Perception of form is blindness.
What seems to save you destroys you.
Salvation has been equated with death and attack.
Love has been replaced with fake love.
What seems special is meaningless.
The body, a device for sensing, is aware of nothing.
The mind is idle, yet seems filled with activity.
Cause and effect have been reversed and separated.
What seems like innocence is denial of sinfulness.
Victims are attackers.
What seems valuable is worthless.
Love is equated with guilt.
Suffering is considered atonement.
Seeming to have no choice is a choice.
What seems visible is actually a block to sight.
What was visible has become invisible.
Identity has been replaced with a fake one.
Body has taken over the mind as if it runs the show.
Body has been equated with people, even though people wear bodies.
Immortal beings seem capable of hurt and being hurt.
Those who are eternally innocent are accused of sin.
There is no truth in the world.
What seems real is unreal.
If you seek you will not find.
All is not as it appears.
If you believe you are part of a dream, made of dream stuff, you can be attacked. If you recognize yourself as the dreamer of the dream, outside the dream like the container in which the dream is taking place - the mind - then you cannot be attacked.
"If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgement or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."
The dream of death, space and time, the world of sin, is all taking place in thought. If you identify WITH this thought, you shift your sense of "who and what I am" away from "that which thinks" to "the thought itself". Away from mind to the dream.
To do this requires that you deny what you are. To deny your soul. Doing this invents perception, and doing it a lot pushes you towards false perception. Here, you believe that since you are a dream, or part of a dream, or made of dream-stuff, the dream ITSELF must be your creator.
This now begins the process of believing that you are at the effect of the world. If you are identified with or as something IN the dream, then you are now vulnerable to anything that seems to take place in the dream. And anything that happens to dream stuff, you will believe is happening to you.
"You are immortal and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do."
By confusing your SELF, with dream figures, ie by believing you are a body, and by extension actually believing that you ARE THIS WORLD ("The world is perception"), you position yourself at the EFFECT of the dream, and introduce all manner of suffering into your experience.
If your identity is something OUTSIDE OF space and time, something BEYOND the body, something more encompassing than the dream world itself... if you are the MIND that is dreaming it, or even better, the soul that is using the mind to dream it, then you are FAR BEYOND the reaches of the dream itself.
"You are safe in God, dreaming of exile"
"The Kingdom of God is perfectly protected. Nothing can prevail against it."
"Nothing can prevail against a son of God who commends his spirit into the hands of God."
"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."
Believing that you ARE a part of the dream, lands you directly onto the battlefield. The dream is the battlefield. If you are a body, and "the body is a dream", then you will believe that you are fundamentally unsafe, because the body is exposed and susceptible and attackable and limited, in the midst of a harsh and hostile world full of danger.
"Today's idea will eventually overcome completely the sense of loneliness and abandonment which all the separated ones experience. Depression is an inevitable consequence of separation. So are anxiety, worry, a deep sense of helplessness, misery, suffering and intense fear of loss. The separated ones have invented many "cures" for what they believe to be "the ills of the world." But the one thing they do not do is to question the reality of the problem. Yet its effects cannot be cured because it is not real."
Anyone believing they are a body cannot truly feel safe. They must live in fear. To believe you ARE a body requires that you believe you ARE the dream. And to believe you ARE the dream requires you to believe you are at the EFFECT of the dream or dreamer. That you are defined by it. And that means the dream is the cause of you. And being able to cause you with an alien will is an instant threat to your peace.
It can never be, that you can say, "Look at me, I'm a man, I am fearless". And it can never be, that you can say, "Look at me, I am a fierce and powerful woman". By identifying AS a body or a gender identity, or the attributes of the flesh, or the size and shape of its form, or its abilities, you are literally positioning yourself as a target for attack. And this belief in attack is inherent to seeing yourself AS a portion of a dream, and it is your own mind that is doing the attacking because it believes in being affected.
You cannot be "an invulnerable man" or "a bullet-proof woman". But you can be an immortal spirit, a soul, a child of God, who temporarily utilizes the dream body for a higher purpose, and therefore infuses it with life and protection. But this is a miraculous supernatural act, in which a power NOT OF THIS WORLD, from outside the dream (holy spirit), is used to OVERRIDE the physical laws of the dream.
It all hinges around the simple question of identity. Who or what are you? What are you identified WITH and AS? What is your NATURE? Are you made of illusions? Are you a reality? Are you something in space and time? Are you eternal and timeless? And this really boils down to the question or, where did you GET your identity from? Where did your TRUEST NATURE come from?
The answer to that comes down to, who is your father? Or who created you? What is your source? How did you come to exist? Because in that question lies all the facts about THEIR nature, and WHAT they could do in your creation, and WHAT you INHERITED from them. And if the ego is your daddy, then you are a mortal temporary limited fictional character in a spacetime of hell. But if God is your daddy, then you are immortal and permanent and can never be affected by dreams.
"The ego IS therefore a confusion in identification, which never had a consistent model, and never developed consistently. It is the distorted product of the misapplication of the laws of God by distorted minds, which are misusing their own power."
"We said before that YOU are the will of God. His will is not an idle wish, and your identification with His Will is not optional because it is what you are."
"All these things are cherished to ensure a body identification. They are songs of praise to the ego. Do not put your faith in the worthless. It will not sustain you."
"In his complete identification with the Christ, the perfect Son of God, His one creation and His happiness, forever like Himself and One with Him, Jesus became what all of you must be."
"Now are we one in shared Identity, with God our Father as our only Source, and everything created part of us."
"The Son of God is my identity."
"Then I lose myself in my Identity, and recognize that Christ is but my Self."
"The step I take today, my Father, is my sure release from idle dreams of sin. Your altar stands serene and undefiled. It is the holy altar to my Self, and there I find my true Identity."
"You I choose, and my Identity along with You. Your Son would be Himself, and know You as his Father and Creator and his Love."
"Long ago we said this course will teach you what you are, restoring to you your identity. And we have already learned that this identity is shared."
"The idea for today presents a very different view of yourself. By establishing your Source it establishes your Identity, and it describes you as you must really be in truth."
"His brothers share his name, and thus are they united in a bond to which they turn for their identity."
"They do not realize that, to deny God, is to deny their own identity, and in this sense, the wages of sin IS death."
"Choose once again what you would have him be, remembering that every choice you make establishes your own identity as you will see it, and believe it IS."
"But there is need for help beyond yourself as you are circumscribed by false beliefs of your Identity, which God alone established in reality."
"I am not an illusion but a reality."
Here in ACIM Chapter 2, the section on "Separation and the Atonement", Jesus spells out CLEARLY just how powerful the mind is to produce miracles.
He speaks of the combination of belief and thought with a power so great that it can LITERALLY move a physical mountain. It is not a metaphor, and it has nothing to do with mind correction or a shift in perception or an undoing of an illusion.
He also tells us that we FEAR the power of our mind and would rather believe that we have no influence, which is part of our disowning of our power and an attempt to render the mind impotent and incapable.
Jesus was able to do the kind of miracles He did because he knew how to use belief and thought combined with the Power of God/Holy Spirit to express and bring about "changes" in the world. For Him, He was performing these kinds of miracles all the time. And it is these kinds of miracles that He IS trying to teach us to become capable of in A Course in Miracles.
Why are we so afraid of this? Why do we have so many defenses against this definition of miracles? What will it take to believe it? A demonstration? Does it take a miracle to believe in miracles?
I think the ACIM community is in for a big shakeup and a probably additional layers of denial and defense, when some people start to perform these miracles consistently and convincingly. Miracles will be proven because they are demonstrations of the truth. And yet even when they are demonstrated there will be further denial.
........
"Few appreciate the real power of the mind, and no one remains fully aware of it all the time. However, if you hope to spare yourself from fear there are some things you must realize, and realize fully. The mind is very powerful, and never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating.
It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power surge that can literally move mountains. It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is arrogant, but that is not the real reason you do not believe it.
You prefer to believe that your thoughts cannot exert real influence because you are actually afraid of them. This may allay awareness of the guilt, but at the cost of perceiving the mind as impotent. If you believe that what you think is ineffectual you may cease to be afraid of it, but you are hardly likely to respect it. There are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level."
- Jesus
If you want to experience any of the attributes that are true of God, such as love, peace, happiness, health, joy, power, etc, then it does entail actually moving closer to God. God has these attributes in him as part of his nature, permanently. And the place in you where you have these attributes is the place he put them, which is within your real self - your soul.
In order for you to experience these things, it actually entails getting in touch with your real self and being aligned with God's will. You can't stay separate from God and expect to feel what it's like to be like God. You have to actually be willing to be close to God, close to love, close to permanent happiness, close to peace, close to that which creates these things.
God is the creator of these things, not you, not the body, not the world. They dwell inside of you in the very same place where you are joined with God, at your inner altar. If you want peace, you have to go there to find it. If you want to be loving, you have to share love with God. If you want to be happy, you have to be with God as well.
This means identifying with your real holy perfect self as God created it. This also means if you are not experiencing these things it's not because there is something wrong with you, it's because you're not being true to yourself and have distanced yourself from God. So the remedy is to simply move back closer to God again. The question then, really, is, where are you, and how much distance (spacetime) have you put between you and the reality of peace, love and happiness?
"A Son of God is happy ONLY when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make." UrT7L2
"The step I take today, my Father, is my sure release from idle dreams of sin. Your altar stands serene and undefiled. It is the holy altar to my Self, and there I find my true Identity." UrW309L2 "Oh my brothers, if you only knew the peace that will envelop you and hold you safe and pure and lovely in the Mind of God, you could but rush to meet Him where His altar is." UrU5A8
"We clear a holy place within our minds before His altar, where His gifts of peace and joy are welcome, and to which we come to find what has been given us by Him." UrW104L4
"Only at the altar of God will you find peace, and this altar is in you, because God put it there." UrT9I18
"If you would look within, you would see only the Atonement, shining in quiet and in peace, upon the altar to your Father. Do not be afraid to look within." UrT13C7
"A miracle reawakens the awareness that the spirit, and not the body, is the altar of Truth. This is the recognition that leads to the healing power of the miracle." UrT1B22G
This segment spells it out plain and clear. YOU are 100% responsible for EVERYTHING you experience, you CHOOSE everything that happens, and nothing happens to you against your free will.
"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.
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."
This is also further reflected here:
"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. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me.
You are the Self Whom You created Son, creating like Yourself and one with You. My Self, Which rules the universe, is but Your Will in perfect union with my own, Which can but offer glad assent to Yours, that It may be extended to Itself."
And also reflected here:
"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No-one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness.
My holy brothers, think of this awhile; the world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all. It merely represents your thoughts. And it will change entirely as you elect to change your mind, and choose the joy of God as what you really want. Your Self is radiant in this holy joy, unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable forever and forever. And would you deny a little corner of your mind its own inheritance, and keep it as a hospital for pain, a sickly place where living things must come at last to die?
The world may seem to cause you pain. And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect it cannot make effects. As an illusion it is what you will. Your idle wishes represent its pains. Your strange desires bring it evil dreams. Your thoughts of death envelop it in fear, while in your kind forgiveness does it live."
What our minds really need is a paradigm shift. That means a really radical sweeping upgrade in terms of premise, context and outlook. Some kind of system-wide "shift" out of an entire field of form into some radically greater perspective.
It's not enough to be dwelling in the realm of problems and trying to solve them. We have to get our minds out of the entire belief in problems. That's a paradigm shift, a refusal to engage with the level of suffering and a desire to completely transcend it.
This is why Jesus tells us for example to not to try to find freedom in the body, or in the world. It doesn't exist there. Or to not seek for love outside yourself, but within.
We've been looking to solve problems and suffering at the level of the problems and the suffering, which at best makes illusions of solutions but doesn't stop it happening. If you want it to all stop completely you have to stop the entire system, to not play the game.
The same applies with death and sickness. Questioning whether such things even exist at all, instead of dwelling on how to solve them. It's the withdrawal of power from illusions that undoes them, just as forgiveness is an entire perspective above the battlefield that renders the whole system obsolete.
The ego for example counsels that a war is real, and that you should play the game of war, and that if you take a side you will win, or alternatively you will lose. What it doesn't tell you is that both sides of the war is a loss, because to exterminate anyone is to lose yourself, because you are one. It is not interested in oneness only in separation. If you play the game, you lose, regardless of the outcome. The only way to shift the entire paradigm is not to play at all.
All reactions to a suffering world that you've made real, which compel you to change it so that you don't seem to suffer, are faulty. They might seem to produce some changes and make the illusion more palatable, but it doesn't really wake you up. What wakes you up is questioning the entire premise of the thing and whether or not it's even possible.
Shifting from a premise that this world is real, to a premise that it is just an unreal dream with no real consequences, is a total paradigm shift. It's always about adopting a much broader and higher context which completely reframes everything. A whole new paradigm, a new thought system, a new perception, a new truth, which is so far reaching and deep that it completely redefines the meaning of everything, and puts everything in its proper perspective.
"Freud was more clear-sighted about this, because he knew a BAD thing when he perceived it, but he failed to recognize that a bad thing cannot exist. It is therefore wholly unnecessary to try to get out of it. As you very rightly observed yourself, the thing to do with a desert is to LEAVE."
"Yet freedom of the body HAS no meaning. And so the mind is DEDICATED to serve illusions."
"Fear not to cross to the abode of peace and perfect holiness. Only there is the completion of God and of His Son established forever. Seek not for this in the bleak world of illusion, where nothing is certain, and where everything fails to satisfy. And, in the Name of God, be wholly willing to abandon ALL illusion."
"Judgment is but a toy, a whim, the senseless means to play the idle game of death in your imagination. But vision sets all things right, bringing them gently within the kindly sway of Heaven's laws."
It's not just a matter of me taking back responsibility for everything in life, and then sitting there all by myself.
There is instead a shift away from ego-self and towards being aware of and TRUSTING in God.
It's not just a matter of realizing the cause of things is in my mind, not out there, although that's necessary.
What is cause? It's not just some idea or decision. GOD is cause.
It's also not just a matter of removing blocks to awareness of love. What happens when the blocks are removed? Love/God shows up. And that's no small matter.
I've relied on my intellect, on my ego's abilities, on my separate intelligence, on my self-taught learning. But this is all essentially because I am not depending on God.
Independent thinking... okay... highly overrated. It's actually a substitute for being connected to, trusting in, and having real faith in God.
I'm opening up to a willingness to surrender, and to actually believe and stay unwavering in, a knowing-based trust that God is taking care of things.
It's not God that wavers or fails, it's my selfish ego trying to do everything on its own.
I have to let go. I have to surrender. And I have to stop being the one who has all the truth all gathered up in my separate mind like a big database of information.
Truth as information is a substitute for truth as an experiential relationship with God. It is a substitute for being WITH God, intimately. For being AWARE of God's real presence and communicating with Him and being directed BY Him.
It really boils down to a simple either-or question. Either I trust in my own abilities, or I trust in God. Either I think that I have to control and enforce everything myself, or I let go of the reigns and let God.
And in that trust, in that surrender, it's not that God just sits there idle. To trust that he is taking care of things, that he can heal all situations, requires strong faith and belief and certainty and loyalty. And that also means, knowing that God actually IS taking care of things... even worldly things, even worldly problems.
This is the next stage in the development of trust. I have to learn to step aside and not only 'let God' but actually trust God, believe God, and put aside my own little fears and worries about how God won't help or isn't in charge or can't heal things or whatever.
It's about opening up to relying on God, knowing that God goes with me, allowing God, being intimate with God and allowing myself to be supported BY God. And this has everything to do with working miracles, which REQUIRES faith and firm belief and TRUST in God.
My lack of faith, is what it comes down to. As Jesus says in the course we have placed great faith in the ego, in our own selves, in intelligence and thinking and learning, that we have displaced our faith away from God.
I/we must learn that God really is on our side, really is our partner, that we really are taken care of by Him, that he really can and will do what He says he can and will do, and to trust Him to manage life for us.
It's not just that we are separate from God and have to live in separation and maybe get some input from God once in a while. That isn't the LIFE that we are meant to live. We are meant to team up with God and be loved and united with Him, and actually have Him IN us and working THROUGH us FOR us, without us having to carry the entire weight of the world by ourselves.
How can I trust God unless I am willing to let go of control of life and actually allow Him to do this? How can I trust unless I am 'hands off'?
God repeatedly says to me, "let me". And I did not really understand what this meant. I didn't know if it meant he would do something through me if I did something. I didn't know if it meant he was 'maybe' taking care of something, and then me having no faith in that entering into fear and believing that He wasn't doing anything.
If I don't have trust and faith that God can take care of things, I in effect block God's power and actually do fail to RECEIVE God's blessings.
Anyway.
Today I am grateful and thankful that God HAS delivered, God HAS provided, God IS taking care of situations, and I am not alone any more.
From Lesson 132... totally filled with juicy proof that the world is not real or God's creation.
"W-pI.132.4. THE WORLD IS NOTHING IN ITSELF. 2 Your mind must give it meaning. 3 And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and THINK THEM REAL. 4 Perhaps you think you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. 5 Yet in truth you found exactly WHAT YOU LOOKED FOR when you came.
W-pI.132.5. THERE IS NO WORLD APART FROM WHAT YOU WISH, and herein lies your ultimate release. 2 Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly. 3 Ideas leave not their source. 4 This central theme is often stated in the text, and must be borne in mind if you would understand the lesson for today. 5 It is not pride which tells you that YOU MADE THE WORLD you see, and that it changes as you change your mind.
W-pI.132.6. But it is pride that argues you have come into a world quite separate from yourself (made by God?!), impervious to what you think, and quite apart from what you chance to think it is. 2 THERE IS NO WORLD! 3 This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. 4 ****Not everyone is ready to accept it****, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. 5 He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again.
W-pI.132.7. But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn THERE IS NO WORLD, and can accept the lesson now. 2 Their readiness will bring the lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize. 3 Some see it suddenly on point of death, and rise to teach it. 4 Others find it in EXPERIENCE THAT IS NOT OF THIS WORLD, which shows them that THE WORLD DOES NOT EXIST because what they behold must be the truth, and yet it clearly CONTRADICTS THE WORLD.
W-pI.132.8. And some will find it in this course, and in the exercises that we do today. 2 Today's idea is true because THE WORLD DOES NOT EXIST. 3 And if it is indeed YOUR OWN IMAGINING, then you can loose it from all things you ever thought it was by merely changing all the thoughts that gave it these appearances. 4 The sick are healed as you let go all thoughts of sickness, and the dead arise when you let thoughts of life replace all thoughts you ever held of death.
"HOW CAN A WORLD OF TIME AND PLACE EXIST, if you remain as God created you?"
"THERE IS NO WORLD APART FROM YOUR IDEAS because ideas leave not their source, and YOU MAINTAIN THE WORLD WITHIN YOUR MIND IN THOUGHT."
"Yet if you are as God created you, you cannot think apart from Him, NOR MAKE what does NOT share His timelessness and Love. 2 Are these inherent in the world you see? 3 Does it create like Him? 4 Unless it does, IT IS NOT REAL, and cannot be at all."
"IF YOU ARE REAL THE WORLD YOU SEE IS FALSE, for God's creation is UNLIKE THE WORLD IN EVERY WAY."
"THERE IS NO WORLD because it is a thought APART FROM GOD, and MADE TO SEPARATE the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus DESTROY His Wholeness. 2 Can a world which comes from this idea be real? 3 Can it be anywhere? 4 Deny illusions, but accept the truth."
"Today our purpose is to free the world from all the idle thoughts we ever held about it, and about all living things we see upon it. 2 THEY CAN NOT BE THERE. 3 NO MORE CAN WE. 4 For we are in THE HOME OUR FATHER SET FOR US (Heaven), along with them."
"For I am real BECAUSE THE WORLD IS NOT, and I would know my own reality."
Thoughts are attempts to create. They are attempts to give and express. They produce effects. They are not passive or neutral. A negative attacking thought is an attempt to use thought for destructive purposes. That means to "mis-create" or to attempt to "create destruction" or to "not create", ie to create a lack of love (an emptiness/sin).
Let's say that expression/extension is life, and is a matter of thought. As you express anything, you are creating or miscreating. Either way you are producing an effect. Mind, as it thinks, is applying itself. It actually causes something to happen.
When we having loving thoughts, the thoughts we think with God, they have a miraculous healing power because they are thoughts of wholeness, holiness, innocence and harmlessness. They are creative thoughts. They are miracles with the power to affect others.
When we having attack thoughts, thoughts thought with "the ego" or "lacking God", lacking life, we are thinking destructively and are attempting to bring about a less-than-creative outcome. This has an effect just as much as holy thoughts, except holy thoughts are far stronger because innocence is strength.
A thought you have of someone is not just a separated-off commentary, it is an expression and a transmission. It is a creative act. You are trying to give something to them and send it to them. And there are no private thoughts, so they will receive it. This is also how people perform "psychic attack" by thinking negatively or fearfully of others.
Jesus indeed even goes on to say that we curse others through what we might call a "spell", which is an attempt to reinforce the ego beliefs others have already chosen, which further imprisons them. Your thoughts are capable of imprisoning others just as much as setting them free and healing them.
Perhaps we don't want to admit that thought has such a power or influence because we are really afraid of thought and of the responsibility which comes with "thinking well" of ourselves and others. And the fact that this is also the secret of salvation. The ego interprets responsible thinking as a reason for guilt and blame.
The thoughts we have of others aren't merely mental chatter, or a conversation. They are creative acts. You give people your thoughts. You communicate them to them, sharing the thought with them, to either strengthen or weaken them.
If you have high uplifting thoughts of others, you resurrect them with your mind. If you have fearful victimized concerned guilty thoughts about others, you imprison them and attack them. If you feel lovingly toward them to are thinking them into health. Thoughts are powerful, they are not idle.
"If I did not think I would not exist, because life is thought."
"Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."
"ALL thinking produces form at some level. The reason why people are afraid of ESP, and so often react against it, is because they KNOW that thought can hurt them."
"By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers"
"And YOU are healed BECAUSE you wished him well. This is the law the miracle obeys"
"It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not the real reason why you don't believe it.
People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them." "I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thinking."
""Casting spells" merely means "affirming error", and error is lack of love. When man projects this onto others, he DOES imprison them, but only to the extent that he reinforces errors they have already made."
"It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains."
"The truth is that you ARE responsible for what you THINK, because it is only at this level that you CAN exercise choice."
"You WOULD be responsible for the effects of all your wrong thinking IF IT COULD NOT BE UNDONE."
"It is pointless to believe that controlling the outcome of mis-Thought can result in real healing. When you are fearful, you have willed wrongly."
I am going out on a limb a bit to say, that Holy Spirit is a powerful healer and is the medium of miracles. He is quite capable of healing all forms of sickness on all levels including the physical. He shares the power of God. There is nothing that your holiness cannot do, and there is nothing that His holiness cannot do.
Holy Spirit doesn't just sit there on some throne winking at you while you watch thoughts go past or while you gently hand over little bits and pieces of ego. He isn't idle. He isn't there to just be some administrator or to sit and watch while you do all the work. And he's definitely not some intellect-friendly 'metaphor'.
Holy Spirit is an active agent of God who is perfectly capable of performing literal miracles, miracles which anyone on this planet would agree is a miracle. Miracles that include extraordinary healing of body parts, the growing of new limbs and organs, the removal of toxins and metal plates and artificial attachments, the correcting of unbalanced body proportions, weight loss, removal of scars, giving you hearing that you never had since birth, providing you with an entirely new set of internal organs... I mean.. there is NOTHING Holy Spirit cannot do.
Ok, this is a bit radical. This is not your ordinary A course in wimpy miracles. This is not "Oh a miracle is just a change in perception" or "a miracle is looking at things in a different way". Fuck that.
This is a course in MIRACLES, folks. It really is what it says on the can - learning how to perform real, powerful miracles. Not some watered-down nice safe little mind-training exercise program to listen to on your headphones. We are talking about the Holy Spirit wielding the POWER OF GOD to perform absolutely any correction to ANY consequences whatsoever that may have stemmed from your belief in separation, sin, guilt or fear.
The ONLY thing that is 'stopping Him' for enacting this power is YOU. Your willingness.
"Holy Spirit will correct all of the consequences of your wrong decision if you will let Him." - ACIM
ALL of the consequences. Not just little mental thoughts and psychological faux-pas.
Ok.. sounding a bit evangelical or something?
Well... the ACIM community is rather sparse and doesn't have a whole lot of leadership and doesn't also have a whole lot of experience in the 'supernatural' aspects of the Course. Most people want to sweep it under the carpet. I have suspected things about it for a long time but felt awkward saying so because it seemed like I was just sticking my neck out and nobody else seemed to agree.
Well. You go watch some videos somewhere of these supernatural churches etc where certain branches of Christians have, over the centuries, come to learn not only how to access Holy Spirit's power but how to wield it in such ways as to perform literally 'real miracles'. Their theology might be riddled with errors but they are STRONG in their application of Holy Spirit to really heal serious problems.
People getting out of wheelchairs. People being cured of cancer. People having completely new organs grown in place of diseased ones. The complete removal of blindness and deafness. Sure some of it is faked, but in many cases it is very genuine. These are the kinds of things that the disciples of Jesus did when they went about their Father's business. These are the kinds of things Jesus Himself performed, WITH Holy Spirit, to raise the dead and change water to wine and feed the 5 thousand and cure the blind and all the rest of it. THE SAME HOLY SPIRIT IS IN YOU, waiting for you to to LET HIM TEACH YOU TO HEAL. He's not some intellectual substitute version of Holy Spirit. He is the power of God!
"I will heal as I let Him teach me to Heal" -- doesn't just mean, oh, I'll sort of have some nice comfortable tidying up of my insides. It means, Holy Spirit can HEAL ANYTHING and He will teach you how to do so with Him, "AS I LET HIM". There is no limit to what you are capable of.
How will you overlook your brothers sins and your own and demonstrate that His attack has had no effect on you, literally, physically, if you do not have the power of Holy Spirit to reverse all physical ailments and cure all diseases and evidence of attack? Are you going to do that on your own with your little ego self? Nope. But with Holy Spirit, you can become absolutely invulnerable.
Yah I know.... sounds far fetched. Sounds "out there". Too radical. This is what A Course in Miracles wants for us. Do you think Jesus only gave us a nice watered down Course that doesn't have the real 'meaty' stuff in it? No. Jesus wants us to do what He has done and more. And that means, pretty big fricking powerful miracles. You are a miracle worker, not a receptionist.