This really makes no sense. If you are thinking the way most people think most of the time, it makes no sense.

If I give you all my money, I have no money left. If I give you my food, I cannot have the food. If I give you myself, I sacrifice myself. If I give you my time, my time is used up.

Surely this is the real truth? At least this is the truth of THIS WORLD. In this physical world, under the laws of physics, it appears to be true that everything is finite and limited. There is only so much of things.

This is because nothing in the world is whole. Everything in the world is lacking. An apple lacks the materials and properties of a banana. A car lacks the materials and properties of a newborn baby. One thing here is not another thing. What I have, you lack, and what you have, I lack. Therefore there is a finite limit on what there is to have, and who has it.

This is why the law of this world is "do not share anything." When you think you are sharing through the physical ownership transfer of objects, you are not really sharing. If I give you half of the pizza, believing I'm sharing it with you, I'm really not. I'm sacrificing and losing half the pizza and cannot have what you have.

The part you have is not the part I have. We do not really share the same part. We have separate and competing parts, and we are both losing and sacrificing in a "compromise" in order to have anything at all. Sharing in this world is based on loss and exclusion. The only way we can appear to share anything is to not share it, but instead to restrict what is shared. This is not true sharing.

A Course in Miracles makes a claim which many people might just accept as if it makes sense, but in terms of how this world functions and how people think, it makes no sense at all. It says that giving and receiving are one. It also says that what you give away you will receive. It also says that in order to have "all", ie everything, you must give everything to everyone. This makes NO sense. How can I still have everything if I've given everything away? And why, if I were to give nothing away, would I HAVE nothing? Surely I'd still have everything? It makes no sense.

You see, the people of the world have been so accustomed to living in spacetime, which is is a realm of illusions. It's a realm of laws which are OPPOSITE to the laws of God. Here it only seems to "make sense" to say that "If I give, I lose". If I give you something, I must lack it. If I give you everything, I will have nothing. And therefore giving is self-destructive and self-denial and not in my best interests. Which means that being selfish and hoarding and possessing exclusive ownership rights is entirely "natural" in this world. But that's not remotely spiritual.

If what Jesus says is true, that giving and receiving are one, and that I must give in order to receive, and that when I give I will receive, and that when I give I will RETAIN what I have - and yet the other person will have it AS WELL, he is teaching a principle which completely transcends the nature of this world. He is saying that when there is true giving, I will KEEP what I have, AND YET at the same time the other person will ALSO have it. Which means that we both now have the WHOLE of what has been given. Not that we compromise, not that we "share" by splitting it in half, not that we each can only have part of it.

He is saying that we can in fact BOTH have ALL of what there is, AT the same time, WITHOUT lack and without sacrifice and without limitation. That does NOT compute in terms of the physical laws. It is totally against the laws of this world. It does not make ANY sense at all in terms of how physical objects function and interact.

Jesus is not only suggesting that when you give, you will receive all of what you have given, and will still have all of it, and that the other person will ALSO have all of it, but he's even saying that therefore when you give to another, and you both share in it simultaneously and fully, there is now an INCREASE. How can anything which has been given away cause an increase in what you have? Yet this is heaven's law, that BECAUSE everything is given fully, it is received fully, and is shared fully, and now more people have it and there has been an increase in what is had.

He presents this also in terms of the idea that "ideas can be shared" and that "ideas increase by being shared". This is to clarify that physicality cannot be shared in this way, but mind-content can. When mind gives all, it still has all to give, and yet has shared all, and now all have all, and everything belongs to everyone all at once. Ideas increase by being "given away", because in truth, when you give something real away you still have it, because you also receive it. Because giving and receiving are the same thing.

So this teaching is really telling you something important. The LAWS of reality, of god, of the Kingdom of Heaven, ARE NOT the same as the laws of space or time or planet Earth. The functioning of reality does not correspond to how physical objects are "shared". The nature of God's mind does not operate according to finite laws of "either I have it or you do". And all real relationship operates on this basis that "everything is fully accessible to everyone always." Even YOU are shared with others, and everyone has full access to you as even part of themselves.

This is the nature of oneness, a system in which what belongs to one belong to another. What is mine is yours. What is me is you. And yet there IS sharing, because there ARE many to share WITH. Without there being ANOTHER, there cannot be anyone TO share with. This is why in reality in God's system of sharing, in which everything MUST be shared ("Nothing real can be increased except by sharing"), THERE MUST BE multiple recipients TO share in what exists. And this again further supports the fact that God has many sons.

So if you think that somehow ACIM is non-duality or that God only has one son or that God can't have many creations, etc, you should really take a good hard look at this idea of giving and receiving being one. Because it is clearly a law and a dynamic which utterly defies what you have come to expect of spacetime and its contents, it completely transcends all notions of things being "separated off" and compartmentalized, and really completely destroys the idea that in oneness there is nothing to share WITH.

You cannot accept the idea that giving and receiving are one, while simultaneously claiming that ACIM is a non-dualistic teaching, that there are no brothers to share with, or that reality is just one thing. If Jesus is correct in his teaching, then the oneness of giving and receiving automatically implies that God's Kingdom MUST entail the sharing, and the giving, and the receiving, of everything by everything, and thus the creation of many sharers who must share in everything together and in unison. Indeed this uni-son is the one son, who IN unison is the sharing by many sons, all of whom God created TO share in everything, together, forever.

"Here are both giving and receiving seen as different aspects of one Thought Whose truth does not depend on which is seen as first, nor which appears to be in second place. Here it is understood that both occur together, that the Thought remains complete. And in this understanding is the base on which all opposites are reconciled, because they are perceived from the same frame of reference which unifies this Thought."

"Father, I must return Your Love for me. For giving and receiving are the same, and You have given all Your Love to me."

"For giving and receiving ARE the same. And to ACCEPT the limits of a body is to IMPOSE these limits on each brother that you see. For you MUST see him as you see yourself."

"The unforgiving mind does not believe that giving and receiving are the same."

"The interval you think lies in between the giving and receiving of the gift SEEMS to be one in which you sacrifice, and suffer loss."

"It is this joining that we undertake to recognize today. We will not seek to keep our minds apart from Him Who speaks for us, for it is but our voice we hear as we attend Him. He alone can speak to us and for us, joining in One Voice the getting and the giving of God's Word; the giving and receiving of His Will."

"It IS awareness that giving and receiving ARE the same. BECAUSE it does not make the same unlike, it sees no differences where none exist. And thus it is the SAME for everyone, because it sees no differences in THEM. Its offering is universal, and it teaches but one message. What is God's BELONGS to everyone, and IS his due."

"If paying is associated with giving, IT CANNOT BE PERCEIVED AS LOSS, and the RECIPROCAL relationship of giving and RECEIVING will be recognized."

When you move away from love, you move away from power. Love is power. God is love. God is power.

Moving away from love you move into fear. Fear is powerlessnses. It's the attempt to have no power. It's the attempt to be overpowered. It's the attempt to give your power away to someone or something else, who would otherwise have no power over you.In fear, you give your power to something in the world, asking it to have YOUR power OVER yourself. You ask it to attack, threaten, hurt, destroy and upset you. You give it the power to do this in your mind by framing it as an attacker. You want to be punished when you are afraid, and are asking the world to hurt you.

Fear seems to be saying that you do not want something to be happening, but it is DOING the opposite. It is requesting that there be suffering. It's a way for someone who is guilty to ask another to agree that they are guilty, deserving of punishment. As if to ask, please confirm that I am worthless and deserve suffering, and please make me suffer for me.

Being in fear is being away from love, and therefore away from life and resurrection. Fear produces death and sickness. "All forms of sickness even unto death are physical expressions of the FEAR of awakening." Suffering therefore arises from powerlessness, in which you appear to have no power to stop it because you believe falsely that you have no power.

Being afraid is a displacement of your total power onto the world. You give it your power and make it have power over you. You demand that it treat you a certain way, and usually in a destructive or threatening way. You fear in order to give your power away and to become powerless. Being powerless feels like weakness, it makes you freeze up, the life drains from you, you become paralyzed and eventually dead.

Death is a total power loss. It's like you are battery and all the life is drained out of you. It represents an unwillingness to live and an unwillingness to have power over the world. Truly you have power over death because nothing can overthrow your power unless you will to be powerless. "No one dies without their own consent."

"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."

Giving your power away is also murder. It frames another person as an attacker and accuses them of sin. It associates cause with them while also believing in separation, and so they appear to be sinful to you - the cause of your suffering. While fearing them, you are attacking them. While feeling powerless against them, you are using your power to attack them. Seeking to destroy another destroys yourself. Seeking to disempower another strips you of your own power and gives it away. You cannot be powerful when you are taking power away from others - either you are both all-powerful or you are both dead.

To become powerful again you only need recognize that you still have total power to choose not to give your power away. You do it to yourself. No-one ever takes your power from you. No-one has power over your will and freedom. It is you who MUST consent to give your power, and you cannot "lose" it accidentally. Reclaiming entails recognizing the secret of salvation, that it is you who gives it away, and it's not the world that takes it from you.

All of your power is God's power. "To recognize that all power is of God is to gain all power." When you disown power you are disowning God, and are saying that you do not belong to God. It's an attempt to take yourself away from God and give yourself to someone else to be the author of you. Then you believe that the world is your cause. And when you believe that something evil and unlike God is causing you, you regard it as sinning against you.

There are no causes in the world. There is only cause in your mind. The world does not cause any kind of suffering. It does not cause sickness or disease or illness or damage or malfunction or death. Only your mind has the power to cause these things to show up in your dream. And it is in your mind that you have total power to undo and reverse and prevent all of these things. If you do not choose to give your power away, you cannot die. Who could see death who is powered by God?

Watch yourself as you give your power away to the world. Every time you believe it is doing something to you, you have given it power. You have framed it as having YOUR ability to cause. You are then afraid of your own power, seen dissociated and projected onto someone else. You accuse them of using your power against you. To believe that the world can overpower you, is to be afraid of power.

And to be afraid of power is an attempt to reject power. This is why fear feels like you're trying to stop something from happening.You cannot be disempowered unless you alone choose to disempower yourself. When you slip into this choice, you give power to the world and it gains the seeming ability to tempt you. But you gave it this ability by believing it has cause, power, mind, alien will, and ability of its own. It has NONE of its own, beyond what you have lent to it. Since you are disempowering yourself on a daily basis, you need to therefore recognize that you're doing this and stop doing it.

You need to take your power back, not from the world as such because it did not really take it from you. You gave it away freely. But you must freely reclaim it by realizing that in your mind there is an activity, an effort, a mechanism of thought, in which you are actively trying to get rid of your power. Every fear disowns power and assigns it to something else. You are fearing instead of loving, because you are trying to be a suffering victim. You are only ever doing this to yourself, and you can reclaim your power at any time.You have in you the ability to reclaim not only all power, but all power in heaven and earth. And then nothing has any power over you at all. When you are all powerful you are sharing in God's power, and nothing can oppose his will.

"God is seen as outside, fierce and powerful, eager to keep all power for Himself."

"It was only my DECISION that gave me all power in Heaven and earth. My only gift to you is to help you make the same decision FOR YOURSELF."

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

"My father gives all power unto me."

"you are part of God, Who IS all power."

"By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that ALL POWER IS YOURS."

"He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."

"I am not helpless, but all powerful."