you are believing, you ALWAYS believe that you are experiencing the truth.

If you are feeling guilty, you believe this is the truth. If you are projecting guilt, you believe that its true that the other person is guilty. If someone else seems to do something to you and you perceive it this way, you believe this is the truth. Always you are locked into an idea of the truth, regardless of whether this truth is ACTUALLY true.

You can even believe that death is real. You can believe that death is salvation. You can believe that attack is salvation. You can actually walk around believing that it is "totally true" that death means life and there is no God. You can be convinced this is the truth. It doesn't matter that you're grossly mistaken. One thing holds consistent - no matter whether you side with Holy Spirit or ego, SOMETHING is always the truth for you.

Now, whatever your grasp of truth is, this is manipulated by your beliefs. Beliefs are "truth modifiers". You use them to redefine the truth and to make something else be the truth that isn't. This is the ego's tool to convert the MEANING of God into something that God does not mean. It changes the meaning of the truth, the meaning of your identity, the meaning of what and who you are. You use belief to convert yourself into a sinner who deserves to die.

Ok now, given that you always believe you're experiencing the whole truth, this can lead you to not suspect that your grasp of the truth might be faulty. You believe you are complete right now, whole right now, aware of everything right now, that you know everything right now, that you are aware of the entire content of yourself right now, and that this is completely true. EVEN THOUGH... this is not true at all for most of us.

We are always convinced by truth, and we are allegiant to it and protective of it.We will defend it up and down. We will not want to question it. The ego's purpose for questioning truth is to replace it with something even less true that it still thinks is the truth. It does NOT want you changing the truth back toward the REAL truth. So it becomes very easy to mangle and distort the truth and to be caught up in thinking it is REALITY and to be totally convinced that you are RIGHT about it, but to still be very mistaken.

And given you can be really convinced about this, that really forms a strong barrier against even suspecting something is mistaken or that you might be wrong. Why would you even think to need to correct something if you are sure it's already perfect? Why would you even suspect that there is a happier way to exist when you already believe that your SUFFERING is happiness? Why would you want to live forever when you already believe that death is your ultimate salvation and that you will die no matter what, dam it?

You can be lost in the truth. Lost in what the truth seems to be. This is why it's like a hallucination.... you're seeing something that's not even really there and you think its real and you're scared and upset by it as if it's totally real, and yet it's just some silly illusion. You can run away from imaginary monsters and cower under a bush. You can be frightened by what seems like real political nightmares. You can be troubled by what looks to be a genuine threat of terrorism. And yet... this is all still just a dream. It's not TRUE.

Snapping out of a state of 'fixation' on an hallucination, snapping out of a strong conviction that someone else really is wrong, snapping out of believing the story, snapping out of reacting to the world that APPEARS to be real.... it's not easy. But it's what we need to do. We need to wake up.

It's okay. ... you are safe... in heaven.... with God... right now.... and nothing has gone wrong.... and God still loves you.

Sometimes people say that concepts have to be let go. The course even says that concepts have to be let go. The course even says to let go of the course and come to God with empty hands.

Yes. However, the entire ACIM "Text" is conceptual. It's entirely theoretical. The workbook is part conceptual and part practical. And the manual for teachers is also conceptual.

Concepts are needed to help people's minds to adapt to a new paradigm of thought. I think there is even somewhere in the Text where it says you should do the text first in order to alleviate the likelihood of becoming afraid when you do the practice, because without a firm footing in the theory you are likely to come to a number of false conclusions and become frightened.

It seems that even with the Text under people's belts, moving on to the workbook in many cases still gives rise to a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. That's partly because the Text is not well understood and the Course's metaphysics are not well understood.

I'm no saying to be purely conceptual or to get totally obsessed with theory, but it sure does help to clarify what the course is saying and what it means.

At some point the concepts will give way to experience, given that even in course terms a universal theology is impossible. But concepts help to pave the way to the truth and are important in learning to clearly perceive the workings of the ego mind so that you are not so easily deceived by it.

It's not possible to teach "love", because love is an experience without words or symbols. So if anything is going to be taught, it's going to have to be a concept about not just the truth but about the nature and behavior of illusions. To teach the concepts is to learn how to identify illusions, how to look at blocks to awareness, and discovering what your hidden motivations are. Concepts help you with your "work" of undoing the ego.

Obviously at some point they will be no longer useful when reality dawns on the mind. But until then, it is definitely helpful to have a firm footing in the metaphysical "theory" and to be informed about how the ego functions. Without that you're likely to take a lot longer to find your way to the truth and will be more easily confused or mistaken about how to get there.

Concepts that can be applied are especially helpful. It's all part of learning to discern what is true and what is false. The truth is taken first on faith, which means, believing in it conceptually and not as a direct experience. We need to be careful of course not to get lost in the concepts or spin our wheels in the intellect, but so long as it's helping us to move forward it's all good.

The idea of your persona is that it rejects everything you don't like, keeping only the good stuff.

If you get really good at using your persona, you will get really brutal at cutting out things which seem even remotely bad.

Eventually you'll be trying to be SO good and perfect, that there will be practically nothing left to relegate to your 'bad' category. Like you hear people saying, "nothing is ever good enough for them" - a sign of a lack of self acceptance.

And if that carries on, there will be nothing left to get rid of, you will cease to exist. Death.

So you can see, the persona, which seems all sweet and nice and special and important, glowing with a false innocence, is in fact the ego's wish to destroy you, piece by piece, by gradually stripping off more and more parts of you and relegating them to hell, in the pursuit of 'being a God'. And along the way it will complement you on how fantastic your 'good bits' are, even though your 'good bits' are soon to come under scrutiny.

The persona attacks everything that is contrary to what it wants to keep. And its eventual mission is the total removal of absolutely everything that could be conceived of as less than absolutely perfect. It thinks that by doing this, what you'll end up with is some kind of totally 'perfect self'. The perfect ego, a shining glory, the jewel in the crown.

It should be clear that the only ambition the ego really has is to get rid of you. The only purpose of the persona is to slice you up and separate you out and throw large chunks in the trash. What it keeps, it temporarily exalts like some kind of hero or savior or idol. But slowly it continues to find flaws in that idol, demanding even more vigorous 'purification' and sacrifice.

It says, well, if you give this up, and give that up, you'll be better off. It tells you you don't need all of what is, you only need the special good bits. But it doesn't tell you what happens if you take that to its ultimate goal. Keep going, and there will be nothing left of you. You'll live in a world where everything and everyone seems like your enemy, you are totally cut off and alone, depressed and frightened and weak, barely recognizing that you even exist, BUT .... drumroll... you'll have your perfect little fake self. Yay. And then you'll die alone.

So you can see... as you dabble even a little bit in being dishonest, inauthentic, not yourself, or trying to manipulate reality to get some kind of special value, special attention, special love... you're basically buying into a death trap. The temptation is you will indeed seem to get some special love, but.... it calls for a sacrifice. You've got to give up an arm and a leg for it. And then it's still not enough.

This is the promise the ego has for you. Go along with its plan for salvation, seem to achieve some kind of fake goal, or seem to find some kind of fake trophy, or seem to present yourself as some kind of ruler of the universe, and, in return, all of the rest of what you really are will be suppressed and attacked and gotten rid of.

Ultimately, the ego's perfectionism guarantees that NOTHING is acceptable. And sooner or later this will become apparent. Until you wake up and realize there has to be a better way.

You don't need a persona. You don't need an ego. You have God.

If you were witness to a miracle happening, you would probably be simultaneously in awe, perhaps frightened, stunned, and it would also defy a whole bunch of 'laws' that you believe are true.

If it seems that it can't be possible that someone's broken leg is suddenly healed, there is just "no way" that you can accept that this is possible, and yet it happens in front of your face, or even to your own body, this is going to produce a whole bunch of reactions.

One of the things that witnessing a miracle will do is it will DEMONSTRATE to your mind, factually and experientially, that something has just happened which does not FIT into your belief system or your idea of reality. Something just occurred which defies all of the laws that you thought were real. That alone will EDUCATE you, by demonstration and experience, that the laws you thought were true cannot be.

It will also cause your mind to become momentarily aware of a state of being which transcends form. "Miracles are temporary shifts into invisibility, that is why they heal" - ACIM.

"Principle 16 - Miracles are teaching devices" - ACIM

If one moment your hand is burnt, and then in the next moment your hand is suddenly not burnt, this miracle will defy and transcend all physical laws. Your mind will not be able to process this at the ego level. It will be bypassed. Your mind will become aware even if just briefly, that bodies can't be real, or at least that physical form can't be 'stuck' being in a certain state, and this will give you access to TRUTH experientially. This will undermine possibly everything you believe in, but you won't be able to deny it. (The attempt to then DENY this 'attack by truth' will make you sick. ;-)

This is similarly what happened when Jesus went through the crucifixion. He did it to demonstrate that the body is not real and death is not real. When one moment the body seems to be being tortured and killed, and then seems to die, and then a few days later shows up again as though nothing happened... it's not just a matter of oh look, there's Jesus.. your mind instead is going to have an instantaneous shift in awareness.

If Jesus is showing you to your face, that bodies can be switched on and off at will, one moment being dead and the next moment being perfectly alive again, you aren't going to initially be able to comprehend HOW, and just the mere fact of you experiencing this will SHOW YOU and make you aware that the body CAN'T be real - that death CAN'T be real, because here is the PROOF of that staring you in the face.

This has a profound healing effect on the mind and CAUSES awakening.

This is why miracles are also teaching devices because they demonstrate the truth and bypass all of the ego's laws and give examples of, experiences of, the truth in action. They educate by example that the physical laws CANNOT be true. And so they have the potential to instantly awaken and to instantly destroy illusions and false beliefs.

If Jesus showed up next to you right now, and then told you to shoot him dead, and you did it, and then he got up and there was no bullet hole and he was perfectly fine, it would blow your mind. Your mind would HAVE to expand in order to accommodate the evidence. It would show you perhaps for the first time in your life a demonstration of how bodies are not real. And you would've been always assuming that bodies are fixed and objective and constant and all the other illusions about them. And now suddenly Jesus shows you that they are nothing but images which can be flipped into any state at a moment's notice... that totally blows your entire world view about what bodies are. It's highly educational.

That's why Jesus uses miracles for TEACHING, because they demonstrate the truth and teach by experiential example, which defies the ego's thought system and baffles onlookers, causing them to be forced into an awakening.

This is also why many Course students DO NOT REALLY BELIEVE IN MIRACLES, because it is such a world-defying, body-defying, mind-warping, totally transcendent experience that the ego cannot conceive of it, does not support it, doesn't believe in it, can't be open to it, and doesn't understand it. So there is a LOT of resistance against the idea that Jesus LITERALLY is teaching us to perform such miracles.

In ACIM Jesus sometimes says some things which would be .... possibly offensive... to many people. These truth bombs don't go so far as to point fingers or to try to make people guilty, but it's quite likely that people will either feel guilt or anger about it. For example when he says basically that all sick people are trying to kill others through contagion. ....

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

He's literally saying that those of us who choose sickness, or really any form of victimhood or suffering, even fear, are ATTACKING others. "The ego's purpose is FEAR, because only the fearful can be egotistic."

"frightened people are apt to be vicious"

"those who are afraid are apt to be vicious"

This isn't exactly sugar-coating anything or walking on eggshells. Again he doesn't linger on it such as to try to make people feel guilty for it or worsen their state, but he IS literally saying that if you are afraid you are being vicious. That fear is a state of attacking others.

You'll notice that in both sickness and in fear, it always SEEMS like we're victims. Someone or something else is causing it. WE didn't cause it. WE aren't doing anything! WE are the innocent one! As little victims we get to portray ourselves with the "face of innocent", exonerated and harmless and helpless. SO THAT someone else can play the role of victimizer, accusers, inflicter of wounds and source of viciousness.

But let's make no mistake either that if we go into fear, we ARE in fact attacking love, trying to oppose love, and are trying to bring about a state of love's absence. We might not LIKE how it feels, but we're willing to do it for a payoff of ACCUSING someone else of causing it. It's part of how we scapegoat and project our sins onto others. So the fearful are actually frightening THEMSELVES by projecting "the cause of sin" onto someone else, making themselves the EFFECT of their own efforts to attack.

Similarly with sickness, no one seems to really WANT to be sick. Sickness sucks bigtime. Pain is a bitch. But we put sickness there so that someone else is accused of causing it, so that we again get a secret payoff of appearing to be innocent. We didn't apparently choose it or cause it, so we can blame it on the world. And now we are willing to be helpless, powerless, victimized and suffering, if it means we can accuse the world of causing it. There's a big payoff in that.

It means we're actually very vicious when we're in fear, and we're also very vicious when we're sick. Just as we're vicious in death, vicious when depressed, vicious when unhappy, vicious when unfairly treated, and vicious when terrorized. The ILLUSION OF victimhood covers up the underlying desire TO ATTACK.

And so attack is COVERED UP by defensiveness. Sickness COVERS UP a desire to CAUSE others to be sick. Fear COVERS UP an accusation that others have power over you, affecting you against your will. ie that you WANT to be use them to victimize yourself. There is a whole lot of vicious attack under the surface.

This is what Jesus is pointing to. Not to make anyone MORE guilty or to accuse anyone of anything, but just calmly to look at what's going on and to be honest about it. When I am afraid I am far more likely to become vicious and angry. When I am sick I am somehow trying to prove that the world sucks. That's just what it is.

But the world is ignorant of this and blinded by appearances, and so has "sympathy" for sickness and fear, protecting it like it's unasked for and unchosen. As if the sick or fearful person is innocent. This is a huge trap, and the fearful person DELIGHTS in persuading others to go along with the lie and side with them. Fearful people act like black holes sucking the life out of others.

I know because I used to be that. I've seen it up close. I had to learn that my fear was really MY vicious attack on others which framed them as evil and produced reactions of "fear" in my mind. That my sickness was an attempt to avoid and accuse and be victimized and suffer, for various reasons. What the world thinks is normal is not normal. The false empathy it has for suffering is a total ego smokescreen which we all have fallen for. We have to look deeper and not buy into the bullshit.

We even have to look at the fact that "being a victim" is not only always chosen, it's an attempt by the victim TO victimize. Do you think that's enough of an eggshell to walk around and not touch with a bargepole? Because most people will react to that with ego and hate and accusation of guilt, as if to even utter it is a sin. But the truth is, as Jesus would confirm, is that if I become victimy I AM victimizing the world. I am accusing it of doing things to me. I am WANTING to suffer. And that's entirely my doing it to myself.

We have to outgrow all these old ego modes of operating, of problem solving, and of functioning. They are attempts to solve the separation from God in ways that don't work. They are efforts to deal with the fallout and psychological effects. But they have to be replaced with something that does work. Real honesty and willingness and forgiveness.

In many areas of life at the moment, Holy Spirit's guidance to me is to "try".

I have seen in many ways how I stop myself or don't do something, on the basis of the ego's justifications, which basically goes like this:

"I don't think I know how to do that, so I won't"

However, the way Holy Spirit's mind works, the act of "attempting" to do something is actually an act of faith, which only needs to be a "little willingness" to START, to just TRY to do it.

The reason is that as you begin to try to do something, a FLOW starts to happen, Heaven comes to support you, you become receptive to guidance, and you get help. But you don't get the help UNTIL YOU TRY.

An insight here is that your WILLINGNESS TO TRY to represent God, is an invitation for God to enter and support you, to heal through you, and this is how you ASK or "PRAY" and how you receive what you asked for.

So you have to overcome the "I don't know how, so I won't", and turn that into "I don't know how, but I trust Holy Spirit to help me, so I will try".

This actually has a lot to do with learning to work miracles.

Miracles require that you be trusting God/Spirit to work through you, support you, guide you, direct you, in a very spontaneous state of trust/faith, where you simply show up to "do God's bidding"... .ie God's will. It requires you to make yourself available and just be empty and open to receive, and just go along with it, even if you have no idea what's going to happen.

So we have to learn this difficult lesson, of stopping relying on the ego's huge body of thought and learning and information, or the ability to intellectually "figure out on your own" everything you need. We have to shift into a mode of fluid, trust-based willingness to extend God's truth. And there is not really anything the ego can do to prepare you for this.

It takes a lot of BALLS, or guts, in a way, to have COURAGE, to have the confidence to just step up and "do it" with a sense of believing that it simply is going to work out WHEN you do, even if you have NO CLUE how that's going to happen up-front.

That sense of certainty, of dependency on Higher Help, to just go out there and step into the shoes or the role and just fly by the seat of your pants, not alone and frightened to hell (because you will fail if you try to do this with the ego), but based on a deep trust in being supported SUPERNATURALLY if you do so, will lead to miracles.

You have to show up and fulfill your function, in order for Heaven to help you to fulfill that function. It really does take a leap of faith, stepping into the UNKNOWN, stepping into the spontaneous state of trust and being in the moment and not premeditating or practicing or rehearsing or learning ahead of time. Just being flexible and free and WILLING to be used by God.

This is why you often see people doing miracles on the streets where they just go up to total strangers and offer a prayer and just start doing it and Jesus/Holy Spirit show up and people get healed. That takes some pretty major faith/trust that that supernatural help is going to be there. You can't fake it, either. It won't work if you don't "believe" ie have come to believe the truth of God.

The truth of God is that God wants to heal immediately right now and is totally ready to do so right now. It's only you not stepping into the ROLE of healer that is holding the miracles back. This is how Jesus was able to just go around and spontaneously "miracle the shit out of everything." - you can quote me on that ;-) He had no preparation, no reliance on ego skills, He just trusted God really strongly and the support was right there because he got into a flow and was of service.

But if we don't even try to do something, thinking that we are relying entirely on ourselves only, and that we don't have the knowledge or ability, we have already failed. We're in a state of failure. And we know we will fail if we keep trusting only in our own strength. Which is fear. Fear will block miracles because its an attempt to trust only what you know and not what God knows, believing you are the source of miracles or that something about how you perform them gives them their power. All power is from God and can only be SHARED AND EXTENDED by you, and you must learn to trust it.

Once we do learn to get over our ego objections and "I can't so I won't", we'll get more into the miracle-working mindset and miracles will flow naturally. When these miracles aren't flowing, something has gone wrong.

In our default ego react-to-the-world mode, it seems that how we feel is dictated by what happens. The "hierarchy of illusions" tells us that something has a given amount of importance or seriousness and that we should have an appropriate amount and type of reaction.

How much ego emotion you have about external events seems to be driven by those events, as if automatic. As if you should be upset when you find out about cancer, or you should be frightened by a tornado, or you should be hurt when someone attacks you. As if you are merely an effect of the world.

But Jesus is training us to be more responsible for how we feel, what we think, and what we experience or make of things. He's telling us that we are cause, not effect. After a while we start to notice a certain amount of detachment from external stimuli. What happens doesn't necessarily have the power to change who we are, dictate how we feel, or force us to be upset.

This entails a combination of knowing yourself, taking responsibility for thought and sight, not giving away your power, the cessation of playing the victim role, dis-identifying with the attackable body, an increased recognition of reality, and a willingness to forgive.

This movement away from victimhood towards empowerment gives you the strength and clarity to remain "less changed" by what happens. You are not so easily tossed about on a rollercoaster of suffering. And you are equipped with more tools to help you apply principles and techniques to get you out of victim-mode sooner.

You might then start to notice that when you're in a better frame of mind, you feel more invulnerable, more confident and assertive, able to stand your ground and remain true to what you choose to experience. When external problems arise, you are less thrown around and more able to stay centered. Your happiness is less disturbed and your peace of mind less upset.

You will probably also notice that when you are not in such a great fame of mind, have entered into upset, are having reactions, buying into temptation and illusions, suffering and in pain, sorrowful and unhappy, you feel really out of touch with it. As if you're back to square one, forgetting how to forgive and feeling like a powerless victim.

But eventually you'll rise up again in strength and light and love and forgiveness, and remember your training, and return to a state of greater peace and confidence. And then you'll compare the two states and realize that how you feel is not really dependent on the world. What you make of events, how you perceive them, and the effects that you put into yourself, are not quite so strongly bound to the world or other people.

That means you awaken the ability to deliberately choose to remain in the light more often. You start to realize that you aren't happy or unhappy "because of" external things. You realize that if you are unhappy about something it is really an internal state, and not really caused by the external. And that anything that's disturbing you is the result of you putting it there through a mistaken choice.

Gradually you separate yourself off from the external and spend more time in the happiness and strength that you want to be in. You realize that, if you could just be happy right now, a certain event or situation or problem wouldn't be upsetting to you. That you don't "have to" have certain upsets or reactions or ego emotions of despair and fear.

Then it becomes more about moving through life as though you are in the world and less "of" the world, being "passer-by", being less changed and disturbed regardless of what happens, buying into illusions and temptations less, remaining more calm and centered in your truth even if it contradicts what's happening, etc. It means you become more in charge of your destiny and able to not only cause things to happen deliberately but able to withstand the ego's onslaughts more easily.

"My self is ruler of the universe" ... "It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept." UrW253

And so you develop a real sense of there being a difference between what happens and what you feel. That how you feel is not based on the world or its problems or how people are doing or what's happening. And you can in a way float above it or beyond it, out of reach of it, regardless of what seems to be transpiring. This places you "above the battleground", where you are safe and invulnerable.

When you dip into ego and nightmares and victimhood you'll probably forget all this, lol. ... but when you rise like a pheonix back out of the ashes, you'll remember again and laugh. And you'll stop making all your feelings dependent on external things. You'll return to being able to stay centered in power and stillness, a calm in the storm, a "need do nothing" of rest, regardless of the world.

"He will remain when you forget, and the body's activities return to occupy your conscious mind. But there will always be this place of rest, to which you can return. And you will be more aware of the quiet center of the storm, than all its raging activity. This quiet center, IN WHICH YOU DO NOTHING, will remain with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you are sent." UrT18H10

Eventually you'll master this so much that you'll remain in your "happy place" forever. No longer driven by outside events, deceived by appearances, tossed around by threats or made to be anything not of God.

"It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events OUTSIDE him. It is impossible that the happenings that come to him were NOT his choice. His power of decision is the DETERMINER of every situation in which he seems to FIND himself by chance or accident. No accident or chance is POSSIBLE within the universe as God created it, OUTSIDE of which is nothing. Suffer, and YOU decided sin was your goal. Be happy, and you GAVE the power of decision to Him Who MUST decide for God for you. This is the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit, and even this He gave to you to give yourself. For, BY this gift, is given you the power to release your Savior, that HE may give salvation unto YOU." UrT21C3

Jesus refers in the course to sickness as "a magical solution". It's an attempt to solve a problem. The only problem is, this solution is mistaken, because it actually does something opposite to what the person thinks it will do.

If you are confused about what the truth is, you perceive the truth as something false or evil. You even will feel threatened by it. Then you will seem to defend yourself against it. And so you will erect defenses to push the truth away. The trouble is, truth life and health. So when you push it away, even on grounds that you think it is not truth, you are pushing life and health away. And this results in sickness. Even if you believe you have pushed sickness away.

"Sickness is a (mistaken) defense against the truth."

The person then ends up sick, using sickness as a defense, to try to protect themselves, to save their life, from the truth. But the truth is life, and what they're really doing is trying to save themselves from life. And this is why they've induced illness by mistake, thinking that they're inducing life. They've mistaken life for death, and have chosen death by mistake.

"Sickness is but a little death."

All this means is that sickness is a MISTAKE. It's what someone produces when they are MISTAKEN. They come to a wrong conclusion, based on a false belief or a wrong perception, and then seek to erect defenses that they don't even need, and try to protect themselves from something beneficial, believing that they'll be better off. There is no SIN involved here, it's just a matter of being very mistaken. A choice made on a false premise.

The form of sickness, even physical death, becomes nothing more than the outcome of someone's mind that is confused. It's the result of a creative person, a person who is powerful and making choices, who happens to just be making unwise choices, because they don't realize they are mistaken. They are confused about what is true, they are not entirely sane, and so they THINK they're making a totally sound choice and acting on it, when in fact they don't really recognize what they're doing wrong.

So now you've got a world filled with powerful creative minds, who are constantly choosing and creating, but who are confused. And so they keep creating mistaken stuff, stuff which hurts them, stuff which produces suffering, stuff which makes their bodies sick, not because they're inherently sinful or guilty or deserve it, but simply because they are mistaken about what things are. They don't recognize what is really true, and have made false conclusions, and now are choosing things which they think are one thing, but are another.

To be sick therefore is nothing more than a mistake in the mind. It just means the mind isn't really recognizing what the truth is, and has mistaken the truth for something false, and mistaken something false for something true. And now they're convinced that they are in fact pursuing the truth, all the time, except their navigation system is off because their truth-detector is faulty. And so they head towards death, thinking it is life. And hell is confused with heaven.

Everyone always protects what they believe is true. What is true is your treasure. What is true defines your identity. It's close to your sense of self. Of life. Of what you think is holy and pure and good and worth having. Truth is what you accept and allow and want. But if your idea of truth is faulty, if you are confused and mistaken, you will still have this attitude about your truth, except it won't really BE the truth in the big picture. But you don't know that, because you have mistaken something false for something true.

The simple confusion of what is true and false is the entire basis for people producing ALL of their own suffering. It's merely a mistaken choice. It's powerful creators mis-creating by mistake because they have not mastered their own creative power. And result is a world if conflict and suffering which the people are creating by mistake, being unmasterful of their abilities.

It's chosen by mistake, or in error. A wrong conclusion was arrived at. A faulty response was activated. Someone thought that a "magical solution" would work, when in fact it produced the opposite effect. And everyone who has chosen sickness thinks that they have chosen continuity and life. Even those who have chosen death believe they have chosen the preservation of themselves.

All suffering is just a mistake. Mistakes call for correction. They don't need judgement or condemnation or punishment. No-one needs to be kept suffering. No-one deserves to linger in torment. Or to be destroyed or killed. Even the most heinously evil-seeming person is merely a person who is very confused about what is true and false. They are just insane, lost, alone, frightened, uncertain, out of touch with reality, and making poor choices. They just don't know what the truth is.

This is why ACIM is constantly suggesting that we simply "choose once again". That we have made a wrong decision somewhere along the lines. A mistaken choice. Which has produced unfortunate effects, symptoms, conditions. And now we are suffering because we chose something on faulty grounds, without proper justification. And now if we don't want to keep suffering, we need to have a little willingness to be open to being mistaken, to recognizing that our idea of truth is faulty. To recognize that we just made a mistake and need correction.

Then we can be willing to not only open up to a greater truth, to accept atonement, but also to allow the Holy Spirit to undo the consequences that we came up with. The unfortunate "mis-creations", the side-effects of unwise decisions, the suffering we induced for ourselves due to being a confused creator. All we need is to become un-mistaken. To recognize our mistakes and receive correction. So that instead of being mistaken, we are correct. And when you are correct, you can cause nothing but immortality and happiness, based on truth.

"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."

"Say to yourselves the following, as sincerely as you can, remembering that the Holy Spirit will respond fully to your slightest invitation:

I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace.

I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise.

I WILL to decide otherwise, because I WANT to be at peace.

I do NOT feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM.

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

The ego can be likened to a train which is hurtling towards death. You don't necessarily need to be on the train.

But sometimes you hop on the train, with a one-way ticket.

Once you're on it, automatically you will begin hurtling towards death. You'll be frightened by this, and start kicking and screaming that you don't want it. But so long as you're still on the train, you're not really taking steps to counteract it.

You need to get off the train.

So getting on the train is you "identifying with" the ego. Trying to make it your identity. Trying to make it who you are. Trying to define yourself using its view of things. Trying to take on its identity as though you are it.

Once you do that, whatever it sees, whatever its opinion is, whatever it is trying to accomplish, and whatever it experiences, starts to become yours.

So now you've gotten yourself caught up in "bad company", you're being swept along this path that doesn't lead to a happy place.

So now you're in a split mind, because part of you remembers and wants to be back in the state of happiness that you had when you were off the train, but now part of you wants to be on the train.

So with that split mind, there's going to be stories running at the same time. There'll be the story of "I don't want this, I want to be happy, I don't want sickness, I don't want to die, etc", but at the same time there's be "I want to be on this train, I want to die, I want to escape God, I want to head to hell and meet my end."

Both of those stories will be experienced by anyone who is in cahoots with the ego. And that is anyone who is in the victim consciousness mindset.

You want to get out of it, but you don't. You want to protect the truth, but your idea of the truth has become tainted. You want to maintain innocence, but you've confused innocence with projecting guilt. So you end up having this two-faced state of conflict, a war with yourself, where you're torn apart.

As you head to death on the death train you're terrified and screaming that you do not want it, BUT, you're still choosing it. You're still on the train. And you're not getting off the train because you've come to believe the train is the truth. You think it's real. You think you want it on some level. So you stay seated.

We really need to become clear in our distinction of what YOU are, and what the TRAIN is. The train always heads to death. The train always wants to destroy. The train always goes away from God. That's all the train does. The train is the ego. That's all it does. It has no other mode of functioning. It will never change. It was designed as a device to produce death. If you use it, if you use the train or get onto the bandwagon, you will experience death.

But that's only because you've associated yourself with it, you've identified with it and think it IS YOU. No-one would want to give up themselves. No-one would want to give up their identity or stop protecting themselves. You protect the ego because you think it's who you are. You defend it till the death even if it kills you because you think its who you and what you are. You think that everything the ego sees in you is true of you. That you're made of sin and guilt and fear.

So you have all this struggle and all this conflict and all this fear about where things are headed and all these half-hearted attempts to fail at getting off the train, but you don' really want to get off the train UNLESS you can see that it is not YOU. It's not your real identity. You've become confused about WHO and what you are.

You will be perfectly happy to let the train go on its merry way IF you can see that doing so will not mean the end of you. You will happily let the ego go if you can recognize who and what YOU really are (real innocence, holiness, truth etc), and that these properties are NOTHING to do with the ego train. Therefore, it's loss is no loss at all.

You'll get off the train completely and stop trying to protect it only when you are certain that it is not yourself. And until then, you'll keep seeing the truth as a threat and keep building defenses against it.

The truth is the platform. It's where you want to get off

Why is no-one talking about the POWER OF GOD?!

There are some people who have been known as miracle workers. They typically work the same way. They are in close communication with God and the Holy Spirit. They are humble and have humility before God. They recognize that God has all power, and nothing else has power not even themselves. They depend on God for everything and trust the Holy Spirit with strong faith.

They are willing to do God's will, to go where they are sent, and receive a lot of specific guidance. They follow instructions, and do simple things like holding someone's hand, but then the Holy Spirit moves with great power.

There is always POWER involved, the power of God, which by the way is unlimited and immensely strong and capable. I've felt this power ONE time so far and it is totally off the charts absolute and intense. These people recognize that they barely do anything but be open channels for His healing power, and he moves through them and sickness and death are reversed.

This is also what Jesus is teaching us in A Course in Miracles. Not watered down miracles that are just shifts in perception. Not nice safe-sounding joining in love. But an actual application of a real POWER. This power can literally do anything, it is totally thousands of times beyond any notion of power you have ever experienced in this world.

A power which is so strong it is actually capable of building body parts, changing events, altering matter, reversing sickness and death, moving mountains etc. Not some act of forgiveness or some being nice to people. A real power, a very very strong power. A power which we are being trained to allow to operate through us.

You who have tried to keep power for yourselves, have lost it. You still HAVE the power, but you have interposed so much between it and your AWARENESS of it, that you cannot use it. EVERYTHING you have taught yourselves has made your power more and more obscure to you. You know not WHAT it is, nor WHERE. You have made a SEMBLANCE of power, and a SHOW of strength, so pitiful that it MUST fail you.

We are so out of touch with this power that most people don't even conceive of it as existing. But God's power is totally unlimited and so is your holiness - for which there is nothing you cannot do. We're talking totally unlimited miraculous power here. This recognition of the power of God is MISSING from so many people's teachings and the way we talk about miracles as if they're just nicer ways of looking at things.

Jesus is telling us how to be like him, how to break the laws of physics, how to reverse all the laws of the world, and how to utilize the power of God for good. Moses for example parted an entire ocean, which is in fact a SMALL feat for such a power.

"Why is it strange to you that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a little feat for such a power."

I felt this power one time when I was attempting a healing for my wife. She said she had this pain in her hand. It was probably nerve pain due to paralysis from her stroke years ago. I was trying to heal it with my hands on hers, sending energy etc. At some point and for a reason I have absolutely no idea about, there was suddenly a feeling of IMMENSE POWER present next to me.

This power felt so strong and so absolute it felt like it could've moved the whole planet without effort. I have never felt anything remotely as strong in any way in physical form. This power was still and deliberate and loving yet super-capable of anything. The mere presence of this power seems to cause a miracle, because all of a sudden not only was the pain gone from her hand, but also her mind was healed, and she was oblivious as to anything having happened, and even had forgotten that there was ever a pain there, as if it had never existed.

I have not felt that power before or since, but I hope to connect with it more. It is the power of God, and when you realize that this power exists, you know that miracles are far more than some "change of mind", or even something that you do at all. Quite honestly this power is SO strong that you might be frightened by it, and yet at the same time is not threatening in and of itself. And in a way, its strength is reassuring. This is why the course says that the Holy Spirit does SO MUCH in comparison to your tiny little contribution.

"All power in Heaven and earth is therefore given him and he will share it with you when you have completed yours."

When I write or read ACIM stuff, after a while I'll start to feel upset. I may feel overwhelmed, or agitated, even hurt, and might feel like I want to cry. It's almost like someone just said a whole string of lies about me.

I look at what part of me feels this way and I acknowledge what it is likely feeling. It feels offended by everything the truth says. It feels threatened by it. It does not want anything to do with the stupid-ass course and does not want to wake up at all. It wants it all to go away. It wants the truth to shut the hell up. It sees it as constantly attacking it, and it won't leave it alone. It feels victimized and threatened and hurt. It is offended by everything the truth said, as if it were all a personal insult and attack. It is frightened about the notion of the truth being true, and hates the Holy Spirit.

This "part of me" does not want anything to do with ACIM, or any spiritual path, or any kind of waking up, or anything to do with God. It just wants to be the way it is. It is reluctant to have anything to do with God or making truthful statements or reading what is true and or studying. It just reacts to it all from an ego perspective.

This is something maybe not spoken about by many people but it happens with me all the time and I think it probably does with most people too.

This stuff happens because the ego's vantage point is actually totally opposite to the truth, opposite to God, opposite to reality. It interprets everything to do with God as false, wrong, bad, evil, vengeful, an attack, offensive, abusive, hurtful, to be avoided, etc. Every possible attribute of "evil" is assigned to God by the ego. Every possible way to want nothing to do with it is given him. This is simply because the ego believes that what is true is false, and what is false is true, and in this it is actually insane and confused.

Then, there is my mind, which is "doing this ego", or is identified with the concept of it. So part of MY mind or self is latched onto this perspective, caught up in it, identified with it as if it is true of my own self, as if it IS me. So part of my mind is turning my back on God and is peering back at God through highly negating opposing ego glasses, and everything it sees is backwards and upside down and inside out. But it doesn't realize this. And so as I look "through" the ego, everything true is false, and everything real is an illusion, and God is death and death is life.

We have this stuff going on in us so long as we are identified with the ego/body. A bodily identification, an ego-thought-system identification, a sense of limitedness or exclusion or specialness. That collections of vantage points seems to form "the ego self" or false self, an "area" of our mind that is temporarily flipped inside out. And so long as we're still bound to it in that way, exposure to the light will be experienced as attack by darkness. And moving closer to truth is experienced as reality falling apart. And trying to open up to love and sharing and union is interpreted as a threat to my very life.

It's tough to go through this because on the one hand the majority of me is wanting to awaken and be loving and spiritual while this ego portion wants the exact opposite. And so doing the course, reading the words, doing the lessons, writing about the topics, whatever related to it, sooner or later pushes these buttons and out comes the tears and the tantrums and the emotional breakdowns and the resistance and the procrastination and all the rest of the dysfunction.

We perhaps have to be gentle with ourselves, with the part of our self that is still confused, still bound and identified with a way of perceiving that is backwards. And some times that part of ourselves needs a break, it needs a rest from course shit, it needs to stop reading and writing and thinking about it 24/7, and it needs to just live and do some basic earthly ego things for a while, to cool off, to feel less threatened and pressured. Because that self, typically filled with childhood traumas and twisted early beliefs, is completely confused about God and truth and everything real.

It wants nothing to do with it. And actually it can become seemingly "happier" when you ease up on threatening it. Gotta throw it some bones sometimes. Relax, take a study break, go shopping, eat some fun food, whatever. Be "normal" for a while. This can actually bring you a feeling of peace, at the ego level, temporarily. Then when you are rested and ready to press forward, go exposure yourself to what the ego interprets as "its demise" all over again.

"NO evidence will convince you of the truth of what you do NOT want."

""Give up what you do not want, and keep what you do." How simple is the obvious! "

"When you think you are projecting what you do NOT want, it is still because you DO want it. "

"You must have noticed that the emphasis has been on bringing what is undesirable TO the desirable, what you do NOT want to what you DO. "

Again it's quite simple. God and his kingdom are absolute reality and truth. Just "what is." The entire "separation from God" is just you denying this and becoming delusional that something else is true and real. This puts you out of touch with reality, and you start to hallucinate a false world. Your mind goes insane and can't tell what is true or real anymore.

The situation you're in physically, is that you seem to be in a world. But the psychological problem is that you are not even in touch with what this world is either. You do not see it correctly because you are to filled with denial.

The ego state of mind is full of distortions, denials, deceptions, lies, wishful thinking, fantasies, unwillingness to see, false beliefs, filters, judgements, meanings, opinions, and all manner of unreality. A kind of private inner world, like someone walking around in a daze, in a constant state of daydreaming.

Our attempt to deny God's truth and reality, also puts us out of touch with the "truth and reality" of THIS world. The desire not to see God's creation, causes us to also "not see" this world clearly. Our denial of eternal life, also causes us to not see heaven's reflection in this world.

What we're then needing to is to get in touch with reality and accept that reality. To become able to see truthfully and to see what is actually true. To recognize what everything is, without all the denial and distortion and lies about it. Jesus calls this "reality contact", as well as "true perception", and seeing the "real world." We might rephrase "real world" as "the world as it actually is."

We first become able to accurately perceive this world. This requires the undoing of all the ego devices, the unwillingness, the denial and distortion, the self-deception, the lies we keep telling ourselves. This requires a whole lot of radical self-honesty.

Honesty is really the same thing as "admitting the truth", which means also to "allow access" to the truth. To let the truth in. If we cannot accept the truth then we are not accepting atonement and are not having true perception. When we are reluctant to accept a situation, we dislike a situation, we want things to be different, we wish they were the way they used to be etc, that's all various forms of not accepting reality. It's always to do with not accepting a FACT.

The main issue here is denial. If all we did was undo denial and become more honest, we'd be finished. But we don't like to ever admit to being in denial, because denial is what keeps things away from us. It's a defense, it's what we use for ego protection and to keep our lies safe. To admit that you are in denial is to admit that there is something that is true that you do NOT WANT. And that means that to stop being in denial you'll have to becoming more WILLING, and open to ACCEPTANCE, that the thing you've been denying is actually true.

We basically just keep looking away from reality. We keep hiding our sight, unwilling to see what's really here. We keep avoiding, deceiving ourselves and distracting ourselves. We keep going off into the past and into the future. We are not present with what actually exists now, even on this illusory physical level yet alone the level of God's reality. We don't want to accept what is true, and this denial of truth was the beginning of the whole separation and the making of the ego.

So it's very helpful for us to pause and reflect on how we might be in denial, what we are denying, why we are denying it, and to become willing to stop being in denial. It means though having to swallow a "hard truth", something that you perhaps have been avoiding. Or even frightened of. Or something that seems that, if you were to face it, you would be horrified.

But it is the avoidance of truth that makes you horrified, and the horror comes from resistance - the lack of acceptance, not allowing the truth to be true. It has no effect on you when it washes over you and is allowed to be what it is. We have to accept this world first, even though it's an illusion, before we can accept God's kingdom. That doesn't mean accepting that it is ultimate reality, it just means letting it be what it is without fighting it.

All suffering, all despair, all loss, all unhappiness, all stress and fear, all threat and danger, all loss of peace, comes solely from the unwillingness to accept what is true. Your only choice is between denial or acceptance, and you will find hell or heaven as a result.

"You ATTACK the real world every day and every hour and every minute, and yet you are surprised that you cannot SEE it."

"Miracles are examples of right thinking. Reality contact at all levels becomes strong and accurate, thus permitting correct delineation of intra- and interpersonal boundaries. As a result, the doer sees the truth as God created it. This is what is meant by the point on "perspective adjustment."

"Make the world real unto YOURSELF, for the real world is the gift of the Holy Spirit, and so it BELONGS to you. Correction is for all who cannot see. To open the eyes of the blind is the Holy Spirit's mission, for He knows that they have not LOST their vision, but merely sleep."

"The term "right-mindedness" is properly used as the correction for wrong-mindedness, and applies to the state of mind which induces accurate perception. It is miraculous because it heals misperception, and healing is indeed a miracle, in view of how man perceives himself."

"YOUR denial of reality precludes ACCEPTANCE of God's gift, BECAUSE YOU HAVE ACCEPTED SOMETHING ELSE IN ITS PLACE."

"You who have spent your lives in bringing truth to illusion, reality to fantasy, HAVE walked the way of dreams. For you have gone from waking to sleeping, and on and on to a yet deeper sleep. Each dream has led to other dreams, and every fantasy that SEEMED to bring a light into the darkness but made the darkness deeper. Your GOAL was darkness, in which no ray of light could enter. And you sought a blackness so complete that you could hide from truth forever, in complete insanity. What you forgot was simply that God can NOT destroy Himself. The light is IN you. Darkness can COVER it, but CANNOT put it out."

"The ego looks straight at the Father and does not see Him, for it has denied His Son."

"The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist."

"All special relationships have sin as their goal. For they are BARGAINS with reality, toward which the seeming union is adjusted."

"You looked upon the unreal and found despair. But by SEEKING the unreal, what else COULD you find? The UNreal world IS a thing of despair, for it can never be."

"The sense is very literal; -- denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT. No-one can really DO this, but that you can THINK you can, and BELIEVE YOU HAVE, is beyond dispute."

The whole thought system of ego and being separate from God, is rooted in the idea of murder. This might not be apparent, and you might not think that many of the things you do are murderous. We reserve that term for when a body kills a body for example.

But in the course, "murderousness" is any form of inequality. It's a denial of the Golden Rule, the law of God. In truth what we do to another we do to ourselves, because we are one. But to the ego there is a breakdown in cause and effect, and between self and other. And this gives rise to what seems like a possibility that you can attack (cause) without being attacked (effect). Or that what you do to your brother you do not do to yourself - that what is true of him is not true of you.

This is a murderous idea because it now means that you can attack and escape the consequences. It means you can assign guilt to someone else and not yourself. That someone else can be hurt without you being hurt. And this is the very definition of murder.

Make no mistake also that the ego heavily believes in this, and as a result heavily believes that YOU are murderous, and that you are extremely guilty for having done so. Murderousness is the idea of sin. The ego believes that you have literally murdered God and his son. And as a result, it claims that you should be extremely guilty. This is the core of its belief.

The truth is that it is impossible to murder anything real, the Golden Rule cannot be violated, what you do to another you still do to yourself, you cannot escape consequences, and you have NOT murdered anyone or anything in reality. Therefore you are NOT guilty.

But you're going to find that as you explore this and attempt to undo this belief in your murderous nature, which the ego does heavily believe, the ego is going to put up quite a fight, and its going to keep insisting that you're a very guilty person. Deep down you do believe this, and it's a belief that it highly mistaken and will have to be systematically dismantled with the Holy Spirit.

The ego's desire to kill YOU off, is its belief that YOU have killed yourself off. And since you are the son of God, it believes that you not only are against yourself but that you want yourself to die. This murderousness is a suicidal belief of self attack. But if you cannot be killed, because you are immortal, then you also cannot be guilty, and definitely do not deserve to die.

What we are undoing through forgiveness is a seemingly murderous intention, which claims you have committed the ultimate sin, and therefore at completely guilty and worthy of death. The ego will hold this up in your face and wave it in front of you like it's true, because it believes it is real and has happened. But your job is to NOT believe this, because it can't possibly be true in God's reality.

The ego belief in you IS murderous and wants the total destruction and death of God and his sonship. And it would try to persuade you that YOU are itself, and thus are just as guilty. But you are NOT a murderer, you are innocent and holy. Your belief that you are guilty is mistaken. You are not guilty. You have not sinned. And God still welcomes you with open arms.

"What is NOT love IS murder. What is not loving MUST be an attack. EVERY illusion is an assault on truth. And every one does violence to the IDEA of love, because it SEEMS to be of equal truth. What can be EQUAL to the truth, yet different? Murder and love are incompatible."

"The darkest of your hidden cornerstones holds your belief in guilt from your own awareness. For in that dark and secret place is the realization that you have betrayed God's Son, by condemning him to death. You do not even SUSPECT that this murderous but insane idea lies hidden there. For the ego's destructive urge is so intense, that nothing short of the crucifixion of God's Son can ultimately satisfy it."

"Of this you dream. And, UNDERNEATH this dream, is yet another, in which YOU become the murderer, the secret enemy, the scavenger and the destroyer of the brother and the world you fear alike. Here is the CAUSE of suffering, the space BETWEEN your dreams and your reality. The little gap you do not even see, the birthplace of illusions and of fear, the time of terror and of ancient hate, the instant of disaster; -- all are here. Here is the CAUSE of unreality. And it is here that it will be undone."

"Now, for an instant, is a murderer perceived within you, eager for your death, intent on plotting punishment for you until the time when it can kill at last. Yet in this instant is the time as well in which salvation comes. For fear of God has disappeared. And you can call on Him to save you from illusions in His Love, calling Him Father and yourself His Son."

"A murderer IS frightened, and those who kill FEAR death."

"How can a battle be perceived as nothingness, when you ENGAGE in it? How can the truth of miracles be RECOGNIZED, if murder is your choice? When the temptation to attack rises to make your mind darkened and murderous, remember you CAN see the battle from above."

Heaven has always been the same, has not changed, and will always be the same.

The way that heaven was before "we separated" (an illusion, not possible), is still going to be the same it is NOW and the same it will ALWAYS be.

When the separation is over, the earth, which is an illusion, and is impossible...

"It is the world you see that is impossible."

...stuff which seemed to be the "possible content" of a world of separation, WILL NOT be getting "access" to heaven, will not be joining with heaven, and will not be CHANGING heaven into some kind of "post separation" state that is DIFFERENT to how heaven was BEFORE separation.

Heaven is a constant state.

There is NO WAY that planet earth can be "integrated" into heaven, included in heaven, or turned into heaven, or translated into heaven, or seen as heaven, or in any way become "part of" heaven. Heaven CANNOT CHANGE.

Heaven is the same as it always was, always is, and always will be. There is no open-door policy for renegade worlds to find amnesty. Earth CANNOT be translated into heaven. No part of "the separation" can become part of heaven.

The separation HAS NOT HAPPENED. The separation is IMPOSSIBLE. You cannot BE separate from God in truth, you cannot actually make "real planets", you canot create a "real world" of form and populate it with "real bodies". None of this "making of planet earth" has actually happened!

It is not happening now. It did not occur! Separation is impossible.

People are concerned that who THEY ARE is going to be left behind and left out of heaven, when the universe disappears, and are frightened that THEY HAVE ALREADY BEEN LEFT OUT. There are subconscious illusory fears and experiences of "rejection" from God playing out, whenever anyone tries to find a way to KEEP the Earth and rationalize HOW it is possible for it to become part of God’s creation.

God’s creation is already DONE. It is COMPLETE. There will be no seconds. There is no afterthought. Earth cannot become part of it on any terms. ILLUSIONS CANNOT ENTER HEAVEN and earth MUST be an illusion because separation CANNOT HAPPEN and HAS NOT HAPPENED. So the entire foundation of "the earth existing" is FALSE.

The world DOES NOT EXIST NOW, it DID NOT EXIST in the past, and IT WILL NOT EXIST in the future.

This is also reflected in Jesus’s statement that "at no time does the body exist". At no time does Earth exist either!

We are worried that who we ARE is going to be left out of heaven, forgotten by God, not included in the return home, and that what we ARE is tied to FORM and therefore when FORM is shown to have NEVER EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE, we think this means WE will not be able to enter heaven. But truth is, we are believing this ALREADY, because we already think we sinned for real, were already kicked out, and have already been rejected by love.

Truth is, if we stay identified with the ego, we will keep trying to find ways to prove that there IS a world and it will somehow become a part of heaven. WE DO NOT NEED THE WORLD. "The world holds nothing that I WANT". You do not NEED this wold at all, neither to keep its specialness nor to keep WHO YOU ARE. It has no meaning, no usefulness, no purpose, IT IS AN ILLUSION. You don’t want this!

Why in any way try to "defend the earth" or find some loophole or rationalization for how it will be kept and become part o heaven? GOD has already created your HOME - heaven - and it is PERFECT FOR YOU.

When you cross over the bridge to heaven, you will recognize that you GAVE UP NOTHING and GAINED EVERYTHING. The world, earth, IS NOTHING. Giving it up is NOT A LOSS. There are no grounds for keeping it. If you want to keep it, you have *ego attachments*, which are keeping you bound to an ILLUSION of something other than what God WILLS for you to have.

What God is offering is far greater, IS EVERYTHING, compared to the meager shit-farm that is planet earth. This World OFFERS YOU NOTHING. Nothing that you want. "A teacher of God will be more than willing TO GIVE UP ALL THE PLESAURES OF THE WORLD." Ie, give up the earth, because it no longer. SUBSTITUTES FOR LOVE. Pleasure is not love. Your TOYS of physicality are not love.

God has a wonderful reunion planned for you. When you finally let go of the world that NEVER EXISTED, recognizing that it is NOTHING because "there is no world", you will HAPPILY accept WHAT DOES EXIST - which is God’s creation for you, which is HEAVEN. What you will GAIN is absolutely huge compared to the fact that you will not LOSE anything worth having AT ALL, because earth is NOT WORTH HAVING.

Defenders of the planet have one thing to learn. THERE IS NO WORLD, and never was. There IS nothing to turn into heaven. All the content of heaven is *already complete* and nothing else will be added to it other than an extension of what it already is INSIDE it. Let go of planet earth. It is an impossible place. It is nothing more than an illusion. It is not God’s gift to you. You should have no desire to have it be kept in any way whatsoever. What God IS going to share with you is FAR BETTER than anything you could ever dream of.

We do not want to LOOK AT the fact that there is a NEED for healing. We actually are in denial that something HAS gone wrong, and that healing is necessary. And instead we have covered it up with a belief that NOTHING is wrong, or little, and healing is NOT needed.

Jesus describes here for example that we are afraid to look at our inner altar to realize that it HAS been defiled, and that we DO need healing, because we're frightened of the idea that something has gone wrong. But by looking at this fact with the Holy Spirit and through atonement, you can see only the need for healing as a call for healing, and thus for the restoration of the altar.

"The reason why the real vision is obscured is because man cannot endure to see his own defiled altar. But since the altar has BEEN defiled, this fact becomes doubly dangerous unless it IS perceived. This perception is totally non-threatening because of the Atonement. The fear of healing arises in the end from an unwillingness to accept the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary. The fear arises because of the necessary willingness to look at what man has done to himself."

He talks elsewhere as well about how we do not want to ADMIT that we have BELIEVED that we are separate from God, and now find ourselves in a state which seems to embody and symbolize that separateness. That we DO believe we are NOT with God. And that we need to be willing to look at this horrifying truth in order to ALSO be willing to correct it.

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

This runs contrary to what many people say and teach, that "the separation has not happened". This is false. THE separation is a term for the fall of man and the tiny mad idea, which is an actual thought we DID have and DID choose to believe in and tried to make real to ourselves. THAT happened, even if actual real separation is impossible. And now we find ourselves in a FALSE experience of a world in which we SEEM to be separate and believing it's real. THAT is happening. But it's not ultimate reality, in which real separation is impossible.

But we have to be willing to admit that this HAS occurred, that something HAS seemingly gone wrong, we HAVE mis-created an entire world, we HAVE identified with fake bodes, in order to also acknowledge that there IS a need for healing. People ARE calling out for love. Miracles ARE needed.

This is something that is coming to my awareness strongly at the moment, the great NEED that there is in the world, in EVERYONE, for healing and help. Only by admitting that this IS the situation we're in, can we be willing to BE helped, and to be OF help to others.

There is also a great blindness that many people have of not wanting to ADMIT that they are suffering. A great tolerance for pain. A great denial that anything is even wrong. That they are not happy. That they are sick and dying, or seeming to. This is partly because of the tremendous confusion and thought-system reversal which has interfered with our ability to RECOGNIZE what is actually happening - what situation we ARE in - what we HAVE done to ourselves, and the NEED we have for healing and correction.

In other words, no-one wants to admit that they DO believe they have tried to destroy themselves, others, and God, because looking at this would seem to imply guilt. But looking at it honestly without egoic reactions allows you to also see the call for Atonement, and the REASON why there is a great crusade to eradicate all lack of love - of God - everywhere.

For me, this recognition is starting to take the shape of feeling like I'm on a mission. The amount of atonement I have so far received is revealing a desire NOT to tolerate the "lack of love" (guilt, sickness, fear, death) in myself and others. To side only with God and his laws and truth. It's creating a compassion for the plight that ALL of God's separated children are finding themselves in, not just in ACIM circles but worldwide. The sheer EXTENT of the fall of man and the sheer extent of the world's insanity. ONLY by looking at this can you acknowledge just how much help IS needed, which then COMPELS you to be helpful.

"Only the sick NEED healing. The Soul does not need healing, but the mind DOES."

"Perception IS a separated state, and the perceiver DOES need healing."

"The Holy Spirit is the Christ mind that senses the knowledge that lies beyond perception. It came into being with the separation as a protection, and inspired the beginning of the Atonement at the same time. Before that, there was no need for healing and no-one was comfortless."

"It is only THIS that makes you willing to engage in endless "battles" with reality, in which you DENY the reality of the need for healing by making IT unreal."

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

If you meet a person who complains a lot, they frame themselves as a victim and then tell you all the many many ways that someone or some group of people are wrong. They go on and on and on and on and on endlessly. And meanwhile you feel like you are being held hostage and can't get away and you can't shut them up. And then as you try to leave, they follow you and keep on going with their diatribe.

What's happening is the person is full of guilt and shame and secretly condemns themselves a lot. They see themselves as victimised by all the many things in the world that they seem to not like. But they are not being spiritually responsible, for their experiences and feelings, so constantly accuse the world of causing it. They feel justified in pointing a finger of blame and listing off all the many sins they see outside themselves, but really because they themselves believe they are sinful. They hate themselves, so they like to hate others. Their shit don't stink, and they portray themselves as always idyllic and harmless and justified in being righteous.

The payoff for them is that if they can project their sins onto other people and find everyone to be guilty, it makes them have a certain sense of psychological relief from the heavy burden of their own hidden guilts. They get to come off as innocent and not like those who sin, separated off from them, and therefore not the guilty one. It produces an illusion that they believe they are not guilty, which is a form of denial.

Meanwhile, the more that they do this, the more they are basically imprisoning others. They are projecting their own imprisonment, and in effect really see themselves as imprisoned by their own guilt. They are locked in and stuck in their own confinement, so are expressing confinement to you. And that makes you feel like you are being locked in confinement. Whether or not they actually target you or complain about something you are believing or doing, it doesn't matter, because they want your indirect acknowledgement that they're right and that you are bearing witness to their innocence.

So long as you agree with them, don't stop them, allow them to spew, and go along with it as though condoning it and not challenging it, they will keep going and never end. They find validation by your passive receipt of it. Meanwhile their condemning blaming imprisoning vibe can make you feel like you're being held hostage and that the other person is using you, like you're chained to them and have to hear the long list of sins, so that they'll feel better about themselves. They don't want to let you go or be free because they won't be able to scapegoat and get rid of their guilt. It's really a guilt dump onto you so that they feel better, in illusion.

There is another way that this plays out. I've noticed if someone sees themselves as a victim and isn't being spiritually responsible, they'll believe that things you personally do make them feel unpleasant, guilty, shameful etc. They will then accuse you of being the cause of their suffering, even though they did it to themselves by taking something personally. They will twist what you said and use it against you as though you caused them to have a reaction. And now they'll start to get angry at you and scapegoat you and demand an apology.

This becomes a form of intimidation, where responsibility has been shifted, and now you supposedly are responsible for making them feel better. They hold what they did to themselves against you, and now you feel like it's your fault, you feel guilty, and now you feel like you have to atone or make it up to them. You have to now grovel and lower yourself and make an apology, after which they grin with delight that they forced it out of you and made themselves feel superior.

It becomes a kind of tyrannical relationship of control and blame, where you are accused of causing them what they're supposed to be responsible for. You feel imprisoned by this accusation, and supposedly guilty for causing them. They get this angry strong opinion about how you're wrong. They totally depend externally on someone apologising or meeting their needs or sucking up to them, in order for them to feel better, because they are not being responsible for how they feel. They depend externally on this positive feedback and getting positivity from others, to make up for their lack of responsibility for feeling shit. And meanwhile they judge the living shit out of everyone and everything.

So then you start to feel obligated and held hostage and like you can't tell them they're wrong. Since they depend so heavily on external validation, you also sense that if you were to say anything against them or that they might take as an attack or that they might think of as not validating their bullshit, they will become even more angry and negative and scapegoating, and then they'll become a big monster and do something even more threatening and aggressive and controlling. So then you become afraid that they'll have power over you, control you, manipulate you, and that you're not good enough.

This kind of person is so victimy and so dependent on externals and so believing the physical world and generally likely atheistic and non-spiritual, such that they act like a gatekeeper and superior person whose opinion has to be requested on all matters. Like they are really important and special. And if you agree with them they shower you with ultra positivity and loveliness, and if they don't agree with you they go into an angry pout mode and become aggressive.

The special love flips to special hate. So now it's very hard to question their motives or to point out their flaws or to push back on their strong opinion because you know they'll just go into attack mode and make you an enemy. So instead they get to stay in a kind of 'everything's wonderful' state of illusion and fake special love relationship and dishonesty and irresponsibility, acting like they have the face of innocence all pleasant and nice to everyone, only to become an enraged monster when anyone points out their bullshit.

Either way you can end up feeling held hostage by someone's ego, with demands that you act a certain way, or indirectly demands that others act a certain way, in order for them to be happy. It can be difficult to stand up to and to draw a boundary with these people, to stop them from their spewing or to raise doubts about their motives. In both cases the person is a scapegoater, a judger and a hater of the things in the world that they consider wrong.

They segment the world into positives and negative, side heavily with what they like and side heavily against what they don't like. This is a spilritualizaiton of the world, an attempt by their egos to make out that some parts of the illusion are better than others, and leads to believing that they themselves are better than others. In their siding with the face of innocence they become overpowering and seeing themselves as holier than thou. In effect, those who portray themselves as the innocent victims tend to be the most vicious accusers.

"The partly innocent are apt to be quite stupid at times." UrT3D3

"This is particularly unfortunate, because frightened people are apt to be vicious" UrT3C15

"The first presents the face of innocence, the aspect acted ON. It is this face that smiles and charms and even seems to love. It searches for companions, and it looks at times with pity on the suffering, and sometimes offers solace. It believes that it is good, within an evil world. This aspect can grow angry, for the world is wicked, and unable to provide the love and shelter innocence deserves. And so this face is often wet with tears, at the injustices the world accords to those who would be generous and good." UrT31E2

"Beneath the face of innocence there is a lesson that the concept of the self was made to teach. It is a lesson in a terrible displacement, and a fear so devastating that the face which smiles above it must forever look away, lest it perceive the treachery it hides. The lesson teaches this; "I am the thing you made of me, and as you look on me you stand condemned, because of what I am." UrT31E4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes doing ACIM seems very difficult. It boils down to a simple fact. Everything in the world is opposite to the truth. And that means you're going to have to become opposite to everything in the world!

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

This is no easy feat. Everything in the world is totally backwards, inside out, and upside down. It is opposite to heaven's laws and nature in EVERY way.

"...earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

So it's calling for you to totally go against the grain in order to be sane, to deny and defy the whole nature of this entire world and not believe a single thing about it. The world is insane, and you want sanity.

"What does this prove except the world is mad? Why share its madness in the sad belief that what is universal here is true? Nothing the world believes is true. It is a place whose purpose is to be a home where those who claim they do not know themselves can come to question what it is they are."

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."

"This IS an insane world, and do not underestimate the actual extent of its insanity. There is no area of your perception that it has not touched, and your dream IS sacred to you."

Our position in "false perception" is one where we have reversed or swapped cause and effect. We've also swapped what is true and what is false. Everything is totally back to front. We now believe the world is happening to us, causing us. And yet, we are immortal beings, causers, creators, rulers of the universe, to whom nothing is supposed to be happening.

There are very strong empowerment themes in ACIM to do with you learning to re-adopt the position of having power OVER the world. Over even sickness and death. Over all problems and forms of suffering. In which you are the cause of the dream, and not its effect. Where you are invulnerable and incapable of being hurt. Where you would show and demonstrate to others that you cannot be hurt even physically.

"Show your brother you've had no hurt of him."

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

Whenever our mind believes for a second that cause and effect have been swapped, we see ourselves as at the effect of the world and other people. They're doing it to us. We're being affected. We are now passive victims, suffering against our will, experiencing things we seem to have not chosen or wanted. But then the course is saying, absolutely everything that happens you must have chosen and wanted, and you did it to yourself.

This is reflected in the secret of salvation "you're doing this to yourself." It doesn't even matter what form it takes or who seems to be the victimizer. If you see yourself as an effect of the very thing you made, you are playing a role of victim and are positioning yourself to be hurt by it. And yet you are an immortal being, who cannot be hurt.

"Nothing real can be threatened."

The real meaning of this is that you are an immortal being and you are CAUSAL. You caused this world. You are the dreamer of it. It is nothing but an effect and it cannot do anything to who or what you really are. You've dreamed up dream figures and set them about attacking your body.

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal? "

"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did."

"My Self is ruler of the universe. It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen."

And then Jesus even goes on to say that you cannot suffer or be sick or hurt or killed or anything against your will. That even death is CONSENTED to in all its forms.

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

So we've got the world seeming to function backwards, in which it seems capable of causing your body, making it an effect of the world. You've got random chaotic events "happening to it". You've got all manner of inescapable problems, people attacking you, stuff going wrong. And you're supposed to fly in the face of it all exclaim, THIS IS DOING NOTHING TO ME.

That's not easy. You're asked to act like an immortal being in a mortal world. And that means if you are not vigilant, you're going to be constantly drawn into the world's ways, tempted to believe what it shows you, deceived by its illusions and frightened by its images. You have to constantly be on-guard and vigilant in your willingness to take a forgiving attitude instead.

Forgiveness means little more than looking at the world from a point of view of it BEING NOTHING LIKE YOU, and therefore that you are immortal and it is not. Forgiveness symbolizes your immortality and points to your invulnerability. You can accuse no-one of sin if it is impossible for you to be sinned against. If the world can do nothing to you, you cannot be angry at it. You can only be benevolent by recognizing that you cannot be changed.

That's difficult work. Being confronted with a totally backwards world all day every day, and being asked to totally go against it and deny it in every way. That even your body lies to you. Even your planet is a false world. Even the events that sure as hell look like they're happening aren't happening. That even the suggested proof of sin that your body can be crucified is a total deception. The world is COMPLETELY UNNATURAL.

"as it seems to be the most unnatural and difficult for the untrained mind."

"Deny your own identity and you will not escape the madness which induced this weird, unnatural and ghostly thought which mocks creation and which laughs at God."

"The ego wants to teach you that you want to OPPOSE God's Will. This unnatural lesson CANNOT be learned"

"Miracles seem unnatural to the ego"

"To you the miracle CANNOT seem natural, because what you have done to hurt your minds, has made THEM so UNnatural that they do not remember what is natural to them. And when you are TOLD about it, you cannot UNDERSTAND it. The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you."

"Guilt is a sure sign that your thinking is UNnatural. Perverted thinking will ALWAYS be attended with guilt, because it IS the belief in sin."

For you to become your natural self, you're going to have to stop believing anything the world says or does. That's not exactly easy if your'e used to being in false perceptions where you buy into the entire system and think it's the truth. You're quite literally stuck in hell and trying to get back to heaven. And the only way to get back there is to become heaven-like while you're in the midst of evil.

You're being PULLED in two different directions. The world is trying to pull you into hell and darkness and death. God is trying to pull you into heaven and light and happiness. The two are irreconcilable. They are totally opposite. You will have to abandon the world if you want to go home to God. You will have to turn your back on death and reject sickness and choose away from sin and guilt and fear. And most of all, you will have to learn to see yourself as the RULER of the universe, in no way a victim, and entirely equipped with the power of God.

When you first perceive that someone has something wrong with them, is sick or suffering in some way, and this strikes you as real, you will have a reaction.

Your reaction will be part of what you have put in place in your mind, because both what you see in the other as sickness and your reaction to it coexist in a single split-minded dynamic.

You will react to what you've shown yourself, believing it. If it is real to you, you will be horrified and upset and will want to stop the suffering as if that will solve your upset, but the other person's suffering isn't the cause of your upset - your split minded perception is.

You will want for the person to be free of this pain or sickness or situation. You think that if you solve that, your own upset will go away, but it won't. You will then automatically start trying to fix them and change them and even force them to be different.

Your attempts to fix them will then compel you a great deal and produce a lot of what seems like a genuine desire to help, a motivation to research and figure out and find solutions. You can get into that quite deeply.

You will convince yourself that you are being caring, that you just want to help the person, are trying to heal them, want to take away their hurt and save them.

But what you don't realize is that you're doing all this as a reaction to something you perceived which frightened you and upset you. You think that your response is based in helpfulness and selflessness but it's really a selfish reaction to what you showed yourself and what you saw in the person.

Your use of them entailed you seeing truth within their sickness, believing their sickness to be real, showing yourself their illusion of sickness as though it is the truth and is really happening. That is actually an attack on your part. That is you using the opportunity to imprison them by holding these perceptions as true of them, maintaining the sickness and keeping it.

Your efforts later to get rid of the sickness, as extremely caring as they may appear to be, are actually an egoic cover-up to the fact that you are keeping the sickness in place, have attacked the person with the sickness by agreeing with it, and some part of you actually wants them to be sick.

The truth can be upsetting to admit to. Shocking isn't it, that you thought you were just trying to help and care about them and in fact you were hurting them, contributing to their suffering and keeping them imprisoned.

All you've been doing this whole time is rebounding off your own false, erroneous perception, which showed you an illusion of sickness as though it was God's given truth, which must be horrifying if sickness is the truth, and then were attempting to get rid of that as though it was in the person and not in your own mind. The making-real of what you thought was in the person, was just a projected portion of your of mind attacking itself.

If you admit to this then you will learn to stop trying to fix and heal and correct and help and solve the person's problem, because in REAL truth they do NOT have a problem. You do. YOU are upset about what you see. YOU are upset about what appears to be a real suffering. IF it were real, your upset would be justified indeed. But it's not. You are mistaken. And that means that all your attempts to help based on keeping it real and believing it's truly happening, are actually counter-attacks and are NOT forms of healing.

So all this time you thought you were trying to help, you were hurting, agreeing with what the person believes about themselves, and holding them captive to their own suffering. Your failure to UNDO their sickness is an attack. Your failure to see through and overlook the illusion of their sickness - which is not REAL sickness (it doesn't exist), is actually an attack. Since you did not forgive, you must have judged, and judgement is condemnation.

If you can admit this to yourself and collapse this whole illusory response to a misperception, you will stop trying to fix and solve the person based on what is "really happening to them." It's a false reaction, because it's not TRUE that something is really happening to them. Their sickness is an illusion, not a reality. Their immortal self is NOT threatened. There is no real danger. Life isn't under attack. Only by perceiving and believing as such do you support life and set your brother free from their imprisonment.

Once you admit you were only reacting to your own upset, because of what seemed like a really deep "genuine" feeling of caring and wanting to help and make everything better, you will see that this desire to help is really an illusion. It's part of the ego. As supportive as it SEEMS, it is not helping at all. It is just your own emotional upset flaring up into a nightmare and causing you to go on the offensive trying to solve everything that doesn't exist. Pretty funny actually.

When this denial has been undone, you are now more clearly confronted with a greater degree of truth about the situation. Your challenge now is to ACTUALLY FORGIVE what you see, to not believe in it, to truly UNDO it, by correcting your mind and offering this correction to your brother. Your lack of support for their belief that they are sick will be healing, helping to guide them towards the truth that will set them free.

Now you can be TRULY HELPFUL, by offering a miracle of forgiveness and coming from real love, which isn't a love that enters into FALSE EMPATHY. False empathy means you are believing in the suffering of others and agree with it and therefore are attacking them and yourself with it by joining in it with them. That isn't helping you or them. True empathy means representing God, genuinely, offering miracles of love, and shining a light for your brother to see.

There are parts of the Course describing miracles where it says that they shine a light to reveal all the ways that we are in error. It doesn't necessarily do anything but it reveals how we are in fear and let's us see that clearly so that we can recognize illusions and thus make them disappear. It points the way to the truth.

We must learn to OVERLOOK the appearance of sickness, instead of reacting to it. We must learn not to believe our eyes or think that this is proof. We must recognize our own ego reactions based on our own nightmare of hallucinating that sickness contains the truth. Sickness is always an illusion and if we're not recognizing that we will become upset and try to attack it with "help". That is not forgiveness and it is not healing or helpful. Such helpfulness is hurtful.

Strangely, you will become more loving and truly compassionate when you are not having your own gigantic mega reaction to someone's plight. You'll be more present and available and productive and constructive. You'll be able to truly help them and support them, rather than making it all real and going on a rollercoaster ride. It's not easy. The ego has lots of traps up its sleeves and this is one of the big ones.

One time, I was exploring my relationship to the holy spirit and it occurred to me that perhaps I was misunderstanding by presuming he was "separate from me", since I always heard him as a separate voice. And this idea came to me that maybe he was not separate and that this separation between us wasn't there. This seemed harmless enough but this opened me up to the idea that I was now "exposed" to the holy spirit without any defenses or blocks or separations or walls, and my ego did not like that one bit.

The ego in me, which was playing with this idea but not really dropping the deeper walls, interpreted this to mean that the holy spirit had "access" to me (to my ego-identified self) and that this meant he could do anything to me and I would have no defense or way to stop it. I wasn't ready to accept this level of openness without the trust that's needed. I felt that if there was nothing to stop him, the fact he proves there is no ego would dissolve me and was therefore *perceived as* an attack or threat. Of course the holy spirit wasn't doing anything of the sort but that's how I interpreted it.

Instantly, within a split second, and without thinking of it at all, my mind attempted to push him away, or rather, to recoil. To distance myself from him by trying to increase the "gap" between us, trying to hide deeper in the body, and to try to go into denial/resistance/blockage to shut him out. The only defense really was the attempt to block my AWARENESS of him. This happened really quickly and I could really feel this recoil in fear. It's not something I "figured out" it's just something I did automatically. I saw the need for a defense to keep me (my ego self) "safe" from this threat of unity. I actually felt scared of what the holy spirit was going to do to me.

Within an hour, my head became congested, my ears started ringing, they became quite blocked, I was starting to get sinus drainage etc. This came on really quickly. Of course, I did not recognize that I had induced this myself, or chosen it. I was doing what is described here in "sickness is a defense against the truth":

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

Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that it is done."

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

So by the time the hour was up, my BODY was sick. I was not aware I'd caused it or the cause-effect relationship of the event with holy spirit versus what the body was doing. I just thought I was getting sick out of the blue. I started looking ELSEWHERE for causes, wondering if it was something I ate, something I contracted, some emotions coming up, whatever. I then proceeded to suffer with blocked ears, trouble hearing, ringing in the ears, headaches, sinus congestion, for the next couple of days. And you can bet not one single idea of what caused it was related to that event. In effect, the defense is put in place to shut OUT awareness and this blockage causes you to not be AWARE that you CHOSE the defense for this exact purpose to try to make the threat go away.

After a couple days of suffering - and my hearing issues were basically a symbolic representation of "I don't want to hear this truth", I started trying to figure out when it started. I realized that it started right around when I was having that interaction with the holy spirit. And then fortunately I remembered that it had frightened me. And so then I was able to put two and two together and realized that, or at least was open to the possibility, that maybe I had chosen this as a reaction to him. I also was not on "speaking terms" with the holy spirit at this point because I was feeling afraid and did not feel safe or trusting of him, so he hadn't been saying anything.

I started to tentatively realize that I needed to get past this fear. I needed somehow to find a way to re-approach the holy spirit again, without being afraid, having some kind of TRUST, and to find a way to relate to him in terms of that openness to him without it MEANING that I was threatened or under attack. I needed a different way of looking at it so that I wouldn't misperceive our "unity" as a dangerous thing. So I became willing, and I started to try to deliberately trust and to take baby steps towards communicating with him again. And as I did, I was willing to put aside the fear that had been induced.

When I did this, I saw clearly that I had created this defense as a way to try to protect myself and out of fear. And since I could now be willing to more carefully trust the holy spirit and not fear him, it became obvious that I had NO MORE NEED for this protection. Like, it was okay to let down my guard.

Within an hour, all the symptoms vanished completely.

"Healing will flash across your open mind as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. "

"There will be no dim figures from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey."

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

"No-one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. When this is seen, healing is automatic. It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear."

The body is a wall, like a fence, which was drawn around a PART of your total mind, in order to section it off and claim it as personal territory. The purpose of this body fence is to define that some tiny portion of your mind is yours alone, not shared with anyone, and that all of God and Creation are kept outside. Within this fence is the idea of the selfish self, the ego, which now regards itself as a whole self, but through bodily identification lacks the relationships that imply being.

This means that as you return to the wholeness of yourself, of your soul, you necessarily must re-inherit and open up to the vast expanse of the rest of your mind, which had been disconnected and externalized. Literally, the rest of you is out there, in your brothers. You are much larger than the tiny little PIECE of self that is hidden in a body. Only a PART of your mind finds itself imprisoned in flesh and the rest of you is unlimited.

Your mind is in fact so unlimited it is larger than the universe of spacetime. And symbolically we invented bodies as a tiny speck of a fence around a tiny speck of the total mind/self. This tiny piece of yourself is what finds itself within the body, as an ego, believing it is the whole of yourself. The whole rest of yourself symbolically is outside the body fence as the external universe. And it is huge in comparison. When you awaken, you reunite with the rest of the universe that you separated a PART of your mind off from. Thus not ALL of you went into the separation, only a tiny portion of your total mind.

"The body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist."

"The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate ***parts of his Self from other parts***. It is ***within this fence he thinks he lives***, to die as it decays and crumbles. For within this fence he thinks that he is safe from love (the whole of himself). Identifying with his safety, he regards himself as what his safety is. How else could he be certain he remains within the body, keeping love (the rest of him) outside (symbolized by the external world)?"

"God cannot come into a body, nor can you join Him there. Limits on love will ALWAYS seem to shut Him out, and to keep you APART from Him. The body is a tiny fence ***around a little part*** of a glorious and completely limitless idea (your full self). It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little ***segment*** of Heaven (a PART of your full mind), splintered from the whole, proclaiming that, within it, is YOUR Kingdom, where God can enter not. Within this kingdom the ego rules (the selfish/special/posessive self that produces the body fence), and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe (the rest of you which seems outside the body and symbolically extremely vast).

***This fragment of your mind ("the ego") is such a tiny part of it***, that, could you but appreciate the whole, you would see instantly that it is like the smallest sunbeam is to the sun (you are much bigger than your little body self). Or like the faintest ripple on the surface of the ocean. In its amazing arrogance, this tiny sunbeam has decided it IS the sun; this almost imperceptible ripple hails itself as the ocean. Think how alone and frightened is this little thought, this infinitesimal illusion, holding itself apart, against the universe. The sun (God/soul/oneness) becomes the sunbeam's "enemy," which would devour it. And the ocean terrifies the little ripple, and "wants" to swallow it.

Yet neither sun nor ocean is even aware of all this strange and meaningless activity (God does not acknowledge your belief that part of you is separate from the rest). They merely continue, unaware that they are feared and hated by a tiny segment of themselves. ***Even that segment is not LOST to them*** (this tiny part of mind must be KEPT and reintegrated), for it could not survive APART from them. And what IT thinks it is in no way changes ***its total dependence on them FOR ITS BEING***. Its whole existence still remains IN THEM (you are always joined to the rest of yourself). Without the sun, the sunbeam WOULD be gone; the ripple WITHOUT the ocean IS inconceivable.

Such is the strange position in which those in a world inhabited by bodies seem to be. Each body seems to house a SEPARATE mind (a part of your total mind that is separated off), a DISCONNECTED thought, living alone and in no way joined to the Thought by which it was created. Each tiny fragment seems to be self-contained (your little sense of self), needing each other for SOME things, but by no means TOTALLY depended on their One Creator for EVERYTHING. And needing the whole to give them ANY meaning, for by themselves, they DO mean nothing. Nor HAVE they any life apart, and by themselves. (the little part of mind separated off in the body is still part of the whole).

Yet, like the sun and ocean, your Self continues, unmindful that this tiny part regards ITSELF as you. It is not missing; ***it could not EXIST if it were separate*** (its not really separate), nor would the whole BE whole without it. It is not a separate kingdom, ruled by an IDEA of separation from the rest. Nor does a fence surround it (body is an illusion), preventing it ***from JOINING with the rest*** (of you), and keeping it apart from its Creator. This little aspect is NO DIFFERENT from the whole (still holy mind), being continuous with it, ***and at one with it***. It leads no separate life, because its life IS in the Oneness in which its being was created.

Do not accept this little, fenced-off aspect ***as*** your Self (because you are unlimited). The sun and ocean are as nothing, beside what YOU are. The sunbeam sparkles only in the sunlight, and the ripple dances as it rests upon the ocean. Yet in neither sun nor ocean is the power that rests in you. Would you remain WITHIN your tiny kingdom (body), a sorry king, a bitter ruler of all he surveys, who looks on nothing (the world/gap), but who would still die to DEFEND it? This little self is NOT your kingdom. Arched high above it, and surrounding it, with love, is the glorious whole, which offers all its happiness and deep content to EVERY part. (including the separated off mind that's in a body)."

Here is also an additional quote from elsewhere in the course which confirms further that only a small part of our mind was stolen away from heaven, not all of us, and finds itself now to be in a body.

"Therefore, it is the tiny part of your self, the little thought that seems split off and separate, that the Holy Spirit needs. The rest is fully in God's keeping, and needs no guide. But this wild and delusional thought needs help, because, in its delusions, it thinks it is the Son of God, whole and omnipotent, sole ruler of the kingdom it set apart to tyrannize by madness into obedience and slavery.

This is the LITTLE part of you you think you stole from Heaven. Give it back to Heaven. Heaven has not lost it, but YOU have lost sight of Heaven. Let the Holy Spirit remove it from the withered kingdom in which you set it up, surrounded by darkness, guarded by attack, and reinforced by hate. Within its barricades is still a tiny segment of the Son of God, complete and holy, serene and unaware of what you think surrounds it. Be you not separate, for the One Who DOES surround it has brought union to you, returning your little offering of darkness to the Eternal Light."

The whole problem with false perception is really just one of confusion about "what is the cause." Or more to the point, who is causing it. We could rephrase that as "I don't know what God (cause) is."

In the separation there was a disassociation from the role of "causer" or chooser (creator), and the ownership and responsibility of this causing was projected onto others. We then ended up in an extremely confused state of not being able to clearly discern, "who is doing what to whom?"

In the ego thought system, cause and effect are completely reversed, things which are true seem false, things which are false seem true. There is a breakdown of the Golden Rule, in which anything that's true is true of both of us.

It's replaced with the ego's idea that what is true for me is not true for you. Which really is another way of saying, cause and effect are separate. I can cause you without being affected. And you can cause me without being affected. I can accuse you of doing something I did not do, and thereby believe I am innocent while you're guilty.

This is the ego's idea of "getting away with murder", because it believes it can cause things to happen and escape the consequences. So when we get into "its you not me", or "you did this to me", any kind of blame or finger-pointing or scapegoating or believing that "cause" is outside of you, you will instantly go into a victim role. And victims are always confused about who is attacking them.

In that confused state of ego reactions, it always seems like it's someone else doing this to us, some external event happened, some unforseen circumstance, some unwanted happening

Usually you'll feel devoid of all responsibility for causing it. ie it'll seem like you didn't choose any of it, and you don't want it. But this is because you have no clue whatsoever what is really causing anything. And so random fingers point at random targets hoping some mud will stick.

As you apply forgiveness, ie you become more honest and less in denial about your contribution, you start to sort out exactly WHO is causing stuff to happen. At first it seems like it's everyone except you, but then gradually each time you see that YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF, or was something you did in fact choose, or that it did have an effect on you, the picture starts to become clearer.

The more you can take responsibility for choosing the more you will discern clearly and recognize that you are the cause of your suffering. You will also start to notice that the ego's breaking of God's laws does not work, and in fact when you do attack or scapegoat another you do NOT escape the consequences. It makes you feel guilty, it frightens you, it upsets and stresses you out.

Eventually, there becomes a clear association between "being a victim" and "attacking yourself". A clear line of causation from what you are choosing and the effect YOU experience as a result. You'll see it's not possible to blame another without feeling blamed. It's not possible to judge without feeling judged. It's not possible to attack without feeling attacked. And it's not possible to accuse someone of being the cause of you without you feeling like a vulnerable victim.

And so then it becomes obvious, that you feel like a victim BECAUSE you positioned yourself as one, seeing yourself in that role, and wanting to do so in order to try and get a payoff of scapegoating. But you no longer can pretend that your attacks on another don't hurt yourself. You can't help but notice that the instant you try to shift guilt to someone else, you will immediately feel that familiar weakness, threat and lack of safety that accompanies a victim mentality.

It then becomes an unavoidable no-brainer. That is, you clearly recognize and distinguish, whenever I attack, I feel attacked. Whenever I want to make someone out to be guilty, I feel like a victim. Whenever I try to be unforgiving, I feel unforgiven. It has a direct correlation, because I AM the cause of everything I experience, NOT the other person.

It then becomes harder to pretend to yourself that your attempted attacks on others have no effect on you. You are affected every time. You simply cannot maintain peace and happiness at the same time as being angry with someone. You can't truly honestly justify anger in any situation because you know that it's bullshit. And it'll become increasingly noticeable that you're bullshitting yourself as you sort out exactly who is causing everything you feel.

So then it becomes quicker and easier to catch yourself. You can see, well, as soon as I went to point a finger at someone and use them as a scapegoat, I felt like a victim under attack. Funny that. I made that happen. I gave myself that experience. And so I can choose again and withdraw that self-attack, that self-positioning of "I'm the victim here!". That demand that I be weak and vulnerable and recognized as a suffering frightened liar.

Since I then see that I do this to myself and it was very obvious that I did this, the entire "appeal" of playing the victim role withers away. There's no point to it when you can more accurately discern that it very much does hurt you. There are consequences. And so the challenge then is to no longer see yourself unfairly treated or as a victim of anyone or anything, recognizing that it's only when you do that you feel that way at all. And you no longer want to feel that way.

Fortunately since it's an inside job where you're the only one causing, and other people are never the cause of you AT ALL, it really boils down to your own willingness to admit to what you're doing to yourself and to want a better way. To prefer not suffering over suffering. To recognize that hurting hurts and attack attacks, rather than believing it does something else. Because in our confusion we don't even realize what the fuck we're doing to ourselves, and we end up killing ourselves in the name of self preservation.

True perception is accurate perception. It is recognition. It is awareness and discernment. It is the ability to SEE, clearly, what the truth of this situation is. What is really going on. Who is really causing and choosing. Where things really originate and what their effects actually are. It's the willingness and ability to not be blinded or confused by the ego temptation to think its one-sidedness can work. It's simply honesty and openness to the truth.

Who would hurt themselves unless they thought they weren't hurting themselves in doing so?

Who would hurt themelves once they recognized that they cannot be hurt unless they do so?

Who would hurt themselves if they recognized that even the slightest attempt to hurt others diminishes your own happiness?

Who would hurt themselves when joy and peace and love are the price?

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

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

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

"This is a course in cause, not effect."

"The power to work miracles belongs to you."

In order to awaken spiritually, we have to take total responsibility for everything we experience. This is based on the core truth that we are immortal beings, and being immortal means nothing outside of you is responsible or capable of causing you. You have total freedom and you hold the reins of destiny. You are only ever an effect of God, and nothing else.

This means that we cannot be attacked, hurt, destroyed, made sick, upset, suffer, be killed off, or altered in any way. Literally there is nothing in the entire universe which can do anything to us whatsoever.

"He looks on what he chooses to see. No more and no less. The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world."

Because of this, we have to learn to regard the whole world as being not responsible for anything we are experiencing. The world cannot have hurt us, it cannot have attacked, it cannot be guilty or sinful, and it certainly cannot end our eternal life.

In any way that we find ourselves believing that something in the world is responsible for how we feel, what we experience, what happens, or any notion of victimhood, we are lost in a state of irresponsibility. This means we are disowning our divine responsibility to be immortal and are pretending that it's someone else's job to own the power.

Being irresponsible means giving your power away to someone or something else other than yourself, so that you can play the role of being powerless, which means portraying yourself as a victim. The victim role includes all forms of belief in being attacked, hurt, damaged, made to be sick or dead, any upset, any emotional reaction, and any belief in being unworthy of absolute permanence.

Jesus is telling us that our true nature is to be a completely powerful, causal, purely creative being, who exercises the will and power of God to extend and create life. There is no room in this role for the slightest measure of powerlessness or victimhood. It is entirely a position of OUTPUT, of radiance shining outward, of extension without holding back. This outward expression is so strong, it is the strength of the spirit and it makes you utterly invulnerable. It shines outward with such power that nothing can enter to harm you.

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

In victimhood, or false perception, we reverse the cause and effect and believe we are at the effect of something external, that we are taking INPUT from the world. This is entirely backwards and false. It is a delusion to believe it, and it is nothing more than a state of insanity and irresponsibility. It means you are not owning your power, and instead are giving it away to the world to try to make yourself a victim. If the world can do anything to you at all, you can be destroyed against God's will, which is impossible.

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

Our true functioning is deliberate and powerful. You look out from a state of innocence and holiness, making absolutely no attack (sin) against the world, knowing that it is nothing but your dream, coming from your mind, and is exactly how you want it. Nothing happens without you choosing it to happen, nothing happens against your will, and everything you decide is completely intentional with guaranteed effects. You are the dreamer of the dream, and you cannot hold it accountable for what you have caused it to do.

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

"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."

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

"My self is ruler of the universe." This is not a grandiose ego claim or a fantasy. You have power over the whole world, capable of surmounting, reversing and undoing death, of breaking all the laws of physics and defying its whole reality.

"What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it."

Consider for a moment the idea that the world is not responsible for anything you feel. It has done nothing to you. You are not frightened by spiders down the side of the furniture. You are not upset about elections. You are not grieving the loss of an external body. You are not damaged by food or weather. You are not upset about groups of judgemental people. Nothing whatsoever in the world has any power or causation over you whatsoever.

You cannot be hurt by anything in the world because you are not in the world. You are in heaven in God as immortal spirit. You are not a body. The world is your dream which you are putting there on purpose, and it does not exist without your wanting it. You are not upset for any reason that you think. No-one in the world has ever done anything to cause anything you are feeling or experiencing. Your upsets have nothing to do with anyone and solely to do with what you are doing to yourself. This is the secret of salvation.

"Only the self-accused condemn."

"It can be but myself that I crucify."

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

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today."

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

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

As soon as you begin to believe the world is the cause of you in any way, you are being a victim. You are disowning your power of decision and causation, are projecting it out and accusing something else of causing you. This requires a blocking of access to your power, which makes you feel powerless and weak and afraid as the world looms over you. But it is your own power looming over itself. You have to take back that power.

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

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering."

"If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave 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." "I am in danger nowhere in the world."

Ultimately our aim of reaching true perception and moving beyond the world entails a complete ownership of who and what we are, a complete identification as Christ, a total relinquishment of every form of victimhood, a total letting go of all attempts to suffer. This includes letting go of all notions of being upset by the world, attacked, threatened, in danger, made to be sick or unhappy, or made to die. This includes ceasing to believe in death and dying and destruction and murder.

The world is not responsible for ANYTHING you are experiencing. No-one is guilty. Nothing is to blame. You're doing this all to yourself and you can stop whenever you like. Whatever you're experiencing you have chosen and you want. Your prayers are constantly being answered and you are always receiving what your giving is asking for. You can end this game of death and victimhood at any time and go home to God. "This is the ONLY thing that you need do for vision, happiness, release from pain, and the COMPLETE escape from sin, ALL to be given you. Say ONLY this, but MEAN it with NO reservations, for here the power of salvation lies:

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

Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done TO you. Acknowledge but that YOU have been mistaken, and ALL effects of your mistakes will disappear."

"There is no death because the Son of God is like his Father. Nothing you can do can change Eternal Love. Forget your dreams of sin and guilt, and come with me instead to share the resurrection of God's Son. And bring with you all those whom He has sent to you to care for as I care for you."

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

If you do not choose to die you will never die, and if you do choose to die it will be fake. There is no death, the son of God is free.

"Swear not to die, thou holy Son of God! You make a bargain that you cannot keep. The Son of Life cannot BE killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the universe that MUST be One."

If you are immortal, you cannot suffer. You cannot be hurt, damaged, offended, upset, sad, unhappy, depressed, lacking joy, unloved, abused, made sick, killed, harmed, bruised, wounded, angered, nothing. You can only be immortal.

So what does that mean, in light of what seems to be "you suffering"? Even "your suffering" cannot be truly happening to you. YOU cannot be suffering. Your immortal self CANNOT be experiencing suffering. You cannot suffer. So who is suffering?

"Spirit is in a state of grace forever."

So when you seem to be suffering, let's say you feel hurt because someone called you a "stinky fart face", can it really be that you ACTUALLY are hurt? And if you FEEL hurt by this, is this "you feeling hurt" actually really happening? Even if you feel it, even if it seems "it applies to me", even if it seems it was targeted "at you", even if its "highly personal and reminds me of the time I kept farting in church", CAN IT BE POSSIBLE that YOUR IMMORTAL SELF is actually experiencing this or believing it?

It must be that even when under attack, "you" that feels attacked is some kind of fictional construct. It can't REALLY be your immortal self that is attacked. Your immortal self cannot be sad or upset or feeling betrayed or victimized. It's impossible for your real self to feel anything but joy and love and happiness. So when you have an "I feel hurt" moment, even if it involves HEAVY emotions, and terrible pain, and totally seems to be all about YOU and how you feel... CAN IT BE?

It cannot ever be really your true identity that is suffering. Even if you seem to "hurt yourself", you are not hurting yourself. You can't BE hurt. So who or what are you hurting? If you even decide to kill yourself, YOU cannot be killed. So what is dying?

"You are immortal and you cannot die."

WHO or what is being killed? Sure enough it is the body that is involved. But in addition, how is it that there seems to be a sensation that it's YOU that is going down with the ship? WHO or what is under attack? Is this taking place IN YOUR MIND?

Is it possible, that when there is a sensation of hurt or upset feeling or guilt etc, that the feeling ITSELF brings with it a kind of illusion or "sense of" "self"? Could it be that when you are feeling guilty, and you feel like a target, and it feels like everyone can see you and knows you are there, and you are "self conscious" in public, and you want to hide from everyone because you feel like they KNOW your inner guilty secret.... is it perhaps that the guilt ITSELF brings a sense of "centric identity"? Is not anything other than love, a sense of selfishness, and thus a sense of ego?

Some years ago some stuff happened and I had a large amount of guilt because of it. And because of this guilt, I felt ashamed and took it with me everywhere I went. And I felt constantly threatened. Anywhere especially in public, which I avoided, it felt like I had a target on my back, that EVERYONE knew that I was guilty, and they could see this guilty self, and MY experience of this guilty self was a feeling of being very "self conscious". Nervous about what I AM. Feeling like I am "evil" or "bad". Feeling certain that I AM THE GUILT. And that everyone was pointing a finger at me.

It would then happen that if people would attack me, or call me names, or accuse me or whatever, I would feel like "this guilty self" is vulnerable AND attackable. If they would accuse me of something, they were accusing THIS guilty self of it, and IT was self conscious, and IT felt attackable and vulnerable, and IT believed that it deserved punishment and that IT was the ACTUAL target of what people were putting out there. So when they called me by name, and then hurled an abuse, this "guilty self" felt like it was ABOUT IT, personally, and that they were directly addressing this guilty self.

But then after a time and much healing, this guilt was gone. And then I noticed that when these same people were being the same way they seemed to be before, it clearly did not appear to be ABOUT ME, and it was not targeting "that self", that guilty self, that was in me before. And that guilty self and its sense of being "self conscious" ie in fear, was not there to "receive" the attack. It did not exist, so they could not AIM their attack AT it. And so "I", my identity, which was no longer bound up with the guilt, saw myself as NOT being the target of their expressions. And so I felt invulnerable and could now recognize that they were attacking themselves. What happened to the sense of SELF that was present IN THE GUILT?

See, whatever you make TRUE of you you will believe is WHAT YOU ARE, and in effect WHO you are. So if you believe of yourself, "I am guilty", you will believe this DEFINES you. And now you ARE guilt. And this guilt has components of ego in it. And ego is selfish. Ego is a kind of "self centeredness", a self-important self-interest.

If the absence of separation means that there is pervasive light everywhere throughout the universe, then ego is a massive CONDENSING of that, down to a point, such as a star, so that all you are now left with is masses of darkness and a tiny CENTER of a point of light. And this "all that's left" little concentration of "self" now seems to be separated off and small and weak and vulnerable. That littleness is the sense of EGO, and it is experienced like a focus on yourself alone, in isolation.

Everything about ego is about becoming small, little, contracted, compressed, diminished, weakened, self-focused, self-centered, selfish, self-attacking, self-important, self aggrandizing, delusions of grandeur, etc. This condensing produces a kind of "sense" of "me", distinguished from the rest, broken off and separate. This sense of self is "self conscious" ie made of CONCERN for self and FEAR of its own weakness and littleness. The "self conscious" self is in fear and looks out frightened of the world that threatens it. The more EGO you have, the more ego stuff you have, baggage, dark feelings, guilts and hurts, the MORE you feel self centered and like this stuff "is a self". A sense of "separated me", cut off from the rest and not sharing.

It brings with it a kind of "focal point", a contracted little fearful corner of the mind, and the more this little corner withdraws and hides and tries to be even smaller and weaker, the MORE the sense of artificial "self" increases. Because the amount of selfishness is going up, the amount of self importance is going up, the amount of superiority/inferiority complex is going up, and this all produces what SEEMS LIKE a sense of "there is something here", "I am something", "I am all these feelings", "I am these thoughts". You become identified with FORM.

The whole egotism, the attitude, inherently has this bunching up, crunching together, condensing, tightening, contracting kind of thing about it, and this SENSE of this happening FEELS like the formation of a hot-spot in the mind that seems like "where something is, moreso than the rest", or "self interest". A sense of an island within the mind. A "self".

When the guilt goes, when the self attack goes, when the sin is gone, the egotism is gone, and all this tightened contracted littleness "dissipates" and stops being so focused, and without the focus on a tiny little huddled-in-a-corner-hiding sense of identity and truth, that sense of being "separated off" and "a separate identity" goes with it. It just disappears. But that isn't the end of YOU, because your sense of self EXPANDS and moves towards the UNLIMITED, universal, endless holy christ self that you really are.

So who is it that suffers? Who is it that can BE hurt and FEEL vulnerable? It is not your immortal christ self. It is not the real you. But it can seem to be a SENSE of "you" because part of your mind gets caught up in the contraction and withdrawal into "a center", into a little prison, a bodily identity, an identification with locality in space-time. And the more ego-stuff you have in your mind, the more intensely that your mind forms into a huddle of tightly-held-onto stuff, creating an IMPRESSION of you being kind of snagged or caught up on this collection of ego material. And being localized around a "point" it makes you feel like you are this little separated off dot of identity.

It is kind of like.... the suffering, ITSELF, suffers. Just as how fear is self-fulfilling. The guilt ITSELF brings with it a feeling of separate self. Any ego emotions, be it anger or sadness or grief or loss or lack or abandonment or unworthiness or sinfulness or fear or whatever, all brings with it SELFISHNESS, which is isolation and contraction and that attempt to GET AWAY FROM everything else, producing an increasing sense that you are "this something" in the middle of the ocean of mind. And this "sense of self" always feels vulnerable and threatened and unsafe. But this sense of self is PART OF the ego material that's in the mind, and without it your mind DOES NOT experience being a target.

Without the guilt, you cannot feel this. Without the unworthiness or loathing, you cannot feel this. Your mind is elastic and sort of snaps-back into its expanded, non-localized state, spread out evenly and smoothly instead of tightened and restricted and limited. When the guilt goes, YOU stop feeling like "you" are susceptible and attackable. You stop feeling like YOU are guilty. And that sense of "contracted self" goes.

Your sense of identity stops being "caught up in" the "truth" that the guilt expresses. Because if you believe "I AM guilty" then this will set you up to experience that you AND the guilt ARE ONE. And now you ARE guilt. And in the guilt is your "self", your identity. And you will not want to let it go if you believe that letting it go will be the loss of who and what you are. So there is a kind of addiction to the ego materials and an unwillingness to see YOUR SELF as being something NOT associated with, or identified with, the ego materials. e.g. with the guilt. "I am guilty" will feel like you are MADE OF guilt. That it is fundamentally your nature.

So who is suffering? Who is hurt? Who is it that is having loss? Who is sad? Who is unworthy? Who is afraid? THOSE THINGS, combined with your mind, produce a sense of identity, or identification WITH those things, that makes YOU feel and perceive that it is YOU that is those things. That they APPLY to you. Because you think they are PART of your makeup. But it is those things themselves that bring with them the sense of artificial SELF, that is the ego, the selfish self-centered self, the hoarding possessing self, the playing small self. And without YOUR CONSENT, without your BELIEF, that these things are true of you, that sense of little self cannot remain. Because true self is expansive and infinite.

You seem to suffer because you identify WITH and AS ego stuff. Which temporarily makes you believe YOU are being attacked and YOU are the guilty one suffering. But it is really "the ego", the non-existent fictional self, the selfishenss, that is the guilty one. IT feels like IT is guilty, made of guilt. And when you WITHDRAW your allegiance from THE GUILT, that sense of "its about me" goes with it. And then you recognize that your REAL self, your immortal self, was NEVER guilty. It CANNOT BE guilty. And your immortal self doesn't have that sense of self-consciousness, self-concern, self-importance and selfishness.

You can think you are suffering, but you aren't. In a way, it is the ego that is suffering. Ego = suffering. You can think you are "the little self that suffers", but it is NOT really you. Your mind can get CAUGHT IN the trap of the ego viewpoints, which bring with them a sense of self-focus and self-worship and vulnerability, but you are not ever really those things. It is the ego that suffers because the ego IS suffering. It is the ego that has guilt because the ego IS guilt. Without guilt there is no ego. Without a bodily identity there is no body. Without sin there is no world of sin. And without death there is no world.

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

So when you feel like "I am guilty" or "I am anything" other than as God created you, know that you are lost in the ego and are feeling ego stuff and ego stuff feels this way and the sense of artificial "me", self importance, being self-absorbed, selfish, comes with that territory. And it is that vulnerable, sensitive false self that seems to be the target of the suffering, NOT your immortal self. And once you dis-identify from that EGOTISM, the whole ego thought system, you let go of these false accusations and the falsely accused goes with it. And all that is left is your immortal spirit. Your true identity in God which can never be attacked.

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

Fear is not "just fear". It's not just "an emotion". It's not just "one thing". It's not just "a reaction". Everything that fear appears to be, it is that, and it is not that. There is much more happening that isn't obvious.

Fear is the opposite of love. Death is the opposite of life and life is love. Fear and death are therefore the same state - the end result of the ego's thought system of sin.

Fear is self deception. Let's look at how the ego thought system deceives us.

God establishes what is ACTUALLY true. This truth is reality. It is eternal life, love, happiness, safety, peace. This truth is always true. Nothing can change it.

Ego means nothing more than truth reversal. It's an attempt to oppose the truth through denial. Ego can't change what is true. But, in ego you can DENY it or "pretend" that it's not true.

To deny what's true, you believe it is false. God's truth, or the truth about you, becomes false to you. Simultaneously, things which are false and unreal start to SEEM true and real. You start believing UNTRUE things about yourself.

Jesus describes the end result of this process (the ego thought system) as "total confusion". It's a state where everything true has been confused with or mistaken for, everything false. And everything false has been confused with or mistaken for, what's true.

You could not be more confused than to have no idea what is ACTUALLY true or actually real. It's a state of not recognizing anything for what it is. A total loss of perspective. It is insanity. Fear and death are insane. Fear is paralysis, or the stopping of life, which is death.

When your mind is confused, it's because you believe something is true which isn't REALLY true. Something seems real that is not real. Something seems to be happening that isn't really happening. You think it is, but it's not. In this state, you are simply very MISTAKEN. And in denial. And unwilling to accept that a totally opposite truth is the real truth.

What is false? Death, sickness, suffering, unhappiness, fear, guilt, sin, attack, murder, threat and danger, darkness, insanity, delusion, disassociation, not knowing who you are, unreality, non-existence, etc. All of this is false because it is OPPOSITE to what is actually true - God's truth. None of it is real and none of it exists.

What is true? Eternal life, happiness, freedom, fearlessness, freedom from sin and guilt, immortality, being incapable of sickness or death, nothing to be afraid of, no threat or danger, total safety, peace of mind, invulnerability etc.

When you CONFUSE these two, and put belief into the false stuff, you "make it real". You try to invest it with reality and truth.

"Whatever you BELIEVE IN becomes REAL to you."

To do that you have to deny what's really true. This denial is a block to awareness. It makes you UNAWARE of the real truth or the big picture. It disassociates you from what you are believing in the big picture, and the consequences of that belief.

That means you are CAUSING things (making them through belief), which are producing EFFECTS, but you are no longer aware that you are causing them, so they seem to be caused by something other than yourself. Who wouldn't be frightened of an "alien will" (a will outside of your awareness of what your own will is willing) that seems to do things "against your will"?

It's the mere fact that you are unaware of what you are choosing, wanting, supporting, believing in, that results in "stuff happening" that you didn't SEEM to will. And this stuff is then experienced as being unfairly treated. Especially given that everything that happens in ego is a form of suffering. And who wants to suffer? No-one sane.

So then, naturally, you perceive that you are suffering not because you chose to, but because someone or something else separate from you caused it. You really caused it, but you don't see that, so you HAVE to pin it on some other cause, automatically, to try to make sense of where it came from. This is the root of all projection.

The simple notion that there is "another cause" besides yourself, is the root of all fear. Because if something can CAUSE YOU other than God, can change you, affect you, or hurt you, without you being able to prevent it, that is grounds for terror. The mere perception of "a separate thing" that seems cut off from your oneness is grounds for fear.

As you move further into the ego darkness, increasing fear, consciously you start to experience what SEEMS to be a greater unwillingness to want or 'own' what is happening. You want to get away from the danger, away from the source of threat.

Because in denial you believe/perceive more and more than it's got nothing to do with your own choice. That you are having absolutely no part to play in making things happen, did not choose them, do not want them, did not cause them, and don't even HAVE a choice. And death is an attempt not to choose at all.

The more this increases, the more you go into denial, the less aware you are that you're choosing to believe death is salvation. Here, false = true and true = false. If both the true and the false are false, and the true and the true are true, there is a total blurring of distinction and no difference between them, resulting in total confusion.

The threat of death seems to be on the increase, your conscious horror at this increase makes you squirm like you don't want it and try to avoid it, but unconsciously you are choosing it.

For example, if you believe in cancer, at all, you will become afraid. Believing it exists whatsoever, that it has power, that it causes death, that it even exists at all, places your mind into denial. Because in God's truth, cancer does not exist. Cancer is false, untrue, unreal, non-existent, powerless, causeless, nothing. Cancer is totally an illusion that has no effect on the Son of God.

But if you've moved into "I believe cancer exists", you MUST now be in denial. That means you believe in cancer, but you are not aware that you believe in it. What's left of your conscious awareness is now limited only to the scope of what you are AWARE of. You are not aware of your belief, BUT, your belief is moving you TOWARDS cancer. Because whatever you BELIEVE EXISTS, you WANT MORE OF.

Whatever you believe in, you try to invest it with reality. You try to MAKE it be true. You give it a sense of truth, power over you, an alien will, causality, strength, threat. The more you believe in it the bigger of an 'enemy' you make it, and the more your perception warps to make it seem large and looming and able to affect you.

So there's your mind believing "cancer is a very real danger", which puts you into denial of the truth, which makes you unaware you believe in a dangerous threat, which makes you confused about what is true and false, which makes you think cancer is real and true and your salvation, which makes you want it, which CAUSES IT.

So now there is an increase in your 'environment' of the presence of this illusion of danger, and your conscious awareness is becoming afraid because strange disconnected threats are looming on the horizon, and you are not aware of how they got there. It seems like they're happening "on their own", separate from your mind. And because they seem separate, you perceive that you have no control over them. This perceived lack of "ability to influence it" produces fear.

This is the general state most of us find ourselves in - seeming to have no power or control over anything external, anything that seems separate, or anything in the world. As if the world is causal, decides your fate, and you just have to suffer, or run away in fear. As if it has its own will, separate from yours, that you can do nothing about, making its ultimate attack unavoidable.

Whatever you believe in, you make it real. Whatever you believe in, you give truth to. Whatever you believe in, you value. Whatever you believe in, you want to see. Whatever you believe in, you will perceive. Whatever you believe in, you make happen. Whatever you believe, you'll defend with your life, because you associate LIFE with "whats true".

It is not possible for example to believe "cancer exists", while also claiming to believe you are not threatened by it. I do not have it but I am scared of the idea, purely based on beliefs in its existence. You cannot believe in a causal power outside you without feeling threatened. You are not immune to it just because "it doesn't seem to be happening to me". You will fear it even if it's not seeming to happen. And the unconscious masses have done a lot to amplify its "reality".

The only way to not have fear of cancer therefore is to not believe in cancer. AT ALL. ie, cancer does not exist, cancer has no power over me, cancer does not cause death, cancer isn't affecting me, cancer has not done anything to me, cancer cannot do anything to me, I do not believe in cancer, cancer does not exist, there is no cancer, cancer is a lie, cancer isn't real, cancer is an illusion I made up, cancer has no mind of its own, cancer does not exist at all, there is no cancer, cancer is nothing, cancer is not making me afraid, I have power over cancer. etc

That's what you have to believe in order to be free from it. And being free from the BELIEF in it DOES make you INVULNERABLE. That's what you have to believe in order to not put yourself into the state where you'll be afraid of it. And that's what you have to believe in order to not CHOOSE IT. Because if you "believe it exists but I don't believe I have it", you are trying to have it.

Whatever you believe in, you are CHOOSING. If you don't want to choose something, you must NOT believe in it. You can't believe in something and then claim that it does not apply to you. You can't believe in something and then claim to be free of it. Believe it, and you give it power over you instantly and are moving towards manifesting/materializing it into your experience. And fear and suffering then become the consequence of that.

The secret of salvation states that you are doing everything to yourself. That means, in your confusion about what is true and false, you keep choosing things which are FALSE, by believing they are TRUE. By mistake. Because you are mistaken about what is true. You keep choosing things which are unreal, by believing they are real. And that means you literally WANT TO SUFFER.

By believing in illusions or false things, things opposite God's reality, you are electing to make those things part of your reality. So that you can have a false experience of them. Beliefs are attempts to CHANGE WHAT IS TRUE into what you want to be true. But belief can also be used to line up with what is ACTUALLY true, so that you believe the Atonement truth, which sets you free.

In fear, which includes unawareness, you are consciously kicking and screaming to get away from what seems to be coming to you "on its own". Unconsciously, ie behind denial, you are actually MAKING IT COME TO YOU by believing in it. And that literally translates to, you are doing it to yourself. Or the adage, "what you fear comes to you" or "what you fear increases". This is literally true.

Jesus says "You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

This also means there are NO CAUSES OF SUFFERING BEYOND YOUR OWN CHOOSING.

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

And that then means, if you were to actually sort out what is REALLY TRUE, from what you THINK is true, ie that you WANT GOD, and learn to recognize the ACTUAL truth again, you would also simultaneously recognize that false things ARE false. You would recognize that cancer is an illusion that does not exist. You would recognize that there IS NO THREAT. Because then you have stopped threatening yourself.

All fear comes from self-threat. A sense of danger that results from YOU believing that you are under attack. Which is an attack on yourself. "My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

For example, if you believe you sinned, and choose not to forgive yourself, you'll believe you are guilty. But this isn't merely a belief in guilt. It's a belief that you ARE guilty and an acceptance that your guilt is TRUE. If guilt is true, you will WILLINGLY ACCEPT that you DO deserve punishment, because it it SUPPORTED by what you believe is true. You will not object to it. So instead, you will WELCOME suffering. But even more-so, MAKE SURE IT HAPPENS.

This now means you YOURSELF believe that you logically deserve to suffer. And this means you now ACCEPT that you MUST suffer. Which means you believe you should suffer. Which means you now have it in for yourself.

It means you are now seeking to attack yourself in order to punish yourself, because it is justified, and this is SELF THREAT. It is suicidal. And that is going to terrify you more than any external projection of "who is causing fear" or "how its going to happen".

Guilt leads to fear. Guilt leads to more self attack. Your SELF attack is what frightens you. YOU are the cause of your fear.

So then when you are in fear, you are trying to hurt yourself. You are scaring yourself. You might project it onto all kinds of external stuff but it's self attack. Ever notice that when you are afraid you start finding all kinds of EXTERNAL things or "causes" to pin the fear on? Many things around you start to become threatening? That's projection. Your perception is warping. It's the same as accusing your brother of your own sins. You accuse your brother of your own self attack and reasons to fear.

So fear is really a state where you are CHOOSING TO SUFFER, where you are wanting what you are threatened by, are trying to make it happen, to undermine your immortality. BUT you are disowning it so much that it SEEMS like you have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

You are in denial that the thing you thought was going to help you is actually hurting you. You are in denial that your savior is your attacker. You are in denial that what you WANT is actually working against you. You are in denial that your defense against truth is causing you to be MORE sick. And you are under the impression that death is going to save you from God's wrath.

Your internal conscious messaging might be "I hope that doesn't happen, it's scaring me". But your ACTUAL activity is "I hope that happens, I want that to happen, I believe in it, it's going to save me." Your mind holds visions of threats and dangers in front of its perception to attack itself.

This is why fear is such a slippery thing. It's so deceptive, back to front, inside out and upside down. It SEEMS like the TOTAL OPPOSITE of what it is. The experience of it seems like you totally don't want it, but this COVERS OVER the fact you are WANTING exactly what you are frightened by. If you are scared, YOU scared yourself.

You have to own up to this, look deeply at it and realize what you actually are doing, rather than what seems to be happening on the surface. All victimy persons, everyone who is afraid, all who are terrified, ACTUALLY are choosing and wanting everything that they are afraid of. AND they are the one DOING THE ATTACK. This is why victims are victimizers and victimizers are victims.

Fear is choosing with the ego, siding with deception.

In fear you secretly choose to suffer, by choosing something that does bring suffering (ie to God it is FALSE), but which you BELIEVE brings salvation. And this stems entirely from being CONFUSED about what is really true and what is false.

All the attributes of God's truth need to be given back to God. You need to re-associate aspects of truth with God's truth. God's truth is where the safety is. God's truth is where salvation is. God's truth is what will ACTUALLY help and heal you and give you life. God's truth is what will protect you from harm. God's truth will give you immortality. And by choosing it, you will GET what you EXPECT to get, rather than the total opposite.

Learning to RECOGNIZE that is the entire process of working on your spiritual awakening. The "sorting out" of true vs REALLY true. What do you REALLY WANT to believe in. What are you believing that isn't REALLY true. How might you be very mistaken in your conviction that death is real? How might you be mistaken in believing that cancer even exists? How might you be confused about whether you can even be affected by anything, given you are immortal?

Gradually you will side with the ACTUAL truth rather than siding with what you BELIEVED was true. And that's a really good thing. Because now your expectation is that the truth will help you and make things better for you, and it ACTUALLY DOES. And then you will develop TRUST in it. You can't trust the ego. It is all lies and deception. One thing pretending to be something else. It is two-faced because it contradicts the real truth.

Only the truth is true. Only the false is false. Only eternal life is real. Death is an impossible illusion and does not exist. In God's love there is NOTHING to be afraid of. "Nothing unreal exists." Nothing false is true. And recognizing that will bring you peace and freedom from suffering forever.

"What if you looked within and saw there IS no sin?"

Fact: God is permanent, nothing real can be changed.

Fact: You cannot change God's will.

Fact: You cannot produce effects in God against His will.

Fact: You cannot sin against His will or cause Him in any way.

Fact: You have not caused God, you cannot cause God, and you never will cause God.

Fact: You have not sinned in reality, against reality, to reality, or in any real way.

Fact: It is IMPOSSIBLE to sin. It is IMPOSSIBLE to affect God. You have NOT done so. Nothing real has happened.

So, the question we now have is... what is this state that we're in, where it seems like something went wrong and we're suffering?

There was this tiny mad idea which basically was the idea that something impossible is possible. Even though you knew it was IMPOSSIBLE to affect God, you tried to BELIEVE it was actually possible. You wanted to believe you COULD sin, and that you HAD done so, and that it had produced ACTUAL real effects in reality against God. However, the impossible remains impossible so you HAVE NOT DONE IT AT ALL. Believing that you have, is an obvious ERROR.

So all that this separated state entails is BELIEVING IN something which isn't true. Believing and investing "reality" into and trying to MAKE REAL, something which is not real and never will be. You are trying to convince yourself that you can, and have, sinned. All your states of suffering, sin, guilt, fear, punishment, sickness, death, are all attempts to prove that you CAN DO what you cannot do. That you CAN kill God and His son. Or that you have. You cannot. And you have not. And you never will.

So you are immortal and you're trying to prove that you can be mortal, but you can't. Nothing you do can change the facts. You cannot actually sin. You cannot change God or His Creation. It is literally impossible. So all this other stuff that you BELIEVE, all the ways that you think you should be suffering, all the fear that comes from the guilt, all the guilt that comes from believing you DID sin, it is in fact TOTALLY UNFOUNDED AND UNNECESSARY.

It's kind of like, a long time ago you THOUGHT that you HAD committed some terrible crime, or that you tried to attack God, and in the scuffle you IMAGINED that you had in fact lashed out at Him and hurt Him. And it seemed to happen so quickly you took one glance and thought you SAW evidence or proof that you had actually inflicted harm. And then you suddenly recoiled and went into the sin belief and then into guilt and then into fear and suffering. You went off by yourself hanging your head low and BELIEVING that you had done something REALLY BAD back there. That you committed a terrible crime and all of reality was affected.

But here's the good news. In your moment of attempted attack you were ONLY MISTAKEN in believing that you DID actually do something. You made an ERROR in believing that a sin was committed. The good news is, God was in fact NOT AFFECTED, you DID NOT change Him, and there HAS NOT been any harm done. So now here you are, suffering and hating yourself and hurting yourself ONLY because you think that you deserve it because you THINK that you actually DID commit a sin. But in truth... this is the good bit... YOU DID NOT SUCCEED.

So if you could turn back time and go look at that moment where you thought you attacked God, you'll be surprised to find out, that YOU DIDN'T. And God has been happy and healthy all this time. And He's not even mad at you. He isn't holding any grievance and He just wants to love you. He sees in fact that you became horrified by your own belief in your own attack, which DIDN'T DO ANYTHING, but you didn't realize that it didn't do anything. You THOUGHT it was real. You put reality into it and believed in it. You convinced yourself you were a sinner, when in fact you've been innocent all along.

So this state we find ourselves in, in this world, suffering and unhappy, is ENTIRELY a case of mistaken identity, mistaken criminality, and being TOTALLY IN ERROR about what we think happened. NOTHING HAPPENED. You DID NOT SIN. NOTHING HAS CHANGED. REALITY IS NOT AFFECTED. GOD IS HAPPY WITH YOU. And yet here you are believing, in a dream, that you did in fact commit a sin.

So you're not really dealing here with real sin, at all. Reality, is kind of "over there", unharmed, unchanged, completely the same as it always was. Even your own holy self is there, innocent as ever. And then "over here", where you're hanging out, you're immersed in this cloud of confusion and self deception, believing that you did a crime YOU DID NOT COMMIT, and becoming suicidal and beating yourself up for it, when in fact you DIDN'T EVEN DO IT! You're living in a fantasy world of believing you DID, and trying to PROVE that you COULD, but you can't and NEVER WILL prove it. "You've made a bargain you cannot keep."

So you're just a bit confused. You're in error. You're mistaken, to believe that you can or have sinned. It's JUST A MISTAKE. You are mistaken ABOUT sinning. That's why it is TOTALLY FORGIVEN and forgivable, because you HAVE NOT DONE ANYTHING REAL. You've frightened yourself and reacted and gone into self loathing purely on the basis of a misunderstanding. And so now our work with A Course in Miracles is all to do with coming to realize that you DIDN'T DO what you think you did. This is the basis of forgiveness, learning to recognize THERE IS NO SIN. Sin is NOT REAL. There is no such thing as real sin because it's impossible. And this whole dream has had NOTHING to do with real sin, and everything to do with IMAGINED SIN.

We're just cleaning up the mess and confusion which came from BELIEVING an illusion is real, BELIEVING that the impossible is possible, BELIEVING that you've done something that you could not POSSIBLY do. The innocent cannot sin. You cannot leave your innocence, nor can you stop being innocent because it's God's will that you be innocent forever. You CANNOT DESTROY GOD'S CREATION. And you have done NOTHING to change it. All you worry and guilt and self-attack and punishments and sinfulness and fear is all FOR NOTHING, because it's all founded on a LIE. A totally false premise. You were MISTAKEN to BELIEVE that you can or did sin. YOU DIDN'T.

This whole "problem" is not to do with healing a sin, it's entirely to do with waking from BELIEVING that you did. From thinking it happened. From thinking it was possible at all. This is why the whole thing is merely an ERROR, as seen by the Holy Spirit. He knows you cannot sin and never have. He knows that this error, this entire illusion of trying to make sin real, is completely a lie. Totally false. You never will separate from God. You never will attack Him. You never will kill His Son - yourself. You never will lose your innocence. You are just dreaming of being a sinner, while all along you are not one.

"But we can dream we have forgiven him in whom all sin remains impossible, and it is this we choose to dream today."

"True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist. And it is ... Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not."

"Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where truth was"

"Today s idea but states the simple truth that makes the thought of sin impossible."

"For it is impossible to think of sin as true and not believe forgiveness is a lie."

"What faith you give to sin, you TAKE AWAY from holiness."

"It is not inherent in a mind, which cannot sin. As sin was an idea you taught yourself, forgiveness must be learned by you as well, but from a Teacher other than yourself".

"Do I DESIRE a world in which I have no enemies, and cannot sin?"

"The Self Which God created cannot sin, and therefore cannot suffer."

"And what is wholly sinless cannot sin. Such is the simple truth."

This is key to understanding what this world of spacetime is. The mind makes IMAGES of things. Pictures of things. Visual thoughts. They are along similar lines to imagination, or visualization. We produce pictures in the mind. This is also the same process as dreaming, and as hallucination.

We imagine things and imagine their form and appearance and picture them mentally. And as Jesus is saying, this same process was used to make physical bodies, and therefore also the physical universe.

This means that this world we're in, it's not really an "actual existence", or containing any real objects. It's in fact just a 3D thought-driven PICTURE, an image, like a 3d hologram, pictured and maintained in the mind, which LOOKS LIKE a world.

But a world that is merely an image, is imagined. A world which shows up as visual objects, is really just a collection of pictures. It's not at all the same as a real creation, which has substance and existence. It's a manufactured, wishful-thinking, hallucination, dream, projected visualization, taking on the shape of a planet in a galaxy. As a result of wanting to see it, and therefore of "daydreaming" it.

Obviously the things that you daydream don't really exist, although they seem to exist while you are dreaming them. The mind is basically inventing a world, picturing it, imagining what such a world might be like IF it really existed. But this is not the same as causing it TO exist. It's really just a blueprint or photograph of such a world. A "what if". Like if you were to imagine a pink elephant and see it in your mind.

The body was formed to use precisely this kind of seeing, focusing on images and believing them to be real. When in fact it's a form of hallucination. The body forms pictures and presents them like little photographs to the mind. Like a realtime 3d movie feed of an imagined artificial world.

This is how the world is nothing, even though it appears to be something. This is how the body is nothing, even though it seems to show up as a picture of form with a shape. It's not REALLY there, because dreaming of something is nowhere near the same as it actually existing permanently in reality. The whole world is just a mad idea.

"And what you SEE there, YOU will recognize as what it is; a picture of what YOU THOUGHT WAS REAL, and nothing more. For, BEHIND this picture, YOU WILL SEE NOTHING."

"The Holy Spirit offers you, to give to him, a picture of yourself in which there is NO pain and NO reproach at all."

"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured."

"The picture of your brother that you see means nothing."

"The picture of your brother that you see is wholly absent, and has never been."

"The world I see is hardly the representation of loving thoughts. It is a picture of attack on everything and by everything."

"Forgiveness paints a picture of a world where suffering is over, loss becomes impossible and anger makes no sense."

"The picture of Heaven and eternity grows MORE convincing, as you look at it. And now, by REAL comparison, a TRANSFORMATION of both pictures can at last occur."

"It is the witness to your state of mind, the OUTSIDE picture of an INWARD condition."

"Do you LIKE what you have made? A world of murder and attack, through which you thread your timid way through constant dangers, alone and frightened, hoping at most that death will wait a little longer, before it overtakes you, and you disappear. YOU MADE THIS UP. It is a picture of what you think YOU are; of how you SEE yourself."

"This sickly picture of yourself is carefully preserved by the ego, whose image it IS and which it loves, and placed OUTSIDE you, in the world." "Your picture of the world can only mirror what is within."

"The world you see is based on SACRIFICE of oneness. It is a picture of a COMPLETE disunity and total LACK of joining."

"No-one who makes a picture of himself omits this face, for he has need of it."

"And what are YOU who live within the world, except a picture of the Son of God in broken pieces, each concealed within a separate and uncertain bit of clay?"

"Perception seems to TEACH you what you see. Yet it but witnesses to what YOU taught. It is the outward picture of a wish, an image that you WANTED to be true."

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of ANYTHING, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son. You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell."

"A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him."

"Sickness is but a "little" death; a form of vengeance not yet total. Yet it speaks with certainty for what it represents. The bleak and bitter picture you have sent your brother, YOU have looked upon in grief."

"It is my own attack thoughts which give rise to this picture."

"Seen through understanding eyes the holiness of the world is all I see, for I can picture only the thoughts I hold about myself."

"Perception can make whatever picture the mind desires to see."

"What I see reflects a process in my mind, which starts with my idea of what I want. From there, the mind makes up an image of the thing the mind desires, judges valuable, and therefore seeks to find. These images are then projected outward, looked upon, esteemed as real, and guarded as one's own. From insane wishes comes an insane world. From judgment comes a world condemned. And from forgiving thoughts a gentle world comes forth"

"And when you think you see some value in an aspect or an image of the world, refuse to lay this chain upon your mind"

"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."

"If you are not a body, what are you? You need to be aware of what the Holy Spirit uses to replace the image of a body in your mind."

"An idol is an image of your brother, which you would value MORE than what he IS. Idols are made that HE may be replaced, no matter what their form. "

"Do not allow the body to be a mirror of a split mind. Do not let it be an image of your own perception of littleness."

"Parents do not create the image of the

ir children, though they may perceive images which they do create." "It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing."

"My thoughts are images which I have made."

"The images I see reflect my thoughts."

"Let graven images you made to be the Son of God instead of what he is be worshipped not today."

"If you are fearful, it is certain that you will endow the world with attributes which it does not possess, and crowd it with images that do not exist."

"Once again, images are perceived, NOT known."

"Images cannot see."

"You do not doubt that the body's eyes can see. You do not doubt the images they show you are reality. Your faith lies in the darkness, not the light. "

"Images are symbolic, and stand for something else."

"The concept of the self stands like a shield, a silent barricade before the truth, and hides it from your sight. All things you see are images because you look on them as through a barrier which dims your sight and warps your vision, so that you behold nothing with clarity."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FED-UP WITH SUFFERING? PUTTING UP WITH WHAT HAS HAPPENED? TOLERATING PAIN? WANT SOME RELIEF?!!

The ego’s thought system is specifically geared to make you suffer for as long as possible.

Every time something "happens" in this world, it is symbolic of sin. Sin seems like an irreversible event which, once it has happened, produces inevitable consequences. The consequences are believed to be irreversible, and so we resign ourselves to tolerating them, accepting them, allowing them putting up with them, and SUFFERING, for a long long time.

Sin, or events, as soon as they happen, move into the past. This was our ego device for using time to keep the "cause" of all problems locked in the past, beyond access to the present, so that it could not be changed. The past ITSELF is the idea of "something happened which cannot be changed." And pretty much everyone believes, you cannot undo the past.

Then, the consequences of sin proceed according to ego laws, extending indefinitely into the future, featuring lots and lots of suffering. We believe we cannot do ANYTHING to change what has happened, so we just put up with it. Our mind, believing this ego arrangement, starts to become CONDITIONED to think and perceive and be USED TO living this way. Stuff happens, we accept it as real, we do not undo it, we think we have to LIVE WITH IT.

This mental conditioning, kind of a habit of thought, which runs completely OPPOSITE to the thought system of the Holy Spirit, is a thought system of maintaining suffering. Ie, maintaining the consequences of sin indefinitely. We become used to it. We think it’s NORMAL! We then tolerate the suffering for as long as possible, until it adds up and destroys us. Living this way, is unforgiving. We have condemned ourselves to death.

Since this conditioning has been built up over a very long period of time, it seems almost impossible to even question it or do anything about it. Surely we cannot undo sin? Surely we cannot REVERSE the consequences of our wrong decisions, or events which seemed to "happen"? But we can.

Holy Spirit had news for me, because I believed and acted this way. I did not believe stuff could be undone. I didn’t even know there was ANY OTHER WAY to live. I was so USED TO accepting that whatever happens, it’s a done deal. As soon as I become sick, I accepted I must suffer it and use magic and try to get over it the "normal" way. This always means, a long drawn out period of suffering. Lots of time spent feeling like shit. I did not even IMAGINE that it might be possible NOT TO HAVE TO SUFFER this way.

Holy Sprit started teaching me that "you need not suffer". One day I burned my hand on hot water. It became sore fast. I started believing, I was going to have a sore hand for a week, would have to suffer with it, this was really really annoying, and I was mad about it. I saw no way to avoid that suffering, other than trying to use magic. It hurt, and I was pissed. But Holy Spirit had news for me! He said, "you need not suffer". My hand started to shake. A miracle was happening, but I did not want to LOOK at it. I was a bit frightened, because miracles blow the ego expectations out of the water.

Something was happening completely contrary to how things normally happen, against y ego, and against my resistance. After a few moments, I looked. All of the soreness was completely healed, all the redness gone. And at that moment, just for a moment, something happened in my mind... a sudden glimpse of some kind of miraculous state of being, a mind which knew that anything of the body can be flipped on or off like a light switch, to which it was completely immune. It was a moment of LIGHT. A state of mind I had never experienced, caused by my EGO ILLUSIONS being proven before my eyes, that they were NOT TRUE. Miracles are teaching devices!

At times I also have emotional releases of old pain. These used to require that I cry at great length. I have cried so many times over the past years doing the course it’s probably in the 1000’s. But lately, Holy Spirit has been teaching me, "you need not suffer". As I go to cry, showing a willingness to release, Holy Spirit immediately steps in. I can’t even get a tear out. He does his healing thing, producing various temporary effects and shaking and so on, and then the upset is GONE. Just disappeared. No need to cry at all. In fact, laughing at the end of it. I thought I had to suffer, feel upset, let it out the painful way. Not any more! Now, every single time I go to release emotions, Holy Spirit does it for me! You could say, I never need to cry ever again. Isn’t that something to be thankful for?! It’s a miracle every time.

Now, this applies to all of us, because this is what happens when a MIRACLE happens. Miracles REVERSE what seems to have happened (sin), proving it was NOT irreversible. They can reach BACKWARDS in time and beyond all "causes" that we think were in the past out of reach, and UNDO them, restoring us to how we were BEFORE stuff happened. Restoring our innocence and immortality! Miracles reverse time! This is completely the OPPOSITE of what we usually experience as "linear time". Linear time seems to only move forwards, shoving sin into the past and guilt and suffering into the future. Not so, say miracles! Miracles GO THE OTHER WAY! They rewind, they undo, they collapse, they correct, they reverse, they heal, they restore, and demonstrate that YOU DO NOT NEED TO SUFFER EVEN A LITTLE BIT FOR ANY TIME AT ALL!

This is mind-bending for us who are accustomed to thinking with the ego, assuming that linear time (shit happens and it gets worse) is "normal", and just taking the way this world SEEMS to function at face value. My mind is so used to moving "forwards" with the consequences of sin, that to get myself to even THINK about moving the opposite direction is a real challenge. My mind doesn’t seem to want to go that way! It’s like a whole different direction of perception. It takes baby steps. It takes practice. And each time I am a little bit willing to entertain this idea...."maybe I DON‘T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS", and the sooner the better, and imagine that it MIGHT be possible to NOT have to go through the whole train of suffering in the future, I open up to the Holy Spirit, who CAN OFFER HEALING NOW, and prevent having to suffer a long drawn-out PUNISHMENT.

Holy Spirit is capable of REVERSING absolutely anything the ego has made, of undoing absolutely ALL SIN, proving and demonstrating that NOTHING stands in the way of God’s healing power, and that SIN is absolutely NOT PERMANENT and HAS NO REAL CONSEQUENCES. "Holy Spirit will undo the ALL the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him", literally means, MIRACLES WILL OVERRIDE ALL CAUSES AND EFFECTS and will UNDO every form of suffering you ever thought you "had to experience" based on "what happened" or "what you did". We do not "have to" go along with the whole "something bad just happened, let’s immediately accept it has happened and PUT UP WITH IT" bullshit. THAT IS THE EGO! We must STOP TOLERATING THE EGO, because the only place it leads to is suffering and death.

It can be hard to do, especially at first. I have experienced this myself, and I still feel like a baby at this. Each time something "goes wrong", or some sickness pops up, or whatever temptation there is that "there’s nothing I can do about this", the challenge is to catch myself and stop myself and be like.... wait..... I don’t have to accept this crap! This is not God’s will. I don’t have to SUFFER! MAYBE there is another option. "I can see peace instead of this", or rather, "I can choose a miracle and UNDO THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW! I don’t have to just go into a future-predicting VICTIM mode and the whole story of how this is going to ruin my life forever. THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY.

There is! Question that time must go forwards. Question that you are stuck with what happens to you. Question the temptation to believe there is NOTHING that can be done to undo this. And you will be going up against YOUR OWN BELIE that there is nothing anyone can do, and it’s a strong one! You’re going to have to really stretch your mind to consider and be open, that EVEN THIS.... even this "thing" thats happening, big or small, EVEN THIS you don’t have to accept, it doesn’t have to stay, MAYBE it can be undone, MAYBE there is a way to heal this with God. And gradually you will develop TRUST in the Holy Spirit and be willing to BELIEVE His Power to heal anything, and thus become OPEN TO RECEIVE THE HEALING. Holy Spirit has an unlimited supply of healing waiting for you!!!!!! There is nothing your holiness cannot do. There is nothing his holiness cannot do.

But it will take practice, because your mind has been TRAINED to "go along with the consequences of sin", at great length. So much that you think it’s totally NORMAL - everyone seems to suffer the asame way, bad stuff happens and there’s nothing we can do. That’s the battle-cry of SIN! The ego LOVES TO SUFFER! Our mind may even have DIFFICULTY even beginning to entertain this idea that events can MOVE IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION. Like someone hitting REWIND on the VCR! We do not have to live in a world of "doing" (to us). We can live in a world of UNDOING. Simply because we do not see hardly anyone demonstrating this, we have ASSUMED that we must suffer and whatever caused stuff to happen, we’re stuck with it. It’s bullshit!

We have not seen someone coming BACK to life after being dead. We have not seen a car accident being reversed and no consequences coming from it. We have not seen someone with terminal cancer suddenly have cancer no more. We have not seen a dead baby being resurrected. We have not seen a leg which was broken 5 minutes ago be completely healed. We have not seen broken objects be repaired, or lack be filled out of nowhere, or people being CURED of what the world says "cannot be cured". Ego/sin says nothing can be cured! It is CERTAIN of your death. We must choose the OPPOSITE DIRECTION! That’s what miracles are. Every miracle demonstrates the mind is more powerful than the body and more powerful than SIN.

Miracles are reinforced by forgiveness which recognizes sin has no consequences, and it UNDOES THEM! We simply ASSUME that everything proceeds forwards, starting with sin, ending in DEATH. It does not have to!

Let’s practice being the ones to DEMONSTRATE that sometimes, and it should be ALL THE TIME, things can go backwards. Stuff can get healed. There can be total reversal of death. "Causes" can be nullified and cancelled out, and all effects which came from them UNDONE. We need to work with the Holy Spirit in our OWN EXPERIENCE, learning that we don’t have to put up with the things that "happen to us" in life. Let him show you that you need not suffer.

Let him show you that you DON’T have to tolerate that cold for 2 weeks, that you DON’T have to just accept that you will never get your paralyzed limb back, that you DON’T have to just lay down and die just because SIN claims that you do.

This is learning to trust the supernatural healing power of miracles, which UNDO everythig the ego tries to DO. It is nothing short of the complete reversal of all death and destruction and chaos, and the undoing of the separation, and the guaranteed RESURRECTION of God’s Sons. Miracles REVERSE what the ego has "done". That is how they UNDO. Miracles don’t really do anything at all, because all they do is undo? Is that a sorry excuse for a watered down non-miracle? MIRACLES UNDO EVERYTHING THE EGO HAS PUT IN PLACE!

Guess also why Jesus says the MIRACLE is the only tool available to you to control time? Because miracles MOVE TIME BACKWARDS in order to revert and undo the consequences of sin! They RETURN YOU to innocence, health, wholeness and happiness from which you came, which is symbolically in the distant past. With miracles, you need not AGE, you need not DIE, you need not SUFFER, and you need not be SICK ever again! Nothing needs to go wrong and stay wrong! There is NOTHING YOUR HOLINESS CANNOT DO. This takes learning, patience, practice and trust, in the HOLY SPIRIT, that HE has the power and ability to HEAL ANYTHING FOR YOU if you will allow it and just be open to this one simple idea ..... maybe there is a better way, than having to suffer the consequences of sin.