Chapter 1A Course in Miracles:
The Book

"The body cannot create, and the belief that it can, a fundamental error, produces all physical symptoms. Physical illness represents a belief in magic. The whole distortion that made magic rests on the belief that there is a creative ability in matter which the mind cannot control." T-2.IV.2:6-8.

Another way to put this, is the belief that physical matter, form, body, world, is capable of CAUSING something to happen.

Elsewhere I recall, I think in the early urtext, Jesus telling Helen that anxiety must arise when you believe that illusions have the power to do something to you. Thus the belief in magic is the belief that stuff in the world is not only causing bad things to happen to you, but that you can use the same magic to undo that magic.

It should be obvious how self-contradictory that is. Trying to use a magical power outside of you in order to counteract the effects of a magical power outside of you, means that you will just continue to reinforce the belief in magic by trying to use it against itself.

Believing that the body or the world has a mind of its own is a belief in magic. It's believing that somehow the output or effects of the system have gained some kind of magical will of their own, that they've taken over, they've gone rogue and are now running the show. As though images coming out of a projector come alive on the screen and start directing their own movie.

Jesus is suggesting that believing in magic will 'cause sickness'. Ie, if you believe the world or body can affect you, that GIVES power to it and manipulates it as though it magically is doing something to you on its own. That is self attack, and it will produce symptoms of sickness.

If a person has even a tiny amount of unawareness, they are in a state of believing in magic.

Perceiving that you did not choose what has happened, and that therefore there is some other 'will 'or 'cause' separate from you, is a belief in magical causes. Perceiving that other people do things to you against your will is a belief in magic.

Magic essentially is victim consciousness.

A Course in Miracles, the book, unfortunately does not contain everything there could ever be said on every subject.

It's important to recognize this. Since there is so much "truth" in the book, or conveyed through its words, many people come to believe that truth is ITS FORM. Ie the specific words it uses is the "entire truth".

This is especially because the course is trying to communicate to us "the whole truth", the exact perfect truth, and nothing but the truth. But if we start to think that the words used, the form of the book, and its limitations, constitutes what the whole truth is, we become obsessed over the specific words.

Then there are debates about what the words say with a quote-war erupting, competition between versions and so on. People will say "where did Jesus say that" or "where does the course say that".. and things will allegedly not be "proven" unless you can find specific words which "say it" in a specific form.

Words themselves are not meaning. They are symbols, carriers of meaning, and there are many ways to say the same thing. In the course Jesus does the best He can, but he's working with a language based on limitation. He can only put a certain amount of words into the book and only a certain amount is said on given subjects. But even moreso, the MEANING that he intended is sometimes lost or not seen at all if a person focuses solely on the form of the words.

Meaning is always deeper than the words. If you are a course student who is always trying to find out what the words explicitly say as in, the exact words used, as if this gives you the meaning of the course, then you will become limited right along with those limiting words.

There are parts of the Course which Jesus later "clarified" necessarily, such as in the clarification for terms. He even said some things later in the "notes to helen" about how He made his body disappear, which was not mentioned anywhere else in the course and those who have not read it would likely come to some other conclusions about how the dream is overcome.

Jesus did NOT speak at "great length" on every topic, and some topics he barely even touched on, giving us precious few words representing colossal subjects, such as the definition of very large terms like "world" and what exactly the real world is or is not, and what he exactly means by the world being "translated" into heaven, and so on. Or what he means by a "universe". There are many many areas of the course where we really could've used a Q&A session to really get into the details of these things and become much clearer about them. This lack of clarity results in a lot of debate and arguments and speculation.

It is not possible to make accurate conclusions based on this limited material at times. You can't just point to some quoted piece of text and say, that's what the course says, or means, or teaches. The meaning is beyond the words. And I've seen plenty of people putting their own meaning onto the verbatim quotes and claiming that this is what the quote "clearly says and means". .but it doesn't.

Don't be deceived that the FORM of the course holds all of the truth in it. It is just a set of symbols trying to point to an experience or meaning that runs deeper. Learning what the truth is and what the course really means or intends, requires you to generalize the learning. You have to take something Jesus said over here and something he said over there and make sense of how it fits together. And in that area, you will find a lot of people disagreeing.

At some point we are to leave the course behind and go to God with empty hands. That's because the course itself is a MEANS to get there, not the end. Don't put the course on a pedestal and worship its glorious words or the idol worship of anyone who wrote or edited it. That's not what it is FOR or about. Beware of the FORM.

"Nothing so blinding as sight of form."

What we really need to do is learn the core truth and how to apply it and work with it to produce miracles and healing and awakening. And to develop TRUST in Holy Spirit and Jesus as our teachers and to let go of the ego.

A Course in Miracles, the book, unfortunately does not contain everything there could ever be said on every subject.

It's important to recognize this. Since there is so much "truth" in the book, or conveyed through its words, many people come to believe that truth is ITS FORM. Ie the specific words it uses is the "entire truth".

This is especially because the course is trying to communicate to us "the whole truth", the exact perfect truth, and nothing but the truth. But if we start to think that the words used, the form of the book, and its limitations, constitutes what the whole truth is, we become obsessed over the specific words.

Then there are debates about what the words say with a quote-war erupting, competition between versions and so on. People will say "where did Jesus say that" or "where does the course say that".. and things will allegedly not be "proven" unless you can find specific words which "say it" in a specific form.

Words themselves are not meaning. They are symbols, carriers of meaning, and there are many ways to say the same thing. In the course Jesus does the best He can, but he's working with a language based on limitation. He can only put a certain amount of words into the book and only a certain amount is said on given subjects. But even moreso, the MEANING that he intended is sometimes lost or not seen at all if a person focuses solely on the form of the words.

Meaning is always deeper than the words. If you are a course student who is always trying to find out what the words explicitly say as in, the exact words used, as if this gives you the meaning of the course, then you will become limited right along with those limiting words.

There are parts of the Course which Jesus later "clarified" necessarily, such as in the clarification for terms. He even said some things later in the "notes to helen" about how He made his body disappear, which was not mentioned anywhere else in the course and those who have not read it would likely come to some other conclusions about how the dream is overcome.

Jesus did NOT speak at "great length" on every topic, and some topics he barely even touched on, giving us precious few words representing colossal subjects, such as the definition of very large terms like "world" and what exactly the real world is or is not, and what he exactly means by the world being "translated" into heaven, and so on. Or what he means by a "universe". There are many many areas of the course where we really could've used a Q&A session to really get into the details of these things and become much clearer about them. This lack of clarity results in a lot of debate and arguments and speculation.

It is not possible to make accurate conclusions based on this limited material at times. You can't just point to some quoted piece of text and say, that's what the course says, or means, or teaches. The meaning is beyond the words. And I've seen plenty of people putting their own meaning onto the verbatim quotes and claiming that this is what the quote "clearly says and means". .but it doesn't.

Don't be deceived that the FORM of the course holds all of the truth in it. It is just a set of symbols trying to point to an experience or meaning that runs deeper. Learning what the truth is and what the course really means or intends, requires you to generalize the learning. You have to take something Jesus said over here and something he said over there and make sense of how it fits together. And in that area, you will find a lot of people disagreeing.

At some point we are to leave the course behind and go to God with empty hands. That's because the course itself is a MEANS to get there, not the end. Don't put the course on a pedestal and worship its glorious words or the idol worship of anyone who wrote or edited it. That's not what it is FOR or about. Beware of the FORM.

"Nothing so blinding as sight of form."

What we really need to do is learn the core truth and how to apply it and work with it to produce miracles and healing and awakening. And to develop TRUST in Holy Spirit and Jesus as our teachers and to let go of the ego.

When Jesus said heaven is not a place he meant only it is not part of spacetime.

In the following section He talks about this. Notice the section is called "beyond the body", not staying in the body.

"VI. Beyond the Body

1 There is nothing outside you. That is what you must ultimately learn, for it is the realization that the Kingdom of Heaven is restored to you. For God created only this, and He did not depart from it nor leave it separate from Himself. The Kingdom of Heaven is the dwelling place of the Son of God, who left not his Father and dwells not apart from Him. Heaven is not a place nor a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect Oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else; nothing outside this Oneness, and nothing else within."

Anything outside of heaven, which means this universe of illusions, is not part of Heaven, is not real, and does not exist. There is no world. And "there is no life outside of heaven" meaning anything outside heaven (Earth) is not life.

Also, ask yourself this. Where is Jesus? Apparently he is not in a body. He left bodies permanently 2000 years ago. So where is he? You cannot experience heaven while being in a body still. The body has to be disappeared in the overcoming of the illusion of death, before you can be freed of the limitations that the body places on awareness.

Many times Jesus states "in Heaven."

Jesus is in heaven. He is not in a body or in this universe. ACIM was comminicated to Helen through channeling from another dimension.

Being in the reflection of heaven, which is the face of Christ, in this world, is not being in heaven. Heaven is an awareness ONLY of God as real. Abstract, pure, holy and eternal. "Heaven and Earth are opposite in every way" tells us if you are "in Earth"you are not in Heaven. Otherwise God created this world, which is bullshit.

"God is in everything I see"applies only to seeing the face of Christ in this fictional world, which is only preparation for the transition to heaven. It does NOT mean God is in this world or that God is lurking behind its forms. Who can be at peace with death and destruction, or accuse God of creating such a cruel world, when death is a sign of hatred? God is love, not hate, and eternal life does not mean bodies that suffer and die.

Read the lesson "no one can fail who seeks to reach the truth". It takes you BEYOND even the real world, beyond true perception, beyond the face of Christ, beyond the forgiven world, escorted by Angels to Heaven. And Jesus says He can take you to Heaven any time. He wouldn’t exactly have anywhere to take you if being in the world meant you were there already.

Heaven is not Earth. Earth is not real and does not exist.

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way.

God does not suffer conflict. Nor is His creation split in two. How could it be His Son could be in hell, when God Himself established him in Heaven? Could he lose what the Eternal Will has given him to be his home forever? Let us not try longer to impose an alien will upon God's single purpose. He is here because He wills to be, and what He wills is present now, beyond the reach of time."

"You cannot fail today. There walks with you the Spirit Heaven sent you, that you might approach this door some day, and through His aid slip effortlessly past it, to the light."

Perhaps one of the greatest miracles of all performed by Jesus was simply that He made his body permanently disappear. He did not die because He was not his body at all. His body didn't lay in the tomb rotting. He - immortal Spirit, Christ, made the body disappear completely because he no longer believed in any of the illusions that it was made to uphold. He did not have to "go through death" in order to exit the world. As ACIM says, the world is not left by death, but by TRUTH!

He had withdrawn absolutely all belief in separation, all belief in the body being the cause of anything, all victimhood, all belief in being at the effect of the world, and that means the body to Him had absolutely no further sense of apparent reality. He knew it was - LITERALLY - nothing at all. It wasn't that it still existed and was something special, or a special communication device (that was a pre-ascension state). He recognized the complete absolute truth, that there is no world and there is no body. It is NOTHING other than an illusion that isn't real.

And with that, His body literally disappeared from existence. This was the final demonstration, the final statement, that He had overcome death, that He was not a body at all, and that the body is just an illusion.

It is our task, similarly, to learn to DISAPPEAR the body, to learn to disappear sickness, to disappear death, to overcome all material laws, to reverse every sign of sin, and to recognizing that all of the things of this world are literally NOTHING. They are not a special something, or a God-filled something, or a real-something, or meaningful, or important.

"There is no world. This is the central thought the Course would aim to teach". Quite literally, Jesus's disappearing of His body foreshadows the "Disappearance of the Universe", which WILL happen when the brotherhood is again united in truth, because this world is NOTHING more than an illusion and God did not create it.

You do not need a body to exist. You do not need this world to exist. You are Immortal Spirit, forever.

Below is the quote from Jesus where He described this from the additional material given to Helen.

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was. And that is what "rolling the stone away" means. The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body’s nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear.

I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body’s worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand. But now I talk to you and give you the same message. The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you awaken and decide to dream no more. And you still do have the power to make this decision as I did.

God holds out His hand to His Son to help him rise and return to Him. I can help because the world is illusion, and I have overcome the world. Look past the tomb, the body, the illusion. Have faith in nothing but the spirit and the guidance God gives you. He could not have created the body because it is a limit. He must have created the spirit because it is immortal. Can those who are created like Him be limited? The body is the symbol of the world.

Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there anytime you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does so. And then, and then… I cannot speak of that.

A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death. This is the message of the crucifixion; there is no order of difficulty in miracles. This is the message of the resurrection: Illusions are illusions. Truth is true. Illusions vanish. Only truth remains.

These lessons needed to be taught but once, for when the stone of death is rolled away, what can be seen except an empty tomb? And that is what you see who follow me into the sunlight and away from death, past all illusions, on to Heaven’s gate, where God will come Himself to take you home."

The truth is plain and clear. It can be presented in a perfectly clear manner. It can be spelled out with such logical clarity that anyone in their right mind would have absolutely no problem accepting it makes sense and is true. "No-one can argue with a fact" IF they are in their right mind.

However, when someone is not in their right mind and has an ego, something very weird happens.

It doesn't even matter how clear the truth is. It doesn't even matter that we are surrounded by and immersed in the absolute truth of God in Heaven RIGHT NOW. We still for some reason do not see it, recognize it, accept it, or want it. What is up with that?

Presenting the truth to someone extremely clearly, with maximal black and white clarity, leaving no room for confusion, STILL is not enough to get someone to accept it. This is why Jesus said he took every measure to make the course as clear as possible, but that people CAN AND WILL find controversy in it IF they look for it (with ego).

The problem boils down to.... the ego IS NOT WILLING to accept it.

We could be shown plain and simple what the truth IS. And yet we could still DENY it by being UNWILLING to accept it is true. This reminds me of Helen S saying that she knew the course was the truth but she could not believe it.

The ego has this very weird thing it does, a kind of blindness, an insanity, a sort of vibe it gets, even if something is totally plain and simple truth, that it will STILL persist with a sense of "I don't believe this", "It's not true". To have that kind of stubbornness in the face of the facts, is nothing less than an act of denial.

For example.

"The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite." (so now we know any opposite to love does not exist)

"Your Love is Heaven" (so now we know heaven is love - and expressed in many other phrases)

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way." (so now we know, heaven and earth are opposites in EVERY way)

And because of this, logically, 100% bulletproof logic, earth therefore DOES NOT EXIST. Because love, which is the same as heaven, has no opposite that exists.

This is a FACT.

However, you can put this fact down in a post or put it in front of someone's face in big letters, saying:

HEAVEN IS LOVE AND HAS NO OPPOSITE, EARTH IS OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN, THEREFORE EARTH DOES NOT EXIST.

You can even put flashing lights around it if you like. And big giant arrows pointing to it. Even a sign that says "this is the truth, learn it well." And maybe even have it make big loud sounds so as many people come to look at it as possible.

But if someone is IN DENIAL... they will not be WILLING to accept this. They may in more extreme cases bawlk at it like some kind of horrendous lie was just told. Or launch into some kind of tirade trying to find holes or redefine words or come up with SOME RATIONALIZATION that seems to suggest, maybe this is not the truth. It is nothing short of the ego defending itself against the truth.

That denial is utterly insane. It is an unwillingness, nothing else. It's got nothing to do with whether the facts are true or not. The facts are true. They are solid. God established them forever. The only problem is, some people will see these facts and STILL, over and over again, DENY that they are true. There is an UNWILLINGNESS TO ACCEPT IT.

That can only mean, the person (their ego) believes something ELSE is true, which they do not want to accept is FALSE. The unwillingness to accept something is FALSE, that you believe is truth, is the whole problem the ego poses for us. It thinks it knows what's true already. It's already decided, because IT wants to decide what ALL truth is instead of accepting it from God. ITS will to CHOOSE what the truth means, the authority problem, is its UNWILLINGNESS to accept God's Will. The facts. And so the ego WILL DENY the truth, until a person chooses to stop being IN DENIAL, and to become WILLING to accept that the truth is true.

The truth is, there is no Earth. Period. This is the meaning of "there is no world". Period. This isn't opinion. The logic of the metaphysics is utterly irrefutable. Jesus agrees with it. Jesus has expressed it. WE are the ones who WANT to deny it.

Denial of the truth really is the only problem we seem to have. It is an UNWILLINGNESS.

And what that means is, we are WILLING AGAINST GOD's WILL, willing with the ego, willing to have a separate will. Our separate will blocks us from accepting God's Will.

So if someone cannot accept this truth, that there is no world, and Earth does not exist AT ALL, it is because they are still rejecting God's Will.

When we become willing, we will be willing to accept. We have to be willing to accept truth in order to accept the atonement. This requires the willingness to put aside willing against God, and to will WITH Him. To carry out His will. Because his will for us is perfect happiness and eternal life. If we will against it, we will be in denial and choosing suffering and unhappiness and mortality's illusion.

We can stay in denial as long as we like. This is how we delay the curriculum. The time you take it is VOLUNTARY because you have FREE WILL. You need to be willing, to accept the truth as IT defines itself, and to align yourself with it, by being willing to let go of your belief that something else is true. No-one can enter heaven without accepting the truth as it is.

"Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

In A Course in Miracles, we are taught in many ways that we are all one. By this we mean, that God created an entire family, a sonship, comprising many individual beings, who simultaneously are individual and one. Each Son of God is all the Sons of God, as the One Son. "One brother is all brothers."

This means we have a kind of collective consciousness or "hive mind". The Christ Mind is this shared mind, which each individual mind created by God is merged and identified with. This means that anything in one mind, is also in another. Any form of healing is experienced by everyone. And everything you give or do affects everyone.

It also means you are not really an isolated, separated off stranger, who stands alone and has private personal experiences. This is why there are no private thoughts. The body is the idea that you are disconnected from everyone. But relationship re-establishes that you share and are joined, with the whole sonship. In fact you ARE the whole sonship. Part of you is in EVERY child of God.

In truth then, it is not possible for you to do or think or feel anything without it in some way influencing or being shared by THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. Every attitude you have affects everyone. Every thought is heard by all. We are all plugged into a giant psychological web, sort of like a holographic internet. And everyone has access all the time to everything.

When Jesus accomplished the resurrection and ascension, he DID IN fact accomplish it for and with ALL of us. We could not be excluded from it, and all of us are a part of it. The atonement IS about sharing and is a collective relationship between an individual and THE WHOLE.

"The Atonement is a lesson in sharing, which is given you because YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO DO IT. The Holy Spirit merely reminds you of what is your NATURAL ability."

When Jesus resurrected and ascended, a "part of" all of us MUST have done this as well. The part of Jesus that is IN you, which IS you, accomplished this. Jesus had to basically plug into and accept the parts of him that are in all of us, shared with and one with us, knowing us AS himself, in order to accept atonement fully. Therefore his awakening did in fact wake all of us up, to some degree. He plugged us ALL back into God.

Each individual mind in the collective has its own will. So what does that mean when someone chooses to rise into the light? It means everyone else must be pulled upward at least a little, even if they themselves are pulling the whole sonship down. Some light MUST enter their minds, because the light in Jesus's mind is in ALL minds.

When Jesus accomplished this, we were ALL illuminated and enlightened to some degree, and some part of us knows this. And each time YOU heal or resurrect or think well of yourself and others, you ARE resurrecting the whole sonship. Part of you IS Jesus, and IS already awake in heaven. And as each person chooses the atonement, it is being chosen on behalf of everyone.

"You WERE in darkness until God's Will was done completely by ANY part of the Sonship. When it was, it was perfectly accomplished by ALL. How else could it BE perfectly accomplished? My mission was simply to UNITE the Will of the Sonship WITH the Will of the Father by being aware of the Father's Will myself. This is the awareness I came to give YOU, and YOUR problem in accepting it IS the problem of this world. Dispelling it is salvation, and in this sense I AM the salvation of the world."

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

"I ask for your forgiveness, for if YOU are guilty, so must I be. And if I surmounted guilt and overcame the world, you were WITH me."

"A miracle is never lost. It touches many people you may not even know, and sometimes produces undreamed of changes in forces of which you are not even aware."

"I am alone in nothing. Everything I think or say or do touches all the universe. A Son of God cannot think or speak or act in vain. He cannot be alone in anything. It is therefore in my power to change every mind along with mine, for mine is the power of God."

"To heal, or to make joyous, is therefore the same as to integrate and MAKE ONE. That is why it makes no difference TO what part or BY what part of the Sonship the healing is done. EVERY part benefits, and benefits equally. YOU are being blessed by every beneficent thought of any of your brothers anywhere. You should want to bless them in return, out of gratitude."

"When I am healed I am not healed alone.

And I would share my healing with the world"

"I am in charge of the process of Atonement, which I undertook to begin. My Atonement was for the canceling out of all sins (i.e., lack of love) which human beings could not otherwise correct. That is what the Biblical statement "underneath are the Everlasting Arms" means. (Helen Schucman explanation: This means that He will backstop whenever human miracles will not suffice for atonement purposes. However, it is perfectly clear that when a person can atone by miracles, both giver and receiver are atoning. It is better to atone this way because of the mutual benefits involved.)"Inasmuch as you do it unto the least of these, my children" really ends with "you do it unto yourself and ME." The reason why YOU come before me is because I do not need miracles for my own Atonement, but I stand at the end in case YOU fail temporarily."

"It is impossible that anyone be healed alone. In sickness must he be apart and separate. But healing is his own decision to be one again, and to accept his Self with all its parts intact and unassailed. In sickness does his Self appear to be dismembered and without the unity which gives It life. But healing is accomplished as he sees the body has no power to attack the universal Oneness of God's Son."

"And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch, or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you. Perhaps you will not recognize them all, nor realize how great your offering to all the world, when you let healing come to you. But you are never healed alone. And legions upon legions will receive the gift which you receive when you are healed."

"No-one is healed alone. This is the joyous song salvation sings to all who hear its Voice."

"I can help because the world is illusion, and I have overcome the world. Look past the tomb, the body, the illusion. Have faith in nothing but the spirit and the guidance God gives you. He could not have created the body because it is a limit. He must have created the spirit because it is immortal."

The book, is an expression FROM truth, attempting to point to truth. It contains SYMBOLS of truth, twice removed from reality.

Because truth expressed the book, the symbols in the book are not necessarily all possible expressions from truth. Truth could conceivably express a million books, all from the same source or mind. They could all appear to take on different forms and use different words, yet essentially say the same thing.

The form of the book, the words used, the sentences, the sections/chapters, is only one collection of symbols, all coming from the same source.

It is entirely possible for that source of truth to continue to express itself in many, many more forms. It is possible that the Course could in fact be 1000 times larger, or a million. There is basically no limit to how many "forms" it could take, provided those forms express or symbolize a consistent source.

This is why it is then important to recognize that, of all the FORMS in the book, all of the words, you are not necessarily getting ALL words that can ever be said about truth, and you're not necessarily hearing every possible clarification.

For example, in the main Course itself Jesus doesn't really explicitly talk about making his body disappear. Yet, in the notes given to Helen later, from the same source/truth, he clarified further by adding extra information. That information is clarifying as to the meaning of various other parts of the Course, especially surrounding resurrection and how we might leave the dream without death being involved.

There are also times when Jesus says one little phrase somewhere in the Course and doesn't really expand upon it, and yet it's a very key phrase which puts many other things into perspective.

There are also times when I really wish Jesus would've gone into much more detail about certain things, especially miracles and some of the aspects of the end of the universe. In other words, if Jesus were present, there would be a lot of questions we could ask Him which would clarify many things. This is why it is VITAL to get in touch with Jesus/Holy Spirit and develop a relationship with them, so that you can learn from them DIRECTLY.

It's important then not to get too hung up on the specific exact WORDS which Jesus expressed, thinking that the FORM of those words is the truth. The form is not the truth, it's just one of MANY possible symbols and expressions. Further additional forms might possibly change your perception of those words and what they really mean.

If for example you will only accept something as correct if it has an explicit quote in the Course that you can point your finger at, then you are getting bogged down in form and are not seeing the metaphysics.

The form of the words of the Course are twice removed from reality. Once removed from reality is the metaphysics, and/or the symbols in the dream. For example, outer space, filled with seemingly nothing but emptiness, is symbolic for the ego's attempt to make God as absent as possible. Bodies are symbols of having an identity God did not create. etc.

When you look at the words and learn from the words, you should learn, or be able to infer/imply, what the metaphysics of the truth is. Stuff like the structure of the dream, the levels, what certain things mean, where they fit, etc... is not always necessarily 100% spelled out in words. You have to look deeper. As you "generalize the teaching", you will gradually build a clearer picture for yourself about how everything fits together.

Some of those clarifications will bring you insight into how, sometimes, Jesus uses words in certain specific contexts which, if taken verbatim, might imply or infer something which is incorrect. Also sometimes He speaks at certain "levels" and confusing those levels produces a lot of confused metaphysics. Some things apply at certain levels and not others.

Also sometimes Jesus uses words which He seemed to have build up quite a specific definition of elsewhere, but uses them quite loosely in "general conversation" in such a way that people then take this and think it's some kind of metaphysical fact. Sometimes Jesus is just simply talking casually and using normal language, how most people would, and not necessarily teaching doctrine in every word.

With enough exposure and learning you should be able to transcend the Course's words and get more in touch with the "core metaphysics" which is kind of hiding somewhat behind the words. The structure of the dream, the proper location of certain levels and their meaning etc, becomes more apparent when you go deeper into it, and Jesus hasn't necessarily "spelled it all out" directly.

We have to be careful not to get hung up on "where does it say that in the course" kind of approaches. Not everything IS said in the course. And yet, some things are true/logically consistent which may never have been expressed.

We also have to beware of thinking that only what is said in the Course is coming from Jesus's authority and therefore no-one else can say anything that Jesus hasn't said. As you transcend the words and get more of the metaphysics you'll be able to extrapolate it and come to conclusions which are completely consistent with Jesus's teachings.

That makes it possible to write additional content, additional words/symbols, based on the same metaphysical foundation, in order to be consistent with Jesus and not contradict his intentions. You don't need to be in his mind of authority to do this, you only need to grasp the basic logical structure of the separation.

There is a lot of material in the Course and it can become quite blinding through its sheer volume and seeming complexity. But we need to learn, in a sense, to forgive it, by learning to overlook its appearance and look deeper to see a closer or more accurate truth. The truth is simple, not complicated, but the ego has a field day with getting caught up in the form of things.