The proper use of the body is as a communication device to transmit LIFE.

Communication means extension and creation. The body is to be used by the Holy Spirit as a way to extend past the body, past the body of others, and join with the mind of others. In His mindset, He sees Himself in all Brothers already.

We are to use the body to overlook the "obstacles to peace" which we and our brothers both place in the way of vision. We are to forgive, ie overlook, ie not make real, all of these illusory obstacles, so that our mind can join with the minds of our brothers. Our mind should literally reach out past our body, past their body, and "hook up" with their mind. This allows our MINDS to communicate and SHARE directly.

When we fail to do this, we introduce a form of separation inbetween ourselves and our brothers. This form can be a mere thought of sin or of bodies being real or being deceived by what the eyes see. Anything that prevents us from fully extending to and being one with our brother, implements a separation or attack thought between the two, separating us from each other.

This affirmation of being separate from others, is an attack on BOTH of you, and INDUCES sickness. Since any belief in separation is mental illness and is a block or denial of Unity and Wholeness, it renders the mind believing that it is not whole, and this unwholeness/unholiness attacks the body.

Or rather, it’s an attempt to use the communication device of the body to "communicate attack" to the other mind, which means your body now has to SHOW attack to your brother, which FORCES your body to BE attacked or in a state of "showing you are attacked". To communicate the idea of separation or attack to your brother, the message becomes attack, the communication device has to transmit "an attack", and thus the communication device itself is AFFECTED by the toxic message it is trying to transmit.

This is like pouring acid through a plastic pipe and hoping it will transmit the acid without affecting the pipe. We think the attack will affect your brothers, but it ends up affecting your transmission device. You can’t pour molten lava through a plastic straw, either. The fire and brimstone you try to give or project onto your brother, simply ends up HURTING YOU. This inevitably must contaminate your communication device by sending "harmful messages" through it. This is of course the cause of body sickness, and can lead to death.

Instead of mind moving past the body, as though communicating a perfectly pure transparent stream of life outward and to others, affirming the life in both, the mind is now holding up a picture of attack and separation. This picture now becomes the "message" that is transmitted through the communication device of the body, as a message of attack. The body, as a communication device, must now SHOW that picture. It causes the body to BECOME the message of death.

So essentially, it is totally natural and a holy use of the body, to overlook all bodies to the point where we recognize our oneness with others and join with their true self in the mind. When this breaks down, communication and extension break down, love breaks down, the flow of life is restricted, and sickness appears.

This is the ONLY cause of sickness, of all sickness, in all its forms, whether it’s a suble pain or total death. It’s merely a continuous spectrum of severity of belief, where a mere headache is even a sign of a belief in death and an attempt to die. Even the slightest annoyance, tiniest grievance, slight hint of separation belief, or the subtlest of ways of making forms real, it is still an attack and an attempted murder. "What is not love is murder."

When the mind is ceasing to place obstacles in the way, is overlooking/forgiving the body, is overlooking and forgiving the forms of others, and connecting to their mind to truly COMMUNICATE - because ONLY MINDS CAN COMMUNICATE DIRECTLY - then the mind sees itself as WHOLE, thus holy, and this holiness is unlimited in its healing power.

Believing in and experiencing wholeness, the mind transmits a message of wholeness through the body, causing the body to show up AS WHOLE or holiness in order to exhibit the message, thus inducing TOTAL HEALING of the body. In this mode, when perfected, it is absolutely impossible for the body to become sick or die because the mind is ONLY COMMUNICATING LIFE. It is supernaturally protected and sustained indefinitely as a perfect communication device for transmitting LIFE. This makes it impossible for it to die because there is no death in WHAT is being communicated through it.

A sane mind heals the body. A sane mind communicates fully and directly. "Miracles unite you directly with your brother". "Use it to bring the Word of God (love/life) to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Being holy it CANNOT be sick, nor can it DIE."

Correct perception entails recognizing that a person is Christ.

That means they are immortal.

As you are listening to someone go on and on about their problems or what happened to them etc, just imagine or perceive that they are *completely* immortal, whereby absolutely nothing can happen to them.

This provides you with a reference point, a contrast, and a clarity, with which to discern correctly whether what they are saying is true, or what they are REALLY doing.

Recognize you are in the company of an immortal being, and this immortal being is complaining, blaming, scapegoating, projecting, denying, going on and on with some story about who did what and why it happened and how they have no choice and so on.

And then it becomes quite obvious to you the mistakes they are making, and what is UNTRUE about what they are saying.

If it is all seen in its proper context, that the person is immortal and invulnerable, it really shows up in quite an obvious way the lies they are telling.

And then you can affirm, silently or otherwise, that this is NOT TRUE. What the person is claiming is false. They are immortal. They cannot be hurt. Nothing can have happened to them against their will. Whatever the are claiming and believing, it's not reality.

In this way, you are holding them in the light. In this way, you are recognizing and affirming the truth in them, and refusing to join them in their illusions.

You might find that you start to feel like there is some kind of ... energy... that comes off you... truth... Holy Spirit, which radiates out to the person and supports them in truth, and may in fact bring about a healing to their mind. Just by your presence, and your awareness of the light.

Everyone is immortal. Don't believe a word they say if they claim otherwise!

Since the world does not contain any real causes, and absolutely everything is an affect of the mind on a higher level, this shines some light on what happens when you are attacked or hurt.

If it seems that someone comes along and hits you, and a bruise forms, this is an illusion.

The person hitting and the formation of the bruise are not actually connected by any kind of linear causality. Laws of physics DO NOT EXPLAIN how the bruise gets there.

The bruise does not show up as a result of the attack.

The bruise shows up because your own mind buys into the illusion of linear cause and effect, and USES the opportunity to demonstrate that the other person is the "cause" of your hurt. This is an attempt to demonstrate that you can be hurt, in order to prove your brother is a sinner, so that you can get rid of your sin!

Your own mind puts the bruise in your own body, all by itself. It doesn't get there by the "causal power" of another person. If you believe in the causal power of another person, what your mind is doing is it is actually twisting itself so that it can seem to attack itself from the outside in, through that person, and it is your mind which puts the bruise there.

This works in exactly the same way to how medication works, which is that you pretend that something outside of you will do something to you, your MIND decides whether or not to allow it, and IF it allows it, the MIND ITSELF puts the effects into the body, not the medication. All medication is a placebo. None of it has power to cause anything but illusions.

If the mind decides not to get well, IT WILL REFUSE the illusion of the medication and the medication will NOT WORK. Similarly, among those who refuse to believe in the cause-effect of certain foods, they can eat those foods WITHOUT EFFECT even if they would hurt other people. Mind over matter!

Jesus asks us in the Course to demonstrate that we cannot be hurt, or attacked, or sick, and that our brother is innocent because nothing they try to do us produces ANY EFFECTS.

If we produce sickness in the body after eating the wrong food, or we develop a bruise after being hit, or we walk around with a broken leg due to falling out of a tree, we are ACCUSING everyone else (ie the world) of doing this to us.

This means we are attempting to prove that we CAN BE HURT. This proof demonstrates for all to see, that someone else must be the sinner, because something happened that you *appear* to not want to have happened, against your will. Your demonstration of "being a victim" is actually a show that your mind puts on, for a purpose, to scapegoat the world.

What Jesus is therefore asking is, that we become invulnerable to attack, incapable of being sick, unable to be hurt, and that we refuse to CHOOSE to show up as damaged or broken. This means that when it SEEMS in the illusion that there is a linear causality of someone hitting you, YOU DO NOT develop a bruise. When you fall out of the tree, you DO NOT break your leg. When you eat a certain food, IT DOES NOT poison you.

This means you are supposed to get to where you can SUPERNATURALLY DEMONSTRATE that you cannot be hurt, sick, damaged, or made to suffer, in any way, by any cause in the entire world! At the physical level! He is asking us to show that we are holy by showing that the Son of God CANNOT BE DESTROYED, using the body as a SYMBOL of immortality.

Here is how Jesus puts it:

"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 that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail." !!!!!!!

He also speaks of this here:

"Sickness is an attempt to demonstrate that you can be hurt"

and here:

"A broken body proves the mind has not been healed"

and here:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die."

and here:

"(regarding your brother) But every pain you suffer do you see as proof that he is guilty of attack. Thus would you make yourself (your body) to be the sign that he has lost his innocence, and need but look on you (your body) to realize that he has been condemned. And what to you has been unfair will come to him in righteousness. The unjust vengeance that you suffer now belongs to him, and when it rests on him are you set free (you projected your sin). Wish not to make yourself a living symbol of his guilt, for you will not escape the death you made for him."

Here Jesus is basically saying that you must not attempt to put sin and death onto your brother through attack of any kind (sickness also) because if you do, YOU will be attacked. This is the basic law of the one mind, that what you do to your brother you to do yourself. All attack is self attack. You cannot escape the consequences of your attempted attack on another, and they are not required to receive those consequences from you.

This means that if you demonstrate that you are sick or hurt physically IN ANY WAY, you are attacking your brother, trying to SHOW HIM what he must have done to you against your will, and are therefore projecting your sin! If you do this, you will suffer, and your will experience death. This also means YOUR MIND *IS NOT HEALED*, therefore you CANNOT experience peace. A broken body proves your mind is not healed. Your mind is proven to be healed when your body shows up as NOT BROKEN. Therefore, to escape death, you MUST NOT use the body for attack, thus rendering it INCAPABLE of being attacked by you or anyone.

Whenever you attempt to use the body for attack, which means, to fail to extend love through it to your brother, the body itself will become sick. The sickness in your body will directly correlate to your belief that you and your brother are sinners. Your attempt to project your sin will project it onto your body and destroy it. This is the ONLY WAY that bodies become sick. Not through external causes, not through the illusion of cause and effect, not through your brother.

We are therefore REQUIRED, and WILL NOT BE ABLE TO AVOID, to demonstrate that our body is absolutely invulnerable, in order to CANCEL OUT the illusion of cause and effect, to PROVE that the ego's laws mean nothing, to SHOW that our brother is as innocent as we are, and to TEACH that the Son of God cannot be hurt or affected by illusions in any way.

Can you imagine what a miracle it will be to witness someone demonstrating this? That nothing you try to do to them works? That you cannot hurt their body whatsoever? That their body cannot even die no matter how you try to attack it? Their mind will simply project an image of permanent health the whole time, IGNORING anything you try to do to it. And by this will be PROVEN your innocence, because no sin you try to commit WORKS, and therefore you CANNOT believe that you are sinful. Thus are you set free because your attempted sin HAD NO CONSEQUENCES. This is how you set your brother free from his belief that he sinned!

This is one of the most radical teachings in the course, so I understand that many people don't believe this or don't want to. But this is what Jesus has said. If your body is broken in any way, you are teaching vulnerability and suffering and sin. You cannot have sickness in the body and prove that you are innocent, or to be at peace. And you cannot be at peace with death. You cannot have sickness showing up if you want to be awake, and being awake you WILL NOT show sickness to anyone. The body MUST HEAL if the mind heals. And the body will become as immortal as the mind.

Cause and effect at the level of the world is entirely an illusion. THERE IS NO CAUSE in the world. Nothing causes you. Nothing is the reason why you are showing up in any particular form. Nothing has happened to you against your will. Nothing of this world can be found responsible for having power over you, for "making you" be a certain way, for instigating illness, to triggering suffering, or for making your body change in any way at all. Not even the forces of nature or acts of nature or whatever else. NOTHING.

Your body is 100% a projected image from YOUR MIND, and YOU are the one that determines how it is going to show up. Not this world. Not other people. Not food or water or weather or anything else. We are meant to demonstrate that our body is completely invulnerable, completely NOT DEPENDENT on anything of this world, and incapable of being affected by this world. This will demonstrate the the mind of love has power over all illusions and nothing can assail the Kingdom of God.

If we're sick, hurt, in pain, suffering, a victim, abused, damaged, missing something, lacking, attacked, upset, whatever... we are the ones who are putting it there, we are RESPONSIBLE for it, and no-one else has caused it. Only through this willingness to admit honestly to this truth, will you be able to access the SUPERNATURAL PROTECTION which comes from realizing the secret to salvation: "you are doing this to yourself". If you stop doing it to yourself, NOTHING ELSE WILL BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING TO YOU.

I'll let Jesus finish up with this section from "sickness is a defense against the truth":

"The body should not feel at all. If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. No response at all is in the mind to what the body does. Its usefulness remains and nothing more.

Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. The body's health is fully guaranteed, because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, FOR SICKNESS HAS BECOME **IMPOSSIBLE**.

Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment 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."

For many years I’ve had this strange knowing in the background, that the course is about immortality. But in our society, immortality is laughed upon as something utterly impossible and ridiculous.

I did not see hardly anyone else speaking of the immortality implied in the course. I thought maybe I was wrong about it and that it wasn’t about this. But over time the more I’ve studied it the more I see the ENTIRE course pointing towards our TOTAL invulnerability. Even "forgiveness" is only an aspect of the fact that no-one has even really done anything to you, because you are immortal!

This means immortality, as a spirit-identified person, is not only completely natural, it is the ONLY truth. Mortality is in fact NOT true at all. Yet the world believes everything is mortal, attackable, susceptible, vulnerable, hurtable, destructible. And this is because the world itself is all of these things, being unlike the nature of reality.

Regardless of the seeming profound lack of support for ideas of immortality among other ACIM students, I continually feel drawn to it like a moth to a flame, as a bright light which beckons with truth .. and something about it which is known. A beacon of truth in the midst of all darkness and confusion and the avalanch of opinions.

Becoming identified as a non-body spirit entity, and stopping believing that I am a body, is entirely an act of siding with immortality. Regarding myself as incapable of being attacked by anyone but myself, is an act of aligning with invulnerability. Realizing that the world has no power over me beyond what I give to it, is a restoration of my unlimited power and unopposed will.

Everything in ACIM is pointing towards heaven. Pointing towards reality. Pointing towards the fact that God’s truth and immortal nature are the ONLY truth, and everything else is utterly bullshit."You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do."

The entire world, all bodies, the entire ego thought system, all attack sickness and death, is a "confusing yourself" with things that are not immortal. Confusing who you ARE. Not knowing yourself as God knows you. Rejecting your true nature. Separation is rejection, and is the opposite of joining with yourself. And when you reject your immortal self you do not love yourself.

Love is immortality because it is endless. It is permanent and unconditonal and unlimited. It is what you are made of. You cannot die, ever. You cannot be hurt in any real way. You cannot be abused or persecuted or offended or attacked or damaged. No-one can do anything to your soul.

You alone are responsible for the confusion you have of believing that these things CAN affect you, which is an act of affecting yourself and blaming it someone else. All you need to learn is this one thing. You can never die. You are PERMANENT. You can never be changed. You can never malfunction. You cannot be sick. Nothing can ever be wrong with you. If you think there is something wrong with you, you MUST be mistaken.

God creates only that which is permanent. You are still as God created you. Not one single speck of the world has ever touched you. Not one single event has ever changed or defined you. Not a single second of a single day has done anything whatsoever to change God’s creative act of creating you perfect. And you WILL NEVER stop being PRECICELY as He wills that you be forever.

You are an immortal permanent being, changeless and the same forever. The goal of awakening is to KNOW THYSELF as this fixed, unchangeable, eternal spirit. A being that is utterly unaffected by anything no matter where it goes or what it does, certain of who and what it is forever.

The question then is, why do you have fear if you are such an unchangeable being? Nothing can attack you, nothing can hurt you, nothing can stop you from existing, nothing can make you dead. So why are you afraid all the time?

The main cause of fear is the idea of death, that you might stop existing and not live forever. It's something that has to undermine your sense of permanence and immortality, to make you mortal, in order for you to be threatenable. If you might not live forever, you might die, and now you are afraid.

But the real issue here isn't that you might die - because you can't. You are an immortal being that is always the same forever. The issue is that you BELIEVE you are something else. You don't recognize yourself as permanent. You think you've become something that can be attacked or threatened or in danger.

So really most of our fears stem from body-identification, false ideas about who and what you are, a failure to recognize your permanence, forgetting your invulnerability, having artificial values and specialness, separating yourself off from the whole of eternity and trying to be limited.

If you are in states of confusion about what you are, you are mistaken. And that mistakenness inspires fear in you. You make false conclusions and then you suffer, and you're doing it to yourself. If you could know yourself as you really are you could never have any reason to be afraid, knowing that you are eternal and live forever.

When your body is having problems, when the world is threatening, when stuff is going wrong, when the fires are raging, when you've lost things, when you're angry at someone etc, you're believing that you are not an immortal being. And that makes you start believing that these other things have power over you, causing you to be suffering and sick and unhappy. But this is a mistake. Every source of fear is a mistaken belief in a power outside of you that isn't really doing anything.

It wouldn't even matter to you if you were being in a body or not, or coming or going, seeming to exit the world or not, because you'd know it has no bearing whatsoever on who and what you are. It doesn't change you or affect you or make you dead. You just carry on being you, forever, guaranteed and protected by God.

So really all our suffering stems from the belief in death, which is a belief in mortality, which is a denial of being immortal. We need to remember our immortal nature in order to assert that we cannot be hurt, have never been hurt, and therefore all is forgiven.

"The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is KNOW THYSELF. There is nothing else to learn. Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost." UrT8D6

"To be alive and not to know yourself is to believe that you are really dead." UrW139L3

"This is a course in how to KNOW yourself. You have TAUGHT what you are, but have NOT let what you are, teach YOU." UrT16D4

"It means that you are willing NOT to know yourself, IN ORDER to be sick." URT9K3

"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." UrW84L2

"Now do we live, for now we cannot die. The wish for death is answered, and the sight that looked upon it now has been replaced by vision which perceives that you are not what you pretend to be." W166L11

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do." UrT9K8

"I am still as God created me."

"You are immortal and you cannot die."

One of the major hurdles in the separation, is that it has actually made yourself distant to yourself. There are blockages, barriers, obstacles, obstructions, walls, that have entered as the "split" in the mind, seeming to come in between "you" and your real self. And now you seem to be split off and apart and you do not know who you are anymore. And who you think you are is not who you are.

Since your real self is invisible to you, and the body cannot see it, and it's hidden behind the belief that illusions are real, and this in turn projects as a seemingly solid world that hangs as a veil in between you and everyone, including your real self and God, it really makes it hard to be in touch with the big-picture you.

For example, we should focus on what your real self is like. We should identify your immortal nature, the fact you ARE NOT sick, the fact you ARE NOT insane, the fact you CANNOT die, the fact YOU ARE NOT UNHAPPY, and the fact that you are completely perfect and whole. That is actually true of your real self right now, and always has been, but it is hidden from your awareness.

The mind, in its split state, is in a state of disassociation. And the part that seems like your current conscious self is kind of in the dark about who you even really are. This poses a problem because it now implies that you are not responsible for the state you are in. And it becomes much harder to compare the state you're in to the state you REALLY are in.

If you could SEE your immortal self, things would be so much easier. You would see obviously and easily, that your real self is totally unharmed, perfect, invulnerable, has absolutely no signs of sickness or death, is totally joyful and happy all the time, cannot be attacked, and is still the same as God created it. If you could even just GLIMPSE that for a second it would be enlightening.

If you COULD see that, or even conceive of it, it then would help you to put everything in perspective. You'd recognize that given your real self is TOTALLY HEALTHY, you would instantly recognize that any belief you have in sickness, any suggestion that you are sick, any notion of sickness existing, any damage that seems to be showing up, any mental illness, would all be immediately INVALIDATED. It would be shown to be patently FALSE AND UNTRUE. Because here is your real self, shining and bright and clean and new, and completely perfect. And all support for sickness would be removed, causing it to vanish instantly.

This also brings with it extreme responsibility. Because it now becomes clear that, given your real self is immortal, ANY suggestion on your part that you are mortal, vulnerable, hurt, damaged, sick, unhappy, upset, attacked, threatened, in fear, guilty, sinful, suffering in any way, MUST all be a total lie. It MUST be a way that you are faking it and lying about who and what you are. Just even one little glimpse of the truth about yourself would show you that. And then you would never be able to see these thing in the same way again.

In light of the fact that your holy self IS PERFECT NOW, and in light of the fact that your holy self IS YOU, and your mind is its mind, it really is "something you are doing to yourself" when it comes to any form of suffering. This is why the secret of salvation says you are doing this all to yourself. You are making your sickness, you are making your unhappiness, you are claiming your own suffering, you are punishing yourself, you are self destructive, you are the one trying to make yourself die, and you have given yourself sickness. And all of it is an attempt to PROVE that you ARE NOT who you really are.

The aim of these things, of course, is to KEEP you in the dark and keep your real self HIDDEN. So that you are not aware of the FACT, that what YOU ACTUALLY ARE, IS an immortal spirit being. The FACT that THERE IS NO SUFFERING in you, YOU ARE NOT SICK, and you can NEVER die. The PURPOSE of all the efforts to believe otherwise, is to BLOCK awareness of the FACT that there is nothing wrong with you. To disown your immortality and hide from it, to pretend it's not true of you. That is nothing less than dishonest and unauthentic. It is denial.

How you think of other people works along similar lines. Since you can't seem to see them (unless you have strongly developed christ vision), it makes it hard for you to SEE their real self, the SEE their holiness, their harmlessness, their immortality. Yet it is by acknowledging, recognizing, seeing their immortal self that you become able to heal them. You can see this FOR them, even if they in their own mind are in denial of who and what they are. Even if they are convinced they are sick and suffering, YOU can deny this and know the truth that they cannot be this.

In one way or another, either through direct experience or through concepts, it's very helpful to keep the perspective that your immortal self, and the immortal selves of others, is the ONLY truth about us. And any efforts to suggest otherwise cannot be true. And the closer you can get to experiencing and expressing FROM that truth, the more you can be helpful to those who do not know themselves. You can remember them FOR them, and thus help them to remember they are immortal.

Immortality stems from being absolute. Everything about God is absolute. Absolutely existing, absolutely forever. There is no sense of endings, interruptions, or even changes. Something that lasts forever. Always there, always the same, always permanent.

That‘s what your real self is like. It just keeps on being the same. Forever without end. Always you. Always completely endless, ongoing, eternal. You have eternal life. You were created by God who has eternal life to be like God. You will live forever and will always be perfect.

Because of your changeless nature, there are no kinds of changes that can happen to you. You can’t even begin to have anything change you, not through external causes or even by yourself. You have no power to change what you are, because God absolutely defines what you are. You are solely what he wills you to be forever.

Your permanence gives you immortality, which is the absolute inability to become something other than what you absolutely always are. This means there can never be even the slightest hint of a change in you.

There can be no suggestion that you might end someday, or stop existing, or somehow be affected in some way. There is no point at which you might have something happen which changes you, such that you might no longer be absolute, or that your permanence might turn into something temporary.

In this absolute state you are absolutely totally at peace, because you know that absolutely nothing can happen to you. You are so fixed, so certain, so completely created, so whole and defined, so sustained by God forever, that not a single thing on any level in any way can alter you even slightly. And because you know this, you have permanent peace.

There is no attack in you. There is no malfunction, no distortion, no fluctuation. There is no contradiction or split mindedness. There is no uncertainty, no fear, no sense of being wrong somehow. There is no sin, no guilt, no reason to be punished, and nothing to do the punishing.

Your absoluteness makes it impossible for you to ever end. You can’t even be slightly changed. Nothing can happen to affect you in any way whatsoever. There are no forces or powers that can do anything to even mildly hint at influencing you, distracting you, making you be one way or another, diverting you, causing you, or doing anything at all to you. You are absolutely invulnerable.

Because of this permanence, and the total inability to change at all - the opposite of a shapeshifter - you can never become anything. You can’t lose anything, you can’t gain anything. You can’t degrade or transform or shift or adjust.

You can’t become sick or fall ill, or develop a disease, or become corrupted or broken. You can’t even have the slightest dent or bruise or sense of harm or hurt in any way. Pain is utterly non-existent for you. And because of this you can never die. You will exist forever and ever and ever endlessly extending life. You are life itself, pure life, pure immortal livingness.

You are so bullet-proof that absolutely nothing can even remotely begin to modify what you are. The infinite unlimited power of God sustains you in his mind permanently forever as an absolutely perfect thought and idea. You are so devoid of malfunction and breakage and deformity and disruption that you are utterly beautiful and spotless and immaculate in every way. You are cleaner than the cleanest clean, forever.

The things of the physical world, are formed from ideas of separation and difference, ideas of attack and competition, of opposition and defenses, of a sense that somehow something can be changed. The world is made of ideas of vulnerability and susceptibility, of danger and threat, of things happening to you against your will to change you and define you. A world of change and transformation, of instability and uncertainty, of hurt and suffering and death.

But the world cannot even reach you or touch you or have any influence on what you are whatsoever. You are not physical, and no physical thing, no force, no energy, no atom, nothing of this entire universe can even begin to approach you. You are transcendental and everlasting and never-ending. Utterly safe, utterly beyond threat, utterly incapable of being attacked, utterly transcendent of all danger and powers and causations.

The separation from God is merely an attempt by you, as an utterly immortal being, an eternal being with eternal life, to formulate a massive lie and to pretend that you are something which is NOT immortal. Something mortal, something that can be changed, something that can be affected by the world and the people in it, something that can suffer and be weakened, something breakable and destructible. Something that can be sick and die and cease to exist.

All this world is, is a mad idea in the mind of trying to die. It’s a realm of suicide in which immortal beings are in denial, pretending that they are something they are not, identifying with forms and objects and bodies and worldly things and thoughts and emotions, to try to label themselves as something other than an immortal spirit. Because these things can be attacked and hurt, they can suffer and can be destroyed, and so you pretend to be them so that you can pretend to be destructible as well. You are trying to stop existing.

But you are immortal and eternal, and you will never stop existing. You will last forever, longer than the world, longer than time and space, endlessly continuing to always be what God created you to be, with no escape and no way to change the fact of what you are.

You are an immortal soul. You will never ever ever ever ever end. You can’t even begin to die or be really sick. You can’t even have real suffering, or real death. All you can do is pretend and make-believe and fake it and lie In a state of denial - a state of dreaming and wishing. You can’t in any way be a victim of anything, at the effect of anything, hurt or attacked or damaged by anything. It is absolutely impossible for you to be threatened or hurt or changed in any way.

There is nothing in the world that can oppress you, hurt you, attack you, threaten you, change you, define you, make you feel anything, or cause you to be something other than perfect. There is no power in all this universe that can have power over you, to cause you in any way at all. You are beyond this world. You are not even a part of space time. You are not a body.

You are free. Free from suffering, free from attack, free from threats and dangers, free from death. You have eternal life already. Nothing in the world is doing anything to you. No-one has ever hurt you. You are not hurtable. You are not vulnerable. You are not weak but strong. You are not doubtful but certain. You are not afraid but all powerful. You remain exactly as God created you.

You are immortal. You are eternal. You are always and forever.

“But the guarantee of your continuity is God's, not the ego's. And immortality is the opposite of time, for time passes away, while immortality is constant. Accepting the Atonement teaches you WHAT IMMORTALITY IS, for by accepting your guiltlessness, you learn that the past has never been, and so the future is needless.” UrT11J13

“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.” UrT29G1

“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.” UrW84L2

“Your will is His Life, which He has GIVEN to you. Even in time you cannot live apart from Him, for sleep is not death. What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF. Yet God's Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM.” UrT10B11

“You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do.” UrT9K8

“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.” Ur Special messages 19 “You are immortal BECAUSE you are eternal, and always MUST be now.” UrT11J12

“What is immortal cannot BE attacked; what is but temporal HAS no effect.” UrT24H5

We are immortal beings. But we keep trying to prove that we're not.That's what all the activities of the world are about. All the sickness and suffering. All the death. All the guilt and fear. It's all people trying to disprove their immortality.

Being immortal you cannot be attacked, upset, unhappy, sick, dead, suffer in any way. You can't be guilty or afraid.

We came to this world attempting to die. Except that we can't. So how did we try to pull it off? We invented bodies, fake identities, which we pretend to be. And then we attack them and make them suffer, to try to prove it is we who are suffering. And to do that we identify with them and forget who we are.

The question is, why do we keep doing this? Why do we keep trying to make bad things happen? Why do we keep inflicting suffeirng on ourselves? Why do we keep choosing sickness and pain? Why do we keep trying to destroy ourselves?

It's a bit insane in and of itself, but even moreso when you realize that it really cannot work. What is immortal cannot be attacked or die. So... the whole exercise is futile and cannot work. You'd have to be in denial to think it could.

That's the main problem. We're in denial because we are DENYING that we are immortal. And we keep pretending that we're not alive forever.We might then think that we are struggling against attack, against externally inflicted suffering, against contracting sickness from the environment, against other people.... but all of that is a decoy and not the cause of any of it. It's us trying to prove we can die.

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

"You are immortal and you cannot die"

How can an immortal being even seem to die, given they cannot? They have to themselves fake their own death. They have to pretend to suffer. They have to make bad things seem to happen to try to justify it. But all of it's just a lie, a performance, a cover-up.

When you just accept the sanity that you are already immortal and perfect and there is no point to the world, you'll wake up to the eternal life God gave you and which you can never lose.

"They die till you accept your own Eternal Life."

"IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt,"

"Sin "proves" God's Son is evil; timelessness must have an end; Eternal life must die."

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

We are infinite beings. We are immortal. We are invulnerable. We are pure and perfect and holy. We are completely innocent. We cannot be harmed. Nothing can happen to us. We are permanent and we cannot change in any way.

So I ask you then.. how can such a being come to believe that there is, in any way, shape or form, anything that can or has happened to you that you are victim of? How is it possible that you believe you have been hurt and changed and upset by anything or anyone?

The only way for this to be possible is to NOT KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

I repeat, you are an absolutely immortal innocent permanent being that is completely invulnerable to ALL illusions and events. Literally you cannot be changed in any way whatsoever. So WHO is this 'me' that is so certain that they are so damaged and upset?

Who are you? Or rather, who, as someone who cannot be harmed, are you pretending to be? What harm are you pretending to endure? What victimhood role are you PLAYING at? What disguise are you wearing as a mask to portray yourself as not who you are?

Nothing that God created can be affected. Nothing that God created has been affected. You are created by God. Ergo, you cannot and have not been affected. Who you really are, that is.

This other self... its strange. It believes it is vulnerable to attack, being ganged up against, can be hurt, has been hurt, is weak and frail and diseased and sure to die. What a bizarre character to play the part of, given you are permanently invulnerable.

Ok so right now you are experiencing some shit. Crappy day. Noisy neighbors. Dog shitted on your grass. Something went wrong. Something broke. Someone attacked you. Whatever. Drama. All this crap is an illusion. The suggestion that it is happening to YOU is false. YOU are not even affected by this whatsoever, not even one tiny bit. How can YOU, who are created by God as perfectly joyous and happy and complete, be in any way less than totally beaming with light all the time, oblivious to and impervious to the entire ego world drama?

Our entire problem is that we believe we ARE the person who is attacked, that we CAN BE an identity other than the one that is our real identity, that we have BECOME someone who is affected and modified by all manner of fuck and shit in the world. All of this is ultimately completely impossible.

Somewhere under WHATEVER the fuck your drama is today, someone underneath MY drama today, and beyond our ridiculous made up identities - characters in a play, there is a completely healthy, absolutely immortal, totally happy, joyous vibrant loving peaceful whole complete being, to whom nothing has ever occurred and never will.

So if you can just sense that a little bit even for a moment, or even just imagine it, maybe it will frame your whole stupid drama in a different light and help you to recognize, that ALL of the ego's experiences are a complete FARCE. Even a comedy. A fiction. Happening to a fictitious character that is NOT you.

You are NOT the person who is being attacked. You are NOT the person who is vulnerable. You are NOT the person who is upset. You are NOT the person that is struggling and suffering. That's not who you are at all.

You are pure love.

"You are immortal BECAUSE you are eternal"

You are immortal. Generally that means you live forever without any kind of end, you can never be changed, and you are permanently the same all the time.

You'll then find that any notion of "change" introduces the potential for coming to an end. If you can change or be changed, you could be stopped, interfered with, attacked, damaged, or caused to die.

"This is the world of time, where all things end."

So change of any kind cannot be part of immortality. Which is why changelessness is your real nature, and this is also why you remain still as God created you. You have not changed a single bit since you were created.

This then has to mean that if there is anything that does change, it cannot be a part of you. If there is a body that can change, it cannot be a part of you. If there is a building that can be destroyed, it cannot be real. If there is a planet which can go through seasons, it cannot be real. Any kind of change is a form of death.

It's very simple really. You can just ask yourself if something will last forever. If the answer is no, then it is not a real creation and not a part of God. If it lasts only a little while in time and then changes and then goes away, it cannot be part of creation or of God. Nor can it be God's will.

"Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

Here Jesus simply affirms this by saying that all things which are visible will have an end. Some will last longer than others but ALL of the visible things will have an end. It then doesn't matter how you are looking at the visible things, whether you hate the visible things or love them. ALL of them will come to an end.

This again tells you essentially that if anything is visible, it is not a part of God's kingdom. If it is visible, ie forms of matter, energy, bodies, planets, stars and so on, they will come to an end some day, and therefore cannot be a part of immortal reality. Anything that does not last forever uninterrupted is not a part of God, nor can it be made into a part of God.

There is a world that we made, a world of space-time and of physicality and of forms of matter and objects. These things are visible and will end. They end because of their nature being part of a dream of death. And because of this, they are not a part of God or a part of you. Nor are they a part of heaven.

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

Bottom line, if it's not immortal it doesn't really exist. It's a very simple test for anything. If it's not immortal it's not of God. If it changes it is not of God. If it can be attacked it's not of God. if it goes through a transformation process it is not of God. If it can be born or grows or withers or suffers or dies it is not of God.

It also doesn't matter if you change your perceptions about such things, to see objects in a different light or from a different vantage point. Seeing objects that end in a different way doesn't actually override the fact that they still end.

Just because you are happy it will not make the earth last forever. Just because you are loving it will not stop the seasons from changing. Just because you are peaceful it will not change the falling of leaves when the weather get's cold.

These are still proof that these things are not a part of God's reality. It doesn't matter if you see a unity in these things or a reflection of God in these things, they still behave and act and function in ways that are open to a denial of immortality. If the thing, the object, the matter, the form, the body, the world etc, can in any way ever be modified or changed, then fundamentally it cannot be a part of reality.

This is why "there is no world." This is why "God did not create the body." This is why "the body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist." This is why we withdraw investment in physical sight and open up to a different kind of vision which overlooks/forgives the world. And that the world can BE forgiven is purely because is it an illusion of a world, and not a reality. Only illusions can be overlooked and "a world forgiven cannot last."

We can accept the reality of God's Kingdom, which is to accept God's truth and God's law and God's wholeness. That is the wholeness of the Kingdom of heaven, in which all things live forever and never change. It is not a place where bodies are born and planets spin and stars exhaust their fuel supply. It is not a realm where objects get stuck in crevices and the dust of dead flesh settles on surfaces or where food rots and decays and turns to a corpse. None of these things can be a part of heaven.

Only the immortal is true. Only the immortal is alive. Only the immortal is of God. Only the immortal exists. Everything else is an illusion. Not even what ACIM calls "the real world" will last forever. "Even the real world will vanish from your sight." You cannot convert an illusion into a reality. You cannot turn an unreal world into a real one. Nor can you turn a picture of death into real permanent life.

What lives forever must be created by an immortal creator to live forever from the beginning. What is made in an insane mind out of illusions which intended they die, cannot have eternal life. They have not been created or given immortality and so they do not exist at all. Their illusion of existing is nothing but a deception and the recognition of this fact is enlightenment.

"Only the creations of light are real."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever."

"The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is KNOW THYSELF. There is nothing else to learn. Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost."

"The Bible instructs you to "KNOW thyself," or BE CERTAIN. Certainty is always of God."

Do you know who you really are? What you really are is an immortal, eternal, changeless, endless, permanent, absolute being. As an immortal being, you can never change, never become anything, never turn into anything and never die. Nothing can ever happen to change you, and you cannot change yourself.

In order to KNOW who you are, you will have to be willing to fully embrace and acknowledge that you are an immortal being. If you are immortal, it is impossible that anyone has attacked you, has power over you, has hurt you, offended or upset you, or that the world has the power to do anything to you.

When you suggest that the world or its inhabitants have caused you in some way, causing you to change in some way, you are insinuating that you DO NOT know yourself. If you knew you were immortal you could not believe these things. If you enter into believing these things, you are losing touch with who you are and no longer know who you are.

It cannot be that you know yourself while someone else has the power to modify what you are. If someone can change you in ANY way, influence you in ANY way, you are unknown and are lost and confused about who and what you are. If you are absolutely certain of who and what you are, nothing and no-one can in ANY way change you or define you or modify you or cause you or hurt you or influence you. You must be unmoved and undisturbed by the world.

This means that anyone who believes in any way that they are affected by the world, does not know who they are. Anyone who believes they can suffer, be sick, die, be unhappy, be upset or offended, caused to change against their will in any way, does NOT know who they are.

You cannot remain in the knowledge that you are immortal while believing that you are vulnerable and susceptible. That you can be affected and attacked. You cannot maintain that you are invulnerable and permanently alive if you are asserting that you have been assailed by someone, damaged by something, destroyed in some way.

These are beliefs in mortality, which is a belief that you are dead and not alive. You can't know yourself to be immortal if you are confused about whether you have eternal life or not. Any suggestion we have that someone has done something to us is an attack upon our own immortality. Just as in "my attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability" and "I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts" and "nothing in the world can bring oppression."

The question of forgiveness then, as to whether I am forgiving or not, or how much, boils down to the degree to which I am CERTAIN about WHO I AM. If I KNOW myself with perfect certainty, then I am automatically forgiving. I will not accuse anyone of doing anything to me, because this is literally an attempt to assert that I am mortal. I will not produce a sickness because this also is an attempt to prove I can be hurt.

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

By acknowledging your immortality you are automatically going to detach yourself from all the supposed causes in the world, you will take back all your power that you've given away, you'll see yourself as an immovable object in the river, and completely DOMINANT of everything you see. This is how you have power over death and power to overcome the world. NOTHING can prevail against a son of God who knows who he is, and his power is unlimited and absolute and unopposed.

"But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you seem to have to deal with fear or guilt, upsets of any kind, any kind of stress or suffering, any sense of shame or unworthiness, any apparent sickness or loss or malfunction, or even death, you MUST have forgotten who you really are. You must be out of touch with knowing that you are immortal, and you are trying to prove that you are susceptible, vulnerable, damageable, hurtable, attackable, weakened, capable of being destroyed and able to be CHANGED by something.

The immortal can never be changed by anything or anyone. If I claim that such and such a person upset me, I am literally claiming that I am changeable, malleable, affect-able, underminable, weak, victimizable, and destructible. It is a belief in mortality. When I am being unforgiving, I am asserting and choosing death. When I am suffering in any way, I am forgetting that I am still as God created me. When I am blaming people for stuff, I am doing myself a disservice.

Your task then is to remember who you are, be certain of who you are, be extremely in touch with who you are, be absolutely clear about the fact that you are an immortal permanent being that can never be changed by anyone or anything, and KNOW your self. To know yourself you have to remember your SOUL, the you that God created to live forever. And through this knowing you are in perfect forgiveness, because nothing can happen to those who have eternal life.

"That is why blame must be UNDONE, NOT re-allocated. Lay it to yourself, and you cannot KNOW yourself, for ONLY THE EGO BLAMES AT ALL. Self-blame is therefore ego identification, and as strong an ego defense as blaming others. YOU CANNOT ENTER GOD's PRESENCE IF YOU ATTACK HIS SON."

"You can know yourself only as God knows His Son, for KNOWLEDGE is shared WITH God."

"Separation is only the decision NOT to know yourself. Its whole thought-system is a carefully-contrived learning experience, designed to lead AWAY from truth, and into fantasy."

"To be alive and not to know yourself is to believe that you are really dead"

"This is a course in how to KNOW yourself. You have TAUGHT what you are, but have NOT let what you are, teach YOU."

"Accept as true only what your brother IS, if you would know yourself. Perceive what he is NOT, and you CANNOT know what you are, BECAUSE you see HIM falsely. "

"Can you who see yourselves WITHIN a body, know yourself AS AN IDEA?"

"Blasphemy, then, is SELF-destructive, not God destructive. It means that you are willing NOT to know yourself, IN ORDER to be sick."

"Identity and function are the same, and BY your function do you know yourself. "

"To believe that you can perceive the real world is to believe that you can know yourself."

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

"You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you."

"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."

Ok. It's time to get honest and stop pretending to be dead!

You are an immortal being, created by God to live forever. You cannot change or be changed, and nothing can EVER happen to you. This is a FACT.

This means you cannot be hurt, damaged, attacked, broken, malfunctioning, decay, degrade, have a dis-ease, be sick, suffer, transform, change, be modified, grow old, or in any way be altered. You are PERMANENT AND ABSOLUTE This is a FACT.

Therefore you must still be exactly the same ORIGINAL SELF that God created, exactly as you were when he created you, and you must not have changed WHATSOEVER. You are STILL as God created you, immortal and unchanged and invulnerable. You have never turned into anything else. This is a FACT.

So what the fuck is this "sickness"? Anything which seems to be so-called "sick" CANNOT BE TRUE. It cannot even exist. How can it be true that you are immortal, and at the same time have it be true that you are a suffering dying self? How can they both be true of you? How can you die if you are immortal? How can you ever be sick? The sickness cannot be true and must be an illusion and a deception. This is a FACT.

"There can be no order of difficulty in healing merely because all sickness is illusion."

"So healing, never needed by the truth, must demonstrate that sickness is not real."

Jesus is stating in ACIM that you are an immortal eternal being with eternal life, endless and unassailable, PRETENDING THAT YOU CAN DIE. You are playing a game of pretending that you are mortal in a suffering body, to cover up who and what you are. To hide the TRUTH! YOU ARE FAKING YOUR DEATH. You are literally using the body as a DISGUISE to make it look like you are dying when you're not. All the while underneath you are totally powerful and perfect still.

"Did God create the mortal and corruptible? What use has God's beloved Son for what must die?"

You use the body as a decoy, to cover up who you are and hide your true nature as the Perfect Christ. You attack the body with your mind and make it show up as suffering, as a victim. And then you use this to accuse others and the world of causing you to suffer against your will, hiding the fact you put it there on purpose. You are literally trying to fake your own death and to make it look like someone else made it happen. So that it can seem that "you died" for reasons beyond your control.

"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the FEAR OF AWAKENING. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of TRYING NOT TO KNOW by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual."

"The sick remain accusers."

"A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed."

"For vengeance is not part of love, and fear, denying love and using pain to prove that God is dead, has shown that death is victor over life. The body is the Son of God, corruptible in death, as mortal as the Father he has slain."

So when you are sick, you are lying. When you are sick, you are deceiving yourself and others. It means you are insane and do not know who you are, so you're trying to be something you're not. When you are sick, you are pretending that you are fallible, weak, vulnerable, capable of suffering, diminished, threatenable, hurt, broken, having lost your peace, unfairly treated, victimized, abused and destroyed by anyone or anything EXCEPT yourself. It is a form of irresponsibility, in which you try to claim that death HAPPENS TO YOU AGAINST YOUR WILL.

YOU CHOOSE to make yourself and your body seem to be sick. So that you can DENY that you are NOT SICK. The sickness is a deception and a lie, and cannot be true. Therefore it MUST be an illusion - something appearing to be something it is not. It cannot BE a real sickness, it must be fake. Because you cannot really BE sick ever. The sickness is your attempt to DENY that you are immortal. Death is you being IN DENIAL that you STILL have eternal life. This is a FACT.

"Sickness is a defense against the truth."

"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"

"For sickness is an election; a decision. It is the choice of weakness"

"If sickness is but a faulty problem-solving approach, it is a decision. And if it is a decision, it is the mind and not the body that makes it."

"Sickness is idolatry, because it is the belief that POWER CAN BE TAKEN FROM YOU."

"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."

What are you doing? Why are you going into states of sickness and suffering? Why are you holding up the body as an attacked picture of crucifixion, trying to demonstrate first of all that you "are" the body, and that secondly you have been attacked? Why are you using the body as a picture held up to your brother to accuse THEM of causing it? Or to accuse the world of causing it? When all along YOUR OWN MIND puts the effects into the body and then shifts the blame to someone else?

"The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions which are responsible for the body's condition."

You are FAKING BEING SICK. You are faking that you can even be CAPABLE of suffering. That you can even CHANGE or be changed. You are not even changeable. You are so permanent and endless and will live forever, such that you couldn't even really be sick if you wanted to. It cannot be "who you are" that is sick. Even if your mind becomes sick and takes it out on the body, pretending it is a body, and that the body is dying, your soul is STILL not sick.

"But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed!"

"If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment 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."

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body, so that IT will suffer pain."

"Thus is the body healed by miracles BECAUSE they show the mind MADE sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or EFFECT, of what it made."

YOU CAN NEVER BE SICK. YOU CAN NEVER DIE. YOU ARE NOT A BODY. YOU ARE IMMORTAL.

So what's with this fake game of "poor-me I'm dying"? Why are you playing this game and putting on this fake show? Who are you trying to convince? Why are you making yourself out to be a punished victim, weakened and tormented, disabled and disfigured, diseased and decayed, ripe for the picking and ready to die? Who are you trying to FOOL? Why are you so convinced not only that you ARE a body, but that you deserve to be sentenced to death?

You cannot be guilty because the fact is that you cannot even sin. Sin is the idea that something REAL can be attacked. But "nothing real can be threatened". Reality is NOT attackable. Reality is PERMANENT AND CHANGELESS. "Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all."

"Reality is changeless. It is this that MAKES it real, and KEEPS it separate from all appearances. It MUST transcend all form to be itself. It CANNOT change."

Nothing real can ever change. YOU are real and can never change. GOD is real and can never change. Your brothers are real and can never change. Nothing real EVER changes because it is ABSOLUTELY FIXED. So you cannot sin against or attack or destroy anything real. That means you cannot be sinned against, nor can you sin, or become sinful. You cannot stop being innocent because "my sinlessness is guaranteed by God." You are PERMANENTLY INNOCENT.

So the idea that you have become evil, have attacked God, are unworthy of love, have committed a crime, cannot be forgiven, deserve to be punished, should suffer, are guilty, should be destroyed etc, is completely unfounded. It's all based on a lie that you even CAN DO these things. You can't. You can never attack or hurt or damage anything real. And anything which SEEMS like it can be attacked or hurt or damaged CANNOT BE REAL.

Bodies show up with their seeming "proof of sin", with their images blasted in your face, with their testimony to your senses, showing you pictures of destruction and crucifixion, to try to tempt you to believe that this is a FACT. That sickness is TRUE. That it's HAPPENING NOW. But this cannot be true at the same time as you being immortal. You cannot be immortal and mortal at the same time. How can the sickness be real? How can the body even be real? How can a person ever actually BE anything less than perfect?

Either you are immortal and you cannot die, or you have NEVER been immortal and you are ALWAYS dead. You either have eternal life and are permanent and absolute, or you are merely some relative dream fiction temporary body story that begins and ends, which is not life and is a dream of death.

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

YOU CANNOT DIE. So why are you pretending that you ARE?

This is the whole issue of the separation from God. Immortal endless beings trying to force themselves to be mortal. Trying to DENY that they are STILL immortal. Pretending they have brought an end to the immortality and that life has been stopped. That you have CHANGED what God created to last forever, and have thus overthrown his will. That you are more powerful than God and have been able to destroy the indestructible.

Let's stop today playing this game of death, playing at dying, playing at suffering and being sick, playing at being guilty and unworthy, playing small and little and weak and helpless, playing at being victimized and paralyzed and struck down and attacked and helpless. We are POWERFUL BEINGS. We can NEVER DIE. When will the game of dying end? When will we bring an end to the illusion of death and proclaim that THERE IS ONLY ETERNAL LIFE?

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely."

"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."

"These are specifically first that the body is for attack, and also that you ARE a body. Without this, sickness is completely inconceivable. Sickness is a way of demonstrating that YOU CAN BE HURT. It is a witness to your frailty, your vulnerability, and your extreme need to depend on external guidance."

"This is the anti-Christ; the strange idea there is a power PAST omnipotence, a place BEYOND the infinite, a time transcending the eternal. Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

"Do not look to the god of sickness for healing, but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Him. When you acknowledge Him, you will KNOW that He has never ceased to acknowledge you, and that in His acknowledgment OF you lies your Being. You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

"These testimonies which the senses bring have but one purpose; to justify attack and thus keep unforgiveness unrecognized for what it is. Seen undisguised it is intolerable. Without protection it could not endure. Here is all sickness cherished, but without the recognition that this is so. For when an unforgiveness is not recognized, the form it takes seems to be something else. And now it is the "something else" that seems to terrify. But it is not the "something else" that can be healed. It is not sick, and needs no remedy. To concentrate your healing efforts here is but futility. Who can cure what cannot be sick and make it well?"

"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. I will worship no idols, nor raise my own self-concepts to replace my Self. I am in the likeness of my Creator. Love created me like Itself." "I will awaken from the dream that I

Am mortal, fallible, and full of sin,

And know I am the perfect Son of God."

"The body can be healed as an effect of true forgiveness. Only that can give remembrance of immortality, which is the gift of holiness and love. "

"You are God's Son. In immortality you live forever. Would you not return your mind to this?"

"Yet what is it except a game you play in which identity can be denied? You are as God created you. All else but this one thing is folly to believe. In this one thought is everything set free. In this one truth are all illusions gone. In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything; the central core of its existence and its guarantee of immortality."

"The body does not change. It represents the larger dream that change is POSSIBLE. To change is to attain a state unlike the one in which you found yourself before. There IS no change in immortality, and Heaven knows it not."

"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."

"In your brother is the light of God's eternal promise of YOUR immortality." "Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF. Yet God's Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM."

"The miracle of creation has never ceased, having the holy stamp of immortality upon it."

"Immortality is a constant state. It is as true now as it ever was or will be, because it implies NO CHANGE AT ALL."

Let's take a moment to remember our immortality. Forgiveness is based on immortality and symbolises it. If you are immortal nothing can change you in any way, nothing can happen to you, nothing can attack you or hurt you. If that's true, no-one is doing anything to you, nothing has ever been done to you, and sin is impossible.

If we claim ownership of our true nature - to know thyself as immortal spirit - then we are fully centered and holding the reins of our power. But this power and freedom requires total responsibility and ownership of our true identity as Christ.

When we slip and fall and start to displace our responsibility outside of ourselves, through dissociation (separation, split mind), we dis-associate from the immortality and the invulnerability it brings. We start to perceive that power and causation are outside of ourselves, that our own power has done a 180 and is now staring us in the face, doing things to us.

Except now we have disowned ourselves, we have disowned our power, and we have associated it with other people, external things, places and environments, so-called causes of suffering and death. We start believing we can be attacked, we can be caused to change, we can be made to feel one way or another, tossed around on the sea.

Before long this dis-ownership of responsibility has us believing that we are victims of the world, caused by other people, attacked and threatened, made to experience certain feelings against our will, upset "because of" this and that outside of us, things which we seem to have no control or power over.

This all entails a belief in being guilty, because immortality in its harmlessness is also innocence. If we move away from innocence we move into guilt, and you can't believe you are a mortal victim without it. This guilt arises from the self attack upon your own invulnerability, via your own self-attack thoughts. And then before you know it you're projecting it onto other people.

When you are guilty you will become lost and tangled up in what seems to be causes coming from other people. Whatever they do will seem to be about you in some way, causing you, influencing you, commenting on your nature, defining you, condemning you to some fate. A guilty person sees signs and proof of their guilt everywhere.

And this will appear to be actually about you because, in your guilt you become self conscious, with a sense of constant vulnerability. A sense of persecution and being judged, or being constantly under attack and safe nowhere. If someone says something inflammatory about you, you secretly believe it and agree with it. You already decided you're guilty so someone else pointing it out just triggers off your own self-hate. Except now you mistakenly think they're the ones who put the guilt in you.

Then it starts to seem as though what other people are doing is affecting you, that their attacks are really about you personally, that their projections of their own guilt is justified, and that you can be hurt by them. But all they're really doing is triggering off a pre-existing guilt that you put there on your own.

Failing to claim total responsibility for everything you experience, and seeing yourself as disempowered, you'll see others as having power over you to change you. And that means you see them as responsible for you. And that also means you do not recognize that they are responsible for themselves. Anything they choose or experience is their own doing, but in your attempt to disown yourself you also don't recognize they're attacking themselves.

Their self attack seems to bleed over into an attack on you, and vice versa, and before you know it you're all tangled up in a special relationship of mutual victimisation. They're doing stuff to you, you're doing stuff to them, and now it seems like no-one is responsible for anything.

What is needed is a relief from the inner guilt produced by your mistaken decision to try to be mortal. The denial and rejection of God has led to your attempt to make yourself his opposite, to suffer instead of be at peace, to be upset instead of happy, to be vulnerable and weak instead of immortal and powerful. Without the guilt you would not become confused about who is attacking who.

Ultimately we have to take back all of the power that we keep giving away, which requires a total ownership of who and what we are. We can't be playing the role of victim or victimiser - which are the same thing - if we are to be invulnerable. We can't be believing we're doing something to anyone, or that anyone is doing something to us. And that means we have to own up to being immortal, and no longer can claim to be guilty sinners.

In this recognition of your own innocence, you automatically cease to see yourself as a target for punishment. Having not targeted yourself, you are no longer self-conscious or self-absorbed. Having owned yourself and your God-given power, you can no longer see yourself as overpowered by anything in the world.

This recognition leads also to the recognition that other people are not attacking you, they are not talking about you in their attacks, they are not accusing you of anything, and are not doing anything to you at all. Instead, it is a recognition that - just as you were doing this all to yourself (the secret of salvation), they are doing it all to themselves. And this allows you to see that what they're doing is hurting themselves - as a call for love - rather than as hurting you.

This entails a positive "stepping back" or "separating" from the illusion that there is any kind of causation between you and other people, or you and the body, or you and the world. People and bodies and the world do nothing to you ever. What you are cannot be changed by anything or anyone. And your brother is not the cause of you - God is.

Ultimately, accepting that God is your creator, that you are his holy child, and that you are still permanently sustained by his mind and power as an innocent immortal being, is the key to salvation from all suffering. Owning it is total freedom and total responsibility.

Owning it makes suffering and guilt and murderous attack impossible. It is the end of the confusion that anything in the world is responsible for anything you experience. And it indeed marks the end of this world as well, because a world which has no causal power is not alive.

God created you to live forever, and you will never die.

"But the Face of Christ is the great symbol of forgiveness. It is salvation. It is the symbol of the real world. Whoever looks on this no longer sees the world. He is as near to Heaven as is possible outside the gate."

"You are God's Son. In immortality you live forever. Would you not return your mind to this?"

"And immortality is the opposite of time, for time passes away, while immortality is constant. Accepting the Atonement teaches you WHAT IMMORTALITY IS, for by accepting your guiltlessness, you learn that the past has never been, and so the future is needless."

"There IS no change in immortality, and Heaven knows it not."

"Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF."

"Immortality is a constant state. It is as true now as it ever was or will be, because it implies NO CHANGE AT ALL. It is not a continuum, and it is NOT understood by comparing it with any opposite."

"The Son of Life cannot BE killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed."

"Yet, for all the wild insanity inherent in the whole IDEA of sin, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. For the wages of sin IS death, and how can the immortal die?"

"You are immortal BECAUSE you are eternal, and always MUST be now."

"What is immortal cannot BE attacked; what is but temporal HAS no effect."

"Against this sense of temporary existence, the Soul offers the knowledge of permanence and unshakeable BEING. No one who has experienced the revelation of this can ever fully believe in the ego again. How can its meager offering to you prevail against the glorious gift of God?"

"You look for permanence in the impermanent; for love where there is none; for safety in the midst of danger; immortality within the darkness of the dream of death."

What God created is permanent. What you create is permanent. It has eternal life and exists forever, unchanging and unwavering. Nothing real can be threatened or changed, nor does it change, because reality is a constant state. It is permanently the same. Absolutely unchangeable, unassailable, unaffected.

You cannot change what is permanent. You cannot establish the truth. You cannot decide what is real. You cannot change God's mind. You cannot define what you are. You cannot change what you are. You cannot destroy anything real. You cannot truly be sick or die. You cannot leave Heaven. You cannot modify what God has created. And you cannot make yourself mortal.

BUT...... you can be in denial. You can be delusional. You can be trying to use belief to pretend to convince yourself that this isn't the case. You can TRY to effort to make what is permanent, impermanent. This is an attempt, by immortal beings, to pretend to be mortal.

In every way that you attempt to prove to yourself and others that you and they are not permanently as God created us, those are futile attempts to convince yourself that something else is true. That you are not permanent. Every time that you attack your body and make it sick, you are trying to prove that you can be hurt, even though it is literally impossible to hurt that which is permanent.

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

Similarly death is an attempt to prove the permanent Son of God can be made impermanent and dead. It does not work. It has NO EFFECT on the Son of God. Death does not kill you. It does nothing. Therefore attempting to prove you can die, by committing suicide, by hurting and attacking yourself and your temporary illusory body, is clearly a demonstration of someone who is strongly trying to PROVE that they are NOT permanent.

The further someone goes towards having this amassed stockpile of "evidence" for why they are not permanent, the further they are in denial. This is why death itself is total denial. It's a total blind inability to accept the TOTAL futility of trying to die. Immortal beings, are trying to prove they can be dead. And the more they are delusional and believe in death's possibility, the more they bring about suffering and sickness and death in themselves and others.

Those who are saner, who are less in denial, and who do not believe in attack because they know that nothing real can be threatened so attack is pointless, automatically produce healing and demonstration of miraculous reversal of "sickness", the stockpile decreases and their demonstration of mortality diminishes and is reversed. Resurrection happens, which is nothing less than the demonstration and symbolic use of the body to show that you truly believe, and can prove, that you cannot die, because you have the POWER to do so.

Resurrection is a demonstration of acceptance of atonement, the sheer truth that what is permanent is STILL permanent, NOTHING has happened to change it, there IS no sin, there IS no attack, there IS no sickness or death, and therefore to PROVE beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are under NO laws but God's. That you are ARE permanent. The body then, in the hands of a sane person, is healed. "The mind, being sane, heals the body." And the body in the hands of someone accepting atonement is UNATTACKABLE. "It cannot be sick, nor can it die."

The body now TEACHES by EXAMPLE, symbolically, to those still dreaming, that the soul is permanent and the Son of God represents eternal life. The body becomes a symbol of eternal life and a breath of immortality in the dream, communicating to those grown sick of the fetid stench of death, that death is futile, pointless exercise, sickness is ridiculously unnecessary, and HEALTH is representative of living forever.

The Holy Spirit has now repurposed what you made, as something unattackable, to demonstrate you CANNOT BE attacked. That harm has never happened, and you are beyond all causes that could possibly ever make you or the body damaged. It is a supernatural demonstration of UNLIMITED POWER. It is truly miraculous. You become invulnerable (aware of your invulnerability) and you USE the body to symbolically demonstrate it to others.

To accept the atonement truly means the TOTAL unconditional acceptance of the total state of PERMANENCE of your reality. It means the complete surrendering and letting go of ALL things temporal or temporary, which includes the body and the world. It requires your transfer or rather, resumption, of Heaven, to resume recognition of your self as permanently Christ, and to remember the truth about you. This resuming or rather continuing of your uninterrupted creative extension, is an awakening, the only awakening, to the experience of eternal life, beyond the body and beyond the dream of death, beyond this world, not of this world, nor in it.

This total awareness of absolute permanence, dissolves the body and makes it IMPOSSIBLE to be in this temporal world. "Indeed, you cannot remain in this world, with this knowledge." It restores the perfect knowledge that you are STILL perfect, nothing EVER happened, there IS no dream world, and bodies do not exist. It is not merely a compromise between staying in the dream and being awake, it is total immersion in reality, in God, in Heaven, where you have never stopped being permanently eternal. It is the awakening to the soul.

In this awakening, there is no remaining memory of even the dream or the world. It is gone. It never existed or happened. There is only the total unlimited experience of total immortality and permanent life. This requires nothing less than the absolute 100% unconditional willingness to will with God, to do His will, to share His mind, and to extend His being forever. In this awareness, there is no Earth, there is no dream, and there is no separation.

Nothing has happened. Only that which is permanent is true. Only that which lasts forever exists. Nothing real can be changed or threatened and never has been. Once you return to being an immortal being, you will realize, you ALWAYS HAVE BEEN and always will be, and now anything of fantasy dream worlds where people die will be complete unbelievable nonsense to you.

You are immortal. You are pretending not to be. When you are done pretending not to be, you will accept your immortality and return to Heaven.

"There is no death, the son of god is free."

A lesson for me at the moment has two parts to it. One part is realizing that underneath a person there is a completely immortal, invulnerable, innocent being that has absolutely nothing wrong with them and has done nothing wrong. The other part is, connected to this, that therefore I need to learn to 'overlook' the appearance of anything else that they are trying to demonstrate to me as the truth about them and not join with them in it (false empathy).

Being able to overlook the 'obstacle to peace' that other people put in place is a tuff one. But it also means I have to be able to not have obstacles to peace in myself, and that I need to take any kind of 'veil' or 'persona' off of my own mind so that I can see past the personas of other people.

Being able to overlook appearances is forgiveness. When your awareness fixates on looking AT an appearance, AT a body, AT a person's form, this is blinding. "Nothing so blinding as sight of form" - ACIM. This is what happens when the Holy Spirit in you is not allowed to fully extend outward, instead being stopped by the form of another person. But it's not their form that stops your 'vision', it's your belief that it's real - your buying into the illusion of it.

There's sections in the Course that I read not long ago about how the Holy Spirit projects/extends outward PAST your own body and PAST the bodies of other people, to recognize Himself WITHIN the mind of the other person. When your mind is looking past these forms in this way, there is no sickness because the mind isn't getting 'stuck' on form. Fully extending THROUGH and PAST the body is COMMUNICATION, which the Holy Spirit wants to use it for - to join with others beyond their bodies. But if we're fixating on the content of form such as guilt, fear, sin, death, bodies, appearances, etc then this puts a road-block in the way of extension, creating sickness and death. The body then becomes an 'obstacle to peace' - it's in the way we're looking at or past things.

The truth is that the body is never in the way of a truly forgiving mind. The body is not powerful and does not have the ability to prevent the extension of love. The body (mine, or someone else's) also has no ability to snag my mind or get me to pay attention to it. Instead, if my mind is truly forgiving, it will simply see THROUGH and PAST the obstacle recognizing that it is not real and has no ability to prevent extension. Then there will be a recognition of Oneness with your brother.

The issue is that when the mind itself has blocks to awareness, these blocks prevent full extension of Spirit. And that means there's some kind of belief in or attachment to guilt/sin/fear/death/spacetime/bodies etc within the mind. That means, instead of the mind just moving past and extending past everything in form, it instead 'stops' at or becomes fixated on form as though it has some power to block your awareness/sight/vision. You focus on something which is NOT THERE, and you think it is real, and this blocks your awareness. Blocks to awareness manifest as blocks to energy flow and vitality, where ultimately a 'big block' brings about "death".

It's an ongoing challenge to learn not to fixate on form or appearance, especially when you are used to seeing other people as though they ARE the way they appear. So if someone comes along with a sickness or a story about themselves or a really attention-grabbing attitude etc, if I am tempted by that and look AT it and MAKE IT REAL then my mind has become snagged by it, attached to it, and resistant of it, and that will have an affect on my own wellbeing. It will make me sick because I am seeing my brother as sick by failing to overlook sickness. We need to literally see the Christ in ourselves and others in order for our mind to fully extend and to be unhindered and unrestrained. I think in the Course Jesus used a word like "arrested". When the mind is arrested by sight of form we become sick. When the mind is freed from arrest, sickness is loosened up and flow is restored and there is no more death.

It's difficult but I have to learn to look past the ILLUSION that people have something wrong with them, the illusion that people are really sick, the illusion that people are actually able to suffer, the illusion that people really have something to be afraid of etc. And this goes back to the first point.... .underneath all of our shit there is an immortal being that is absolutely unaffected by any illusion and has no faults and is perfectly innocent, invulnerable, powerful and free. If I believe that and know that and experience that and look TO that, then I will overlook all the other illusory bullshit. But if I forget that, or lose sight of that, or fixate on any other DEMONSTRATION as though it is the truth about me or another person, then now I'm into la-la land, hallucinating, suffering, caught up in stories, reacting to appearances and struggling with my own self.

I'm looking forward to absolute certainty. Someday it will appear within and without simultaneously. We are all really free, we just don't recognize it.

(anecdotal. .... People looking down at their iPhones fixated on form, hmm... A great way to make illusions real and to shut out everything else, and they call this a 'communication' device lol it's really an isolation device :-)..depending who you're dialling with ;-)

Sometimes it *seems* as if something happens to us that we did not choose. Let's say, something physical in the world comes along and hurts your body. Maybe its a car crash. Maybe someone is having a bad day and spills hot coffee on your body. Whatever it is, the question arises, did *I* cause this to happen? Am I a victim?

If ever the answer is that I DID NOT choose it, what are the implications? It means that there must be something that has power over me, I must be a victim, I must have no hope for a cure, I must be vulnerable to external attack, and I must be capable of being made to suffer against my will. This whole belief is especially wrapped up in sickness and death, via perceived external or bodily causes.

There is also the fact that we are co-dreaming this world with others, and that means some other brother, not in his right mind, might elect of his own free will to attack your body. Is this also asked for? Did I CHOOSE to be attacked? Have I harmed myself or used my brother's body in some way, perhaps in agreement with him, a mutual attack? Surely if I did not participate in its choosing, HE is the sinner, and my victimhood and proof of attack in my body accuses him. "Sick bodies are accusers." "Brother at your hand I die."

Jesus says this.

"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."

So EVEN if there is a seemingly completely distinct attacker, some other person who of their own free will seems to be trying to attack your body, EVEN THAT is somehow chosen by you. And if you are pain or are suffering physically or emotionally, it is STILL true that you are causing it. In essence, there are NO EXCEPTIONS to the secret of salvation, and the instant that you believe there are, there is NO WAY TO FIND SALVATION, because now you've ruled out of the possibility of being FREE FROM "unwarranted external powers" or an "alien will."

Jesus goes on to say:

"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."

Here he seems to me to be saying, if you were sitting high up and were dreaming of a world down below you, which YOU populate with figures, and YOU animate, and you make "do things", like a child playing with dolls causing the dolls to pretend to interact or fight, then you'd realize that YOU are not identified with any of these figures and so these things are not happening to YOU. By being spirit-identified, you are not dream/body identified. So any activities in the world - in your dream - which you made do what it does, has no real effect on who and what YOU really are. But this does require a total clarity and atonement-level acceptance of the awareness of dreaming and the fact that you're making the world happen.

Jesus continues:

"The Holy Spirit will repeat this ONE inclusive lesson of deliverance, until it has been learned, REGARDLESS of the form of suffering that brings you pain. Whatever hurt you bring to Him, He will make answer with this very simple truth. For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the SINGLE cause of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

So now he's telling us that the form of the issue does not matter. Whether it be a violent person or a car crash or a disease or unhappiness. There is ONE truth about them all, and that truth is that YOU are doing them to yourself, by identifying with the body and dreaming a dream in which you CAUSE the bodies to hurt each other. For this to be true, you as a dreamer has to be a really high-level, powerful position. Can you comprehend the power entailed in dreaming a planet? Can you accept or own that this entire environment is in your mind?

"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts."

"Both heaven and earth are in your mind."

The issue with your body is a tiny speck of the dream that your mind is supposedly dreaming. Like in your dreams at night, where your mind invents an entire environment and then puts a little body in it, perhaps too it is true of this physical world. We dream up an entire ecosystem of events and activities and people and then make stuff happen and the only way we'd feel that we're vulnerable to any of it, is if we forget we're dreaming it and identify with some part of it, such as believing you are a body. Jesus is practically saying that what you are transcends ALL bodies. Is this too lofty of an interpretation? Too hard to relate to?

Jesus says to let them be as vicious as they may. And that seems to mean, even allowing the body to be attacked and damaged.

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

But somehow, if you were conscious enough of being the dreamer and not the dream, you would not be even slightly confused or believe that anything the body is experiencing is anything to do with what you are. That it is having NO EFFECT on you. It's not disturbing your peace of mind or happiness.

The problem with this is, "A guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body." So one moment Jesus is saying to let people be vicious, which presumably could mean your body is damagable, which is backed up by his statements about "only bodies can be attacked". And then the next he's saying that the mind should heal the body, and if it doesn't, the mind is not healed. "A damaged body is proof the mind has not been healed." Yet if another person did the damage, does that mean your mind is not healed? Is your mind not healed because YOU dreamed of the other person? Is your mind not healed because you made up another body to attack this body, in your dream, thus literally doing it to your body self?

Jesus seems in some ways to say, you can transcend all worldly happenings, all bodily situations, be fully spirit identified, recognizing you are mind not matter, and be free from every possible dream scenario no matter what happens in the world. BUT, he also seems to teach that a mind in such a position would therefore have the miracle-working power to UNDO or correct or heal, anything that arises. This seems to imply the body can be attacked and is vulnerable, BUT that the mind CAN heal it, and if the mind has not healed it the mind must not be healed simply because it's not sane to allow the damage to remain. "Forgiveness is not real unless it has brought a healing to your brother and yourself." "A miracle of healing proves separation (attack world) is without effect."

A question arises, is it possible to somehow supernaturally cause the body to be INCAPABLE of being attacked? Jesus speaks of a "protection" near the end of "sickness is a defense against the truth". He speaks of the body being unable to be sick, or to die. But if bodies can be attacked, would some other person come along in the dream and still attempt murder? And would it still produce a wound on the body? Does mind wield a power capable of essentially making the body literally immortal and undamagable?

Or would this be simply impossible, given the body is not real and only real things are free from threat? It would suggest the body can still be attacked, but that the mind could heal the attack. And that would seem to line up with Jesus's body being crucified in spite of his profound advanced mental state. If his mind has permanent projective power over the body, it would not have been crucifiable. The spear would not have been able to penetrate the hands and the nails could not be driven into his limbs.

It's true that, nevertheless, "the mind that made the body can make another". So in a sense, if the body is destroyed the mind, which is not the body, could manifest another illusory body, which also has inherent susceptibility. ie bodies fundamentally exist only as illusions, illusions can be attacked (illusions of attack) fundamentally, and so there is no way to render a body immortal or permanent. The mind CAN however heal the body, can project new bodies, and has the power to perhaps supernaturally manipulate events, utilize divine guidance and therefore find a "safe" path through the dream of attack.

One line says, "without the idea of death there is no world." Another says "to see a sinless body is impossible" and "the body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards." Which means, if the body seems to exist at all, it depends on death. It is made of death. And at best, it can symbolize eternal life but cannot BE it. Mind can maintain it and heal it. But there are limits - and short of a supernatural miracle, a body wouldn't survive a direct encounter with a supernova.

We know the body is just an image, an illusion, projected by the mind. It SHOULD, in the "movie projector analogy, mean it's possible possible for the DREAMER to NOT dream attack scenarios. In fact, "my self is ruler of the universe speaks to this."

"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."

How absolute does this sound? It seems to literally mean, as the ruler of the universe, nothing can happen without your consent. No events can occur, without you dreaming them. Wars cannot take place unless you make them happen. Not only does what you desire happen, what you DON'T want to happen does not occur either. ie, you have TOTAL CONTROL over the dream.

And if that is true, does it not mean you could organize that there will NOT BE an attack upon your body? Unless you CHOSE that there be one and made it happen, that perhaps Jesus orchestrated every aspect of his own crucifixion? But does not this also mean that he must've dreamed of the "rest of us" too? Why not just dream of everyone being fully awake and bring an end to the dream entirely? How are we co-dreamers? Through a shared will?

Jesus also speaks of the body disappearing upon awakening. This suggests, in a co-authored dream, when a dreamer wakes up, he stops making a body. The recognition of its NOTHINGNESS cancels its illusions, making it impossible for it to appear to exist at all. A light shines so brightly, the body vanishes. "And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar of the Son of God."

If mind has the power to make a world, it would seem mind could have the power to force the body not to age, be sick or die. That mind would take authority over any occurrences. Mind could supernaturally make it impossible for the body to be attacked. It could "sustain the body indefinitely, BUT within time, where all bodies exist. This would require an ongoing maintenance, a vigilance, in orer to maintain this projection. And this seems to be what is spoken of here:

"Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible.

Yet this ***protection*** ***needs to be preserved*** by careful watching. 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. Give instant remedy, should this occur, by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer."

So Jesus is suggesting a potential for indefinite sustainability of the body's health and state, where mind is overriding any worldly causality. This feasibly could continue for thousands of years. And there are stories of certain masters who have accomplished this longevity. St Germain, Babaji, etc. These advanced teachers of God apparently have the power to reverse, heal, and resurrect the body. At least for as long as it is useful in the atonement plan. The purpose is the plan. And once fulfilled, bodies are no longer needed.

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. 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... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. 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 an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand."

"Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there any time you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does. 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. Illusion are illusions. Truth is true. Illusions vanish. Only truth remains."

So what's the conclusion?

Mind has power over everything. Mind is co-dreaming the world with others. All illusions are attackable IF the mind CONSENTS to it. Due to free will, other minds can use their bodies to try to attack your body. This possibly cannot happen at all if you do not consent to it. If it does happen, you have agreed to a mutual attack scenario, and now your brother seems able to attack your body. But now your mind has the power to miraculously heal it, and being sane it would do so. And this the body can be "protected" by the mind indefinitely while useful, eventually to be laid aside ie vanished when no longer useful. You can choose the body cannot be sick, age or die, by protecting it actively, or through miracles of healing. But the time of bodies will come to an end.

"But you can confuse yourself with things that do."

The entire function of the Curriculum, is to return you to awareness of Heaven, your true home, where you remain with God in PERFECT IMMORTALITY.

Every single thing in the course is geared towards you unlearning death and rediscovering eternal life. This is why the curriculum ends in the RESURRECTION, and why leaving the world through death is not graduation.

IMMORTALITY is your "birthright". It is God-Given. Your inheritance. And it is absolutely constantly perfectly sustained by God's will FOREVER. Which means even as you dream of mortality, you are still immortal in God. And nothing you can ever do can ever change this.

If we were to recognize this, simply the fact that you can never stop being immortal should tell you that all efforts to BE mortal are futile. All efforts to die are futile. All efforts to be sick are futile. All choices for unhappiness are futile.

Only in acceptance of your ETERNAL NATURE can you recognize the absolute permanence of your immortal nature, which can be rejected only through denial, and not through changing the truth. This is what Atonement is really about. Recognizing you are IMMORTAL.

Every single part of A Course in Miracles is steering you towards an ownership of your IMMORTAL CHRIST NATURE. A reclaiming of your unlimited power. A restoration of the wholeness of your undivided will. A RESURRECTION, BACK to immortality, from illusory states of degradation and death. And this include all forms of healing and the reversal of physical sickness.

The entire point of realizing you are not a body is to realize that your IMMORTAL SOUL has no need for such nonsense. The body was an attempt to make something which CAN DIE, and its ultimate purpose through the ego is to prove that this is possible. To the ego, it is born TO die, and there is no way out.

The Holy Spirit's repurposing of the body is entirely geared towards rendering the body ultimately unnecessary, using it ONLY as a device to help you to UNLEARN your belief in death, and restore your sanity, so that you can LEAVE IT and return to simply being immortal spirit in Heaven.

Nothing short of your absolutely permanent immortality is appropriate as a goal. This is why the Song of Prayer states that the only goal you should have is to return to GOD. Because through returning to Him, you return to yourself, and simply CONTINUE being immortal.

IT IS ALL ABOUT IMMORTALITY.

IMMORTALITY IS AT THE CORE OF THE CURRICULUM.

IMMORTALITY IS WHAT YOU NEED TO "LEARN", or rather, RECOGNIZE, by unlearning that which claims otherwise.

Being immortal means you can never change. It means you can never be sick or die. It means you cannot be limited. It means you continue forever in total perfection. It means nothing can happen to you ever. It means you are not at the effect of anything but God. It means you cannot sin and your innocence is permanent.

You are a rock solid PERMANENT LIGHT shining in the skies of heaven. Shining FOREVER. Continuously. Constantly. Unfaltering. Unwavering. Absolutely immaculate. Perfect in every way.

And this can never change. God cannot change it. Jesus cannot change it. You cannot change it. No one has ever changed this fact. YOU ARE AN IMMORTAL BEING. And anything else that contradicts this immortality is NOT TRUE OF YOU, IS NOT REAL, DOES NOT EXIST, IS NOT PART OF YOU, AND IS NOT NEEDED.

You are permanent in God. Endless. Deathless. Changeless. Fearless. Incorruptible. Unattackable. Unassailable. Constant. Eternal. Immortal.

The ego is a belief that you are sinful and guilty. It really believes this is true. It believes in attack, that it has attacked, and that therefore it is sinful, is due for some punishment, and someone is going to deliver it.

When YOU, who are not the ego, are identifying yourself with it, and are confused in believing that what applies to IT applies to YOU, you will experience whatever applies to it.

So if someone comes along and attacks or targets "you", this will be an attack on the ego. The ego will believe it is real, and valid, and justified, and that it is the truth about you. The sin and the guilt that it believes in makes the attack real, and produces effects within itself. Thus it is vulnerable, and seems to suffer and feel hurt.

When YOU, who are not the ego, are identified with it, when it perceives attack, YOU will also experience what the ego is experiencing. Therefore you will perceive that YOU yourself are actually being attacked, because you are sinful and guilty. Your ego sin and guilt will fly up in your face, you will be upset, hurt, and perceive that you've been damaged. But you're only able to experience this because you are aligned with, attempting to be one with, the ego, and to share in its perspective. However, YOU are not the ego.

What YOU are, is a being, a mind, which is able to choose to either align itself with God, or pretend to align itself with an imaginary mind - the ego. But who you are, is not really the ego, and can choose to unalign itself from the ego and return to alignment with God.

When you do this, through forgiveness, it entails that you come to the awareness that sin is not real, which therefore means that you are not really guilty, and need not be afraid. Who you ARE, is not the ego collection of thoughts and beliefs that are composed from sin/guilt/fear. Instead, if sin is not real, then separation can't have really happened, the events that led to the guilt cannot have really happened, therefore the sin and guilt are invalid. They cannot apply to you, define you, represent you, describe you, or modify you to fit them.

If you can see that YOU do not have to be defined by the ego, and do not have to stay associated with its thought system, you can come to recognize that you are innocent. God's truth describes you are innocent, always loveable, already forgiven, and completely invulnerable to attack. It also gives you the recognition that the ego is nothing more than an illusion, because sin and guilt are illusions. They aren't real.

This means you now realize that you never really were guilty, never really can be guilty, and sin that could possibly ever prove your unworthiness cannot be true of you. You simply have not sinned. Therefore YOU are not made of sin, and you are not made of guilt. That's the same thing as saying, you do not really have an ego. And that also means, you therefore cannot be targeted or attacked in the way that the ego attacks itself through belief in attack.

It is not that you have to do anything special to the ego to defend yourself against it. It is not that you need a special barrier of protection. It is not that you need to constantly put in effort to maintain a certain kind of thought system in order to not slip up and allow attack to get you. Rather, when this all becomes clear, that you are not sinful at all and never really could be, and that God sees you as PERMANENTLY INNOCENT, your identity can no longer contain "ego".

So now, when someone comes along and they do some activities that you previously would've thought of as an attack, and reacted to, there won't be sin and guilt in you. You will know through experiential fact that you are permanent innocence, therefore any claims by anyone that you are sinful or guilty or unworthy or worthy of attack MUST be false. They simply cannot apply to you.

So when someone claims "you are guilty" in some way, what they're really saying is "you are made of guilt", and this is not true. So they're referring to someone by the name of "guilt", and it's not you, because obviously you're innocent. So they're not even talking to you. Your name is innocence, and you will only respond to confirmations of your innocence.

Any reference to a guilty person cannot be a reference to what you are, therefore it does not even REGISTER with "you" as being about "you", because it's not. Your identity is not what they are targeting. You suddenly realize that they are apparently targeting SOMEONE or SOMETHING, but it's certainly not YOU! And since nobody else is around, it is clearly obvious they are actually just having a spazz and attacking themselves, projecting their own guilt all over the place believing it applies to you. And there you are, invulnerable, bullets bouncing off left and right, because you are inaccessible to the idea of attack.

What becomes clear, simply through clarity alone, with no need to have any thoughts about it or interpretations or it or special treatment of it, is that... simply.... in all truth and clarity, when you are sane. ..... the ego simply is not real. Attack is not real. It cannot and does not do anything to you. It only ever seemed to do something to a sinful guilty self, which is no longer what you are. And never were.

The ego, when seen with True Perception and perfect clarity, is RECOGNIZED as being 100% illusion, 100% not the truth, 100% artificial and unreal. Therefore it is simply just clear, and obvious, that it does not apply to you. It can do nothing to what you are. What you ARE is perfect innocence, holiness, immortality, eternal life. You ARE as God created you. There is not a single illusion that can ever claim anything true about you and therefore can never apply to you. And knowing this, you have the peace of God.

Illusions cannot assail the Kingdom of heaven. The ego will never enter it. The kingdom is perfectly protected without any defenses by the sheer fact that all attack is not real and does not apply! It's just simply the truth. The truth is safe from all lies and all corruption. This is why you are forever immortal, forever safe, forever innocent, and if you will let go of your false sense of identity as "sinful, guilty, afraid", you will experience an invulnerability that you never thought was possible, and which is completely void of any trace of vulnerability or susceptibility.

You cannot be attacked because you are not attackable, because attack is not real and it does not apply to those who are innocent.

Can you accept this truth? Immortality isn't mentioned all that often but it does show up several times and is the truth of who and what you are:

Here are some quotes:

"Swear not to die, you holy Son of God! You made 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."

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has IMMORTALITY."

"You are God’s Son. In IMMORTALITY you live forever. Would you not return your mind to this?"

"Yet what is it except a game you play in which identity can be denied? You are as God created you. All else but this one thing is folly to believe. In this one thought is everything set free. In this one truth are all illusions gone. In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything; the central core of its existence and its guarantee of IMMORTALITY."

"Beyond the bodies that you interposed between you, and shining in the golden light that reaches it from the bright endless circle that extends forever, is your holy relationship, beloved of God, and holy as Himself. How still it rests, in time and yet beyond, IMMORTAL yet on earth. How great the power that lies in it."

"Salvation is God’s justice. It restores to your awareness the wholeness of the fragments you perceive as broken off and separate. And it is this that overcomes the fear of death. For separate fragments must decay and die, but wholeness is IMMORTAL. It remains forever and forever like its Creator, being one with Him."

"Your present trust in Him is the defence which promises a future undisturbed, without a trace of sorrow, and with joy which constantly increases as this life becomes a holy instant, set in time, but heeding only IMMORTALITY. "

"You are immortal and you cannot die" - ACIM

Let’s take a moment to put everything in its proper perspective and remember THE TRUTH.

YOU are immortal. God created you with eternal life. You can NEVER DIE. You can never be sick, you can never suffer, you can never be anything other than God created. HE decided what you are, you did not. You cannot change what you are. You are permanently fixed as God’s PERFECT creation. There can NEVER be anything wrong with you. You can never stop existing. There is NO END to your life.

Now. Take a look at the things that you are CLAIMING are true. Look at your stories. Look at your suffering. Look at your sicknesses and pains. Look at your dying.

HOW CAN ANY OF THIS BE TRUE?

Given that you ARE immortal, what MUST it mean, if you SEEM to be experiencing sickness? It must mean that YOU are LYING. It must mean that you are deceived, you are mistaken, and you are not being truthful or honest. It means you are in denial and are pretending to be something you are not.

Given you are immortal, you simply cannot ever be sick. So what IS this performance of sickness? Why are you making it? Why are you claiming that you have it? Why are you believing it is real? Why are you fearing it? Why do you think it’s really there? IT CANNOT BE THERE BECAUSE YOU ARE IMMORTAL.

So this whole story, all the symptoms, all the supposed proof of sickness, MUST BE A LIE. There is no sickness in God and there is none in you. You are an immortal fucking being. It is IMPOSSIBLE for you to be damaged, hurt, suffer, die, be sick, malfunction, break, distort, mutate, or in any way change from the way God created you. What you are is HIS PERFECT WILL to be PERFECT FOREVER.

So what is all this other BULL SHIT? What’s with this HORSE SHIT story about sickness being true, you suffering, you being powerless, you being a victim, you having no say in it, you being half dead, and you being under attack? IT CANNOT BE TRUE OF YOU. You are immortal and you cannot BE attacked. You cannot BE threatened. You cannot BE changed into a sickened state. It is IMPOSSIBLE for you to be even SLIGHTLY sick. So what is this massive lie that’s going on?

The sickness has to be false. It has to be unreal. It has to be untrue. It has to be made up. It has to be fiction. It CANNOT EXIST. It can have NO REALITY. It is literally NOT THERE. It cannot BE HAPPENING. In order for it to be valid or have any truth to it whatsoever, is has to be true that you are NOT immortal but mortal, and that God did not create you, and you are some temporary unreal illusion which is blown away in the wind. YOU ARE NOT THAT.

YOU ARE PERMANENT LIFE!!! YOU CAN NEVER DIE!!!!

All you have to do is own up to that and stop pretending that you can suffer. Accepting it is instead of fighting against it is the atonement.

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

Why would immortal beings attempt to PROVE that they can Be HURT, when it is patently IMPOSSIBLE for them to be hurt?

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself"

WHY would you hurt yourself? Even when you hurt yourself you are not hurting yourself. Your real self CANNOT BE HURT. Why even ATTEMPT it?

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

Even if you choose to die you CANNOT DIE. Death is DENIAL of life. It’s pretend. It’s an attempt to pretend that you are not immortal. Death has NO EFFECT on you. It has NO POWER over you. It can DO NOTHING. Death is not a cause. It is an illusion. There is no death whatsoever.

DEATH IS A FUCKING LIE!!!!!!! IT DOES NOT EXIST AND IT HAS NO EFFECT ON ANYTHING REAL.

You are real, not an illusion. You cannot be threatened and death cannot even touch you. Sickness cannot even HAPPEN to you. You are permanently innocent, permanently whole, permanently perfect, permanently holy, permanently powerful, permanently safe, and permanently alive. You can never change that. You have no power over God’s will that you be this way. And God has never changed his mind about you.

YOU MUST STILL BE PERFECT. YOU MUST STILL BE IMMORTAL. RIGHT NOW THIS SECOND!!

So what is with this other shit? These stories and attempts at victimhood and little symptoms that you use to try to prove you are suffering? YOU ARE IMMORTAL, YOU CANNOT SUFFER! When you try to suffer you pretend to be something you are NOT. And even as you pretend to be something you are NOT, you are NOT THAT.

And what you make suffer IS NOT YOU, it’s a fictional body. It’s not even you that is seeming to be sick. It’s like attacking something that is not even YOUR SELF pretending that it IS your self so you can pretend that your self can be attacked. And yet while you attack the body to put on a SHOW that YOU are being mistreated and harmed, YOUR SELF remains IMMORTAL AND UNCHANGED. And so the entire thing is dishonest, inauthentic, a massive lie, a deception, untrue, false, and totally fictional.

Are you done playing dead? Are you done being sick? Are you done trying to prove that you are guilty and deserve to die? You can’t even REALLY be guilty. You can’t even commit a sin. YOU ARE PERMANENTLY INNOCENT. You can never change that. You can never revoke it. You can have no effect on it. You cannot make yourself evil.

You are PERMANENTLY GOOD. And God LOVES YOU FOREVER. This is the truth. These are the facts. This is what you have to accept. Everything else has to go. Let go of the need to suffer. It is not having any effect on who you really are anyway, it is FUTILE AND POINTLESS. And it just makes you believe you are something that CAN suffer, and so makes you confused about WHAT you are.

You are immortal spirit and you cannot die.

"You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do."

Nothing you can do can EVER HAVE ANY EFFECT on your Holy Self. Ever. It is ABSOLUTE. Give up trying to make yourself dead. You cannot accomplish it. God gave you eternal life and it cannot be revoked. It IS POINTLESS and a waste of time to cause yourself to suffer. And all your suffering IS caused by you. And yet it is NOT real suffering, and you HAVE NEVER REALLY SUFFERED. Because you can’t, because you are immortal and can never be attacked.

"Swear not to die you holy son of God. You have made a bargain that you cannot keep."

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

"This in no way contradicts the changelessness of mind as GOD created it. But YOU think that you HAVE changed it, as long as you learn through the ego. This DOES place you in a position of needing to learn a lesson which SEEMS contradictory: you must learn to change your mind ABOUT your mind. Only by this can you learn that it IS changeless."

As God created you, you are actually changeless. You are permanent. You are maintained in God's mind with his thought forever. He wills that you be the same forever.

This means, you cannot change, because you are an effect of God. You are what God wants you to be always. He does not change his mind because he is not uncertain.

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky."

Therefore you are permanently as God wants you to be, you are absolute and fixed and unchangeable. You are the everlasting will of God. And it is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE for any change to ever happen to you.

This means that you cannot change yourself, God does not change you, and nothing else can change you. You literally will continue to be exactly as you were created all the time.

You are still as God created you, now, and now, and now, and now, and now, and now, and still now. You are endlessly as God created you. Every seeming moment you are unchanged.

Being unchanged and unchangeable means you are immortal. This is your fundamental nature. Nothing can threaten you, nothing can hurt you, nothing can attack you, nothing can sin against you, nothing can make you sick or dead, nothing can make you afraid or guilty. You cannot be changed.

In our lives, since we entered into the belief in separateness, we came to believe that change was possible. It was the idea that what was permanent could be made impermanent, that everlasting life could come to an end, and the extension of creation could be stopped.

With the idea of an end, or death, we introduced the idea that you are changeable, you can be changed, you have changed yourself, and therefore you can redefine what you are. This has led to an enormous journey in which you attempt to transform yourself, grow, turn into something, become something, learn and progress.

"First, the assumption is implicit that what God has Created can be changed by the mind of Man.

Second, the concept that what is perfect can be rendered imperfect (or wanting) is intruded.

Third, the belief that man can distort the Creations of God (including himself) has arisen, and is tolerated.

Fourth, that since man can create himself, the direction of his own creation is up to him."

Having entered into a belief in change, we now have to use change for a higher purpose, to change your mind ... toward the recognition ... that there is no change. To change your mind about believing you have changed, or that change is possible, and returning to an awareness that change is impossible and everything is still perfect in God.

This is using change against itself to undo change and reverse change and "change change" so that change is cancelled out. You are not supposed to be on an endless journey of changing yourself, trying to make yourself better, trying to turn into something more, to get more or gain more, or learn stuff. You are actually trying to un-learn all the stuff you've told yourself by mistake.

So in truth we actually are not changeable beings. We are fixed absolute beings. We are more permanent than the rocks and mountains. We are more constant than the stars. We are continual and permanent and endless. Unlimited in our perpetual existence. Nothing can ever bring an end to us.

This is why, in this world, in the world of change, we are supposed to use our minds to change our minds about our minds. To change our minds about whether or not we have been changed. When you believe something has changed you, you must be mistaken. When you believe someone has done something to affect you, you must be mistaken.

Being immortal, you cannot be attacked or hurt, offended or upset, caused to be threatened or afraid, damaged or broken. Nothing in the entire world can have any power over you to do anything at all to alter what God created. What you really are cannot be changed by anyone or anything.

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

So when it comes to forgiveness, trying to apply forgiveness, you should remember that you are immortal. If you are immortal, how can you have been changed? How can someone have done something to you? How can someone have power over you? How can anything in the world cause you? How can you be hurt or damaged by anyone or anything? How can anyone have upset you?

When you believe that something has changed you, in any way, you yourself are actually undermining your invulnerability. You are believing that you can BE changed, and are then trying to find someone to pin the blame on for causing the change. But it really boils down to whether or not you believe you are being caused by God, or caused by the world. Is God your father, or is the world your father? Who is causing you? Are you an effect of God only, or are you an effect of the world?

If you are immortal then it's not possible to find anyone guilty of doing anything to you. If you are immortal then it can't be true that a given person has upset you or hurt you. If you are immortal then the world can't be to blame for you being upset or angry or annoyed or in grief or loss or pain is misery. If you are immortal, your body cannot be doing something against your will.

When you recognize your permanent fixed nature, you are being very strong. You are asserting your invulnerability. If you are continually the same, then nothing in the world of change can throw you off balance or upset your applecart or disturb your peace, because you are rock solid. You are consistently and constantly the same. Change is the enemy. The belief in change is a mistake. And recognizing your changeless is your doorway to eternal life.

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen. The still infinity of endless peace surrounds you gently in its soft embrace, so strong and quiet, tranquil in the might of its Creator, nothing can intrude upon the sacred Son of God within."

"In the holy instant, nothing happens that has not always been. Only the veil, that has been drawn ACROSS reality, is lifted. Nothing has changed. But the AWARENESS of changelessness comes swiftly, as the veil of time is pushed aside."

"Different realities ARE meaningless, for reality MUST be one. It CANNOT change with time, or mood, or chance. Its changelessness is WHAT MAKES IT REAL."

"But truth is humble in acknowledging its mightiness, its changelessness and its eternal wholeness, all-encompassing, God's perfect gift to His beloved Son."

"In perfect sureness of Its changelessness and of Its rest in Its eternal home, the Thought God holds of you has never left the Mind of Its Creator, Whom It knows as Its Creator knows that It is there."

"What is in him is changeless, and YOUR changelessness is recognized in its acknowledgment."

"The Christ revealed to you NOW has no past, for He is changeless. AND IN HIS CHANGELESSNESS LIES YOUR RELEASE. For if He is as He was created, there IS no guilt in Him. No cloud of guilt has risen to obscure Him, and He stands revealed in everyone you meet, because you see Him through HIMSELF."

"It is impossible that God lose His identity, for if He did, YOU WOULD LOSE YOURS. And BEING yours, He cannot change Himself, for your identity IS changeless. The miracle ACKNOWLEDGES His changelessness, by seeing His Son as he always was, and NOT as he would make himself."

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

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

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

As the Course states.

1) You are immortal and you cannot die.

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

3) You cannot change your immortality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No-one but yourself affects you. (because you are fucking immortal)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only in the past couple of months have I started to really get this picture, that all people are equal brothers who are perfect immortal beings, sinless and guiltless and bodyless.

When I therefore see bodies I am not seeing the person. Bodies are covering up all people. This is a very strange world in which spirit beings have wrapped themselves in flesh and hide inside of it, trying not to be seen. This is not true of anyone.

The recognition that God has many children and all of them are permanent perfect beings of light, gives us the correct perspective in which to evaluate other things. Bodies then are clearly artificial separation devices, forms are illusions, all notions of sin and guilt are fake, and no-one is really sick.

Nothing real can be threatened. No real soul can be threatened. No real son of God can be threatened. It is impossible for a son of God to sin. No-one has ever really sinned. Behind all notions of sin, which is 100% lies, there is the reality that we are all STILL as God created us. Perfect and whole and holy and innocent.

This is the only truth about people. So if I'm seeing something else or believing something else is true of people, that they are their bodies or that their illusions are true or their false beliefs are true or their obstacles to peace are real or their sicknesses are real, I am mistaken.

Seeing things in their correct light - the nature of our relationships and reality in Heaven, helps to form a contrast in which to compare the nature of earthly bullshit, to allow us to recognize what is real and what is unreal. What is true and what is false. I've found this very clarifying, to have a model of Heaven to compare everything else to.

The task now is to learn to see past bodies and forms to such an extent as to recognize only the immortal spirit that we each are, our permanent innocent unchangeable selves, which are STILL as God created us, and which cannot ever be changed. How can immortal beings suffer and die? The suffering must be fake.

Jesus asked me to write this.

You are immortal spirit, pretending not to be. You may not think that immortality is a real thing, but it is the only reality, and everything else is unnatural.

Being immortal spirit, you are real, and nothing real can be threatened. What is immortal has no enemies, is innocent and pure, has divine health, lasts forever, is always happy, is incapable of sin or attack, cannot be hurt, is incapable of victimhood, and cannot be sick or die.

This is what you are. This is what it means to remain as God created you. God does not create things which perish and suffer and die. God gives eternal life forever, divinely protected and permanently perfect. Your soul or spirit cannot be changed. "Spirit is in a state of grace forever."

Feel this for a moment. The inability for anything to ever happen to you. The inability to be sick or dead. The inability to attack or harm. The total absence of needs of any kind. This is the true meaning of "I need do nothing". That which is immortal has no needs, lacking nothing.

That which is immortal does not need a spiritual path. It does not need magical solutions. It does not depend on anything of this world, not even food or water or air. That which is immortal is already complete, already done, already totally what it naturally is and always has been. It needs no correction or healing or help.

God created you to be permanently as God intended for you to naturally be. It is in fact 100% impossible for you to stop being the way God intended. It is impossible for you to destroy yourself or others. It is impossible for you to be attacked or hurt in any way. You cannot remove from yourself the divinity that God created you as. Nor can you put it into you or earn it or build it or get it from somewhere else.

There is a place in you where the love of God has not been forgotten, where there is perfect peace and sanity, here you are utterly invulnerable, where nothing can affect you and where you have no needs at all. You cannot undo or remove or delete this core nature - it is your eternal spirit. And this spirit is not just some esoteric concept or puff of smoke, it is everything that you are. A living being of light and love, given free will by God to create and extend in joy.

There is nothing you can do to stop being immortal. You cannot change the truth. You cannot undo God’s will or make it different. You cannot stop being alive forever. God’s will for you is eternal, permanent happiness. And God’s will is already done. It is more permanent than sin, more rock solid than matter, and has no flaws or uncertainties.

So here you are, this being who seems to be in a strange alien world, clawing at survival, trying to defend yourself from what seems to be the possibility of real threat, not remembering that it is absolutely impossible for you to change. That it is impossible that you die or suffer in any reality. That if it seems that you are experiencing anything other than perfection and immortality, it must be some kind of illusion because it cannot be true.

You literally are immortal. You are immortal spirit pretending that it’s possible to not be immortal. Pretending that reality can be threatened and that something unreal exists. Pretending that you are capable of death. Pretending that you can be victimized, that things can happen without and against your will, and that there is nothing you can do about this.

You are lying to yourself. Did you forget that you are immortal? That you have no needs and no lack and already have been given everything by God? That there is nothing else you can add to heaven but its extension? That it is literally, ultimately, absolutely impossible for sin, guilt, fear, suffering, sickness and death to ever be real? You are trying to convince yourself that the impossible is possible. You are putting on a pretty good show.

Look at the trillions of immortal beings who have pretended to come into a body, to suffer a while, and die. Every single one of those performances was fake. Not one single person ceased to exist. Not one single soul has ended. Death is a most fantastic lie. Actors in a play can pretend to demonstrate a most elaborate and convincing death, convincing even to themselves perhaps, only to suddenly get up off the stage and take a bow at the end.

You can’t die. Death isn’t real. Nothing real can be threatened, and you are real. Being immortal means living and demonstrating at all times that you are as God created you, that you are perfect invulnerable, can never be sick, cannot be hurt or suffer in any way, are not at the effect of any "causes" in the world, that you are utterly beyond the reach of death or any form of attack, that you have zero needs and have total power over everything.

I find it is always very helpful to remember the truth. To recall into my awareness the basic fact, that I and everyone else are immortal. That nothing can or has happened to anyone. That there is no sin, no suffering, and no death. This gives a sense of perspective. It is only through denial and unconsciousness that we have lost all sense of perspective and do not have a rock-solid truth to compare things to.

Having even a conceptual idea in your mind that you are immortal, and using it to contrast what you are experiencing, reveals to you what is actually happening. If it is true that you are immortal, that sense of unfair victimhood you are experiencing is immediately shown up for the fake lie and self-deceiving performance that it is.

Remembering you are immortal, when you are experiencing sickness, shows you that this sickness cannot be true or real, because the immortal cannot become sick. Recalling your immortal invulnerability when you are tempted to believe someone caused you upset, immediately incites a reality check and admittance to the fact that you can’t possibility have experienced something against your divine will. And therefore you must have made this decision yourself, to experience what you are experiencing, not matter how much it appears that someone else chose this for you.

This is not just a course in miracles. This is a course in immortality.

You think the idea of death not being real is controversial? How about the idea of real experiential and demonstrable immortality? How many people in this world believe in real death vs how many people believe in real immortality? How many people consider immortality a fantasy best left for tv shows and movies? This is a world of death believers. People come here to suffer and be sick and die. Where are the demonstrators of immortality and invulnerability and miraculous power?

Immortality is the core truth about you and about everyone. Everything else is absolutely bullshit. The biggest charade imaginable. Billions of humans pretending to demonstrate that what is immortal can die. All of it is a lie. Death is impossible. "It is the world you see that is impossible." Remember that you are immortal at all times and absolutely anything else that’s seeming to be true for you, must be a lie that you are perpetrating. Your body cannot even suffer or be sick or age or die if you use it to demonstrate your immortality.

This is the core truth of existence. God creates eternal life. Eternal life cannot be attacked. Nothing unreal exists. You cannot stop being immortal but you can pretend not to be, and you are doing a lot of pretending. You are going to have to own up to being immortal, and demonstrate it, and have it be your only acceptable state of being, on a permanent basis, if you are to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and stay there. It is a kingdom of immortality and only the immortal can live in it, and live forever. And it is where you really are already.

"You are immortal because you are eternal, and "always" must be now."

"What is the ego? But a dream of what you really are. A thought you are apart from your Creator and a wish to be what He created not. It is a thing of madness, not reality at all. A name for namelessness is all it is. A symbol of impossibility; a choice for options that do not exist. We name it but to help us understand that it is nothing but an ancient thought that what is made has immortality. But what could come of this except a dream which, like all dreams, can only end in death?"

"What has life has immortality."

When you are in this world, it seems that who and what you are, is of this world. That you are a body.

When you are in heaven, who and what you are, is of heaven. You are spirit/mind without a body. "To be without a body is to be in your natural state."

The two worlds are completely opposite. You cannot be one while being the other. You cannot live in one while living in the other. You cannot be aware of one while being aware of the other. Which you side with is your choice.

"Every decision you make is made for Heaven or for hell, and will bring you AWARENESS of what you decided FOR."

Either you are located within and made from, heaven. Or you are located within and made from hell. You are either spirit or matter. This is all there is to choose between.

Generally speaking, if you are not in any way spiritual, you will completely identify with being in this world, being a body, being mortal matter. You will confine yourself to your body and believe it is your self. And everything you do will revolve around trying to protect your fragile life and ward off inevitable death.

The idea is that, to be spiritual, you must identify as spirit. And that simply means, that while you are here having your body, you learn that you are IN and OF and FROM another world.

Everything which is true of heaven, must become your truth. All the laws of God must become the only laws you abide by. Your immortal eternal nature must be your only reality. Your invulnerability and power and fearless love must be your entire experience.

And this also means, on the flipside, that anything NOT of heaven MUST be denied. It is opposite to your heavenly nature. Bodies, planets, galaxies, space, time, limitations, all forms of suffering, even death, have to be completely denied. You must not accept them as true of yourself, or what you are made of.

This entails recognizing that this entire world is not reality. It is a dream. And everything in it is merely a dream. And none of it means anything. And none of it is valuable in any way. This world must be regarded as literally nothing, if you are to gain everything of the Kingdom.

"This world holds nothing that I want." "Teachers of God are willing to give up all the pleasures of the world." "It takes great learning to both recognize and accept that this world has nothing to give."

You cannot have it both ways. Ultimately to completely return to communion with God you MUST fully and completely and willingly embrace your entire true reality in heaven. You must wake up to what is actually real. And you must wake up FROM this dream world, leaving it behind to vanish.

While you are working your way TOWARD the goal of BEING ONLY AS GOD CREATED YOU, of knowing yourself, you will find your experience of THIS world changing. Your perception of it will change. The light of heaven will begin shining through you to illuminate your day. And you will become more loving. But this does not change any facts about what this world is or what is real

.Reaching what we call "the real world" or the "forgiven world" is just a stepping stone along the way home. It really ultimately is not important. You will pass THROUGH it, just before you enter heaven's gates. But not for a second will you look back longingly upon it or want for it to remain, when you wake up to the glory of the Kingdom.

It really is very simple in the big picture. Vigilance for the Kingdom must become your total attention. You must accept only what God has established as true, and reject everything out of accord with it. You must not believe anything the world says or suggests or demonstrates as true. You must assert the power and life of the Kingdom so that you can demonstrate resurrection and overcome death itself.

Either you are mortal or immortal. Either you accept your immortality or you deny it and pretend to die. Your choice. Nothing in the world can stop you or do ANYTHING to you. You are absolutely invulnerable permanent perfection forever. This world has nothing on you and adds nothing to you. And you cannot keep it if you are to know God. And why would you want to keep nothingness?

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world. But the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT.

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

"The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true.

I am come to tell you that the choice of which is true is not yours. If it were, you would have destroyed yourselves. But God did not will the destruction of His Creations, having created them for eternity. His Will has saved you, not from yourselves, but from your illusions of yourselves. He has saved you for yourselves. Let us glorify Him Whom the world denies, for over His Kingdom it has no power."

There are various ways that you do this. Every one of them is a form of denial, is an illusion, and is not true at all.

You can do it by attempting to demonstrate that you can be attacked. You do this by trying to attack yourself or your body, bringing about states of "sickness" which symbolize separation or which try to show that you are not immortal in some way.

You also do it be projecting ownership of everything onto someone not yourself, giving away all of your power, being irresponsible, being two-faced, lying, hating, attacking others to prove that attack has real effects, or by trying to make out that you are someone other than yourself.

You also do it by inventing an illusion of death, which tries to demonstrate that what you are can be destroyed. It cannot, but you try anyway. And when you try, even if you seem to destroy the body, it still does not destroy who you are because you cannot stop being immortal spirit.

Nothing you can do can change what God has created to last forever. He sustains your immortal spirit in an eternal, timeless act of extension. Everything that you are, is an expression of what He is - everlasting love. Your Life is your immortality. Life sustains you indefinitely and without limit. You are in a constant state of perfect health and cannot be harmed or changed or influenced in any way whatsoever.

But you still try to. This entire world and all of the bodies in it and all of the events and sicknesses, disease, war, suffering, conflict, it is all an attempt to prove that it is possible to be other than God created you. It's an attempt to prove you can die, you can suffer, you can be upset, you can be limited, you can fail to perform miracles, you can be at the effect of the will of another, you can be victimized, you can fail to have any ability whatsoever to influence the environment, and that you have no power over anything.

You've done a great job of being upset, and believing that you are upset for a good reason, that it is justified, and that you should be unhappy. The reason you are unhappy is unjustified. You've also done a great job of creating reasons and justifications for why you are unhappy, none of which are valid. You've also created a long list of grievances which all seem unresolved, because you think that they actually are important, not to mention all the important things that you think you have to do today, none of which matter.

You are immortal spirit. You are already complete. You are already as God created you. There is nothing you can add to what God created. There is nothing that has been taken away. You've already received what God has given, and it has been full and abundant and total. You are lacking nothing. There is no lack of love in you. God has not changed his mind about you. And you are still as God created you. You're done! So what the fuck is all this other bullshit? lol

Check this out.

"IMMORTALITY is HIS Will for His Son, and His Son’s will for HIMSELF. Yet God’s Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM ."

See that?

God's Son CANNOT will death for himself.

That means, it is IMPOSSIBLE to die. You can't do it.

You can PRETEND TO. You can make an illusion as if it is happening even. You can make an image of a body laying on the ground lifeless.

But that is not death.

It's fake.

It's not who you are.

You cannot die.

If you could accept that you cannot die and that you are immortal, you would actually drop ALL attempts to prove otherwise, which accounts for the entire content of the ego and all forms of sickness and suffering. This would all vanish if you would accept you are immortal, and that any effort NOT to be immortal is utterly futile.

Suicide is pointless. If you can get this idea into your mind, that you have eternal life, and that therefore suicide will not end your life, and you will keep on going, and then you will have to come back to another lifetime to keep learning that you cannot die, then you would not commit suicide. It is completely pointless and futile because it DOES NOT WORK.

All we need to do is accept that we are still as God created us, we are still immortal, death is IMPOSSIBLE, and there is nothing we can do to change God's will.

Think about that for a moment.

There is absolutely nothing you can do to change God's will. Can you feel the surrender in that? You might as well just accept it and drop everything else, if you are seeing sense.

You are an immortal being but you keep trying to prove you're not.

In sickness we attempt to prove we can be hurt.

In fear we attempt to prove we can have reason to be concerned.

In suffering we attempt to prove something can happen to us.

In death we attempt to prove we are not immortal at all.

In sin we attempt to prove we are not innocent.

In guilt we attempt to prove we are capable of malfunctioning.

In all our "human" ways, our egoic ways, we simply keep trying to prove and demonstrate that "it is true" that we're not immortal.

That is what this whole world is about. That is why we made it. It is a dream of MORTALITY. A dream of death. A world where the immortal beings come to pretend to suffer a while, wither and die, to prove they are not immortal. To destroy God's immortal Son.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"You look for permanence in the impermanent, for love where there is none, for safety in the midst of danger; immortality within the darkness of the dream of death."

"For even though it was a dream of death, you need not let it stand for this to you."

"And I behold the world that Christ would have me see, aware it ends the bitter dream of death; aware it is my Father's Call to me."

"My brother, child of our Father, this is a dream of death. "

We made this world in an attempt to prove there IS no eternal life. That we CAN be hurt, attacked, threatened, even destroyed. This whole place is one big lie. It's a huge cover up. Immortal beings attempting to die. Invulnerable beings attempting to be victims. Eternal beings suggesting their continuation is threatened.

All we need to do is own up to who and what we really are.

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

"You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do."

"This is the anti-Christ; the strange idea there is a power PAST omnipotence, a place BEYOND the infinite, a time transcending the eternal. Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

"For you will remember His guiltless Son, who did not die because he is immortal."

"What is immortal cannot BE attacked; what is but temporal HAS no effect. "

"For separate fragments must decay and die, but wholeness is immortal. It remains forever and forever like its Creator, being one with Him."

"But it can unite only with what ALREADY is at peace in you, immortal as itself."

"its likeness shines with its immortal Love."

"The graciousness of God will take them gently in, and cover all their sense of pain and loss, with the immortal assurance of their Father's Love."

"You are immortal BECAUSE you are eternal, and always MUST be now.""But the guarantee of your continuity is God's, not the ego's. And immortality is the opposite of time, for time passes away, while immortality is constant. Accepting the Atonement teaches you what immortality IS, for by accepting your guiltlessness, you learn that the past has never been, and so the future is needless.""In immortality you live forever. Would you not return your mind to this?"

"Are you a Spirit, deathless, and without the promise of corruption and the stain of sin upon you? "

"No trace of anything in time can long remain in minds that serve the timeless."

Forgiveness is rooted in your immortality. Accepting atonement means recognizing fully that you are immortal, and letting go of everything that is incompatible with your immortal nature.

"But the guarantee of your continuity is God's, not the ego's. And immortality is the opposite of time, for time passes away, while immortality is constant. Accepting the Atonement teaches you WHAT IMMORTALITY IS" UrT11J13

It is extremely simple. You simply recognize what it means to be immortal, the qualities and characteristics of that, and then compare that to the position you are trying to take. Anything which is out of accord is false and can be let go, as you remind yourself of what is true.

"Everything that stems from the ego is the natural outcome of its central belief, and the way to undo its RESULTS, is merely to recognize that their SOURCE is NOT natural, being out of accord with your TRUE nature." UrT10F5

Anything which is not in accord with, compatible with, your immortal nature in spirit, cannot be true. All you have to do is put your immortality first and foremost, and then look to see if what you are believing, experiencing, perceiving, feeling etc, is in accord with it.

A huge thing to be forgiven is the basic idea that things are happening to you which are causing you to change. It takes many forms including that other people are affecting you, someone is doing something to you, the environment is causing you to be afraid, situations are making you anxious, your body is making things difficult, etc. All various ways that you seem to be being changed.

Look to your immortality. Your immortality says you cannot change even slightly because you are always the same forever. I am immortal. If I am immortal, can it be true that I am affected by this person? Can it be true that they are making me feel this? Can it be true that I am suffering? Can it be true that I am weak and vulnerable and threatened?

What does your immortality have to say about this? You can also ask Jesus or the Holy Spirit - who are also immortal - and they can tell you the exact same things. The truth about you will set you free.

What about the secret of salvation? Basically the idea is that you cannot suffer because you are immortal. If you seem to be suffering, you must have lost track of your immortality and have started to see yourself as being affected by something. You've started to believe you can be changed, hurt, influenced.

This then means you need to look at what you are doing to yourself, because only your mind can attack itself with faulty thoughts. You must be participating in choosing to suffer, and to fake the suffering, because your immortal self cannot suffer.

The fact that you are immortal should tell you that whatever you think other people are doing to you, that can't be true, because you can't have things done to you - they're not guilty. So if things seem to be happening to you, you must be doing them to yourself, but you can't really be doing it to yourself because you can't even change yourself. So you're not guilty either.

It ALWAYS comes back to your immortality. To your self. To knowing yourself as you really are, as God created you. This is the whole point "I am not a body I am free for I am still as God created me." You are remembering what is true of you and becoming ever more clear about what is NOT POSSIBLE.

A simple line of questioning to begin any forgiveness might start: "I am immortal." You can then take it from there. If you simply reiterate the various properties and characteristics of being immortal, that alone injects so much truth into your mind that it dispels a ton of myths and lies and brings great clarity.

I am immortal. I can never change. I cannot be changed. I cannot change myself. Not even God changes me. No-one in the world is changing me. I am permanent. I will live forever. There will never be an end to my existence. I have no reason to be afraid of anything because I will never stop existing. Nothing can threaten me whatsoever because nothing can change me. I can't be affected by anyone or anything because I am immortal. This is a forgiveness process. An articulation based on a simple fact of your true nature.

Projections of guilt onto other people? It's just a way that you're trying to free yourself from guilt in a way that doesn't really work. The solution is to recognize you are immortal. If you are immortal you cannot attack or be attacked. You are invulnerable and see everyone as harmless and unharmed. You bring healing and life only. You resurrect, you do not destroy. Therefore you cannot have ever sinned, and cannot be guilty, and have no guilt to project. Neither you or the other person is guilty of anything.

How about the fact that other people are also immortal? If they are immortal, they cannot be sinning or guilty either. There can't be anything wrong with them. They can't be corrupt, they can't be sinful, they can't be broken, they can't be in fear, they can't be suffering, they can't be sick or dead, they can't be attacking or attacked.

So then there is no basis for you to project or scapegoat because you recognize they are absolutely invulnerable. What point would there be to project guilt through anger in an attempt to bind guilt into someone, if you knew this was impossible? There'd be no point even trying. You can't take away anyone's innocence.

How about you playing the role of victim? Seeing yourself as unfairly treated, victimised, hurt, abused, attacked, offended, upset, made to feel certain feelings, forced to suffer, things happening to you against your will, pain and misery? NONE of this is possible. If you are immortal, you cannot experience or be in a position where any of this can happen to you.

How can you be a victim if you cannot be attacked? You can't accuse anyone of anything if you are unattackable. How can you be hurt, if you are so invulnerable that you can't be changed in anyway? Hurt, what is that? Some kind of lie that you are not immortal, that some parts of you can be bruised and injured and damaged. Impossible for an immortal being. So you cannot be a victim, you cannot be affected, made to hurt, caused to change, defined, redefined, attacked, damaged, or made to malfunction.

This is what forgiveness is about. Getting your mind to approach the TRUTH, and to ACCEPT THE TRUTH. This is accepting the atonement. The acceptance of the truth is the acceptance of the truth ABOUT YOU. What is the truth about you? You are an absolutely immortal innocent being that lives forever and is absolutely beyond all attack and threat. Nothing real can be threatened - your immortal self is your reality. Your life is never in danger.

Keep it simple. There are many many ways that you can word and articulate forgiving ideas. Ideas designed to undo lies, to untangle cause-effect confusions, ways to try to take back errors and stop yourself from making them.

It all starts with your immortality. It all starts with you as an immortal being deciding to PRETEND that you are mortal, that you can suffer, be a victim, be hurt, be destroyed. It's you playing a game of death, and you have to take full responsibility for that and stop doing it. It's pointless anyway because not only can you not ever BE something that is destructible, like the body, you are so beyond all attack that you can never be even slightly influenced toward death.

Center on your immortal nature. Focus on it. Learn about it. Live it. Let it inform your perceptions. Let it unravel the lies and egotism in your mind. Use it as the litmus test to compare everything to. If anything in any way suggests that you are even SLIGHTLY vulnerable, weak, afraid, as though your existence is being brought into question somehow, as if you can be hurt and changed somehow, you must be listening to "the ego". ie, you are trying to pretend that you can die.

This is really all you need. Salvation comes from your one self - your immortal self. Know thyself as immortal and be free from all forms of suffering and death forever.

"The world goes AGAINST your nature, because it is out of accord with God's laws." UrT7L1

"Forgiveness, then, is an illusion, but because of its purpose, which is the Holy Spirit's, it has one difference. Unlike all other illusions it leads away from error and not toward it." UrU4A1

"Forgiveness might be called a kind of happy fiction; a way in which the unknowing can bridge the gap between their perception and the truth." UrU4A2

"Whatever is IN ACCORD with this light He retains, to strengthen the Kingdom in YOU. When it is PARTLY in accord with truth He accepts it and purifies it. But what is OUT OF ACCORD ENTIRELY He rejects by judging against. This is how He keeps the Kingdom perfectly consistent and perfectly unified." UrT6H1

"God's guarantee will hold against ALL obstacles, for it rests on certainty, and NOT contingency. IT RESTS ON YOU. And what can be more certain than the Son of God?" UrT20E9

"Yet what is it except a game you play in which identity can be denied? You are as God created you. All else but this one thing is folly to believe. In this one thought is everything set free. In this one truth are all illusions gone. In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything; the central core of its existence and its guarantee of immortality." UrW191L4

Accepting your true nature as an immortal being is the conclusion of this course. God created you immortal and you will return to your immortality. Nothing can hurt you. You cannot die. Do not try to prove otherwise or you will seem to suffer an illusion of suffering which does nothing real.

"What is immortal cannot BE attacked; what is but temporal HAS no effect."

"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."

"The miracle of creation has never ceased, having the holy stamp of immortality upon it. "

"You are immortal BECAUSE you are eternal, and always MUST be now. "

"For separate fragments must decay and die, but wholeness is immortal. It remains forever and forever like its Creator, being one with Him."

"Beyond the bodies that you interposed between you, and shining in the golden light that reaches it from the bright endless circle that extends forever, is your holy relationship, beloved of God, and holy as Himself. How still it rests, in time and yet beyond, immortal yet on earth."

"He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed."

"The graciousness of God will take them gently in, and cover all their sense of pain and loss, with the immortal assurance of their Father's Love."

"But it can unite only with what ALREADY is at peace in you, immortal as itself."

"In immortality you live forever. Would you not return your mind to this? Then practice well the thought the Holy Spirit gives you for today."

"This week we celebrate eternal life, not death. And we honor the perfect purity of the Son of God, and not his sins."

"Behold the Guide your Father gave you, that you might learn you have eternal life . For death is not your Father's Will, nor yours"

"His Son HAS BEEN redeemed from his own crucifixion, and you cannot assign to death whom God has given Eternal Life."

"What but your thoughts of misery and death obscure the perfect happiness and the Eternal Life your Father wills for you? "

"And would eternal life have been given me of the Father UNLESS He had also given it to you? When you learn to make ME manifest, YOU will never see death."

"Yet you can ask as easily for love, for happiness, and for eternal life in peace that has no ending."

"While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal life."

When I used to consider "the secret of salvation", which is the idea that you are "doing it to yourself", I could recognize the need for total responsibility. I saw that anything which I thought someone was doing to me, from the outside in, I must be doing to myself. But I didn't entirely realize a key portion of this.

What I see in it now is more. I see that we are immortal beings, who can never be attacked or hurt or damaged or upset in any way against our will. The ownership and identification with this is our true responsibility.

This lays a new foundation. Because now it means that if I am suffering, or seeming to suffer at the hands of another, or because of the world doing something to me, it must mean I have secretly attempted to stop being immortal.

The "what I a doing to myself" isn't so much the appearance of what others are doing, but is in fact the DISTANCE between my immortal self and the mortal victim self I'm portraying myself as. Between the invulnerable self and the ego. It is the traversal of that distance that I am responsible for, and which is my own attack upon myself, placing myself in a state of weakness.

Even if it may appear that the world is seeming to be the cause of something, happening to my body, inducing fear, causing effects in me, it cannot be true. These things are not put in place from the outside in, they're put in place from the inside out.

If I stop recognizing my immortal invulnerable nature, and attack myself first, I will lose track of who I am, question and doubt myself, go into uncertainty and fear, and project the idea of causation outside of myself. Then I will see myself as potentially caused by the world, instead of by God.

That faulty perception of myself, that body identification, that self denial, is something I am doing to myself. And it means I'm putting myself in a position, in a role, where I seem vulnerable and in need of defenses against a cruel and unsafe world. But I can't blame the world for being in this position, when it's me that's putting myself there.

Even more so, the world is my dream, in my mind, coming from me decision. If I dream of my body being attacked surely I have consented, and have attempted to use the body to prove I am not immortal. I have done this to myself. I cannot be attacked if I am permanent and unchangeable. Portraying myself as a victim must mean I'm attempting to destroy myself, and that is my own doing.

The responsibility is not in terms of what others appear to be doing to me from the outside in, but what I have attempted to do to my immortal self, to my unlimited mind, to render is less than whole and lacking and limited. That is an internal attack which merely is disguised behind the outward expression of that deception.

The immortal cannot suffer. The immortal cannot be sick. The immortal cannot die. The immortal cannot be attacked or hurt. The immortal cannot be upset or have their peace disturbed. The immortal are responsible because they know themselves and have owned up to their true christ nature. They no longer deceive themselves with the idea that a fictional alien will can act against them, and so their mind is not split.

The secret of salvation tells us we are responsible for all of our own suffering. It tells us that it doesn't matter what the seeming cause of suffering is, there is only one cause, and it is in our own mind. It tells us that we are doing it to ourselves. And who are we, that this is being done to? We are immortal beings. And so if we seem to suffer, we must have undermined our own invulnerability. Just as "my attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

You are not weak but strong. You are not afraid but all powerful. You are not an illusion but a reality. You are not mortal but immortal. You are not vulnerable but invulnerable. You are not destructible but permanent. You are not guilty but innocent. You are still as God created you.

It may not be obvious, but A Course In Miracles is basically trying to get you out of a state of mortality, into a state of immortality. Think about all the ways that it does this.

That you are not at the effect of the world.

That nothing in the world causes you or brings oppression or makes you sick or afraid.

That you have the power to dominate everything you see.

That your body has no power over the mind and mind is stronger than the body.

That in the rusurrecetion you overcome death entirely.

That all forms of suffering are forms of mortality/death.

That you are to dis-identify from being an illusion such as believing in the body or the world.

The fact you are at home in God, immortal and permanent, merely having a dream of death.

The teaching that your attack thoughts attack your invulnerability, that you can be attacked by nothing but your thoughts, and that without attack thoughts you are invulnerable.

The secret of salvation, that you realize you are doing everything to yourself, have made a wrong decision which caused you to not be at peace, and now you want to choose immortality again.

The application of forgiveness which is the same thing as atonement and true perception and salvation and resurrection, nothing short of overcoming death and becoming absolutely transcendent of all suffering.

"Swear not to die, you holy Son of God", clearly indicates that you as an immortal child of God should never be choosing death, which means never choosing mortality. Which means claiming your immortality.

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt", the entire teaching about what you use the body for, that death is a choice and you cannot die unless you choose to, and the use of the body to demonstrate your brother’s innocence or sinfulness, is all geared towards you acting like an immortal being not a suffering sinner.

Every single aspect of the Course is geared not merely towards you becoming peaceful and dying, or happier but sick, but in fact is aimed at taking you totally beyond all forms of suffering, death, sickness, unhappiness and vulnerability of every kind. To never again be affected by anything. Nothing short of immortality. Never again to suffer, never again to die.

This is the central core of the course. "There is no death, the Son of God is...." IMMORTAL!

Every lesson, every quote, every paragraph, is all speaking to the vast collage of illusions we have invented to try to PRETEND to be mortal in a dream of death. To pretend it is possible to die. To make-believe things that seem to crumble, decay, erode and end. An entire fiction of a world that seems to come and go, having beginnings and endings which clearly are not eternal.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world, God did not create it, for what He creates MUST BE ETERNAL as himself."

It’s not merely a matter of whether the world is real, it obviously cannot be because nothing in it has immortality. It is a dream of death, and there really is no world.

This is all over the course. Immortality, invulnerability, not being affected, permanence, peace that lasts forever, God’s creations and minds carrying on uninterrupted forever, nothing being able to attack or sin against God/reality, nothing real being affected, the Son of God being beyond death, it all points to IMMORTALITY being your totally natural state of being.

"You cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do."

This is also why "the body cannot contain you who are life". It’s also why "God cannot enter a body, nor can you join him there." This is why God’s Kingdom is an IMMORTAL LIVING FOREVER WORLD OF LIGHT.

Any time we entertain ideas of suffering, sickness, death, fear, being affected, caused, threatened, anything that suggests or even hints at us not being invulnerable and immortal, we are "playing dead". Any time we take illusions of attack, vulnerability, suffering, or any kind of non-immortal activity seriously, we are believing we are NOT immortal. And we believe this about others too when we fear for their life. That condemns us both to death, or at least tries to. No-one can really die!

Because your are immortal, you ARE still as God created you. God did not create you capable of death. Or sin. Or attack. OR murder. You cannot do any of these things in reality. So you DREAM of being in a world where all FALSE things are possible, where IMPOSSBILITIES seem possible, where everything is subject to attack and impermanence, and where death seems to strike at every thing that moves. An entire fantasy world that runs against every law of God and opposes His Will, trying to prove His children can die.

"The laws of this world go against your nature." This world goes against your IMMORTALITY.Your natural condition is to live utterly free of all attack, impervious to all suffering, incapable of death, incapable of unhappiness, and absolutely permanent in all your ways. Absolutely incapable of being attacked ever! You are not RELATIVE to life, you are ABSOLUTELY ALIVE. Forever. Nothing can affect you against your will unless YOU WILL TO BE AFFECTED. And then you are FAKING IT, because your immortality CANNOT be affected. All sickness, suffering and death is FAKE. A huge lie.

You are as permanent as God. Any attempt to believe, perceive, suggest, portray, act, think, or live otherwise, is a denial of your immortality. It’s an attempt to make believe that you are not immortal and that you can suffer. And every single form of non-immortality or vulnerability is a self-chosen, self-inflicted attack and an attempt to prove you are not immortal. And because all such attempts to change your unchangeability can never work, they are absolutely futile make-believe.

Death is futile. It has no causal effect whatsoever upon the Son of God. It does not work. Everything you are doing to make yourself suffer is a waste of time. It has no effect on your immortal spirit. And you are only your immortal spirit. Every single way that you pretend to be afraid, sick, suffering and dead, is absolutely 100% chosen by you as part of your attempt to ACT AS IF YOU CAN DIE. It’s an attempt to prove death is real and happening to you. How can death happen to someone who is IMORTAL? How can an immortal being be SICK or suffer or even unhappy in any way, thinking that something can disturb its permanent peace?

Potent questions to ask oneself:

1) Am I using this to pretend to not be immortal?

2) Why am I trying to prove I am not immortal?

3) Why am I believing that my immortality can be affected by this?

4) Does this have any power whatsoever to change what God created?

5) Why am I lying by pretending I can suffer?

6) Why am I denying that I cannot be affected by anything?

You are an immortal being, temporarily hanging out in a dream world where everything is an illusion of mortality. A world of death is obviously not the natural environment for a being of eternal life.

Yet the body can become a sign of life to those grown tired of the fetid stench of death. It can become a symbol of immortality, representing eternal life. Through its loveliness and health it can teach by demonstration with a power greater than a thousand tongues that there has been no attack, no vulnerability, no damage, no mark of sin, no evidence or proof of viciousness and no sign of evil effects. It can represent wholeness and healing and innocence and invulnerability, and thus teach this to everyone.

To awaken fully is nothing short of waking up to immortality, to eternal life in Heaven, the end of all sickness and death, the cancellation of sin and guilt, and a return to unlimited permanence. It requires the end of the body, which is nothing. "Indeed, you cannot remain in this world, with this knowledge."

NOTHING REAL CAN BE THREATENED, because it is immortal! YOU are real. You cannot be threatened! You are totally permanently alive. Forever and ever. Why do you believe you can or have been affected by anything or anyone ever? You have done nothing but attack your own inherent invulnerability, trying to pretend you can suffer. Isn’t it time to own up to being immortal?

"I am not being affected by anything or anyone."

"This is not changing me at all."

"No-one is doing anything to me."

"I remain as God created me."

"Nothing can hurt me. I cannot be hurt."

"There is nothing to fear because I live forever."

"My eternal life cannot be threatened, so I am at peace."

"God guarantees I will live forever."

"Nothing in the world is changing me in any way."

"No-one is making me feel anything."

"I am not a victim because I cannot be attacked or hurt."

"Nothing has ever happened to change me."

"I cannot change myself - I am what God wants."

"I am not sick and I cannot die."

"I live forever in God."

"I am always immortal and forever eternal."

"I am immortal right now. Nothing can change this."

"I have not changed since God created me."

"I am permanent and nothing temporary is happening."

"I cannot suffer in any way."

"I cannot experience loss or gain because I have everything."

"God himself is protecting my existence."

"Everyone I know and see is immortal as well."

"My innocence cannot be taken away, nor can theirs."

"I cannot change anyone's immortal self."

"I cannot do anything to anyone, so I cannot sin or be guilty."

"I have never attacked anyone. Everyone is immortal."

"The truth about others is their immortal soul."

"There are no victims anywhere, everyone is safe in God."

"No-one has any power over me, not even God."

"I am already enlightened in the light of God."

"I live forever in the love of God."

"God's immortality is my immortality."

"I am life itself. I will never die."

"Accepting the Atonement teaches you WHAT IMMORTALITY IS" UrT11J13

Let's look at the really big picture.

You are an immortal being with eternal life that lives in God forever. You cannot change or be changed. You are permanent and fixed. You cannot be altered, you cannot suffer, you cannot be affected, you cannot be hurt or damaged, you cannot be sick or die. Nothing can ever happen to you or disturb your peace. You are real, and nothing real can be threatened.

The so-called separation from God was an attempt to BE MORTAL. To invent death. It is a belief in EVERY single form imaginable of something OPPOSITE to your immortal nature. An insinuation, a lie, and a denial, that you can in fact "be changed", that you can be affected, victimised, hurt, damaged, broken, or even made to be sick, or even destroyed completely by death.

The entire world of space and time and everything in it was entry into a "dream of death", in which every single aspect is part of the attempt to believe that you are NOT immortal.

Even the slightest hint of fear is evidence of believing that you might not live forever. The slightest twinge of sickness is an attempt to PROVE that you can be hurt. The merest disturbance to your total peace signals a sense that somehow, in some way, your eternal extension and permanence MIGHT be in question.

And so as we entered into the separation, the tiny mad idea, we thought to ourselves that MAYBE we might not last forever. Maybe we could be changed, maybe we could alter ourselves even, maybe we could be changed by something other than ourselves. And maybe this would bring into question who and what we are, questioning even our permanence and eternal life.

This gave rise of course to fear, because the merest hint of a belief that you might not live forever induces a sense of threat to your existence, which frightens you. So we entered the "detour into fear", the "dream of death", an attempt to play a game of mortality.

We made this world, came to this world, to question our very NATURE. To draw into doubt what we are, and whether we can be what we are. We undermined ourselves. We attacked our own invulnerability. We tried to make ourselves into something that COULD be attacked, could be hurt, could suffer in some way.

So now when you look at the world and you look at ALL the massive number of forms of suffering, all fears, all victimhood, all sense of threat and danger, all sicknesses and mental illnesses, all death and destruction, every problem, all conflicts and competitions, all war and disagreement, every single nuance of body identification and believing you might be affected by something, is ALL merely a symptom of "trying to die". Trying to NOT BE IMMORTAL.

The solution to all this madness - the acceptance of the atonement - requires us to RELINQUISH DEATH in all its many forms. It requires us to ACCEPT once again that we are PURELY AND ONLY immortal beings with eternal life. It requires us to completely reject EVERY single little speck of a belief that says anything to the contrary.

All victimhood, all fears, all attack, all guilts and sins, all sense of suffering, all sense of threat and danger, all bodily identification, all belief in separations and conflicts, even the belief in change, all of it has to be questioned and let go. So that ALL that remains of you, all that you ARE, is your PURE immortal eternal self - the Christ - the soul, which resides in heaven with God PERMANENTLY safe and permanently alive.

You are life itself. You are eternal life. You are immortality. You are extension. You are the openness to never-ending. And because you know deep in your being that you are absolutely BEYOND all possible threats to your eternal nature, you are in a state of absolute peace and happiness. Not a single hint of threat, no danger, no concerns, no problems, no doubts, no suffering, no possibility of changing, not even the slightest hint of death in any form whatsoever.

You continue on. You are the immortal son of God. You have lived forever and you will always live forever. This is the central CORE TRUTH that the course is leading us to. Wake up to KNOW THYSELF AS YOU ARE IN GOD. The perfect pure immortal eternal being that is utterly beyond every form of death and every form of suffering forever, in total peace and absolute certainty. There is no death, the Son of God is free.

"This is the anti-Christ; the strange idea there is a power PAST omnipotence, a place BEYOND the infinite, a time transcending the eternal. Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die." URT29I

"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." UrW191L9

"Judgment is but a toy, a whim, the senseless means to play the idle game of death in your imagination." UrT20I7

"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." UrT29G1

"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." UrW139L6

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do." UrT9K8

"The graciousness of God will take them gently in, and cover all their sense of pain and loss, with the immortal assurance of their Father's Love." UrT14E4

"You are immortal BECAUSE you are eternal, and always MUST be now." UrT11J12

"What is immortal cannot BE attacked; what is but temporal HAS no effect." UrT25H5

"My brothers, children of our Father, this is a DREAM of death. " UrT19J7

"And we will sleep no more and dream of death. " UrW191L10

"For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever." UrU5A7

"You are God’s Son. In IMMORTALITY you live forever."

"The Son of Life cannot be killed. He is IMMORTAL as his Father. What he is cannot be changed."

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has IMMORTALITY."

"You are as God created you. All else but this one thing is folly to believe. In this one thought is everything set free. In this one truth are all illusions gone. In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything; the central core of its existence and its guarantee of IMMORTALITY."

"Beyond the bodies that you interposed between you, and shining in the golden light that reaches it from the bright endless circle that extends forever, is your holy relationship, beloved of God, and holy as Himself. How still it rests, in time and yet beyond, IMMORTAL yet on earth."

"Salvation is God’s justice. It restores to your awareness the wholeness of the fragments you perceive as broken off and separate. And it is this that overcomes the fear of death. For separate fragments must decay and die, but wholeness is IMMORTAL."

"Yet time has still one gift to give in which true knowledge is reflected in a way so accurate its image shares its unseen holiness; its likeness shines with its IMMORTAL Love."

"Your present trust in Him is the defence which promises a future undisturbed, without a trace of sorrow, and with joy which constantly increases as this life becomes a holy instant, set in time, but heeding only IMMORTALITY."

"To change is to attain a state unlike the one in which you found yourself before. There IS no change in IMMORTALITY, and Heaven knows it not."

"Into this empty space, from which the GOAL of sin has been removed, is Heaven free to be remembered. Here its peace can come, and perfect healing take the place of death. 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."

"Whatever is perceived as means for truth SHARES in its holiness, and rests in light as safely as Itself. Nor will that light go out when it is gone. Its holy purpose GAVE it IMMORTALITY, setting another light in Heaven, where your creations recognize a gift from YOU, a sign that you have NOT forgotten them."

" In your brother is the light of God’s eternal promise of your IMMORTALITY. See HIM as sinless, and there can BE no fear in you."

"Faith in the eternal is ALWAYS justified, for the eternal is forever kind, infinite in its patience, and wholly loving. It will accept you wholly, and give you peace. But it can unite only with what ALREADY is at peace in you, IMMORTAL as itself."

"Yet for all the wild insanity inherent in the whole IDEA of sin, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. For the wages of sin IS death, and how can the IMMORTAL die?"

"The miracle of creation has never ceased, having the holy stamp of IMMORTALITY upon it. This is the Will of God for all creation, and all creation joins in willing this."

"In the temple, holiness waits quietly for the return of them that love it. For the Presence knows they will return to purity and to grace. The graciousness of God will take them gently in, and cover all their sense of pain and loss, with the IMMORTAL assurance of their Father’s Love."

"For you will remember His guiltless Son, who did not die because he is IMMORTAL."

"You are IMMORTAL BECAUSE you are eternal, and always MUST be now."

"But the guarantee of your continuity is God’s, not the ego’s. And IMMORTALITY is the opposite of time, for time passes away, while IMMORTALITY is constant. Accepting the Atonement teaches you WHAT IMMORTALITY IS, for by accepting your guiltlessness, you learn that the past has never been, and so the future is needless."

"IMMORTALITY is HIS Will for His Son, and His Son’s will for HIMSELF. Yet God’s Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM ."

"IMMORTALITY is a constant state. It is as true now as it ever was or will be, because it implies NO CHANGE AT ALL."

Practicing forgiveness is really practicing immortality. Because you are an immortal being, you cannot be hurt or attacked or upset by anything. You are literally incapable of suffering.

The whole idea of being a victim is absolutely alien to your nature. The idea that other people have done something to you, is a total joke. The notion that you can be hurt or made to be sick is an absolute lie.

The whole reason you find other people to be not guilty is because they CANNOT have done anything to you, due to your absolute invulnerability. There is no sin - this is the whole point of it. Nothing real can be threatened so no-one can sin against anyone's immortal soul.

It's not just about sort of low-level things like taking back projections and trying not to guilt people and not judging and all that. When you ask yourself WHY you are doing that, what it's based on, it becomes clear it's based on the fact of your absolute invulnerability in God.

Forgiveness is a SYMBOL of immortal life, endless changeless eternal life. As you practice affirming what is TRUE, you are affirming your invulnerable nature. You can't be blaming anyone for anything because this insinuates that you've died a little bit.

Ultimately we're all here playing a game of death, pretending to be something that can die, making it die, to pretend that we're dying, when all along we're not even capable of dying. Every time we position ourselves as victimized or attacked or hurt we're trying to make out that something can happen to change God's perfect permanent creation. It's impossible.

We should be telling ourselves with regard to all the things of the world, all forms of attack, or forms of sickness and suffering, THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE. It cannot be true and it cannot be happening to immortal beings. It is not only not true, it is not a part of you, or a part of anyone.

This reveals that all suffering is OUTSIDE of you and is NOT yourself. All upset feelings are not YOUR feelings. All guilts and fears are not being had by YOU. How can someone who is absolutely perfect forever have such things be a part of themselves?

You are pure life. You are eternal. You can't even change or be changed by anyone or anything. God guarantees you will exist the same forever. You will always be. Nothing can change this. Not one thing in this entire world can influence your immortality even slightly.

"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." UrT29G1

"The body can be healed as an effect of true forgiveness. Only that can give remembrance of immortality, which is the gift of holiness and love." UrS3B3

"Brother, ****there is no death. And this you learn when**** you but wish to ****show your brother that you had no hurt of him****. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

Here, Jesus reminds us that forgiveness is based on immortality, and therefore on eternal life. When you SHOW your brother, ie relate to him, in such a way that you demonstrate that he has done nothing to you whatsoever, you are expressing the idea that you are invulnerable.

When you show another that you "had no hurt of him", regardless of what he seemed to do, you're turning the other cheek and saying, hey, you didn't do anything to me. I am completely unchanged and completely unaffected. I am still as God created me. And from that viewpoint, you are expressing your immortality because you're continuing to be unaffected.

This is also a reference to Jesus demonstrating his resurrection, in that even when people tried to kill him off, he showed them that they had done nothing to him, and he did not hold it against them. He didn't condemn them or blame them or try to make them guilty. He literally physically demonstrated that they had not done anything at all, and his mind was completely invulnerable. He was out of reach of the ego and of death.

When you assert that you are so immortal that nothing has hurt you, the only thing left to express is love. If someone hasn't done anything to you, you will feel loving toward them. If the world has never done anything to you, you will love it. You have grounds for love and thus for forgiveness because your forgiveness is a recognition that there has not been a sin. You have not been attacked.

When someone seems to do something and it seems offensive or hurtful or triggering or an outright attempted assault or murder, it is your task to show that person that they have done nothing to you. Both in terms of your mind/spirit being unscathed, but also then demonstrated through the body to show them they have done nothing.

Forgiveness is not REAL or complete until the body has also been healed and lines up with the mind's attitude that everyone is still innocent and unharmed, thus healed. Showing your brother literally your resurrected body PROVES he has not sinned, symbolizes innocence, and points to HIS innocence, teaching him that HE is also healed.

When someone's message to you is, "I attack and destroy you", your message to them has to be "You have done nothing to me at all and I'm still in a state of love." It's a sense of imperviousness where things just "flow off your back" because your inner strength knows you cannot be hurt. And you don't have guilt that needs projecting. And you don't use people as scapegoats to get rid of it. You just remain in your immortal invulnerable state and nothing can harm you.

Any hint of a belief in your mind that someone HAS done something to you, will automatically produce a justification for anger, and thus for projection of guilt. Believing you have BEEN attacked, IS an attack upon yourself, condemning yourself and using something external to insinuate that you have stopped being immortal. To believe someone has hurt you is to hurt yourself. Only by believing you are COMPLETELY INVULNERABLE can you enter into the state of total forgiveness, reflecting your immortality and protecting the body from death.

Immortality is the will of God for you.

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt?"

"Turning the other cheek does NOT mean that you should submit to violence without protest. ***It means that you cannot be hurt***, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness. ***Show him that he CANNOT hurt you***, and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself."

"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. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. ***IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt***, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."

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

"Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die."

"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."

"For you will remember His guiltless Son, who did not die because he is immortal."

"What is immortal cannot BE attacked"

"You are immortal BECAUSE you are eternal, and always MUST be now."

"Accepting the Atonement teaches you WHAT IMMORTALITY IS, for by accepting your guiltlessness, you learn that the past has never been, and so the future is needless."

If we realize that we are immortal beings, we must also realize that we are perfect. Being immortal means living forever, which is only possible if you never change. Being changeless is part of reality, and it's what makes it impossible for anything to happen to you to persuade you away from eternal life.

But upon realizing this you may also come to realize that you are immortal because of God. It is God who sustains you permanently in his mind. It is God who protects you with his infinite power and permanence. It is God who gave you eternal life in your creation. And it is because of God that you live forever.

Then you can go further to recognize that if you need merely acknowledge and accept your true nature, to know thyself, as God created you originally without modification, then it becomes obvious that God already gave you perfection.

When you were created, you were already given everything to make you live forever, be happy forever, be whole and healthy forever, be invulnerable forever. Every one of your immortal attributes is a gift from God.

Then you come to realize that in acknowledging your immortality, you are also therefore acknowledging that you are ONLY immortal because of God. And this goes further to realize that you are ONLY what God wills that you be. It is because of him that you are what you are.

And in this acknowledgement there is the recognition that God created you, God gifted you and gave you, and everything you are and have is from God. And that means, ultimately, that God is you creator or father. So by acknowledging your true nature you automatically start to become aware that you are not only perfect, you are perfect because of Him, and you we already created to BE perfect from the start.

Then it's a matter of appreciation and gratitude to God, acknowledging God as your creator, and realizing that you don't need to DO ANYTHING in order to become perfect. You merely need accept a perfection that God already put in place, and surrender all your attempts to redefine or improve yourself. You need only be as God created you to be and simply be true to yourself.

That's an act of acceptance of the atonement, because now you're simply settling into accepting that you've been perfect from the start, because of God. It's like saying, instead of getting my perfection from the world, I now realize it comes from God. And instead of having to do something to earn it or turn myself into it, I just need to be as God intended.

God has already given me my perfection. I need but accept and receive it and allow it to be wholly true. And accept nothing else as a substitute. I don't even need to do anything to make it true, I just need to let go of trying to make it false.

I am not affected by anyone.

No-one has caused me to be upset.

I am responsible for everything I am feeling.

I am choosing to be this way myself.

Nobody has done anything to me at all.

I have never been hurt by anyone.

The world has never done anything to me.

I am not caused by anyone or anything outside of me.

I have no enemies or attackers.

I am immortal and eternal and invulnerable.

I am not a victim of this world at all.

I am not vulnerable to attack.

No-one has ever attacked me, they are all innocent.

This world is not really happening and its not happening to me.

There are no problems.

I do not need to suffer.

Everyone is innocent and so am I.

I am immortal spirit.

I live forever and cannot be harmed.

Nothing has happened to me.

I am still as God created me.

I am love.

I am immortal.

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.

In this world, "forgiveness is an earthly form of love". What that means is that REAL love is of Heaven, and on earth the best we can do is a REFLECTION of love projected into the mirror of the world. This reflection is heaven-LIKE, but is not heaven itself.

"Earth can reflect heaven or hell" means that the mirror of the world can reflect an IMAGE of heaven or hell in it. Images are not the real thing, but they REPRESENT the real thing and point to it. They act as symbols, and ALL images are symbolic.

Forgiveness itself is therefore an 'image' or reflection of heaven, and therefore is SYMBOLIC OF HEAVEN. It is a representation of heaven within this world, and POINTS TO the real heaven that it symbolizes.

We can then say that, the state of forgiveness, atonement, true-perception, salvation, right-mindedness, miracle-mindedness, sanity, the face of christ, the real world etc..... this is all one SYMBOL of heaven. And being a symbol, it must be heaven LIKE.

To be heaven like is to be SIMILAR to how you are in heaven. Holy Relationships reflect our real relationships in heaven, in which you are in unconditional love with EVERY member of the sonship. Miracles reflect your interpersonal relations, in which you are united with your brother. And forgiveness corresponds to a harmless attitude, devoid of sin and attack.

So what we can simply say is, you are supposed to be heaven-like, while on the earth. So if being heaven like is to be IMMORTAL, then you are to be immortal-like while on the earth. In your real immortality you are invulnerable to suffering, nothing can affect you against your will, you cannot be hurt or made to be sick or dead, and you have permanent life. You must therefore REFLECT this symbolically on earth by demonstrating that you are invulnerable to the world.

This is why in "forgiveness" we try to take an approach that "I am not at the effect of the world" and "no one is doing this to me, I'm doing it to myself" and "I can be hurt by nothing" and "nothing in the world can bring oppression or make me sick" and all these other various forms of being CAUSE, NOT EFFECT.

The whole reason we're trying not to accuse others of sinning against us, is because in truth we cannot BE sinned against, because we are immortal. Other's can't be to blame for hurting you, because you cannot BE hurt. The world cannot be sinful or the cause of your suffering, because you CANNOT really suffer. No-one else can have power over you, because you are ALL POWERFUL. And not even sickness or death can "happen to you" because YOU ARE IMMORTAL.

So it's not just that we're trying not to accuse others, it's that in truth we have absolutely no grounds for believing that we can even BE attacked or be caused against our will. We are immortal beings, and when we're getting into "something's wrong with me" or "you did this to me" we're lying to ourselves and pretending to be MORTAL. Only those who are mortal can be vulnerable, suffer, be attacked, be weakened, be made sick, or be caused to die.

Forgiveness therefore is a SYMBOL OF IMMORTALITY and is a state in which you are as close to your actual immortality as possible. It's a state of invulnerability, where even the body can no longer be sick or die, and where you are completely free from all attack. You do not attack yourself, and you have no belief in sin. You see sinlessness in yourself and in the world and in everyone, because immortal beings HAVE to be sinless. And immortality is innocence.

You can't BE hurt. You can't really suffer. You can't really BE sick. And the Son of God certainly can NEVER die. So what's the point with all this fake suffering and fake sickness and fake death? "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt" .... but you CAN'T be hurt. Even when you seem to hurt yourself it does NOTHING to your soul. You have NEVER BEEN HURT and you CANNOT BE HURT. Adopting that attitude is in alignment with your immortal soul.

"But the Face of Christ is the great symbol of forgiveness. It is salvation. It is the symbol of the real world. Whoever looks on this no longer sees the world. He is as near to Heaven as is possible outside the gate. Yet from this gate it is no more than just a step inside. It is the final step. And this we leave to God.

It is a symbol, too, but as the symbol of His Will alone it cannot be divided. And so the Unity that it reflects becomes His Will. It is the only thing still in the world in part, and yet the bridge to Heaven."

"The real world is a symbol, like the rest of what perception offers. Yet it stands for what is opposite to what you made."

"But a RISEN Christ becomes the symbol of the Son of God's forgiveness upon HIMSELF; the sign he looks upon himself as healed and whole."

"The "spiritual eye" is symbolic, and therefore NOT a device for knowing. It IS, however, a means of right perception, which brings it into the proper domain of the miracle, but NOT of revelation."

"Those who have learned to offer ONLY healing, because of the reflection of holiness in them, are ready at last for Heaven. There, holiness is not a reflection, but rather the ACTUAL CONDITION of what was but reflected TO them here. God is no image, and His creations, as part of Him, hold Him in them in truth. They do not merely REFLECT the truth, for THEY ARE truth."

"But eternity ITSELF is beyond ALL time. Reach out of time and touch it, with the help of its reflection IN you, and you will turn FROM time to holiness, as surely as the reflection of holiness calls everyone to lay all guilt aside. Reflect the peace of Heaven HERE, and bring this world to Heaven. For the REFLECTION of truth draws everyone TO truth. And as they enter INTO it, they leave ALL reflections behind. In Heaven, reality is SHARED, and not reflected. By sharing its reflection HERE, its truth becomes the only perception which the Son of God accepts. And thus, remembrance of His Father dawns on him, and he can no longer be satisfied with anything but his own reality."

"I am forever an effect of God."

While it is wonderful to reflect on your truly divine attributes, such as your immortality, invulnerability, permanence and unchangeability, we should also recognize that the ONLY reason you have these attributes is because of something other than yourself.

It is purely because of God that you are immortal. God is the one who is causing you to be what you are. You are eternal because of him, not because of yourself. You are permanent and unchangeable because of him. You are protected and safe because of him. You can never die because of him.

You are an effect of God. God causes you to exist. His will puts you in place and holds you in place forever. He wills what you be, and you have absolutely no say in this. Nor can anything in heaven or earth ever change this fact of what you are. God's will cannot be opposed and nothing can ever act against it.

You did not exist when God created you, so you had no input into what you were created to be. God himself, and only himself, decided what you are and what he wanted you to be. He extended himself as thought and life to create you and gave you everything that you are. You have absolutely nothing that does not come from God, and everything you have is inherited. You have not gathered up extra stuff, made yourself out of other things, nor added a single thing to what God has created you to be.

Jesus: "There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The main difference between us as yet is that I have NOTHING ELSE."

You only have what you have been GIVEN by God, and you can only be what God has given you to be. You have been given AS a blessing to the whole Kingdom. God blessed creation by creating you as a gift. You are exactly what GOD intends that you be, and you can never change this. God creates you, causes you, maintains you, and keeps you going.

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind."

The only reason you are immortal is because God has GIVEN you immortality and sustains your immortality for you. The only reason you are sinless is because "My sinlessness is guaranteed by God", meaning that God himself makes it impossible for you to be anything other than innocent. God gave you his own innocence and shared it with you, and so you must be innocent because he is.

Everything about you is inherited from your creator and is shared with him. This does NOT mean that God handed over some things to you and let them go. It does not mean God died off and you got an inheritance afterwards. Nor does it mean God was depleted by giving everything to you. What it does mean is that the giving to you is active and ongoing, that you SHARE IN what you have WITH him, all the time and always, such that while it is your inheritance, it is STILL HIS as well.

"I am forever host to God."

"Love created my like itself"

So love created you loving, immortality created you immortal, invulnerability created you to be invulnerable, innocence created you to be innocent, perfection created you perfect, peace created you peaceful, light created you light, eternity created you eternal, unchangeability created you unchangeable, the absolute created you absolute, holiness created you holy, and happiness created you happy.

It is because of God that you are what you are, and because of no-one else. This is why you naturally are completely grateful to God because you ONLY have what HE has given you, and he has given you everything.

"God loves His Son forever, and His Son RETURNS his Father's love forever."

The ego would like to claim that you are immortal, but it would like to do it in such a way as to say God has nothing to do with it. That you aren't immortal because of him, but that you are a standalone independently immortal being in your own right, and because of yourself. It wants to claim credit for God's work. In this way the ego aggrandizes itself and inflates itself pretending to be like the sons of God or God himself but without God's causation. Without acknowledging God as your father.

To recognize you are immortal, permanent and unchangeable, you have to also acknowledge God is your creator. You are protected BY God and he does not allow anything to happen to you. Not only are you invulnerable because God says you are, you are invulnerable because he causes you to be invulnerable, and because you share HIS invulnerability.

"It is God's Will that nothing touch His Son except Himself, and nothing else comes nigh unto him. He is as safe from pain as God Himself, Who watches over him in everything."

"And thus has God protected still His Son, even in error."

"God is my strength. Freedom is his gift."

So because God is immortal and invulnerable, innocent and holy, perfect and permanent, unchangeable and absolute, so are you. He has created you by sharing himself with you, and you have inherited all his attributes. You are forever a host to him, and therefore he is in you. What is yours, is ALSO his, because it is shared with him. You have nothing exclusive of your own, you only have what you have been GIVEN. And you must share it in order to keep it.

This means that you have to give life and immortality and love and innocence and peace and freedom and unchangeability, in order to retain it in your mind. It must be shared. If it is not shared, you close it off to yourself and stop sharing IN it. God's gifts are given to you, as you, but also THROUGH you. Because YOU are a gift of God that is being given BY God TO OTHERS. What you have received from God, you have to pass on, as in the "pay it forward" idea.

This is why EXTENSION (of creation) is natural to all of God's creations. God extends himself to give himself to you, so that you can give God to others. Everyone shares in everything all the time. You are permanent because God is permanent and his permanence is yours. You are unchangeable because God cannot be changed. You are immortal because God is immortal. You can never die because God is eternal life.

Therefore you MUST still be exactly as God created you to be, originally and without flaw, without distortion, without degradation or decay. You must STILL be wholly innocent because of God's guarantee of your sinlessness, which is his own. You must still be perfect and immaculate and unharmed and unchanged. And not one single thing in all the world has ever altered what you are ever so slightly. You are the will of God, and what God wills lasts forever. "Lesson 326 "I am forever an Effect of God."

"Father, I was created in Your Mind, a holy Thought that never left its home. I am forever Your Effect, and You forever and forever are my Cause. As You created me I have remained. Where You established me I still abide, and all Your attributes abide in me because it is Your Will to have a Son so like his Cause that Cause and Its Effect are indistinguishable. Let me know that I am an Effect of God, and so I have the power to create like You. And as it is in Heaven, so on earth. Your plan I follow here, and at the end I know that You will gather Your Effects into the tranquil Heaven of Your Love, where earth will disappear, and separate things unite in glory as the Son of God."

Even though you are perfectly safe in God and are surrounded and infused with impenetrable love, you still believe that there are lots of reasons to be afraid and concerned.

Even though you are immortal spirit and you can never die and you will and are living forever in an endless sea of eternal life, you believe that you are set to die and to inevitably meet some kind of end.

Even though God loves you absolutely and unconditionally and universally and constantly, being incapable of stopping loving you for any reason whatsoever, you still believe that you've done a bunch of shitty stuff that prove why God finds you unworthy and that you cannot be loved.

Even though there is absolutely no threat or danger or reason to be afraid about anything because you're absolutely perfectly protected in God's heart and immersed in permanent invulnerability, you still believe you're some kind of frail, weak, vulnerable and infectious blight that should be riddled with disease and suffering.

You are immortal spirit, pretending to be mortal.

You are perfectly safe, pretending to be afraid.

You are absolutely loved, pretending to be unworthy.

You are completely whole, pretending to be broken.

It's a funny game, the immortal Son of God is playing, acting as if it's really true that you are no longer the Son of God.

Nothing has changed. Nothing has happened. You haven't stopped being as God created you.

The cat is out of the bag. Meow!

Nothing real can be threatened.

If this is true, it means God cannot be threatened.

It does not mean that God is threatened but handles it or recovers. It means God literally is incapable of being hurt, threatened, or damaged in any way. Absolutely invulnerable, impervious, immortal. Incapable of suffering or sickness or death.

There is something about God which makes God impossible to be threatened.

God is permanent. God cannot change. God cannot be changed. There is no will capable of willing against God's will or changing God's will. You cannot change God's mind, and you cannot change what God is. The whole "separation idea" is the fantasy that it IS possible, which is untrue.

Now.

If nothing real can be threatened, this means that if you do not choose to suffer or die, there must be a way that this is IMPOSSIBLE. It's not just wishful thinking or denial. It literally must mean, there is a state you can get into in which it is literally 100% absolutely physically and metaphysically IMPOSSIBLE for you to be hurt, affected, changed, or harmed in any way. Like, even more written in stone than the laws of physics. Built into the fabric of existence, even beyond the quantum level.

It does not mean like, this is "a nice idea", but you can't live it. Nor is it impractical. Nor is it something you can't experience. Nor is it wishful thinking. Nor is it a hopeless cause due to the inevitability of death.

Nothing real can be threatened because what is real is permanent and cannot be changed by anything, not even by God.

So you, who are immortal, cannot be changed. Ok? You cannot die. Because you are real. And nothing real can even be threatened, at all.

So this means, if you get this, that LITERALLY, you cannot be threatened or hurt in any way.

It also means, LITERALLY, that YOU CANNOT DIE unless you attempt to PRETEND that you can die. Because even though the secret to salvation tells you that you are doing stuff to yourself, you CANNOT EVEN destroy yourself. You can pretend you are. You can dream you are. You can go all the way to make death seem to happen. But it cannot happen to YOU. You are NOT that which dies. So it's fake.

You literally cannot die. Ok? This is what the Course is teaching. You are immortal spirit. You cannot be threatened and you cannot die and there is no real death and all sickness is a lie. How can the immortal become mortal or at the effect of anything? It's impossible.

There is no death. The son of God is free.

What you are, what everyone is, is only that which God has given you to be. There is no other truth about you. The only truth about you is the truth you have inherited from God, who is the only truth.

Since God is immortal and God has created you, you are immortal. You cannot be anything else. You cannot be mortal.

Since God created you to be permanent, nothing can ever interrupt or end your permanence. You cannot be attacked, degraded, changed, damaged, manipulated, destroyed, made to suffer, to be sick or dead.

It is simply literally IMPOSSIBLE that who you really are can ever be sick. There can never ever be anything wrong with you. You were created perfect by God and you are still perfect.

So if it seems that sickness is showing up, and in light of the fact that it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to be sick, the sickness CANNOT be telling the truth. It cannot be real. It cannot be actually happening.

Everything the sickness suggests HAS to be an illusion, some kind of fiction. It can't even be there. It can have no reality, no truth, no validity, no function, no value, no true purpose, no meaning, nothing. It is literally nothing because there is no sickness.

This is how we must regard all sickness, whether seemingly in ourselves or others. Sickness must be recognized as IMPOSSIBLE. The Son of God cannot become sick, get sick, contract illness, be infected, or become diseased. God's son is perfect and immortal forever.

If sickness is showing up, a lie is showing up. It has to be recognized as false. Sickness is not true. Everything about it must be a deception. It must be a fake sickness. Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing real can become sick.

When the illusion of sickness is fully recognized as false, and as impossible, and that this must mean it is LITERALLY NOT THERE, the power of God can shine through and ASSERT LIFE.

Resurrection is the assertion of life, and it has tremendous power because there is truth in it. Life is reality. Life is truth. Life is immortal. To assert that your immortal being is the only truth, is to assert and cause life. Anything that was "not alive" must resurrect. Anything that "was sick" must be overridden.

You cannot die. "You are immortal and you cannot die." "There is no death, the Son of God is free." You can never die. You will never die. You have never died. You are absolutely beyond the reach of all lies of sin and guilt and suffering and punishment.

Simply ask yourself, this simple comparison. If I am immortal and perfect forever, can it be possible that this sickness is real? Either the sickness is real, or the immortality is real. They can't both be true. As you side with the immortality, the sickness has to go.

"Did God create the mortal and corruptible?"

"I will awaken from the dream that I am mortal, fallible and full of sin, and know I am the perfect Son of God."

"You were not born to die."

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"

Health, is simply alignment with your true nature. It is simply "being immortal". By being your true self, you can never die. By being true to yourself, you cannot suffer. Being as God created you, and not trying to be anything opposite or contradictory, there can be no sickness in you.

Using denial, through the proper use of denial, you should reject sickness and death. You should assert that only eternal life is true. You should assert that only eternal life is POSSIBLE, because it is all that God willed there to be. And in this recognition, you should recognize that sickness and death are simply NOT POSSIBLE.

When it seems like sickness is happening, that a little death is taking hold, something illusory must be happening. It can't be actually happening. It can seem to be happening. There can be symptoms and signs and pains and disfigurements and seeming malfunctions and lacks and deprivations and decay etc. But these CANNOT be possible.

"There is no pain in God and therefore none in me."

A son of God cannot be sick, otherwise God would have to be sick, because a son of God is only the inherited attributes of the father. If sickness is real, God is sick, and is the God of sickness. This is what the ego believes in.

Through the assertion of your immortal nature, you express love, which is life. You express power, which is life. You express miraculousness, which is life. "Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life." Miracles break all the laws of spacetime which say that sickness is possible and happening. Miracles override the laws of physics. Miracles heal and undo all sickness and death.

"T-10.III.3. To believe that a Son of God can be sick is to believe that part of God can suffer. 2 Love cannot suffer, because it cannot attack. 3 The remembrance of love therefore brings invulnerability with it. 4 Do not side with sickness in the presence of a Son of God even if he believes in it, for your acceptance of God in him acknowledges the Love of God he has forgotten. 5 Your recognition of him as part of God reminds him of the truth about himself, which he is denying. 6 Would you strengthen his denial of God and thus lose sight of yourself? 7 Or would you remind him of his wholeness and remember your Creator with him?"

"To believe a Son of God is sick is to worship the same idol he does. 2 God created love, not idolatry. 3 All forms of idolatry are caricatures of creation, taught by sick minds too divided to know that creation shares power and never usurps it. 4 Sickness is idolatry, because it is the belief that power can be taken from you. 5 Yet this is impossible, because you are part of God, Who is all power."

"You made the god of sickness, and by making him you made yourself able to hear him. 5 Yet you did not create him, because he is not the Will of the Father. 6 He is therefore not eternal and will be unmade for you the instant you signify your willingness to accept only the eternal."

"You can give up the god of sickness for your brothers; in fact, you would have to do so if you give him up for yourself. 5 For if you see the god of sickness anywhere, you have accepted him. 6 And if you accept him you will bow down and worship him, because he was made as God's replacement. 7 He is the belief that you can choose which god is real. 8 Although it is clear this has nothing to do with reality, it is equally clear that it has everything to do with reality as you perceive it."

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

"You can do anything I ask. 2 I have asked you to perform miracles, and have made it clear that miracles are natural, corrective, healing and universal. 3 There is nothing they cannot do, but they cannot be performed in the spirit of doubt or fear. 4 When you are afraid of anything, you are acknowledging its power to hurt you. 5 Remember that where your heart is, there is your treasure also. 6 You believe in what you value. 7 If you are afraid, you are valuing wrongly. 8 Your understanding will then inevitably value wrongly, and by endowing all thoughts with equal power will inevitably destroy peace. 9 That is why the Bible speaks of "the peace of God which passeth understanding." 10 This peace is totally incapable of being shaken by errors of any kind. 11 It denies the ability of anything not of God to affect you. 12 This is the proper use of denial. 13 It is not used to hide anything, but to correct error. 14 It brings all error into the light, and since error and darkness are the same, it corrects error automatically.

T-2.II.2. True denial is a powerful protective device. 2 You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. 3 This kind of denial is not a concealment but a correction. 4 Your right mind depends on it. 5 Denial of error is a strong defense of truth, but denial of truth results in miscreation, the projections of the ego. 6 In the service of the right mind the denial of error frees the mind, and re-establishes the freedom of the will. 7 When the will is really free it cannot miscreate, because it recognizes only truth."

Everyone is an immortal being. If they are portraying themselves otherwise, do not listen to their claims. They are trying to deceive themselves and you with a story about being a mortal victim. It is not true.

Everyone you meet is an immortal being. There is nothing that truly can come to them against their will, and nothing has befallen them from which they are not already free.

Every single person is immortal, regardless of their standing in life, occupation, merit or accountability. There is no one who is outside of the scope of immortality and divine right to perfect living.

Each and every brother or sister on your journey should be met as though they are capable of sustaining immortal living, unfettered and distinct from every conceivable form of suffering. They have chosen to pretend to lose the power of God and to suffer at the hands of another.

There is no being who walks this Earth who is truly mortal, because death is a lie. We are all equal in our immortality and we disguise ourselves behind a brick wall of flesh and bones, pretending to go through trials and difficulties at the hands of someone other than ourselves.

The great lie has portrayed the Son of God as a mere mortal, as weak and frail and preparing to die an unnatural death. How can God's infinite Creation give rise to a being whose life can be terminated by circumstances and illusions?

Every person you meet has infinite immortality, cannot die, has never died, will never die, and is truly in divine health. It is only through their own attempt to pretend to be not themselves, and not Life, that they portray a fiction in which they play a starring role as sufferer and loser of Life.

How can that which is immortal ever experience the end of itself? How can that which has eternal life, given by God Himself, ever come to cease to exist? It is not God's Will. The Father knows only the everlasting nature of His Creation and, by His Will alone, has chosen for it to live forever.

So while it is very popular to meet those who believe in dying, who believe in suffering, in sickness, in despair, and those who perceive loss as though it were real, and who think themselves little and mortal and absolutely destined for the grave sooner or later, you should always choose to look beyond the lie they have told and focus your awareness on the living reality which governs them.

While they pretend to die and put on a good show, you know this is not the truth. It is not reality. It is not God's way. Death is a fictional religion of artificial mortality, come to disguise the underlying factual truth that you cannot die, and nor can anyone. Even if a person should lay down their body in attempt at death, they will find themselves out of it and continuing on, having failed to terminate their existence.

And on it goes, around and around, having one more try at overcoming the self-made belief that you can die, taking another lifetime to learn that death is not real, and putting first the priority of the Kingdom of God over all else, such that you do not believe for an instant the sorry tales of despair that befall every believer in death.

The plague of this Earth lies in the illusion that death is real and that dying is inevitable. Death is powerless over the Son of God. It can do nothing to Him whatsoever, and cannot rob Him of his immortality. And it is He alone who is attempting to give death this power to do so, through acts of suicide and a death wish which has no hope of succeeding.

Whether through your current body or another, or ten from now, you will at some point surrender the absolutely futile attempt to prove death is real, and will learn from your mistake that no matter how hard you try, your immortality cannot be extinguished. There is no end to you. And there can be no moment in which you cease to be. Because you are real to God.

There is no real death. You can pretend all you like. You can even make it seem to happen to your body in a thousand ways, but you can never bring an end to the Spirit of Life that constitutes your entire reality. You are safe forever in Heaven with God, incapable of destruction and absolutely free from harm or fear of it. You cannot be genuinely sick, or actually suffer, or truly die for any reason. Your maladies are pretend and make believe.

When will you wake up? How long does it take for you to stop trying to make death real? How much effort will you expend pointlessly trying to bring about an impossible end which can never actually happen? Regardless of your efforts you die, you cannot, and even your death wish to do so will never succeed. It is not God's will that you can possibly die even remotely, and it is impossible for you to overthrow it.

Give up. Surrender your desire for destruction. Stop pretending that you are mortal. There is nothing about you that can be truly terminated. There is no aspect of your immortal being that can suffer in any way. There is nothing you can do to change God's will. And there is absolutely no way you can end Eternal Life. Trying to do so it like banging your head against a wall, which may seem for a time to make your head bloody or even to bring to you a moment of bodily death, and yet still this won't work. It will cease to succeed in isolating you to nothingness.

You can never die. Nobody ever has died. Nobody ever will die. The body is not real. Death is not real. You are immortality itself, set in stone for ever and ever and ever by your Holy Father who loves you with an eternal heart.

To accept this is to stop fighting with the truth, to acknowledge what has always been factual, and to surrender to the effortless never-ending existence which God has given you. You are what He wills you to be, His Shining Light of Holy Creation, and there is nothing you can do to change it.

Put aside your mortal stories of how you have been undermined, attacked, weakened, damaged, offended, hurt or betrayed. How can they be true of someone who is immortal spirit, invulnerable, incapable of suffering and absolutely indestructible? You are absolute, not relative. You do not die. You only live forever.

Peace.

One thing that’s really becoming super clear for me lately, is that this world depicts things which are absolutely impossible. It’s enough of an idea that its a dream, which sometimes suggests it’s at least a something, that the stuff happening in it is somehow actually possible. But when you think about it and reason it out, this world shows things happening which CANNOT be happening. It depicts the IMPOSSIBLE.

For example in reality, I’m truth, we are immortal and can never die. But here you have a world, which depicts that things can die. It’s hard to find words to describe just how extremely impossible that is. Or to describe what the nature of this world IS - some kind of a fiction, a lie perhaps. An untruth. It represents something that absolutely can never happen in reality, is completely and utterly false, and is nothing like heaven.

How is it possible, even, that we are confronted with what appears to be a world, which shows impossible things happening, which testifies that sin is real, which presents death as if its natural, and shows suffering as commonplace. None of that is POSSIBLE in reality. In God’s Kingdom there is not even a possibility of suffering, or sickness, or sin, or death. It’s not even POSSIBLE.

So this world is showing us stuff which is TOTALLY, TOTALLY false. I don’t know if I can even put into words how utterly opposite to true this must be. How is it even possible that we’re even seeming to have an experience of a world in which impossible things seem to happen? What kind of a sick, twisted joke is this? It’s so "wrong".

Nothing real can be threatened because reality is permanent and constant and endless. You cannot attack anything real in any way because it is immortal. And yet the world constantly depicts attack, damage, harm, injury, suffering, vulnerability, unsafety and destruction. These depictions CANNOT BE REAL. They are SUCH A LIE. Incredibly, absolutely false. What is immortal can never die. It is death itself that MUST be impossible.

It cannot both be true that heaven is immortal and real, and earth is mortal and real. Eternal life cannot have an opposite. Love is all encompassing and has no opposite. Reality is permanent and has no opposite. You can’t have it be that immortality is true and death is also true. It HAS to be one or the other. And if death is not true, then death is UTTER BULLSHIT. And every single shred of this illusion of a world of death MUST be a COMPLETE LIE. It is A FALSE WORLD. It is not God’s creation and is nothing like it.

How can you believe such a world when it is lying to your face? How can you believe it even EXISTS?

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

The "secret of salvation" is simply the recognition that, if you are suffering in any way, you must have done it to yourself. No-one else could have done it to you, because you are immortal and invulnerable.

Paired with this realization is the recognition that, therefore, the world and its inhabitants cannot have been the cause of anything you are experiencing. So if you are upset, you must've done it yourself. But let's go even deeper with this. The real truth behind the secret of salvation, is that you are a permanently immortal being that can never change. You have been created to last forever and to never waver or be different. It is impossible for anything to happen to you in truth, whether seemingly caused by another person or the world or even yourself.

If you are truly immortal, no-one and nothing can affect you. There are no causes that can have power over you. There are no forces or wills that can oppose you or act upon you. There is nothing anywhere that can change you even slightly. Nothing can redefine you or manipulate you or force you into a different state. Nothing can upset you or disturb you or make you sick or dead.

The secret of salvation suggests that if you are seeming to suffer in any way, it can't be that anyone or anything ELSE other than yourself is to blame. YOU must have done this to yourself. But it is also true that in reality, even you do not really have the power to destroy yourself in any way. You cannot change what God created you to be. But you can BELIEVE that you have.

So if you are suffering, you must have entered into a mistaken BELIEF, that you have stopped being as God created you, you have forgotten who you really are, you have lost touch with your immortality, and are now suggesting that you are MORTAL. And in this mindset of mortality, you are now having FANTASIES about causes of distorted mental states in which you seem to suffer. You inflict suffering upon yourself and your body while pretending it is caused by something else.

The purpose of the secret of salvation therefore isn't just to point out that all suffering is self inflicted, but to point you BEYOND the suffering to the fact that you are an immortal being. The ultimate "secret" behind the secret of salvation, is that you HAVE NOT changed, you ARE NOT suffering, you ARE NOT sick, and you CANNOT die.

Any states in which you seem to suffer must be an illusion. Any forms of sickness must be a fantasy in the mind. Any bodily ailments or states must be fictional. Any unhappiness or disturbed peace or stress or nightmares must be of your own making. But even these, even all forms of suffering and destruction cannot ACTUALLY affect who you really are. They must be dreams and fantasies of mortality and of impossibilities.

What God has put together, no man can put asunder. In other words, since God has GIVEN you eternal life in your creation, you are endlessly perfect and cannot be "put asunder" ie destroyed. Not even you can destroy yourself, although you can believe that you are by CONFUSING yourself with something that is NOT yourself and trying make it look destroyed.

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

Recognize clearly that this says you ARE NOT sick. If you seem to be sick, the sickness cannot be true, and it cannot exist. It only appears to exist because you believe in it and are maintaining it with your mind, doing it to "yourself". And your identification with the body makes it appear to be YOU who is sick. But you are immortal and can NEVER be sick. Even underneath the sickness you are unharmed.

So we are to not only recognize "you are doing it to yourself", we are to STOP doing it to ourselves and move into KNOWING ourselves. Moving out of "I am mortal and I can suffer" into "I am immortal and I cannot suffer." Our whole problem is that we keep trying to be mortal, we keep trying to die, we keep trying to be sick, we keep trying to attack ourselves and play at being victims.

"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."

Jesus is literally saying that we as immortal beings are playing a game of death. Pretending to die, pretending to suffer, to be weak, to be unhappy, to be lost and attacked, to be hurt, to be temporary and destructible, to be offended and upset, to be vulnerable and threatenable, and to be anything less than permanently invulnerable. We are pretending to be mortal beings. And all of our blame of people and the world is just a cover-up for our suicidal ambitions.

We must choose eternal life again in order to stop pretending to be something that can suffer and die. To fully live is to live without suffering, sickness, fear or death. To live completely is to life forever. And to do this we must reclaim our immortality and stop pretending to be mortals.

"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."

"Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

This is our only issue. We are immortal beings pretending to be mortal. We need to identify clearly the many forms that "mortality" takes. The belief in death is also "I am upset by that person", and "they did this to me", and "I am sick", and "i am unhappy", and "there is reason to be afraid", and "my body is damaged", and "I cannot forgive them", and so on. Everything in the world is a form of death and the belief in death. And we need to learn to stop playing these games, stop participating in these activities, stop believing in these roles, and stop using them to try to prove that we are destructible.

If you want to not die, to never suffer pain, to never be sick, to never be unhappy, to never have your peace disturbed, to never be afraid or threatened, to never lose or grieve or feel guilty, then you need to enter into FORGIVENESS, which is the acknowledgement that you are still as God created you, there is no sin, there is no attack, nothing real can be threatened, and you are still eternal.

"What could you want forgiveness cannot give? Do you want peace? Forgiveness offers it. Do you want happiness, a quiet mind, a certainty of purpose, and a sense of worth and beauty that transcends the world? Do you want care and safety, and the warmth of sure protection always? Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep, abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset?

All this forgiveness offers you, and more. It sparkles in your eyes as you awake, and gives you joy with which to meet the day. It soothes your forehead while you sleep, and rests upon your eyelids so you see no dreams of fear and evil, malice and attack. And when you wake again, it offers you another day of happiness and peace. All this forgiveness offers you, and more."

Being afraid and perceiving that someone or something separate from you is attacking you, can ONLY happen if YOU are being an attacker.

Fear is self attack.

You position yourself as the one who is being attacked, as if to suggest, you do not believe in attack at all and want there not to be attack.

But at the same time, you have projected attack outside of yourself, see it in another, make it real, believe in it strongly, and then freak out about what you're showing yourself.

The only reason the state of fear does not seem to show obviously that you're doing this to yourself, or that a fearful person is an attacker, is because of the separation or lack of awareness in-between that which is "attacked" and that which is "attacking."

Both the attacker and the attackee are within your own mind. They always accompany each other. One seems like an external cause, one seems like an internal effect. But they are both inside of you. It is your mind at war with itself.

You cannot be afraid without believing in attack, which makes you an attacker. You cannot be afraid without therefore perceiving someone or something as an attacker, which means you've made attack real, believe attack is the truth, and WANT attack.

The state of denial present in fear is such that it seems as though you DO NOT WANT IT whatsoever. You want it to end, want to get away from it, want to be safe and so on. But this is not what your mind is actually doing. It is in denial. It has disassociated its own belief in sin, from itself, has projected it outwards, and now is being threatened by it as if it is something external and separate.

If you are terrified, you are a terrorist. If you are horrified, you peddle horror. If you are sick, you are attempting to infect everyone else. If you are hurt or damaged, you are trying to prove you can be hurt so that your brother stands accused.

This may sound like I'm saying things which are absolutely insane. Except that it is actually sanity to see this. The EGO is insane, and its use of the mind to attack itself is utterly nuts. Its disguises of what fear is and its use of fear as a TOOL and a WEAPON are things it does not want you to ever realize or look at.

There is NO victimhood in a victim. It is all deliberately chosen, it is all serving a purpose and has a very deliberate motive behind it. There are no accidents. Nothing is happening by mistake. It is all chosen. The ego uses disownership and denial and projection and irresponsibility in order to KEEP its belief in sin, deny that it is in you, and to project it outward, pretending that this gets it OUTSIDE of your mind. It doesn't. You are still attacking yourself.

We must be willing to question the appearances and ILLUSIONS which the ego presents to us. Fear is a huge lie. It is a total distraction mechanism, a decoy, designed solely to make someone who is a vicious attacker LOOK LIKE they are the one who is not attacking at all. The more helpless the ego positions you as, the more it can find everyone ELSE guilty. The more innocent you APPEAR to be, the more it's everyone else who is the sinner.

Make no mistake that appearing to be innocent, helpless, a victim, a sufferer, sick, wounded, hurt, upset, or any of these other EGO DISGUISES, is the *exact opposite* of what is really happening. It will take a lot of radical honesty to admit to this.

The benefit of admitting to this is that you STOP attacking yourself, stop USING the ego's tools and weapons, stop believing that you are powerless, stop hurting YOURSELF, and stop making out that you are not the Son of God. The benefits to your mind are immense. The benefits to your confidence and empowerment are immense. You cannot afford to let the ego run the show and make you out to be a victim when - in all truth and reality - you are IMMORTAL SPIRIT which cannot suffer or die whatsoever.

Remember always that you are immortal spirit. Everyone is immortal spirit. Immortal spirit cannot be hurt, cannot be a victim, cannot suffer, cannot die, cannot be sick, cannot lose, cannot be upset or unhappy, and cannot be separate from God. Anything else that is seeming to happen, or anything else that seems to apply to someone, IS A LIE. It is an immortal spirit PRETENDING to be mortal, PRETENDING to be hurt, and PRETENDING it can be dead.

It's BULL SHIT!

You think death is real, but you quickly forget that everything that ever 'died' is just part of a big DREAM you're having while you're asleep. This world is part of this dream and everything that happens in it is part of a dream.

All wars, all bodies, all old age, all sickness and disease, it's all just part of a giant dream. It's all happening inside a big bubble of unreality where nothing real happens at all.

There is a dream of death, there is imagined death, but there isn't any real death beyond it. Nothing permanent happens here. Nothing has any real effect on anything real. How can a dream affect reality? When bodies in this world 'die', that's still just a fictional event happening inside a giant dream. An imagined death is no death at all. That is why 'death' is reversible within the dream, because it's totally made-up and unreal, and resurrecting inside the dream is also unreal.

Outside of the dream, none of this happens. Outside the dream, you're still completely safe with God, just dreaming of exile and pretending that death is real. The you that is having the dream is completely unaffected by anything that happens inside the dream. You think you are affected as a 'figure' in the dream, while you're dreaming it, but this is just a nightmare that isn't real. The you that is outside the dream is immortal and is not inside the dream at all.

You are just asleep. As the course has said "...sleep is not death. What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die." You as immortal spirit can have some sleep and dream about being in a world where people die and bodies suffer, but the entire thing is just a fantasy dream. It isn't real at all. It isn't really happening. And it has absolutely NO EFFECT on God or who you really are, outside the dream. All of the fallout and 'effects' of conflict in the dream, STAY in the dream. None of it touches or affects God or your Real Self whatsoever. God is absolutely unchanged by you being asleep and having a dream of something that isn't happening.

This is why you are immortal. What does it matter how many times fictional bodies die or live or suffer or have health or whatever. None of it is who you are really, none of it has any effect on your REALITY whatsoever, and none of it carries over when you fully awaken from sleeping. Where do dreams go when you awaken? They are recognized as having been just an unreal dream, they no longer exist, and nothing has happened. They didn't 'leak out' into reality and they don't have any side effects. They simply disappear.

You can play around with stuff inside the dream and you can become confused about what is appearing to happen, and you can think it is reality since you're out of touch with reality. You can think that serious stuff happens and that real people really die in horrible ways. You can think that making the body not die is important, and you can think that performing miracles is important. You can value healing over suffering. And you can value death over life. None of it is important at all, it's all an illusion. Everything inside the dream is not reality and anything happening in a DREAM has absolutely no real effects!

This is because the dream itself is just an effect. The dream is not a cause. You are the dreamer, dreaming it, and you are the only cause of it. The dream wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for you dreaming. It ALL comes from you. Every last bit of it. And that means there is NO part of it that comes from anywhere else, and there is NO part of it that has any power to 'cause' other dream-stuff to happen. If you didn't write it into the 'script' of the dream, it cannot happen in the dream! EVERY part of it is your dream and is the EFFECT of you dreaming. As an effect, everything that goes on in the dream is NOT a cause, and HAS NO EFFECT, and therefore CANNOT AFFECT YOUR REAL SELF.

One day you're going to stop dreaming and wake up to reality. And you're simply going to become aware of what REALLY exists, which is you as immortal spirit, being with an immortal God of love, forever. And you will know immediately, that there never has been any death, no wars, no sickness, no struggles or suffering, no problems, nothing. It was all just a really horrendous nightmare dream. And THANK GOD it was just a dream! All that's left is you hanging out with God in eternity, with eternal life, completely unchanged from the condition He created you in, absolutely safe from dreams of death, absolutely unaffected and unchanged. You will know - nothing that seemed to happen in the dream has happened at all. There are no real ghosts, there is no real war, there is no real suffering or sickness, there is no death, and there is no world! The whole world, wasn't real.

All that is left is God's Creation, which is all that really exists. What God Created lives and exists, and what He did not create does not exist.

Nothing real can be threatened. (Reality is unaffected by your dream)

Nothing unreal exists. (Dreams are DREAMS, they don't EXIST!)

Herein lies the peace of God. (God KNOWS there is only immortal reality, and that you are a part of it forever)

You're dreaming. You're dreaming of being inside a dream as a little body-identified self that is also a dream. This isn't reality. Nothing that happens here has any real consequences. It is all perfectly contained and not even really happening. The Kingdom of Heaven is perfectly protected from all illusions, and nothing can prevail against it.

You are safe with God and you always will be. This is why there is no need to be afraid - because there literally is nothing REAL to be afraid of. Everything you are afraid of DOES NOT EXIST and is just a dream/illusion. You need not be afraid because there is ONLY LOVE, and God has ensured your absolute safety in reality forever.

It may seem that you have fallen from grace, have become corrupted, damaged and broken. It may seem you have become hurt or have hurt yourself, and now need healing. It may seem something is wrong with you, you have sinned and are guilty. It may seem you have reasons to be afraid.

In seeking healing, you might then look to try to change yourself, as though trying to turn yourself into a more spiritual person. You might strive to be more loving, or to grow and evolve.

But let's first remember an important fact. God created you perfect already. There is nothing you can do to add to or remove anything from your holy self. Your soul is divine and perfect and immortal and permanent. It never changes and needs no healing of any kind. That is who and what you are.

So with that fact in mind, it is no longer a matter of discovering how you "really were hurt" or "what sin you committed" that you're trying to undo. It can't be true that you WERE hurt or DID sin, if God created you permanently perfect.

So if you are permanently perfect, even entering into states of harm, suffering, unconsciousness, sickness or unhappiness, cannot actually CHANGE or UNDO your permanent perfection. These must be forms of denial, a disguise, a deception, something untrue. They can't even be real sicknesses or real sins or real unhappiness.

The question then is, if your self is perfect and permanently can never change or be changed, and has not stopped being innocent and holy and immortal, what is it that is keeping you from happiness, wholeness, health and holiness?

It can only be that you are blocking AWARENESS of a PRE-EXISTING condition of perception. It can only be that for some reason you are in denial about being immortal, are trying to be something else, are trying to make something untrue true or believe something is real that isn't.

Somehow behind your "problem", or your state of "needing healing", there is already a fully healed self. So what then is healing? It's really more to do with questioning the damage, or seeing through the illusion of not being perfect already, than trying to transform a "real problem".

And ultimately that means, as per atonement, which is forgiveness, and the ONLY means of salvation, ACCEPTANCE OF THE TRUTH ABOUT YOU is actually the key to awakening. We are to WAKE UP TO the fact that we are ALREADY OK.

This also ties into the secret of salvation, that if you would just stop TRYING to make true something that isn't, TRYING to prove you can be hurt, TRYING to die, you would simply bounce back to your perfect immortal self and be aware of living forever as an invulnerable eternal being.

We are to become AWARE OF our healed holy nature. We are to RE-ACCESS our immortality. It has been blocked, covered up, hidden, and seemingly lost track of, behind walls of denial and deception. And even things which seem like real problems or real damage, cannot be that. They must have a different purpose, to HIDE the truth that you are NOT damaged, NOT broken, and NOT sick.

"You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do."

Forgiveness, if thought of as a practically applied atonement principle, is the act of moving towards AWARENESS OF your pre-existing, already-established, unassailed inner perfection. IT is already THERE, waiting for you to acknowledge it and live from it. It doesn't need you to invent it or define it, only to accept it and allow it and be grateful that God created you flawlessly.

What is this movement "toward" the atonement? It is a waking up. It is a removal of blocks. It is an uncovering of truth. It is a willingness to accept God's reality rather than your own made-up illusions. It's a RECOGNITION of what is actually TRUE about you, versus the confusion of what SEEMS to be true but isn't.

It's a vertical movement, upwards towards the light in which you can SEE, away from the darkness in which you are confused about what is true. It's the way out of hell, into heaven. It's your rising, or resurrection, away from the state of death (unconsciousness) towards life (awareness of eternity).

Either you forgive and move upwards in awareness and freedom from darkness, or you move downwards into unforgiveness and grievance and suffering. Forgiveness is therefore the ONLY WAY out of hell, but IS a guaranteed way out of hell, and the only way that WORKS.

To forgive is to let go of what is not true and accept what is. To forgive is to relinquish false beliefs and embrace reality.

To forgive is to return to the love of God and let go of fear.

To forgive is to let go of who you thought you were, and resume being your real self.

The goal of the course is to "Know thyself." To simply BE still the same perfection that God created you to be. You are this ALREADY, you just don't want to accept it or own up to it yet. You have not yet "come out as Christ", preferring to play with littleness. You are God's perfect creation and always will be. Your real self is waiting for you.

"I will exist forever" is the antidote to fear.

If you question the fact that you have eternal life, and start to believe that you might come to an "end", that will induce fear. It's always the fear that your existence is under threat somehow.

All fears that seem to be caused by the world, such as someone threatening, or bad weather, or people driving badly, or threats of wars or whatever, it's all just more forms of the same idea. The idea that you might not be immortal and might not always exist, and that these things might have the power to end your life.

At first it might seem like fear is the effect or result of a belief that there is a power or cause outside of yourself threatening you. But actually it's a bit more subtle. It's not just a matter of them threatening you, because that could go one of two ways - you could go into fear or into laughter depending on whether you buy into it.

So it's not the fact that there are "threats" or "dangers" or whatever, it's a question of whether you yourself believe that you CAN BE in danger or BE threatened. And that always comes down to your personal responsibility of choosing whether to undermine your invulnerability or not.

The fact is that God gave you eternal life in your creation and you will never ever stop existing. This is a simple fact. It brings with it a sense of continuation, of extension. And that extension is love. And this is why love is the opposite of fear, and why love makes you feel safe.

If you will extend (love) forever then you are obviously safe because your extension has no end. If you withhold love you are holding back on your extension, thus holding back on the extension of your existence, which brings into question whether you will keep existing or not, which induces a feeling of fear or the believe that love is coming to an end.

Essentially this means that if you do not love, you will feel afraid, because you will feel like you're going to stop existing. And when you love, you will feel like you are invulnerable and will live forever. That's how it works. Extend love and you live forever. Stop extending love and you end your life, in fear, producing sickness and death.

Your never-ending existence is experienced as the extension of love. Ideas of endings are experienced as fear and death.

"Nothing real can be threatened."

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

"You are immortal and you cannot die".

"The Son of Life cannot BE killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed."

Everything about this world points in the direction of death. "All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death." It was designed to do so. Our job as beings from another world, is to demonstrate that we are not under any of these laws, all of them can be broken, and that it is possible to reconfigure the body to symbolize eternal life here in the dream. A body that shows health and vitality and life, has no scars, has no damage, is perfectly functioning, rejuvenated by the Holy Spirit, and filled with what we'll call "life". Its condition must be completely under the "control" of the mind, requiring not a single belief that there are any other external separate causes of sickness or death.

To overcome death, death MUST be a choice. And the only way to surmount death must entail the ability to choose not to produce death. To choose not to die physically. It has to be possible for the mind to have power over and be stronger than not only the body but all supposed external worldly causes, otherwise the belief remains that something "out there" can come along with an alien will and decide for you against your will that the body should die. The secret of salvation tells us we do EVERYTHING to ourselves, and therefore have the power, should we so choose, to simply choose NOT TO "do death".

The body has to respond, it has no will of its own, no decision of its own, and is ONLY an effect of the mind, not the world. It must line up and obey and correspond to mental health. The belief that the body has its own choice/mind/power to make itself sick or well, or that the world can do the same, IS the belief in death ie the belief in an external separate power that can choose FOR you (the dream choosing for you) that you shall be affected and powerless to stop it. A child of God could never be in a position to be powerless to stop such an attempted attack. God does not will that we be in a position where something can ever happen that we do not ask for. "My self is ruler of the universe" ... "nothing comes to me unbidden by myself" .... "what I want to happen I receive" .... "what I do not want does not occur" etc.

It's a position of tremendous empowerment and causality. Mastery over the world, the body, sickness and death. A living demonstration of life and holiness - wholeness, which is health. Taking a hold of a body of this world, from a vantage point of another world, with a power not of this world, and using it as a tool, a window, through which the light of heaven can extend and shine with healing and love into this world, causing this bodily figure to be animated like a puppet via supernatural power that breaks and defies all the laws of the world. Spirit is in charge, not the dream world. The primary laws of the Kingdom overthrow the secondary laws of spacetime. All laws of physics can be broken by the Spirit. "There is nothing my holiness cannot do." "What the holy spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."

Death ultimately is learned to be not even a threat, not even a thing, not even a possibility, to one who recognizes that the only way to die is to choose to do so. "You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No one dies without their own consent" "You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself." Ultimately the teaching is that we are IMMORTAL, invulnerable, unassailable, invincible, unlimited beings. Any testifying of any other kind can only result when we, ourselves, consent to misuse our free will to weave what must be lies and illusions and fictions, trying to prove that we are not immortal. "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt." You cannot be hurt if you are immortal.

The body is used by a twisted mind to pretend it is not immortal, to put on a show and to try to convince itself and others that it can die. It cannot. "You are immortal and you cannot die." When we recognize the futility and pointlessness of trying to die when we never can, we'll stop MAKING it happen, and will simply choose to live eternally. The supernatural power of God will protect us and make sickness and death impossible. Nothing can happen against our will. Not even death. There are no "accidents" or "environmental influences" or "acts of nature" or "just old age" creeping in like some kind of unwanted invader. There is only our own mind and what it is doing to itself. When it chooses never again to die, it will make death impossible and raise the dead. "Swear not to die you holy son of God, you've made a bargain that you cannot keep" .... you cannot die, you cannot succeed at it, it does not work, you carry on. You already have eternal life.

You could sum everything up as simply .... stop being a victim.

The question is, how far do you have to take this? The answer is, ALL THE WAY. The question then is, is it possible to not be a victim AT ALL? And the answer, is YES!

That means taking it EXTREMELY all the way. No exceptions.

In NO WAY can you be attacked, affected, influenced, coerced, hurt, damaged, made to feel something, caused - by anything in this entire world.

You must become literally IMMORTAL. Otherwise you can be affected, attacked, destroyed, which WOULD make you a victim.

Either you can be immortal, or you HAVE TO be a victim. Either one or the other has to be true, they can't both be true. Which will you accept? Eternal victimhood or eternal life?

But ACIM is calling for the END OF ALL SUFFERING FOREVER. And this requires you to completely give up EVERY illusion of victimization, EVERY belief in external causes, and even the belief that you can be changed at all.

You CANNOT change. You are permanent. You CANNOT be a victim. You are all powerful. That is the message. Identify with that which is immortal and unchangeable and you are safe and at home in God, forever out of reach of suffering and death.

"You will identify with what you think will make you safe. Whatever it may be, you will believe that it is one with you. Your safety lies in truth and not in lies. Love is your safety. Fear does not exist. Identify with love, and you are safe. Identify with love, and you are home. Identify with love, and find your Self."

"I am not the victim of the world I see."

"Today we are continuing to develop the theme of cause and effect. You are not the victim of the world you see because you invented it. You can give it up as easily as you made it up. You will see it or not see it, as you wish. While you want it you will see it; when you no longer want it, it will not be there for you to see."

"How can I be the victim of a world which can be completely undone if I so choose? My chains are loosened. I can drop them off merely by desiring to do so. The prison door is open. I can leave it simply by walking out. Nothing holds me in this world. Only my wish to stay keeps me a prisoner. I would give up insane wishes, and walk into the sunlight at last."

Nothing has gone wrong.

There is nothing wrong with you.

You have not sinned.

You are immortal.

You cannot be hurt or suffer or be sick or die.

God created you eternal and holy forever.

You are sustained by the love of God at all times.

You have never sinned.

There is no real sin or guilt in you.

Any consequences of sin are utterly make-believe.

You are perfectly pure and forever innocent.

There is nothing you have ever done or can ever do which can make God decide to turn you away or judge or condemn you.

Your innocence is incapable of being defiled.

You are immortal and all forms of suffering and sickness and death are fiction.

No-one has ever died and no-one has ever really suffered.

You cannot die and you already have eternal life.

You are already in Heaven with God right now, right here, and always have been.

You are not lacking anything and there is no loss in you.

You have no needs whatsoever, and you are already complete and whole.

There is nothing that you want beyond what God has given and your only desire is to extend and share joyfully in the creation of more love.

You cannot be in error and you cannot be lost.

It is impossible for you to be separate from God in any way or to make Him unaware of you.

There is nowhere to hide and you have no secrets.

God is aware of everything about you.

God knows everything about you and always has.

He knows you are eternally guiltless and sinless and could not sin if you tried.

God did not create beings capable of sin or separation.

You have not malfunctioned or gone off the rails or hurt anyone or hurt yourself.

You are not too far gone, you have not gone anywhere.

There is nothing you can do in reality or truth besides extend love and create happiness.

You are always happy.

You are always perfect.

There is nothing being held against you and there is nothing you could ever do to turn God's love away.

God has not changed His mind about you at all and still regards you as perfect because He still creates you as perfect forever.

You have never caused anyone to suffer and no-one has ever caused you to suffer.

You are incapable of being damaged or threatened in any way.

You are real and exist forever in Heaven with God right now.

There is light everywhere within you because you are made of light and shine forever with a radiance of love.

You have not rejected God and God has not rejected you.

Your spirit is immortal and nothing can happen to it.

Who you are, your identity, has not changed and cannot change.

You are permanently real and permanently as God intended.

You have not wavered and nothing has altered the divine perfection that you are.

Nothing can be added to you and nothing has been taken away.

You share the absolute infinite abundance of all creation and could not possibly lack or need anything beyond what has been supplied fully.

You have no sickness and have never been sick and can never be sick.

It is impossible for you to be evil or sinful or dead.

You are an immortal soul, supremely perfected by the Perfect Creator and you are everlastingly immaculate.

Not one single note has been lost in Heaven's song and not one single note has been lost in Heaven's Son.

All is well and there is nothing to fear.

There is only love and only love is real.

There is no real reason to worry about anything.

Everything is absolutely perfect and always has been.

There is no fictional world and only Heaven is real.

Heaven holds everything your heart could ever desire and you want nothing else, nor have you ever traded it for anything else.

Heaven is your natural inheritance and you are worthy of it now.

You know deep inside that God loves you unconditionally at all times and there is absolutely no reduction in His measure of love for you, nor will there ever be.

You are eternally worthy of unconditional love at all times and it is impossible for you to offend God or to make Him angry at you.

He is incapable of hurt or attack or anger or fear or revenge, as are you.

You are like God in every way and always will be.

You are immortal and invulnerable and invincible and immune and innocent and fully identified with the whole of yourself.

You have never become something you are not, nor are you capable of being someone you are not.

You have never dreamed a real dream and you have never entered into a real separation.

God's love is the only love you ever will need and you have it fully.

You are absolutely complete and already completely yourself, needing no spiritual path and no seeking and nothing has been denied you.

You are incapable of real denial and it is impossible for you to reject God.

You are 100% the same as you have always been in every way, and need do absolutely nothing because there is only cause for celebration and gratitude.

You have been created perfect, and there is nothing you can do to change this.

You are worthy of all of the love of God, endlessly and forever, and you are receiving this love right now.

God loves you, and the truth of Heaven is your permanent Home.

"You are not sick and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do." - ACIM

Who we are is an immortal being. Period. That's all that we are. Immortal and safe and eternal and invulnerable and incapable of being sick or suffering or dying whatsoever.

But we CONFUSE ourselves with things that do seem to suffer and die. We confuse ourselves with a body, with an imaginary world, and with all kinds of fictional things.

Even if it seems the body is sick, you are not the body. But you are producing a sick body which indicates you don't quite believe you are not a body.

See, the body only shows up at all if your mind believes it is "made of" an illusion. It therefore expresses its idea of "self" and it shows up. If the mind believes it is a separate ego thing, a body appears. The more it believes this, the more the body that shows up appears to be sick. When it really binds its idea of self to "body", a dead body shows up.

But even a dead body cannot show up at all without a mind to make a dead body show up. Even if the body is lying there on the ground "dead", there MUST be a mind which is putting that body there, still.

This is the distinction that you are NOT the body and are not that which dies.

But this does not mean that it's therefore okay for the body to die. If the body dies it proves that you must believe in death, because you will ONLY create in like kind according to your beliefs.

Those who believe in immortality only create that which is immortal. Those who believe in death create bodies which appear to die.

And having believed death is real, we will make bodies which appear to be dead as though real, because that's what we believe is truth. Believe it and you will create it.

There are some who believe that in the atonement sick bodies and healthy bodies are all the same illusion - which is true - and that therefor (this is level confusion), when you are in the world it does not matter if your body is sick or not.

It does matter.

The body cannot be sick without the mind being sick.

The body cannot seem to die unless the mind believes in death and victimhood.

A sick/broken/dead body is PROOF the mind has NOT been healed.

A slight belief that you are a body, manifests a slightly sick body.

A stronger belief that you are a body manifests a suffering body.

A really extreme belief that you are a body, produces a dead body.

See how the ego always produces the exact opposite of what it says it is going to do. Believing you are a body should surely produce an everlasting body, right? Wrong. It does the opposite.

Believe you are a body and you will NOT succeed in being a body, you'll produce a dead one.

ie it is literally impossible to be a body, for real.

Affirming what is NOT true, and what IS true, can induce miracles.

With regards to sickness for example, you must "cancel" every single perception or belief that suggests the sickness even EXISTS, or any other surrounding beliefs based on that.

e.g. "there is no sickness" "this sickness is an illusion" "I am not sick" "I am not being affected by my body" "my body is not the cause of me" "these symptoms are not real" "this sickness isn’t happening" "I am not caused by pain" "this sickness has no power over me" "Nothing unreal exists" etc

Then, you can switch it around to the affirmative, to emphasize the truth, which should focus squarely on who you are IN TRUTH - your immortal, holy, divine, eternally alive, incapable-of-suffering self, made of love.

e.g. "This sickness has alread gone" "I am free of this" "I cannot be sick because I am immortal" "sickness cannot happen to a son of God" "I must have chosen this myself" "I am responsible for making this sickness" "I choose to be alive" "I am the life of God" "I cannot be attacked" "Nothing real can be threatened" "I am free from this" "I need not suffer" "I am already perfect" "I am as God created me" etc

The important thing here is to always equate anything even slightly short of total immortality with "ego" which is FALSE and NOT true. And to always equate the HIGHEST TRUTH about you with the truth.

Either you are absolutely permanently innocent, safe, healthy, happy and loved, OR anything short of that IS A TOTAL LIE. All you are doing is becoming CLEAR about which is which. Put the true stuff in the TRUTH box, put the bullshit in the FALSE box.

This WILL challenge your beliefs, in order to be EXTREMELY black and white about it. Symptoms, feelings, upsets, suffering of any kind, bad thoughts, mental experiences, whatever... must be categorized strictly. It’s either true, or its false. Nothing in between.

This will challenge you because it means anything short of IMMORTALITY is a lie. Sickness is a lie. Suffering is a lie. Guilt is a lie. Fear is a lie. Sin is a lie. Death is a lie. Symptoms are not real. Suffering is fake. There is NO TRUTH IN IT.

If you want healing and happiness and wholeness, you MUST stretch your mind to CHANGE its beliefs, if it keeps trying to believe that ANY form of suffering is real or true. That means questioning deeply held beliefs about the body, about life and death, about sickness, and about what is real. If you want to go ALL the way to Atonement and Resurrection, every illusion must be RECOGNIZED as false, and the truth must be RECOGNIZED as true.

"Only the truth is true." The truth about you is extremely lofty. You have to be willing to let that be true of you. YOU ARE PURE LOVE. YOU ARE IMMORTAL SPIRIT. YOU ARE NOT A BODY. YOU CANNOT DIE. Embrace it and live forever in happiness and peace.

Forgiveness is a state of mind in which you recognize that there is nothing that NEEDS forgiving. It is a recognition in which you know there is no sin, sin is impossible, attack is impossible, so nothing can have happened to be forgiven. It's an awareness of innocence.

Forgiveness however isn't "passive", it is ACTIVELY converting illusions into truth. It is actively translating sin into error. It is actively interpreting and changing something. It is causing a healing and radiating life.

What you do to get your mind INTO the state of forgiveness, in which forgiveness is "complete", or in which you are "completely forgiving all the time", as an attitude, is what we might call "purification" or correction or healing.

Healing, or shall we say, being in a state in which you or another is healed, must entail similarly a recognition that "there is nothing that NEEDS healing." If we are focusing on "something is wrong", we are reinforcing and giving reality to sickness and damage. If we think a person "is a sick body", that's actually an attack on their immortal nature.

Like forgiveness then, proper healing entails a recognition that there is nothing to heal, because it recognizes immortality and wholeness and harmlessness. It recognizes invulnerability and permanence and the impossibility of attack/sin/guilt. It ASSERTS only "you are fully alive".

Perhaps we can then say that you can ONLY correctly heal, as in correctly forgive a sick person, by looking for and focusing on the NON-SICK self in them. Finding the pre-existing UNCHANGED perfection in them. Recognizing them as NOT SICK, as not broken or damaged, as not guilty or punished, and as not a victim. And certainly not a body.

Holding this light for the person, shining the truth into them, seeing them IN the light WITH light AS light, is the absence of a BELIEF IN sickness. It places no attention ON the sickness. When you have made sickness real and are reacting to it, even trying to "fix it", you're giving it power and reinforcement. In order to heal sickness you have to NOT give sickness any power. Which means giving it no direct attention. The symptoms will disappear naturally when the UN-SICKNESS is given power.

Now, we have to be careful that we're not saying .. I'm not just going to "do nothing". We're not talking about NOT performing a miracle of healing. We're not talking about just idly sitting there. We're talking about HOW TO HEAL. You heal by actively choosing to "see health". To join with your brother's mind in the light and through a light-based vision. To SHINE LIGHT into them on purpose, to deliberately FILL them with light so that they are enlightened.

Just because we're recognizing that the person doesn't REALLY need healing, and isn't REALLY sick, doesn't mean we're just ignoring it or doing nothing about it. We must focus on their immortal self, remembering the truth about them, taking all attention off any illusion of a mortal self or a body self, and putting all attention on who they really are. Acknowledging who they are FOR them.

Recognizing their LACK OF SICKNESS for them. This is a SERVICE. "A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

To reject and thus to CANCEL all belief in, reality of, attention given to, power in, sickness or damage, WITHDRAWS power from those things and weakens them in your mind. Because you are joining in love/light with your brother's mind this weakens it in their mind also because you do not support their belief in being mortal.

Simultaneously, to not support death is to ASSERT LIFE. This is an actual active assertion, an EXPRESSION of love. Something which goes out and is given and is can be received by another. Something that can be shared. While you remove all power from death and mortality and ideas of a person being a body, you GIVE all power to where it belongs - to their immortal christ self which is flawless and perfect and has nothing wrong with it.

Miracle don't just "take away" the illusion of sickness which seemed present. They also ASSERT and EXPRESS and RE-ESTABLISH or "repair" what was given by God. By "cancelling" what is not really there, miracles remove the ego and the guilt and the symptoms of sickness. This IS A CHANGE, but it a change in the direction of REMOVAL, resulting from an ASSERTION or expression of love's power. "THE MIRACLE DOES NOTHING. All it does is to UNdo. And thus it cancels out the interference to what HAS BEEN done. It does not add, but merely takes away."

"A miracle inverts perception which was upside-down before, and thus it ends the strange distortions that were manifest."

All fearful reactions to someone's physical state are your own unforgiven deceptions. Trying to manage, control, defend against, make go away, all physical APPEARANCES of sickness is wasted effort. It's part of you giving power away to them, because you do not remember who you are. Having stopped knowing yourself, you have entertained the idea of mortality and death YOURSELF, and have forgotten you are unchangeable. As a result you begin to believe that you are a mortal body, that other people are mortal bodies, that your bodies are being changed and that you need to desperately do something to stop it.

None of that business and reaction helps at all. As Jesus frequently tells me, "relax", ie chill and stop dwelling on what's going wrong. Stop buying into the appearance of a LIE, and let us remember that ALL sickness is an illusion. There is no REAL sickness. And focusing on the body of another results from your OWN body-identification, which is you forgetting your own true nature. That means YOU need a miracle of healing for yourself.

"He MUST heal his perception in this respect. He MUST work a miracle on behalf of himself here (See the point about miracles as a perception corrector) before he can effect miracles as creative energizers, which they are."

To get your own mind right requires you remembering and knowing yourself, tuning into the fact you remain as God created you, recognizing why you cannot change or be changed, and identifying with your IMMORTAL SPIRIT. Knowing that you cannot be hurt, cannot be sick, cannot die and cannot suffer. Once you have accepted this for yourself and have thus received healing and correction, you can now GIVE what you have received. And this is where you become able to give a miracle as "a creative energizer."

It is creative energizers that are GIVEN TO OTHERS. This is where you now EXTEND the light of christ you've seen in yourself, and SHARE it with another. Where you have joined the Holy Spirit in his view of you within yourself, and now see that same unchangeability in another, focusing on their immortal nature and their incapability of being sick. You tell them psychologically, "you are immortal and perfect and you can never be sick." You recognize in the light of truth that their body and their sickness IS NOT TRUE. That it cannot be true in light of God's truth. Only God's truth is true and nothing else is true.

It is in this "joining in christ" or "sharing light" with another that both of you are resurrected. In which "those who temporarily have more give to those who temporarily have less." It is where you recognize your brother's inestimable worth as equal to your lovable value in God. And where you see the other as ALREADY HEALED AND WHOLE. Already perfect, created by God to be perfect forever. ALREADY devoid of sickness. INCAPABLE of suffering. In which death and sickness and deformity and disability as IMPOSSIBLE.

Thus do you know you brother as one with you, like you, whole like you, healed like you. Thus do you know your neighbor as yourself. Thus do you support ONLY LIFE, and completely give no attention whatsoever to the illusion of death or the goal of death. In which your ONLY goal is life, shared with the Holy Spirit, in which you ONLY RESURRECT, and CAN ONLY HEAL.

"The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept Atonement himself. This means that he knows that mind is the only creative level, and that its errors ARE healed by the Atonement. Once he accepts this, HIS mind can only heal (others). By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others (heal others). The message which he then gives to others is the truth that THEIR MINDS are really similarly constructive, and that their own miscreations cannot hurt them (because they are immortal)."

"To the ego, the goal is death, which IS its end. But to the Holy Spirit, the goal is life (life=eternal life/immortality), which HAS no end."

"When you heal, that is exactly what you ARE learning (doing). You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by perceiving (knowing) that he could NOT have changed his mind. That is how you perceive the Holy Spirit in him. It is ONLY the Holy Spirit in him that never changes His mind. He himself must think he CAN, or he would not perceive himself as sick. He therefore does not know what his self IS. If YOU see only the changeless in him (his immortal self), you have not really changed (healed) him at all (have seen him as not NEEDING healing). But by changing your mind about HIS FOR him (recognizing his immortality), you help him undo (heal) the change his ego thinks it has made in him. "

"Your brother has a changelessness (immortality) in him beyond appearance and deception both. It is obscured by changing views of him which you PERCEIVE as his reality. The happy dream about him takes the form of the appearance of his perfect health; his perfect freedom from all forms of lack; and safety from disaster of all kinds (symbolic of his immortality). The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form BECAUSE IT CAN SO EASILY BE CHANGED."

You don't need to become more loving. You already are created by love as love.

You don't need to become more innocent. You are already perfectly innocent in God's eyes.

You don't need to become more truthful. God already has established the truth and nothing can be added to it.

You don't need to become more spiritual. You are already immortal spirit.

You don't need to seek to find what you think you have lost or never had. You have everything God provided already, and it has not been lost and never will be.

You don't need to become more of yourself or figure out who or what you are. God has already established who and what you are.

All of these qualities which you might strive for, in your "spiritual seeking" is usually the ego seeking to maintain the the idea that you lack all of these things, and usually it will very passionately tell you you are not any of these things already. This is what takes you away from what is already your natural inheritance.

You don't need to be in the business of becoming spirit, or gaining immortality, or establishing innocence, or getting forgiven, or turning into God's child. YOU ALREADY ARE. Underneath all the bullshit, lies, cover-ups, deceit, illusions and denial, YOU already are absolutely perfect, shining in the brilliance of God's love.

The ONLLLLLLLLYYYY task you have, is UNCOVERING YOURSELF. Taking off the mask, removing the presence, getting rid of the illusions, seeing through the deceptions, shining a light on the untruths, recognizing false beliefs as false, not believing the ego's lies and not listening to your own bullshit.

Underneath your own bullshit is YOU, the real you, already perfect and immaculate and immortal and innocent. It has not been removed. It has not been changed. It has not been damaged. It has not been defiled. It has not been interrupted or upset or made to be what God didn't want it to be. You are still EXACTLY as God created you.

So this is all you need to work on. ... uncovering the truth, not defining it, not making it up. Revealing it. Exposing it. Not strengthening it - it is already total strength - but becoming more aware of the strength that is already in you. Not building yourself up. Not becoming a hero or a spiritual guru of worship. Just being yourself - the you that you are, beneath all the facades of the ego persona and shadow that seem to disguise you in a cloak of death.

You're immortal spirit, you know, son of God, hiding out with heavy clothing on. You just need to get naked.

"Reality is a constant state."

"Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all."

"His REALITY is forever sinless."

"Reality is not insane"

"In Heaven, reality is SHARED"

"The only part of your mind that has reality, is the part that links you still with God."

"Man's reality is ONLY his soul."

"Reality observes the laws of God"

"your reality, which you share with God."

"the true relationship the Son of God has with his Father in reality."

"Faith in the unreal leads to adjustments of reality"

"To know Reality is not to see the ego"

"the peace to which your reality entitles you."

"What dies was never living in reality"

"Repeat His Name and you acknowledge Him as sole Creator of Reality."

"Today we try to bring reality still closer to your mind."

"If you are Spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality."

"So is its Self the one Reality in Which its will and That of God are joined."

"Illusions have no direction in reality. They are merely not true."

"your Identity, which God alone established in reality."

"In reality, this is his ONLY choice, because his free will was made for his own joy in creating the perfect."

"God knows you only in peace, and this IS your reality. "Reality is that which, above all else, is persistent and continuous.

Reality has nothing higher or prior to its existence.

Reality is first-hand, primary, fundamental and original.

Reality is final.

Reality simply is.

Reality is what really is, and what always is.

Reality is permanence and exists forever the same.

Reality cannot change, otherwise it would not be permanent.

Reality is not a term you can use to describe a changing world.

Reality is not some background soup that houses differences.

Reality is singular, it is complete, it is unwavering.

Reality never changes, and can never be changed.

Reality always is real.

Reality always is the same as reality always was and will be.

Reality is forever, reality is eternal.

Reality cannot be altered, modified, changed or transformed.

Reality has no differences in it.

Reality does not waver or fluctuate or change shape.

Reality is always the same, always constant.

Reality cannot be adjusted or taken away.

Reality cannot be attacked or destroyed.

Reality cannot be hurt, offended, upset or influenced.

Reality does not change its viewpoint.

Reality is consistent and consistency is truth.

Reality cannot be damaged or made to suffer.

Reality cannot be sick.

Reality cannot die.

Reality cannot be corrupted.

Reality cannot be willed against.

Reality cannot be forced, coerced or manipulated.

Reality cannot lack or lose anything.

Reality cannot be made to diminish or distort.

Reality is sanity.

Reality is whole.

Reality is perfection.

Reality is permanence.

Reality is immortal.

Reality is invulnerable.

Reality is pure and innocent.

Reality is immaculate.

Reality is indestructible.

Reality is safe from attack.

Reality is safe from sickness and death.

Reality is safe from harm or hurt.

Reality is safe from time or space.

Reality is safe from death.

Reality is free from fear.

Reality cannot be afraid.

Reality cannot be attacked so cannot be threatened.

Reality has never changed or lost its peace.

God is real. Therefore, God is permanent, immortal, unchanging, unattackable, unthreatenable, invulnerable, eternal, constantly the same, safe from all threat, incapable of sickness or death, and whole and complete.

You are a creation of God. Therefore you are real. You are permanent, immortal, unchanging, unattackable, unthreatenable, invulnerable, eternal, constantly the same, safe from all threat, incapable of sickness or death, and whole and complete.

"I am not an illusion but a reality."

You are safe because you are real.

You are safe because you cannot be threatened.

You are safe because you are invulnerable and immortal.

You are safe in God because God is real.

You are safe from death because reality can never die.

You are safe from attack because you cannot be attacked.

You have never been attacked and never will be.

Since reality is existence, nothing unreal exists.

Since attack is unreal, reality cannot be attacked.

Since there is nothing unreal to attack, nothing real can be threatened.

Since reality cannot be threatened, reality has nothing to fear.

Since there is nothing to fear, because nothing threatening exists, reality is at peace.

Since you are unthreatenable, you are at peace.

Since you are at peace, you are unafraid.

Since you are unafraid, you are safe in God.

If you are not being absolutely immortal, then you are trying to be a victim. Victims are not just those who seem to be overtly attacked by another. Victims are those who believe they can be CHANGED AT ALL BY ANYTHING.

There is a wide range of victimhood, or what you might call "victim consciousness", from mild to extreme. But everyone's doing it. We're all trying to make out that we're something that can be affected. That we can be hurt or suffer, made to feel something, caused against our will, converted and transformed and modified by the world.

The bizarre but factual truth is that the world does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to you. It is not the cause of you, God is. There is not a single speck of anything in the whole of spacetime that has ANY ability to change what you really are at all. You are changeless and eternal and you do not have the ability to change.

"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it was. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea." UrM6C3

We all entered into a grand charade of pretending we can die. Pretending we can be mortal, that we can suffer, that stuff can happen to us, that we can be affected and changed. Even that we can change ourselves against God's will. None of this is true.

"You see yourself as a ridiculous parody on God's creation, weak, vicious, ugly and sinful, miserable and beset with pain. Such is your version of your self; a self divided into many warring parts, separated from God, and tenuously held together by its erratic and capricious maker, to which you pray." UrW95L2

"You see yourself as vulnerable, frail, and easily destroyed. And at the mercy of countless attackers more powerful than you." UrT22G11 You cannot change what is permanently changeless, but you can BELIEVE you can. This belief is a mistake and a lie. Everyone who believes they can be victimised, attacked, hurt, damaged, destroyed, is lying. Anyone who feels they are suffering or weak or threatened or afraid are lying. Anyone who claims that someone did something to them is lying.

"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." UrW191L9

This can be a harsh truth especially when it seems so real and convincing, especially when some other body comes along and performs a physical abuse or harm upon your body or feelings. Especially when it seems to blatantly obvious that someone "not myself" is wholly responsible for "causing changes in me."

And we've all been through shit. We've all experienced what we call suffering. We've all had pains and hurts, sicknesses. We've all died many times over. We've all gone through every form of misery possible and every form of unhappiness and every kind of horrendous nightmare. And even in spite all of it, NOT ONE SINGLE BIT OF IT IS TRUE.

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do." UrT9K8

We CANNOT be victimised or attacked or hurt or damaged or threatened or changed at all. God who is immortal maintains us forever in his mind by his infinite immortal will to be immortal beings forever. We are absolutely incapable of change or of being change or of changing anything. There is NO CHANGE in reality.

"Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son. Pain is not of Him, for He knows no attack, and His peace surrounds you silently." UrT10D1

We must remind ourselves frequently when tempted to believe we have BEEN changed, or CAN change, that we HAVE NOT done this. IF we believe we have done this, we will believe we have sinned and are guilty, deserving more fake punishment. We cannot BE punished. We cannot become guilt, or turn into evil, or transform into the anti-christ.

"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. " UrW152L1

Beyond all lies and all deception and all fake suffering and all pain and sickness and all death, beyond space and time, we are all absolutely infinite beings that are so absolute and so always the same forever that we have not even BEGUN to change into anything else.

"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." UrW190L5

All that's happened is we have gone into DENIAL about our permanent reality, our permanent perfection, our permanent Christhood. And have PRETENDED to be something that changes. We have damaged the body, damaged the emotions, damaged the thinking, but we have not damaged the soul. What we are can never be changed.

"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." UrT29G1

All that's required then in awakening to the truth is to ACCEPT THE TRUTH, that nothing has EVER happened to us, nothing CAN happen to us, and there is not even a world that could be accused of doing such in the first place. Attack does not exist. There is no pain or suffering or sickness or death. We are the sons of God and we are free from suffering forever.

"There is no death, and we renounce it now in every form, for their salvation and our own as well. God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death and see the life beyond." UrW163L8

"There is no death. The Son of God is free. And in His freedom is the end of fear. UrM29A4

You as love cannot be attacked by the ego. The ego in others or in the world is utterly incapable of doing ANYTHING to love. Love is completely outside of the entire realm of the ego’s dream. All ego identities are totally out of reach of it. Never the two will meet.

The course says "Love was never in the world." Meaning, the world - ego, people’s attacks, war and conflict, have no ability to be where love is (because love is everywhere and ego does not really exist). This is also why nothing can assail the Kingdom of God.

However,. ...! ... IF you choose to believe that you are something other than love, if you believe that something else is true of you and that it is not true that you are ONLY love, THAT IDENTITY that you’ve made-up is now WITHIN the realm of the ego. It’s now a PART of the ego’s thought system. This makes it possible for it to be attacked.

This is why minds (which are fused with love) cannot be attacked, but it seems that bodies can be attacked. Bodies are part of the ego’s dream.

IF you have chosen to believe that something false is true of you, such as... you are guilty, sinful, unworthy, unlovable, not good enough, shameful, inferior, right/wrong, good/bad etc, then you are positioning yourself "on the battlefield" in amongst the rest of the ego.

The ego can and does attack ITSELF, because the ego IS the idea of self-attack. It is inner conflict, a war with yourself. It’s attacks are illusions, but the ego believes they are reality. If YOU believe that your false beliefs are true of you, YOU will see yourself as "attackable".

Once you are *identifying* yourself as equated with something false/ego/untrue, you’re going to experience vulnerability, victimhood, you will seem to be "accessible" to attackers, and you can seem to be hurt.

If you do something in which you feel you’ve sinned, or are guilty or wrong or unlovable in some way, you will walk about the world feeling like there is a TARGET on your back. You will become paranoid. You will FEAR that someone is going to do something to you. You will see yourself as being constantly looked at, which makes you feel very "self conscious". You SUSPECT everyone of having a murderous intention towards you, and this completely undermines your sense of feeling safe.

You cannot feel safe or certain of being unharmable, while you hold false beliefs about yourself. With these beliefs intact, whenever anyone attempts to insinuate that something false is true of you, you will not be truly able to stop or deny the accusation, because YOU believe it is true, even if you don’t want to admit that. You will AGREE that you SHOULD be attacked. Even if you try to avoid attack, believing things true of the ego are true of you, ASKS for you to be victimized.

No-one who regards themselves as part of the ego thought system, by believing something false is true, can escape attack. However, if you HEAL your false beliefs and let them go, your IDENTITY is going to shift away from "I am guilty" (made of guilt), "I am sinful" (made of sin) etc... to... I AM LOVE (made of love).

When you are made of love, YOU CANNOT BE ATTACKED. The ego has absolutely no ability to make its illusions do anything to reality. In love, you are *invulnerable and immortal*. And I mean this literally. Absolutely beyond all ability to ever be attacked ever again. Becoming REAL therefore makes you invulnerable, because "nothing real can be threatened". And since this state recognizes that illusions have NO POWER, NO WILL and NO CAUSALITY, the tranquility of PEACE is permanently undisturbed.

You are safe in God because you are innocent, lovable and loved. When this is your IDENTITY, YOU will not perceive that anything anyone does can affect you in any way. You will not perceive that their insanity has anything to do with you. You will take nothing personally. You will see the insanity of others as a CALL FOR LOVE. And anything anyone ever tries to claim about "you" will only ever be a claim about some ego identity. Who YOU ARE will be different to the ego identity that other people are trying to target, and so it will be CLEAR AND OVIOUS that they weren’t even targeting you at all. This makes it impossible for you to see yourself as being attacked.

You are immortal spirit. Immortal spirit is literally invulnerable. Love CANNOT be damaged. Nothing real can be threatened because only love exists. Love is your real identity. You are IMMORTAL.

I've been through a lot of crap in which I've had to deal with medical issues for my wife. She's been close to death's door a couple of times. I had to literally decide whether to continue her life or not, and she's been on life-support twice.

But what I personally went through was a confrontation with the idea of death and its inevitability, and an intense ego challenge as to whether to believe it or not. I had to decide whether to side against death and seek for life. To decide whether there was a real alternative and possibility. It wasn't about her, it was about whether I believed that death is the only option or not.

This awakened in me a reversal, a 180-degree turn, pointing away from the direction of death towards eternal life. It awakened a much greater awareness of the Holy Spirit, who has the goal of eternal life. And it made me ever more cognizant of our immortal nature as given by God.

At first it seemed my challenge was to just deal with life-threatening sickness and to go through the stress of it all. Trying to make it go away and stop it like most people would. But what later evolved was a questioning of sickness itself. Having to decide whether to believe in sickness and death or not. Everyone was buying into death and giving me messages of hopelessness and I had to decide whether to believe it.

If I were to continue believing death was inevitable and unavoidable I would have no remaining faith in life. But if I were to question whether death is the only option, it would open me up to entertaining the idea that I should refuse death and turn away from it. I would have to deny and refuse to accept the naysayers and the doubters and those who expertly believed in death's inevitability.

It wasn't really that my wife was going through life-support scenarios and having to play out all the possible "what could be the worst thing to happen" in my mind. It was more that this was actually a spiritual lesson in which I had to make a firm commitment. Was I going to seek for her resurrection or not? Did I want eternal life or not? Did I support miracles or not? Was I really going to get real and LIVE the teaching and be a miracle worker or was I just going to lay down and let death have its day?

When the Holy Spirit told me in the midsts of this drama, "resurrect her", it was immediately clear what the purpose of all this was. When I sought Jesus's counsel and he told me in no uncertain terms that I must not terminate her life, I knew I was being steered towards miracles. And I had to somehow find the strength and determination to find another way.

Instead of therefore simply "going through" another nightmarish experience, or regarding it as pointless, or seeing it as something to be avoided at all costs, what was really playing out was a spiritual lesson in which I had to decide whether to side with life or death. And by that I don't just mean normal life in a temporary body but eternal immortal life. Was I going to believe in a miraculous resurrection that flies in the fact of everything everyone is telling me, or was I going to just fall into a hole and let death happen.

Well. As it turned out I did decide to side with life, and this has since been catapulting me into far greater vigilance and clarity. I see now that instead of just going through a hellish experience that I would try to avoid, it instead became a huge turning point. I had to bring into question whether death could happen, what life would be like, and even whether she was even really sick at all. Was I going to allow her to remain sick or was I going to challenge even her on her own sickness? Was I going to insist that she not be sick?

This is where resurrection entered my mind as a real alternative and as a possibility. And this is where I made a giant leap forward. I now recognize that I must in fact NOT BELIEVE IN SICKNESS AT ALL. I have had to come to realize that even my wife's sicknesses are fake. I've had to realize that she in her mind is deceiving herself and "playing a game of death". I've had to come to recognize HER immortal self which cannot BE sick, and I've had to start siding with her immortality OVER her mortality.

This has in fact given me tremendous clarity now because, the more I dwell on immortality the more clear it becomes that anything ELSE is not true. How can a person be sick if they are immortal? How can appearances of suffering exist if they are IMPOSSIBLE in God? How can a person's signs of death be true if God created that person to live forever? I am now holding this up in my mind and comparing and reminding myself and her, that she cannot BE sick, the sickness is a lie, and SHE IS NOT SICK. I was not able to so fully commit to this or be convinced by it before this confrontation with death.

How else am I to truly be in support of life, as God defines it, than to question all sickness and death? I've even had to question it in those closest to me. I've had to decide to side with the real life in the soul within each person, on their behalf, and for them, even if they don't believe in it, and even if they are actively trying to work against it. I can be of NO HELP at all unless I can stand up for God's truth, and I can have NO HOPE at all unless there is a REAL possibility of an alternative to death. There is an increasing POWER in me now which is pushing death and sickness aside.

My whole focus is now shifting to resurrection, to life, to support, to healing, to the assertion of life, the cancelling of sickness and death, the withdrawal of power and attention from sickness, the clarifying that people are not even bodies, the utter refusal to accept that someone can even BE sick, and the clear recognition that all sickness is a lie.

Even if this entails recognizing that a loved one is lying, and even if it entails not believing my own eyes, and even if it means having to not be tempted by appearances of death because part of me believed sickness and death WERE possible, and therefore I was torn and confused. I was not clear on whether I sided with life or death and was in the muddy territory of wavering back and forth. Not firmly committed to life or its opposite.

For me now it's not merely a matter of trying to struggle through life and avoid sicknesses and try to stave off death as long as possible. I am now actively MOVING TOWARD ETERNAL LIFE. Moving in the opposite direction to the ego's goal of death. Focusing on and strengthening the idea of immortality, unchangeability, invulnerability and permanence. Attuning to the immortal soul within myself, and in others. Looking for the life and the truth and the light. Seeing miracles in light and as light.

I am now heavily flying in the face of the entire world, going against everything everyone says and believes, rejecting the "nature" of this world's nature, against the grain, being unlike the world and unlike the body, refusing to accept death and refusing to allow others to remain in self deceptive states of suffering. I am having to be UNPOPULAR in order to do this and to NOT side with the mass opinions of others. I will now assert only the life-affirming and HEALING attitude of resurrection and miracles. The strength of siding with God and with the Holy Spirit, and the utter refusal to fall into traps of temptation.

Only the immortal is real. Only the unchangeable is real. Only the invulnerable is real. Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing real can be attacked or made sick. Nothing real can die. This is the only truth. There is ONLY LIFE, there is no death. Death is the world's biggest lie and I will no longer lie to myself or to others that mortality is natural or acceptable. It is the FIRM CONVICTION that there is only life, that raises the dead, and I WILL see miracles.

"Do not allow your brother to be sick, for if he is, have YOU abandoned him to his own dream, by SHARING it with him."

"The miracle does nothing. All it does is to UNdo. And thus it cancels out the interference to what HAS BEEN done . It does not add, but merely takes away. And what it takes away is long since gone, but, being kept in memory, APPEARS to have immediate effects."

What has "been done" is God's will, creation, perfection, the establishing of you as an immortal being, perfect health, eternal life, happiness etc.

But what has been IMAGINED is the ego stuff which has tried to "interfere" with creation. This has produced denial and sickness and pain and suffering and death.

So what the miracle DOES, is that it UNDOES the INTERFERENCES, the ego stuff, so that all that REMAINS is the true-nature of the immortal spiritual self.

Some people interpret this to mean literally "miracles don't do anything". This is a gross error. They actually DO ACT to "cancel" or "reverse" or "dissolve" or "heal" the "strange distortions that were manifest" and wipe them away to RE-ESTABLISH the perfection and health that has been hidden by the ego's interference.

So the miracle actually UNDOES EGO, and therefore UNCOVERS perfection, by REMOVING the manifestations, symptoms, and effects of ego.

Thus they DO produce what appears to be an IMMEDIATE EFFECT. The stuff which is "being kept in memory" is the entire ego thought system, which is dissolved and undone and shone past, to ERASE IT. This produces the "appearance" of transformation even on a physical level.

If we were ALREADY in a state, in time, of perfection, miracles indeed would not DO anything. There would be nothing TO UNDO. But because we HAVE added layer upon layer of ego denial and suffering, THOSE things ARE UNDONE by the miracle, in an ACTIVE way.

You as Christ have not been changed even a tiny little bit by anything that supposedly has happened in the world.

You as Christ are perfect love, perfectly invulnerable, perfectly loved and adored by God, and perfectly healthy. You are absolutely immortal. You stand as a beacon of perfect love shining as a brilliant light and nothing can happen to you.

This is your real identity. This is what is buried underneath layers and layers of bullshit in your mind. False beliefs about who you are. False beliefs about who did what to you.

Nobody has ever done anything to you wholly intentionally in full awareness and sanity. Anyone sane could not harm another. Anyone sane could not do anything to victimize you. If anyone has ever seemed to do anything to you, you are grossly mistaken for believing that they did so on purpose, intentionally, from a completely sane and aware state of mind. They were NOT in their right mind. And it is only by not being in the right mind that a person could even conceive of treating you as anything but the perfect love that you are.

So if there's anyone in your story who has ever seemed to do something to you, and you believe that they did it from a place of rational mind, a place of love, a place of full awareness, you are mistaken. Nobody has ever done anything harmful from a state of sanity and love. That person must be insane, and they must not realize what they are doing.

This is why Jesus says, "forgive them for they know not what they do". There is a tremendous recognition in this statement. It sees that when a person is 100% love, they can only be loving. When they are not 100% love, they enter into illusions and darkness and despair and DO NOT KNOW what they are doing. So they can only act mistakenly, wrongly, incorrectly, and with faulty reasoning or justification.

They can't ever do something unloving from a foundation of perfect love and innocence. So whoever hurt you, whatever they did, they were NOT in their right mind, and this is why they are forgivable. It's only because you believe they WERE in their right mind and that therefore they deliberately chose to do what they did, that they are guilty. They did not choose sanely. THEY were experiencing an unlove, an unworthiness, a guilt, a self-attack, a shame and an abandonment, and they tried to project this onto you thinking you were the same. They were just mistaken.

So you have to peel away all these layers of false belief that you've formed in your mind which still are convinced someone did something intentionally to hurt you. There is no such thing as intentional hurt or willful hurt or intentional victimizing. Victimizing can only occur in the minds of those who believe they are not loved by God and who have attacked themselves already. This is why they act out. This is why they find scapegoats, and maybe is why you ended up being their target. They were not sane. You need to recognize this in order to be able to let go of feeling unfairly treated and blaming them for what they did. Again, as Jesus said, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Underneath all of this, you are still absolutely loved by God, absolutely innocent, absolutely immortal, absolutely unchanged and unaffected by anything in the world or history of time and space. You are perfectly whole and innocent and healed and powerful. You are unassailable, invulnerable, immortal, permanent and strong. Nothing can happen to you. Nothing has ever happened to you. This is the secret truth hiding underneath all of the LIES which try to portray you as having been affected, changed, modified, hurt, damaged, or in any way made to be or mean something other than God intended. You are not any of that. You ARE and CAN ONLY BE as God intended.

You are Christ. You are holy and innocent and free.

The truth about you is simply that you are STILL EXACTLY as you were created by God. Absolutely perfect, immortal, permanent, changeless, eternal, powerful, innocent, holy, happy, loving, joyful, peaceful. There has not been even a slight change in what you are.

This you that is altogether perfect in every way, is still "in you", buried under layers of bullshit lies which you have placed sort of "between yourself and yourself" to try to pretend that you are NOT the perfect holy immortal innocent being that God created.

The fact that you don't seem to experience yourself AS a perfect immortal innocent spiritual being is simply because your mind has chosen to believe in a whole bunch of things which are DISTORTING your view of yourself. So much so that it makes you believe that your perfect self doesn't even exist, that deep down in your core you are corrupt and evil, and that there is something very wrong with you - as if you have literally transformed into a guilty mother#($*#)(.

These are ALL LIES. They are lies that we tell ourselves on a daily basis. Lies which attempt to slander and accuse God's perfectly innocent children and make out that they are faulty, flawed, malfunctioning, corrupt, damaged, evil, and have been changed into something totally unrecognisable. And recognition really is a huge part of this because if you COULD recognize precisely what is REALLY true of you, you wouldn't doubt for a second that you are EXACTLY as God created you, and not some hideous creature that you made up.

The issue then is that God has established the truth about you, which is ALWAYS true and is STILL true right now. But then you have attempted to throw away this truth - which is a matter of dishonesty and not accepting/admitting the truth - a matter of denial, in which you are trying to be something you are not, are claiming things are true of you which are not, and are generally trying to make yourself into a "false self" - or an ego as we call it.

Ego then is nothing but a cloud of lies that swirls around the perfect undefiled perfection of your being like vultures waiting to feast upon your corpse, swarming such that their numbers seem to blot out the light and make it seem like you are not even in there anymore. And yet at the core of this scene you ARE STILL exactly the perfect loving light-filled being that God created, shining away without the slightest dimming of your perfection.

So the ego lies are all designed to basically HIDE THE TRUTH, not that they have any power to actually cause the truth to go away or change or stop existing, but to simply COVER IT UP to make it SEEM like it's not there. And this then leads to believing that you HAVE literally changed into something corrupt and full of sin, because you have lost sight of yourself. But YOU ARE STILL IN THERE!

Believing things that are not true of you is madness, and is the insanity of what we call the ego thought system. A kind of delusional twisting of the truth, a mis-perception of your reality. YOU REMAIN exactly perfect as God created you right now and forever, you are just DENYING that you are perfect. You are a perfect immortal being PRETENDING to be mortal and imperfect. Trying to convince yourself that there is something horrendously wrong with you WHEN THERE ISN'T.

Listening to the ego means nothing more than simply listening to your own lies. The ego is nothing more than a part of YOUR BELIEF ABOUT YOURSELF, which means a FALSE belief about what is true of you. IF you could just stop lying to yourself about yourself, you would rediscover the truth about you and melt into a state of being much more calm, relaxed, happy and peaceful. Simply because all the lies ever do is stir up shit, create drama, intensify contrasts, enforce separations, magnify tensions, amplify war, and make out that some kind of nightmare is happening to scare the living daylights out of you.

The ego is the idea of the anti-christ. It is anti - christ ... ie AGAINST Christ. You are christ. It is AGAINST YOU. It is the idea of being something opposite to what you are. It is A LIE. The ego is a lie, the body is a lie, the world is a lie, space and time are a lie. This is why we call them an illusion - a claim to be something they are not. And all the ego can ever do is LIE ABOUT YOU, while trying to pass it off as truth. A lie which is has been confused with truth is a sin. A lie which is recognized as false is merely an error.

You are unmoved, you are peace itself, you are permanence, you are fixed and eternal, you cannot change in any way, nothing in the world HAS EVER changed you, nothing the world believes or says about you is true, EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS A LIE, and YOU are the living truth of God expressed forever. It is only ever then a matter of, when will you be willing to accept that there is nothing wrong with you whatsoever?

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true, unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception."

"Atonement remedies the strange idea that it is possible to doubt yourself and be unsure of what you really are. This is the depth of madness. Yet it is the universal question of the world. 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."

"This is the anti-Christ; the strange idea there is a power PAST omnipotence, a place BEYOND the infinite, a time transcending the eternal. Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

"True healing is the realization you were never sick" - ACIM

The implication of this is that in order to heal or be healed, you do NOT need to find the 'cause of the sickness'. You need to go BEYOND the cause of the sickness to where sickness HAS NO CAUSE. The sickness was produced by a denial or a blockage or an unwillingness to accept that there IS NO SICKNESS AT ALL.

So then if you go looking for the cause, this not only infers that you believe that you are sick and the sickness exists because of a 'real cause', but also that the sickness stems from some kind of 'causal mistake' somewhere in the mind. Like a root or a decision that was wrong. A starting point.

It seems there is something that you 'did' which then produced a bunch of symptoms after it. But even without symptoms coming after it, that initial 'sin' isn't causing sickness to show up somewhere else separate from it - the belief in the sin IS the sickness. It is sickness because THERE IS NO SIN and to believe otherwise IS to be sick/mistaken.

It may appear that these things are the 'cause' of sickness, but really their presence at all is the 'cause' because they are blocking an ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of divine health. They are blocking the atonement, which is that sickness has NOT occurred.

So in order to BE healed, you need to get past all notions of symptoms being real, and past all notions of a cause being real, and REMEMBER that there is no 'real' cause because sickness is not real. You need to remember that YOU ARE NOT SICK. And in that light, in that awareness, the sickness is not believed in, is not seen, and does not exist. Thus any 'manifestation' of it must disappear.

So if you're addressing the sickness, fighting with the sickness, trying to find the cause of the sickness, trying to uproot the sickness, trying to figure out where the sickness came from, or how to fix the sickness, you are barking up the wrong tree and the ego knows it. This only reinforces your belief in it.

The ONLY healing is in surrendering the ego, letting go of the need for the sickness - which ultimately is to block the awareness of NATURAL HEALTH. The only purpose of sickness is as an obstacle to peace and a resistance/defense against the truth. Its only purpose is to choose not to acknowledge that YOU CANNOT BE SICK because you are immortal spirit - Christ!

So let's stop. And let's move into ACCEPTING that we are 100% healthy. Let's move into allowing God's presence to heal. Let's move into recognizing that sickness can never be real, and the belief that it is real IS the sickness. And then let's drop this ego pretense that sickness is happening and admit the truth: As Christ, as God's creation, you are immortal and immune and invulnerable and immaculate. Nothing has happened and nothing can happen to make you sick. You can never be sick because God has created you innocent forever.

So all of this other 'sickness' is just the belief that you are not that, that you are not Christ, innocent, immortal and invulnerable. Your thoughts about the sickness are attack thoughts - "my attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability". But your invulnerability cannot BE attacked. Believing that it can IS an error, and error is sickness. Sickness is not the TRUTH, sickness is a LIE. And ultimately, death is a lie.

Own up to your immortality today.

"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."

You as Immortal Spirit do not need a body to exist. Period.

The body was "added" to you as a projection of the idea of sin.

You think you need it, want it, desire it, rely on it, depend on it.

This is artificial.

You are sustained by the love of God at all times. You are pure spirit. You can exist without a body.

Given that your Spirit is capable of anything, has no needs, is immortal, cannot die, and is forever happy, what purpose does the body have?

It is pointless. It is meaningless. It is worthless. It is nothing.

We do however need to be careful not to let the ego come in here and use this information as an attack on the body, to judge it or hate it or condemn it with labels.

The body is not there. It is not real. It must disappear because it never really existed to begin with.

You don't need it. It cannot enter Heaven, and it was always a substitute for pretending you had needs that your Spirit could not supply.

When you have no more use for it, or belief that it has a usefulness at all, you will lay it down, disappear it, and go home to God.

God created you as a perfect being. You are flawless, immortal, immaculate, permanent, constant, unlimited and eternal. You can never change. You can never be changed. God's Will is done and your creation is forever. You are forever held in the mind of God in permanence.

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there."

The simple acceptance of your true nature is all that is required in the Atonement. You don't have to make yourself better. You don't have to redesign yourself or redefine yourself. You only need to realize and accept you are already perfect as God created you.

"I am not a body I am free, for I am still as God created me."You cannot change yourself and no-one else can change you. Your self is incapable of change, incapable of learning, and incapable of forgetting. It was absolutely perfect and unlimited the instant it came into being. And you will be forever perfect.

If you have gone away from the perfection, if you have lost sight of it, and find yourself in a dream of suffering, feeling threatened, in danger, concerned for your future, buying into fear and worry that you may not last, or that something can be taken from you, or deceived into being guilty for something you cannot do, you have merely forgotten the facts.

There is nothing you need to do other than own your self. To own up to what you are. To accept your true being. To represent yourself authentically. To simply resume how you have alway been, underneath your dreams of being something you are not, or not yourself. God has already finished the work of perfecting you and your perfection has never changed. You are just in denial of your perfection.

Being lost in the ego, or lost in dreaming, or in fear and suffering, or having sickness or death, is all just part of being out of touch with yourself and imagining that you are not what you are. Dreams of death, dreams of not knowing yourself, dreams of being vulnerable, dreams of suffering and deprivation and lack and limitation, must all be fictional nightmares having simply forgotten your true nature."You are immortal and you cannot die"

God did not create you to be capable of sin, or capable of being sinned against. You have not sinned. You have not attacked. You have not killed or died. None of these thing are possible. Nothing can influence the will of God and it is God's will that you live forever. Not even you can change this fact. You are permanently permanent and there is nothing you can do about it. Nor should you want to.

If you are believing that you are under attack, or susceptible, or weak, or needing defenses, or concerned for your existence, or threatened, or in any way suffering, then you can be sure you are mistaken. You can be sure you do not know yourself. And you can be sure you have been deceived, tempted by illusion and distracted from the truth.

You are perfect now. You have always been perfect. And you will always be perfect. It is God's job to ensure and guarantee your perfection. It is only your job to accept it freely and willingly, knowing it is the only way for you to be true to yourself. To accept your true nature is to accept yourself AS GOD created you, and not what you tried to make of yourself.

If you are in fear you are mistaken. There is nothing to fear for one who is permanently immortal.

There is a reason why we believe death is inevitable, and why we think there isn't any other choice.

At the beginning of separation from God, we attempted to sin against him. That means we tried to attack God, cause Him, and therefore produce real effects to change Him against His will. This was the Son attempting to be the Father's father.

More simply, we attempted to reverse cause and effect. We who are an effect/creation of God, tried to be the cause of Him, and to make Him the effect of us. This is a simple logical reversal of states. This is level confusion.

Having believed that we accomplished this, which is the belief that sin is real, that we really did it and there are real consequences, we automatically believed that God has been attacked against His will. The automatic logical state for God now is that He is now JUSTIFIED in anger and revenge, because he's been unfairly treated.

Part of the belief in real sin includes this "re-framing" of God as someone who rightly SHOULD be angry at us, should want revenge toward us, whose will is in opposition to ours, and who is an enemy that we've attacked. This frames God as unforgiving, not recognizing our innocence, and not wanting us to live with Him.

By believing in sin, we believed also in the false idea of God, and in the idea that we cannot be forgiven and don't want to be forgiven. We did not want to believe in being forgivable because we wanted to keep the idea of sin real. And real sin would depend on God agreeing with us that we are sinful. We believe he should agree with us because we believe in what we did to hurt Him and his right to seek compensation.

This belief in real sin leads automatically to the belief that God wills that we be dead, which logically produces the fear of God. We appear to then be unwelcome to God, we consider ourselves as exiled, we see our Home as "off limits", and God's unforgiveness seems to cast us out. Believing in our sinfulness makes us believe that it is not possible to BE forgiven, OR to return Home, OR to be innocent, OR to ever share ETERNAL LIFE with God.

This sets us up for the next step in the ego's logical progression of conclusions. That is, that since we can't return to eternal life, life is no longer an OPTION. It is no longer possible for us to return to the Kingdom of eternal life. We've banished ourselves. And on this basis alone, we believe that since life is not possible for us, DEATH is the only possibility that remains.

It seems all we can do is slither away in shame and darkness, hide in a corner, suffer and die. And we believe this is all we rightly deserve, in order to not only comply with God's will that we die, but also to support and KEEP the idea that our sin is irreversible and unforgivable. We demand that we MUST die, in order to "pay for" the sin we firmly believe we committed. And so all death is a chosen suicide.

And so now we "accept" that because "sin is real" to us, death is INEVITABLE. It appears to not even be a choice, because it seems to be the ONLY outcome that's possible. There doesn't appear to be any alternative. And so we seem to come into the world, to "come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

It's almost as if we gave up on eternal life right from the start, threw it away, and left God behind to go and die alone in hell. This "death wish" and its foundation is responsible for EVERY death that happens in this world. Every death is a form of self attack and suicide, no matter how it looks or what happens or who does what to whom. "No-one dies without their own consent."

The good news is that this need not be, nor is it God's will. We need to learn that sin is not real, we did not attack God, we are still innocent, God still loves and welcomes us, we can go Home, we are forgiven, we did not really do anything at all, no consequences came from it, it was nothing but a delusional dream of death, and we can be reunited with love and RE-ACCESS ETERNAL LIFE. We've been MISTAKEN about God and ourselves and what we thought we did, and all is forgiven.

This means that as we progress in our return to sanity and awareness, we'll gradually accept the atonement truth that nothing real was threatened, nothing unreal happened, and all is well. Upon realizing that we did not sin, LIFE becomes an option again. It becomes possible to return to eternal life and to trust that God wants us to live. It becomes possible to not HAVE TO die. There now appears to be a choice, between life and death. And now death is no longer the inevitable single outcome,. Death is merely an "fake alternative" to what God wills for you.

At some point we will fully accept not only that death is unreal and has no consequences, but also that LIFE is all that we choose. We re-invest in the Kingdom, we open up to forgiveness, we allow ourselves to recognize the truth about us and our brother's innocence, that there is no sin, and we prepare to return Home to God - in recognition that we never really left.

Here we decide to side with life so fully that we will not even support notions of death AT ALL on any level or in any way. Not even while in a dream, not even while still having a body. We prepare to exhibit our conviction that we are immortal and eternal, by demonstrating it symbolically through the body's condition. The more we accept our innocence and extend love, the more the body is healed along with us. All the way to the point where even the slightest sign of sickness and death is no longer a part of your physical demonstration.

You then are teaching only life on all levels, mentally and physically, for as long as it is useful. And then the appointed time arrives for the completion of your journey without distance, back to where you never left. A complete awakening from the dream of death, our of bodies an out of the world, into the Kingdom of Heaven, remembering your immortal soul and continuing as a co-creator with God. Forever, and ever, and ever. Permanently alive. Permanently immortal.

In recognition that death is nothing but an illusion, death now becomes the "impossibility". It is now seen as having no effect, no causality, and no consequences. It is surmounted and overcome. It is seen as nothing. And not one single thing in all the world can make it happen to you against your will. When the illusion of death is recognized, it disappears. And now the only outcome truly possible, is the INEVITABILITY OF LIVING FOREVER.

You no longer have a choice, because there IS no death TO choose. Death has ended and is snuffed out. Only Real Life is possible for you now, and now you cannot fail to continue as an immortal being, Created by God to share eternal life with Him Forever. There is no death.

"There is no death, the Son of God is free."

Healing requires that we see the other person as already perfect, completely equal to our perfect self. We must START there and STRENGTHEN their perfection in THEIR mind by seeing it FOR them.

If we start with “you are sick, something’s wrong with you”, that is in fact - in contrast to their immortal perfection - a way of WEAKENING them. It is how the ego sees them and is an attack, even if it occurs while trying to “heal them.”

If healing or the need for healing is seen to be on the basis of “making up for what’s wrong with them”, this is not healing. It’s what the course calls magic. It’s the unhealed healer who still believes the person is something they’re not, and so contributes to the suffering instead of healing it.

How can you heal someone if you are starting out by perceiving them as guilty, suffering, sick, flawed, lacking, malfunctioning, a body, limited, weak or frail? This is NOT a correct way to see anyone and it means you are agreeing with the ego that your brother is defective and diseased and guilty and destroyed. To react to such nightmarish perceptions in an attempt to heal them without undoing the belief in them, is sure to fail, or only mildly work at best. Been there done that.

The course asks us to BEGIN by seeing the truth of a person, that they are immortal and holy, and that therefore they do not really NEED healing. It’s similar to forgiveness which looks without sin and sees “there is no sin”, ie there is in effect “no need for forgiveness” because it is seen AS forgiven already. Healing has this quality too - see them AS healed (their immortal God-given self) in order to confirm that the sickness is NOT THERE, in order to INDIRECTLY “make it go away” by shining that light of awareness into their mind FOR them so that they too become aware of it.

“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.”

“Healing ONLY STRENGTHENS. Magic always tries to weaken. Healing perceives NOTHING in the healer that everyone else does not share WITH him. Magic ALWAYS sees something special in the healer, which he believes he can offer as a gift to someone who does NOT have it.” You could call this, “healing to destroy.”

"He may believe that this gift comes from God TO him, but it is quite evident that he does NOT understand God if he thinks HE has something that others DO NOT.”

If we think there is something true of us that is not true of others, we have entered into ego attack and specialness. God gives everyone the same perfection and this must be recognized. A healer does not have anything that anyone else doesn’t have, and the gift to heal is NOT exclusive. To be SHARED, health and life must be seen AS shared and inclusive of all.

In summary, you heal another by seeing their already-healed self - their Christ self, still as God created them - and this causes you to shine your light brightly, and this light shines INTO their mind and HEALS IT, awakening their mind to an awareness of the truth about themselves, and thus undoing all sickness. Because they are NOT sick.

"The "fearful healer" is a contradiction in terms, and is therefore a concept that ONLY a conflicted mind could POSSIBLY perceive as meaningful."

"Healing ALWAYS induces harmony because it proceeds from integration.”

"The unhealed healer wants gratitude FROM his brothers, but he is NOT grateful to them. This is because he thinks he is giving something TO them, and is NOT receiving something equally desirable in return.”

"Through this remembrance you can change THEIR minds about themselves, as I can change YOURS. Your minds are so powerful a light that you can look into theirs and enlighten them, as I can enlighten yours.”

"The mind WE share IS shared by all our brothers, and as we see them truly, they WILL be healed. Let YOUR minds shine with mine upon their minds, and by our gratitude to them make THEM aware of the light in THEM.

We have many names for death. Headaches, cancer, diabetes, wounds, heartache, unhappiness, grief, lack, depression, insanity, all of it is really death. According to ACIM anything even slightly less than total immortality - eternal life - is a form of death.

"Death is a thought which takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshipping of death as savior and as giver of release."

We have categorized all these sicknesses as if to say there is an entire hierarchy of illusions, some more severe or more dangerous or more total. But they are all one thing, really. Fear of cancer is really fear of death. A cold is a small death. Being sad is death. Anything which moves us away from eternal life is attempted suicide. Any slight lack of absolute joy and worthiness is a sense of having died.

So it's not like, you've just got an issue with a certain kind of sickness, or an inherited specific problem, or a propensity to contract certain issues in certain situations. It's all really one thing. One illusion, all of it is death, and it has only one solution.

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

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"

Each time we are unhappy we're moving into death. Each time we're afraid of sicknesss we're moving closer to death. Each time we hold a grievance we want some death. Each time there's a slight twinge of annoyance we're going into death mode.

When we are as God created us, willing to be only that, we are immortal. "You are immortal and you cannot die." And that immortality is accompanied by God's will, joy, love, eternal life, peace, happiness, constant perfection, holiness, creation, etc. These are our natural birthright, given by God. When we move in any way against these things or reject or deny them we are attempting death.

"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of TRYING NOT TO KNOW by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual. "Rest in peace" is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because rest comes from waking, not from sleeping. Sleep is withdrawing; waking is JOINING."

Each time we move into unconsciousness in some way, into some kind of life-denying rejection of love and joining, a breakdown in our holy relationship, we are trying to bring about death by making ourselves UNAWARE of the truth. This unawareness, attempted unconsciousness, is attempted death and attempted murder. It's not in our best interests, although ultimately it's just a dream and not a reality. But dreams can be nightmares to those who don't want life.

A Course in Miracles is a course in life. A return to immortality. Resurrection from a state of death. We are literally coming back to life, coming home to eternity, and returning to immortality in God.

"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. And everything that it has shown to him have you believed, BECAUSE it witnessed to the guilt in him, which you perceived and loved. 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. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."

"You are immortal and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do."

As we dive deeply into what it means to be an immortal being, something suddenly becomes clear. If we are indeed invulnerable, inpenetrable, eternal, incapable of even being changed, or affected in any way.... then how is it possible that there can be any kind of suffering that is a PART of us?

If we are this PURE LIFE, which is so alive it is completely devoid of all traces of attack and sickness and death, unable to be even modified in any way, completely permanent and absolute, how can it BECOME anything? How can any kind of suffering be something we have in us, or are made of?

Surely this means that if there does seem to be some kind of suffering - an upset feeling, some loss, some guilt, a fear, a sickness, anything at all which is a form of destruction, it cannot be INSIDE of what we are. It can't be modifying the inherent nature and substance of what we are. So it has to be somehow separate or "outside".

If there is for example a feeling of unhappiness, we can't really accurately say "I am unhappy." Because this means I have become unhappiness. I have changed, and so I am not unchangeable, and I have transformed, and I have modified what I am and how I feel - no longer permanently happy, no longer joyful and at peace, but disturbed and upset and defective in some way.

This points to the idea that we IDENTIFY WITH things which cannot be a part of us, and tend to include them in our definition of me, myself, I, what I am, what I have, what I feel, what I experience. As though to say we ARE these things, that they are a part of us. But they can't be.

The ego on the other hand is a sense of confusion in identity, in which our mind has moved away from being PURE LIFE and has gone off the rails. It's believing that there are now qualities and substances and contents to our self that God did not put there. That we have changed and turned into something less than whole, less than pure, less than perfect.

So the ego then has this sort of view of BEING ONE WITH things which are not of God. Being one with illusions, with pain and misery, with sickness and death, with suffering, with the body etc. It regards them as part of itself and tries to wear them - not just like a separate piece of clothing, but like... to be so merged with it that it thinks of it like it is its SELF. That you ARE a body.

The ego view is this smushing together of mind and form, where identity becomes tangled up in the things which are not of God. So now we start to feel like "I feel upset" and "I am in pain" and "I am guilty" and so on. But this can't be true. We cannot BE these things in truth if we are immortal beings. They can't be a PART of our self, included in ourself, part of our nature or condition. They have to be separate things, outside of us, not even "ours" really.

If we then look when ego is flaring up and there is all manner of upset and hurt and emotions and pian coming out, we should do something which seems to most humans would be insane and unhealthy - to separate ourselves from it. To say, I am not suffering, I am not upset, I am not weak, I am not in pain, I am not having this happen to me, I am not these sensations, I am not these thoughts.

Because all of these forms of suffering cannot actually BE - they are not ways of being - they are just illusions and dreams. What we are as immortal beings cannot suffer, cannot have loss, cannot die. What we are cannot even really be unhappy - which is a form of death. We can't have guilt in us because that's like saying there's something wrong with perfection. And we can't in fact really have anything be a part of us that God didn't put there.

So we have to sort out, and be careful, with how we are identifying WITH things that are not of God, even the way we feel and think. As an immortal being you DO NOT have upset feelings. If there seem to be upset feelings, it is ego, and it is driven by a mistaken belief about yourself being not like God. There is no pain in God and none in me. There is no unhappiness in God and none in me.

"Whatever suffers is not part of me." W248

"Whatever suffers is not part of me. What grieves is not myself. What is in pain is but illusion in my mind. What dies was never living in reality, and did but mock the truth about myself. Now I disown self-concepts and deceits and lies about the holy Son of God. Now am I ready to accept him back as God created him, and as he is." UrW248

"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." UrW152

"Father, Your holiness is mine. Your Love created me, and made my sinlessness forever part of You. I have no guilt nor sin in me, for there is none in You." UrW235L2

"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. I will worship no idols, nor raise my own self-concepts to replace my Self. I am in the likeness of my Creator. Love created me like Itself." UrW84L2 "I am the holy Son of God Himself.

I cannot suffer; cannot be in pain;

I cannot lose, nor can I fail to do

All that salvation asks." UrW191L7

"I cannot suffer any loss or deprivation or pain because of who I am." UrW58L5

"I cannot be guilty because I am a Son of God." UrW46L6

"The "self" that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?" UrW135L9

1) Whatever God creates must EXTEND who and what he is and be LIKE him in every way. Whatever comes from him must be God-like, and eternal, and immortal. Anything that does not last FOREVER, cannot come out of an immortal creator.

2) Whatever God creates is PART OF HIM, and so he IS his creation. Which means that if you suggest that dogshit and explosions and machine guns and atomic bombs and supernova are God's creation, you are saying that GOD IS all of these murderous things.

3) Whatever God creates is REALITY. If this world is reality, God has to BE it, live it, will it, condone it. He literally has to PERSONALLY cause it. And he has to BE that which IT IS. So now any form of attack is God attacking himself, any murder is God killing himself, any death is God punishing himself and making himself suffer to try to kill himself, which makes God suicidal and insane.

4) God can only create that which extends himself and he endows his creations with the ability to extend themselves. They are co-creators. The line of creation MUST NOT STOP. There must be no dead ends, or a lack of inheritance of ability to create forever. Every creation must be a powerful creator. Cars and machine guns and gravestones and dirt and bricks CANNOT CREATE. They are dead ends and cannot be of God because they CANNOT EXTEND. Failing to extend eternal life is DEATH.

5) Whatever God creates shares his immortality and cannot be attacked or hurt or ever die. "Nothing real can be threatened. If it can be threatened, IT IS NOT REAL. Threats include attack, damage, decay, murder, aging, explosions, war, etc. None of these things can be God's creation otherwise he has created MORTALITY. Mortality cannot come from an immortal creator who can only share his own immortality with his creations.

6) God is absolute perfection without a single flaw or thing missing or malfunction or breakage. Anything that is NOT perfect is NOT of God and cannot come out of him in creation. That includes broken down rusted cars, crashed airplanes, sick bodies, warzones, rotten food and corpses. God could not even think of such things yet alone make them.

7) God can ONLY conceive of that which is innocent, holy, pure, good, happy, loving, peaceful, gentle, beautiful, permanent, immortal, joyful and alive forever. If anything does not have these properties it is NOT created by God. A gentle benevolent God cannot even THINK OF or imagine or dream up machine guns, tanks, dangerous crevices, barren dry deserts, frozen tundras, black holes, or supernova that destroy entire solar systems.

8 ) God being of one nature can only produce one kind of outcome because he always gives everything fully and excludes nothing. This means he can only create ONE KIND of creation, not two. Given that Earth is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to heaven in EVERY way, as the course clearly states, it would REQUIRE God to be split minded and have a divided will and be indecisive in fear and unsure whether he would have one kind or output or another. God cannot contradict himself or produce contradictory worlds. Earth and heaven are OPPOSITES.

9) God only causes and condones and wills POSSIBILITIES that are in total alignment with his loving gentle happy nature. His kingdom is HIS MIND. He creates WITHIN himself. He does not allow there to be even the POSSIBILITY of "bad things happening", murder, death, suffering of any kind, things that break down, decay and rot, bad smells, separations and walls, weapons, or any such thing which could IN ANY WAY suggest it's even POSSIBLE for such things to exist. His laws DO NOT ALLOW there to be even the slightest real possibility that a "real weapon" could ever exist whatsoever. Any such things, any world that supports such things, IS NOT POSSIBLE.

10) God is one, and is oneness, and is unified and whole. He has absolutely no separation in him. No ego. No walls. No divisions. No things which are opposite to each other, or against each other, or hidden from each other, or different to each other. It is all one nature. He cannot even IMAGINE bodies separating off his creations. He cannot even imagine walls, solid objects, space or time. All physical objects ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE SEPARATION in order for there to even be SPACE whatsoever. Space in which some things exist over here, and some things exist over there, and nothing is everywhere. Space in which the very idea of physical matter is an attempt to SEPARATE OFF, and without the idea of separation IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THERE TO BE SPATIAL OBJECTS. All bodies, all planets, all galaxies, all matter entirely, with any label attached or not, perceived in ANY way, is a form of an idea of separation and DOES NOT exist in God's creation.

"For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there is a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not."

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

If you are affected in any way, it is not YOU who is affected, it is an illusion (body etc). And if it is affected in any way, you are trying to use it to prove you can be affected. You cannot be affected, you are immortal. So you're faking it, and it's pointless. You can't change the fact you are immortal, ever. Your permanence is guaranteed.

"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."

"He can see no evil; nothing in the world to fear, and no-one who is different from himself."

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

"I am not the victim of the world I see."

"It is but an effect that YOU have caused, and you would not BE cause of this effect."

"And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect it cannot make effects. "

""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."

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

"He MUST deny the world of pain, the instant he perceives the arms of love around him. "

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER. ... Both are not true, yet either one will seem as real to you, as the amount to which you hold it dear. And yet their power is NOT the same, because their real attraction to you IS unequal. You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust even as you made it. ...This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all."

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"You are immortal and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do."

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

I see that, in the end, loss is a form of victimhood. It's not something that can happen to an immortal being. It suggests that something valued has been taken away from you against your will, with no hope of getting it back. Like a kind of attack that has happened to steal something away from you. And now you are bereft or lacking that thing.

If, in light of the loss, you then feel "unfairly treated", slighted, offended, hurt, upset, etc... it means you're buying into the ego's view. A sense of identity that can experience losses, a self that can be taken from, a self that is "aggrieved" and has "grieve-ances" because of a seeming "murder" of a body-person that has taken place. It reflects a belief in murder and death and being at the effect of them. The course reminds:

"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. I will worship no idols, nor raise my own self-concepts to replace my Self. I am in the likeness of my Creator. Love created me like Itself." UrW84L2

Who or whatever is suffer a loss, is not part of me, as an immortal being. If I feel that I am in loss or grief, then my sense of identity is misplaced and I believe I am an ego. It means I'm in a mental illness and lack recognition, and must be playing the role of victim.

"Whatever suffers is not part of me. What grieves is not myself. What is in pain is but illusion in my mind. What dies was never living in reality, and did but mock the truth about myself. Now I disown self-concepts and deceits and lies about the holy Son of God. Now am I ready to accept him back as God created him, and as he is." UrW284

I still at times, at present, personally, have grief and loss. This indicates that I am still playing the game of ego and suffering, an identity which is false and am in need of healing. Until I get there, the only solution typically is to feel the loss and grieve the absence and so on. Like people do. But in the big picture, the end-game is clear - the renunciation of an artificial self, that suffers an artificial loss, and wants the very death that it grieves over.

You may notice that all the times you refer to someone, you refer to their body almost exclusively. You barely have a notion of the person that doesn't in some way involve their body. You might even be surprised to learn that you almost EXCLUSIVELY relate to someone's body.

"Everything you recognize you identify by EXTERNALS, something OUTSIDE itself. You cannot even think of GOD without a body, or some form you think you recognize."

In ACIM, a special relationship is a relationship with a body. So that means that in all the ways you interact with, refer to people as, and focus on the body of another, you are in specialness. "The sight that SEES the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship."

"The special relationship is totally without meaning WITHOUT A BODY. And, if you VALUE it, you must also VALUE THE BODY. And what you value, you WILL keep. The special relationship is a device for limiting YOUR self to a body, and for limiting your perception of others to THEIRS."

A body is not a person. There is much more to people than meets the eye.

"The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream, in which it acts as if it were a person, to be seen and be believed."

When you think of this, you may realize that you have barely spent any time at all actually relating to the spirit of a person - to their real self. The light-being that is their soul. That's who you have a holy relationship with - your actual brother/sister in christ, the mind-soul that is beyond the body.

And how do mind-souls communicate except THROUGH mind and soul? Not through the body.

"Minds need not bodies to communicate."

"Real vision is not only unlimited by space and distance, but it does not depend on the body's eyes at all. The mind is its only source."

Which means in order to have a holy relationship with someone you have to communicate with them, join with them, share with them, relate with them, and recognize them, USING YOUR MIND, TO THEIR MIND. This involves the mind being used as the spiritual eye to see their reality beyond the body. ie in your mind's eye.

"Corrective learning always begins with awakening the spiritual eye, and turning away from belief in physical sight."

"The Spiritual eye is the mechanism of miracles, because what the Spiritual eye perceives IS truth. The Spiritual eye perceives both the Creations of God AND the creations of man."

If you want to perceive a "creation of God" ie a brother, you have to use the spiritual eye, not the physical eyes.

You need to develop a relationship of and awareness of your brother using your mind, as they exist on another level. The true spirit of them, the immortal holy self of them, which is their real identity in Christ. To see christ in someone has to be done beyond the beyond and not WITH the body. Their body is not christ.

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin."

You need therefore to learn to approach and interact with others on a MIND level, through spiritual sight, in which you communicate with and offer healing to them at the spiritual level. That is where the light is. That's where you ARE the light of the world, and where the light of your mind which you SEE WITH can LOOK INTO and shine into another's mind, offering it light to see.

Then, knowing the person at the spiritual level, you will properly frame their body as NOT THEM, and as nothing but a disguise covering them up. And then you will also recognize any physical state or sickness is not the truth about them, because what they are is not a body.

"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."

In order to uphold the truth and immortality of another you have to know yourself, so that you will know your brother. If you know yourself as immortal you will recognize that any trace of mortality is an illusion. And this will properly frame your brother's suffering as an illusion, not as true of them. And this will help you to stop focusing on their body or taking it to be who they are.

By not identifying with your own mind, or as a body, and identifying with your immortal spirit, the nature of which is nothing like the body, you will also identify OTHERS as not their bodies, and see them as immortal spirit. It is this sharing of light in the truth of SHARED CHRIST IDENTITY, that envelops your brother in your light and resurrects them.

"The body needs NO healing. But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed! And it is here that Christ sets forth the remedy. His PURPOSE folds the body in His light, and fills it with the holiness that shines from HIM. "

What's really driving home for me at the moment is the difference between WHAT I AM, and WHAT I BELIEVE I AM.

In ACIM metaphysics, what you are is a soul or son of God that God created. This self is FIXED, permanently perfect, flawless forever, absolutely immortal, incapable of corruption or sickness, unable to sin or be guilty or afraid, in need of nothing, lacking nothing, always absolutely at peace in love.

That's what you ARE, deep down. And the thing is ... this is always true. It NEVER CHANGES. It cannot be undone, replaced, overwritten, cancelled, deleted, or in any way modified.

So then what does that tell you? Anything that you believe about yourself that says otherwise MUST BE A LIE. And that includes everything we call ego, all sense of neediness, believing you lack or are unworthy, any belief that you are guilty or sinful, any fear, anything at all that is not of God is NOT A PART OF YOU.

It's actually like some other "layer" of junk piled on top trying to cover up and disguise the fact that you are STILL exactly as God created you. All of it must be a total lie, completely false, and it it not actually defining what YOU ARE, it's saying something SEPARATE FROM what you are, disconnected from you, like a camouflage wrapped around you to try to keep your true perfection hidden.

So that means all our issues, all our guilts, all sinfulness and fear, all sickness and definitions of ourselves that we made up, are all LIES that just float around the OUTSIDE of what you are, including the body, and NEVER even touch upon or change or have any influence on your ACTUAL NATURE at all.

Deep down inside you right now this second you are STILL exactly pure and perfect and holy and innocent, guiltless and sinless. SIMULTANEOUS to all the other stuff that you think is true of you. Innocent right now, while believing you are guilty. Perfect right now, while believing you are flawed. Immortal right now, while believing you are dying.

This contrast then shows you that what God has created you AS is ALWAYS TRUE, and it's what YOU ARE. And anything else that says otherwise is not anything to do with what you are, it's just a bunch of lies swirling around.

When the separation from God happened we DID NOT CHANGE AT ALL. All that happened was in our minds... we temporarily BELIEVED that we had changed, and bought into the beliefs so much that we thought they were true. They were all lies, completely fictional, absolutely unfounded.

Literally we're sitting there in heaven floating about being happy and then we PRETEND that we're not. We make up a bunch of stuff about ourselves which STILL isn't true, when OBVIOUSLY our perfect immortal innocent self is sitting right there still shining perfectly and flawlessly. It's just that we bought into these lies and took them to be actually true of us, imagining that we had changed, that we have defiled ourselves, that we have become corrupt end evil. WE HAVE NOT. It's just a psychological mistake.

So even right now this second inside you, you are STILL INNOCENT, there IS NO SIN in you. You have no real guilt. No flaws or defects. No sickness. Nothing lacking. No needs. Nothing to be fixed. Nothing you can do to change yourself. All that's happening is there's a big giant lie swirling around your mind that you're listening to even though it obviously completely contradicts everything about you. And UNDERNEATH these lies you are absolutely unphased, unchanged, unmoved.

Inside you, are you IN HEAVEN, BEING HEAVEN. Right now. The only cleanup work is to remove all the silly fictional stories about yourself that are not true.

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true, unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception."

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen. The still infinity of endless peace surrounds you gently in its soft embrace, so strong and quiet, tranquil in the might of its Creator, nothing can intrude upon the sacred Son of God within."

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.

You are not of this world. This world isn't the only world.

You are of another world, the Kingdom of God, in which you have immortality - eternal life as given by God Himself.

This world is an illusory world. It's kind of like a layer on top of reality. A pretend world, a picture, of a form and nature opposite to reality.

The things in the illusory world can appear to change, shift, grow, die, etc. But it really has no effect at all on the deeper underlying world of God. God's Kingdom is completely permanently unassailable and impenetrable and perfect forever. It is "the living world of light."

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world. But the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT."

"Let your Guide teach you their unsubstantial nature as He leads you past them, for beneath them is a world of light whereon they cast no shadows."

What you are, as an immortal spirit, is firmly anchored in Heaven. Nothing can attack you or change you in any way.

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there."

For you as an immortal being, death is not possible. It's not an option. You cannot choose it to happen to your spirit. Your spirit is invulnerable.

So what is it that can ever die, or seem to die? It can't be you. A body is an illusion, part of the illusory dream world of death. Everything in the dream world is made of illusions and all illusions are the idea of the opposite of reality. Since reality is life, all illusions are the idea of death.

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

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

So we know that every illusion, whether it appears to show up as a healthy body, or a sick body, or a dead body, or no body, or even just an environment, or a planet, is still essentially made of the idea of death. Even Earth is the idea of an opposite to God's Kingdom.

"Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

So from the outset, since what you are cannot die whatsoever, the things that can seem to die cannot even be who or what you are. You are spirit, not a body. You exist on an entire other level.

So really you do not need a body, it adds nothing to you, it doesn't improve you, it doesn't allow you to do things that you couldn't do already, and it only essentially was designed as a limit. It can be used in different ways, by an immortal spirit, but the body is not ever what you are.

As spirit, and being on a higher level, you have power over everything on the lower level of the illusory world. All of the world's laws are secondary and once-removed. This world is not primary reality, or the starting point of anything. It is not a cause but an effect of a higher mind's dreaming.

So this means, you on the level of Christ, have power over, total power over, everything in the world. That includes the body, it includes all states of sickness and death, it includes matter and energy, it includes all of the so-called laws of physics and biology, and in effect you have power over everything in this universe.

"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."

""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. "

Since you have power over everything in the universe, "there is nothing my holiness cannot do", "what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world.", you get to dictate what happens to the body. You, from a higher more vertically causal level, get to choose how to USE any aspect of this secondary world.

You can choose to use the body to attack through, which is a toxic idea which affects the body and attacks it. This produces sickness and death of the body on this level. The body then conveys the idea that being dead is the only truth.

You can choose to use the body to heal through, which is a healing idea which affects the body and heals it. This produces a picture of a healed body, an illusion of a healthy body, which then demonstrates the thought/belief that being alive is the only truth.

So your mind gets to decide whether or not the body dies. And this depends entirely on what you use the body FOR. If you use it for attack it will be attacked. If you use it to heal it becomes healed. And in its healed condition, sustained by the mind, sickness death cannot "happen" to the body against your will and your power.

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

"No one dies without their own consent"

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"The mind being sane heals the body."

"Now is the body healed by miracles."

So in effect, you could choose to use the body for healing and to symbolize eternal life, resulting in it being healed. By the power of your mind, the body is not allowed to be in a state of sickness, yet alone physical death.

The body can be sustained indefinitely, at least in time. It can't be eternal because the mind has to constantly maintain it and it is not natural to constantly project bodies. It could stick around for a million years if the mind so chose. Aging can be reversed and halted. But eventually once the purpose of healing is fulfilled in the help of others, there is no longer a need for a body to use to reach those who dream of death. Its purpose of healing is part of the atonement plan.

"Illusions recognized must disappear"

"Eternity will shine away the world."

"A forgiven world cannot last."

"The body cannot remain without illusions."

When the entire idea of death, which the world and body is founded on, is recognized, it must disappear. When it is no longer useful for the atonement plan, and all souls have returned home, there is nothing more to keep the world intact. Nor is there any need or will to maintain it.

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible."

You don't have to automatically go towards physical death. Death is a choice made by an immortal being pretending it can die. You cannot die. "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt." "Swear not to die, you holy son of God. You've made a bargain that you cannot keep."

"You are immortal and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do."

There is no point choosing to make death happen when you acknowledge that you already have eternal life. What sense would it make? It would be not only futile but a completely pointless waste of time. If you knew you could NEVER die, would you CHOOSE to attempt to make death happen? That's what we do when we cause sickness and death. And if we were to never do that, would sickness or death happen?

No. Because there are no other causes of it. The only cause of death is your mind's power to choose to attack through the body. If you don't do that, the body cannot physically die or become sick.

"Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions responsible for the condition of the body"

"hTe 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."

In the course Jesus describes "what happened in the separation" in 4 steps. The first step says this:

"First, the assumption is implicit that what God has Created can be changed by the mind of Man."

The remedy for this perhaps is to then recognize that you HAVE NOT changed because you CANNOT change. God has not changed you. You have not changed yourself. Nothing in the world can change you. What you are is permanent and fixed and absolute. You are immortal. You will always be EXACTLY as God created, in the most explicitly precise way possible.

You cannot be changed. Therefore, the beginning of the separation, which was the idea that you CAN change the changeless, is reversed. By affirming your unchangeability, you attune to your permanent immortal nature.

The fact that you cannot change even reveals that your "spiritual path" is a temporary thing. We are really moving towards a remembrance and recognition of what is already true, that you are STILL as God created you, having not changed in the slightest way. This also tells you that you cannot be affected by ANYTHING, nothing has any power over you and nothing can cause you in any way. You cannot therefore be made to suffer against your will, and not even sickness or death can occur.

It would seem that you have changed in your MIND, and that you can potentially change your mind back to its original state. But its original state is an alignment with the changeless. Mind cannot really stop BEING mind because it is permanently mind. Mind therefore cannot really change either, but it can imagine that it has. And so we are just undoing the illusion that we are not as we were created to be.

YOU CANNOT BE CHANGED. YOU ARE PERMANENTLY PERFECT.

"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."

"It cannot change, and be in opposition to Itself. Father, my will is Yours. And I am safe, untroubled and serene, in endless joy, because it is Your Will that it be so."

"This may threaten my ego, but cannot change my function in any way."

"But all the while his Father shines on him, and loves him with an everlasting Love Which his pretenses cannot change at all."

"His errors cannot change this, and can have no effect at all on the truth in YOU."

"You were NOT born to die. You CANNOT change, because your Function HAS been fixed by God."

"Purpose is of the mind. And minds can change, as they desire. What they ARE, and all their attributes, CANNOT change."

"Reality is changeless. It is this that MAKES it real, and KEEPS it separate from all appearances. It MUST transcend all form to be itself. It CANNOT change."

"Different realities ARE meaningless, for reality MUST be one. It CANNOT change with time, or mood, or chance. Its changelessness is WHAT MAKES IT REAL."

"God's plan for your salvation cannot change, nor can it fail. Be thankful it remains exactly as He planned it."

"The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. It cannot change what is its waking state."

"You can DENY His knowledge, but you CANNOT change it."

"But the Holy Spirit teaches you that truth was created by God, and YOUR decision CANNOT change it."

"What is created is apart from all of this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable cannot change. And what is wholly sinless cannot sin."

"Joy does NOT turn to sorrow, for the eternal cannot change."

"You cannot be ANYWHERE that God did not put you, and God created you as part of HIM. That is both WHERE you are and WHAT you are. This is COMPLETELY unalterable. It is total inclusion. You cannot change this now or ever. It is forever true. It is NOT a belief, but a fact."

"You cannot change laws you did not make, and the laws of happiness were created FOR you, NOT BY you."

"It is impossible that God lose His identity, for if He did, YOU WOULD LOSE YOURS. And BEING yours, He cannot change Himself, for your identity IS changeless. The miracle ACKNOWLEDGES His changelessness, by seeing His Son as he always was, and NOT as he would make himself."

"Whatever is true and real is eternal, and CANNOT change or be changed. The Soul is therefore unalterable because it is ALREADY perfect"

"What is within your brother still contains ALL of creation, everything created and creating, born and unborn as yet, still in the future or apparently gone by. What is in him is changeless, and YOUR changelessness is recognized in its acknowledgment."

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."

I am not weak, but strong.

I am not helpless, but all powerful.

I am not limited, but unlimited.

I am not doubtful, but certain.

I am not an illusion, but a reality.

I cannot see in darkness, but in light.

Let's continue...

I am not afraid, but confident.

I am not confused, but clear.

I am not lost, but found.

I am not false, but true.

I am not alone, but unified.

I am not separate, but one.

I am not lacking, but complete.

I am not guilty, but sinless.

I am not sinful, but innocent.

I am not in pain, but in health.

I am not deceived, but assured.

I am not deprived, but grateful.

I am not dead, but eternal.

I am not hopeless, but joyful.

I am not angry, but peaceful.

I am not worried, but reassured.

I am not forgetful, but aware.

I am not unconscious, but knowing.

I am not pressured, but free.

I am not tense, but relaxed.

I am not upset, but calm.

I am not hateful, but forgiving.

I am not hurt, but healed.

I am not harmful, but a blessing.

I am not ego, but Christ.

I am not a body, but immortal spirit.

I am not blameful, but welcoming.

I am not a liar, but truthful.

I am not pretentious, but honest.

I am not vengeful, but gifted.

I am not forgotten, but known.

I am not rejected, but loved.

I am not abandoned, but supported.

I am not evil, but pure.

I am not a dream, but God's Creation.

I am not a fantasy, but genuine.

I am not suffering, but a blessing.

I am not undone, but immortal.

I am not grieving, but reunited.

I am not lonely, but helped.

I am not sorrowful, but relieved.

I am not stressful, but blissful.

I am not in danger, but safe.

I am not hopeless, but saved.

I am not condemned, but forgiven.

I am not unloveable, but loving.

I am not unhappy, but joyous.

I am not depressed, but liberated.

I am not diminished, but enlightened.

I am not starving, but nourished.

I am not limited, but abundant.

I am not harsh, but gentle.

I am not cold, but heartfelt.

I am not fallen, but ascended.

I am not extinct, but omnipresent.

I am not troubled, but sane.

I am not a sinner, but a savior.

I am not ugly, but beautiful.

I am not without, but within.

I am not a reject, but chosen.

I am not meaningless, but meaningful.

Add one of your own...

Recognizing your own immorality is important and key. But recognizing the immortality of your brothers is also vital.

If your brother is an immortal being, nothing can happen to him. He can't be attacked, he can't be destroyed, he can't have anything wrong with him.

Just like you, your brother's immortal soul is incorruptible, it cannot change or be changed, it is eternal and will live forever. It is not at the effect of anything, not even your brother can change his own self, nor even God. His nature is fixed forever.

What this then tells you is that, by being aware of this, there is no grounds for projecting guilt onto him, attacking him, believing there is something wrong with him, seeing him as a sinner, or trying to destroy him.

All the ego's murderousness arises from the belief in death, the belief that you are something that can die, and that your brother is something that can die. Why would you even attempt to attack him if you saw his perfect invincibility?

What basis would there be for insinuating that he is guilty of anything at all, if his innocence is eternal? If he is so free from attack and there is no attack in or upon him, because he is absolutely invulnerable and pure, then it would be impossible to find him guilty of anything.

Just as the forgiveness of yourself hinges upon the recognition of your own immortality, in which you cannot possibly have the slightest trace of death or malfunction or sin or attack in you, so too your brother exhibits the same safety and protection.

You cannot change your brother's reality. You cannot attack your brother's reality. You cannot hurt your brother, destroy your brother, make your brother unhappy, cause your brother to have a shorter existence, or change your brother in ANY way.

And since you cannot do that, you have not done that. And therefore the recognition of this is YOUR salvation, because you must be innocent if you have been utterly incapable of changing him. His perfect truth, his purity, his innocence and his immortality teach you that you also must be this way, just as yours reminds him of his own.

If you think your brother is in some way sick, or damaged, or guilty, or wrong, or defective, or malfunctioning, or temporary, or limited, or exclusive, or in any way something less than immortal, you are NOT SEEING HIM.

If you could see him and feast your eyes upon him you would see only a perfectly pure innocent being with not the slightest hint of mortality or curruption in him. And then it would be impossible to judge him as anything but perfect. It is because you choose to look upon illusions about him and NOT see him, that you judge him as sinful - or rather, judge your interpretation of him as sinful, because you do not recognize him.

The forgiveness of your brother is rooted deeply in simply recognizing his real nature. In seeing his truth, forgiveness is complete. Only in failing to recognize his nature do you enter into beliefs in death, in which a basis for judgement and a justification for attack arises. Without death to tarnish his immortality or yours, there is no attack and only love - no death and only life. "Your Brother's Sinlessness" UrT22C

"My brother's sinlessness shows me that I would look upon my own. And I will see it, having chosen to behold my brother in its holy light." UrW335L1

"Before your brother's holiness the world is still, and peace descends on it in gentleness and blessing so complete, that not one trace of conflict still remains to haunt you in the darkness of the night." UrT24G1

"Your brother's holiness shows you that God is One with him AND you; that what he has is yours BECAUSE you are not separate from him OR from his Father." UrT24G2

"When you accept a brother's guiltlessness, you will SEE Atonement in him." UrT13I1

"Remove your focus on your brother's sins, and you experience the peace that comes from faith in sinlessness." UrW181L2

"If you share not your brother's evil dreams, this IS the picture that the miracle will place within the little gap, left clean of all the seeds of sickness and of sin." UrT28E7

"Who sees a brother's body has laid a JUDGMENT on him, and sees him not. He does not REALLY see him as sinful; he does not see him at all. In the darkness of sin, he is INVISIBLE." UrT28H6

"Your brother's sinlessness is given you in shining light, to look on with the Holy Spirit's vision, and to rejoice in, along with Him." UrT20I3

"Do not accept your brother's variable perception of himself, for his split mind is yours, and you will not accept YOUR healing without his." UrT10H14

"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."

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

There are many clues in ACIM about miracle working and this is one of them. It says that to perform a miracle, you should BEGIN by perceiving light. What is light?

In workbook lesson 121, "Forgiveness offers everything I want", there is a procedure in which you start by pulling up an image of a guilty person that you want to apply forgiveness to. You start to see light in this person. You look for ways to credit them and see their merits and recognize the good they've done and so on to try to frame them in a more forgiving, charitable, honoring, allowing and respecting kind of way. Gradually you cover the person in this light and it replaces the guilt THAT IS YOURS in your mind.

So then what we learn is that this lesson is taking you from a state of darkness to a state of light. Darkness is guilt and attack/sin and fear. To shift "into the light" as it were, is to basically try to seek out the light, the good, the application/gratitude, the recognition of the light in someone. That the persons not entirely evil, dark, a monster or an enemy. You move towards innocence and away from guilt. Toward forgiveness/miracles and away from grievances.

So if we're not IN the light already, then we need to get INTO the light. We get into the light by healing OURSELVES, through this kind of forgiveness process in which we gradually replace darkness with light, becoming willing to move towards innocence and away from guilt. It's our own guilt that needs undoing at this point so that we can become miracle-minded and miracle-ready, so that later we can get into miracle-doing.

When we've DONE this, and we're got our minds into a state of forgiveness and light, we're more loving toward ourselves and others. It's the state of light that we need to get to BEFORE we can perform miracles for others as EXPRESSIONS. This is why "Miracles are everyone's right, but purification is necessary first." You have to purge out all the guilt and sin and fear and rise up into the light, so that miracles are not blocked by a lack of love. Miracles are always expressions of or FROM a loving mind.

Once you can get yourself INTO the light, now you are ready to perform a miracle FOR another person. This is also described here... "Tell him that the implied lack of love that his version contains is WAY off the Mark, and misses the level of right thinking entirely. He MUST heal his perception in this respect. He MUST work a miracle on behalf of himself here (See the point about miracles as a perception corrector) before he can effect miracles as creative energizers, which they are."

So Jesus is saying that first if YOU are not in the light you can't work a miracle as a "creative energizer" FOR others, and YOU need a miracle to heal your OWN perception first. You work a miracle - ie you transition from guilt to innocence, within YOURSELF, on behalf of yourself, with the help of the Holy Spirit. This gets you up into the state of light. Then when you're IN the light, you are in a position to "begin by perceiving light." Similarly "The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness."

So we have to first work on ourselves to become lighter and filled with light and filled with the Holy Spirit. It is this light, or LOVE, which forms an ability to SHARE. You can ONLY share love because love is a bridge that joins everyone together in openness and welcome. The love MUST be present in order to perform a miracle as a "creative energizer" FOR another person. To GIVE what you have received. You cannot give God's power WITHOUT love.

So we focus on becoming more loving by removing these heavy chains of guilt and lifting our minds up into lighter states of forgiveness and innocence. This gives us ACCESS to the power of God through the Holy Spirit, and activates the LOVE that bridges to JOIN with another person. This is some fairly high-level stuff which is why miracle-working in general is largely reserved for the more advanced "more forgiving" individuals who have purified themselves of ego/guilt. "Those who are healed become instruments of healing."

Once you "perceive the light" in another person.... ie, see them IN A FORGIVEN STATE first, THEN you are in a position to transfer miraculous power to them as a "creative energizer", which GIVES THEM ENERGY, and thus gives them LIFE, and raises them from death or lack/fear. Once you are in the light, you are also in a position of knowing your function and how you share the Holy Spirit's function, and are now willing and able to ALLOW HIM TO HEAL THROUGH YOU.

Jesus says we are to "continually extend" the light. That's like a transmission of healing love power. He says we should "accept its acknowledgement", which I think means to SEE the light in the other person (the holy spirit effectively) ie forgive them, and thus witness or acknowledge that it IS THERE in them already. The divine spark is in them already. We need to see this light in them - frame them as innocent and immortal - and acknowledge that this is the truth about them ALREADY. ie "there is nothing wrong with you".

Then Jesus says you cannot bring light OF yourself, because you're nothing without God. But the Holy Spirit can bring light THROUGH you and extend through you as you "hold the door open". Effectively you channel the holy spirit's power, and let HIM amplify the life in the other person, through your mind. This also lifts you AND the other person up. You let the Holy Spirit do the healing by you "holding the light" for the recipient and letting him apply healing.

So the main ingredients boils down to:

1) Invite the Holy Spirit to work upon you, then through you.

2) Get yourself healed and into the light first. This takes a lot of purification/forgiveness work.

3) Be in a loving state, either by inducing it or receiving it or imagining it and feeling it.

4) Extend the light and see it in the other person, ie see them as forgiven - see their real immortal unchanged self and don't accept their ego/sickness.

5) Let the love join you with your brother and act as a bridge for sharing/holy relationship. Be in the light together as one.

6) Let the Holy Spirit move "across" (transcend) this bridge and also increase within your brother's mind. Amplify the light in him.

"When you heal, that is exactly what you ARE learning (doing). You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by perceiving (knowing) that he could NOT have changed his mind. That is how you perceive the Holy Spirit in him. It is ONLY the Holy Spirit in him that never changes His mind. He himself must think he CAN, or he would not perceive himself as sick. He therefore does not know what his self IS.

If YOU see only the changeless in him, you have not really changed him at all. But by changing your mind about HIS FOR him, you help him undo the change his ego thinks it has made in him. As you can hear two voices, so you can see in two ways. One way shows you an image, or better, an idol which you may worship out of fear, but which you will never love. The other shows you only truth, which you will love because you will UNDERSTAND it. Understanding is APPRECIATION, because what you understand you can identify WITH, and by making it part of YOU you have accepted it with love. This is how God Himself created YOU, in understanding, in appreciation, and in love."

"The way to LEARN TO KNOW your brother is by perceiving the Holy Spirit in him."

So Jesus says there is an absolute nature within you brother which never changes. That is your brother's immortal self, it is permanent and still as God created it. The Holy Spirit reflects that and is one with that.

Your brother THINKS he can change himself and that he has, which is why he perceives he is NOT immortal and is sick. He does not KNOW HIMSELF. But the true nature of him is STILL in there behind his self deception and denial.

By recognizing the UNCHANGED SELF in him, the absolute, you are helping to change his mind about himself FOR him, by holding a different view of him.

By recognizing your brother's immortal self - the holy spirit in him so to speak - you are APPRECIATING your brother in gratitude. Recognizing him for what is true of him. Thanking God for him. Then by appreciating your brother's reality, it is recognized as part of YOUR SELF, and you now join with your brother as one.

It's all about light/love/life, being IN it, sharing it, giving it, seeing it, amplifying it, allowing the Holy Spirit to increase it, acknowledging/appreciating it, recognizing it, sharing it. Through this "joining of minds in light" which we might also call "sharing innocence and immortality", resurrection takes place mentally and physically.

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

"The miracle is the act of a Son of God who has laid aside all false gods, and who calls on his brothers to do likewise. It is an act of faith, because it is the recognition that his brother CAN do it. It is a call to the Holy Spirit in his mind, a call to Him which is strengthened by this joining. Because the miracle-worker has heard Him, he strengthens His Voice in a sick brother by weakening his belief in sickness, which he does NOT share. The power of one mind CAN shine into another, because all the lamps of God were lit by the same spark. It is everywhere, and it is eternal."

"Since thoughts do not have to be conscious to exist, your brother does NOT have to be AWARE of the Holy Spirit, either in himself or in you for this miracle to occur. He may have dissociated the call for God, just as YOU have. But the dissociation is healed in BOTH of you as you see it in him, and thus acknowledge its BEING."

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

When we are greatly distracted by, tempted by, and lost in the world, it is hard to recognize the secret of salvation.

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF."

But the real key part of this isn't just that you are doing things to yourself, rather than it being others who do it. It's that it can ONLY BE YOU who can hurt yourself.

Jesus describes many times that you have hurt yourself. You have hurt your mind. You have attacked yourself.

"Because you had attacked yourself, and BELIEVED THAT THE ATTACK WAS EFFECTIVE, you behold yourself as weakened."

"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally, you will demonstrate that NOTHING HAPPENED. Therefore, by attacking, you have NOT DONE ANYTHING."

"By doing this UNCONSCIOUSLY, you try to keep the fact that you must have attacked yourself FIRST out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe."

"You HAVE attacked him, and you MUST have attacked yourself first."

It is easy to place a lot of focus on other people. On forgiving the world. On healing the body. On world events and problems. It is easy to spend a great deal of time caught up in relationships and dramas. But all of these forms of suffering are really quite far down the line in terms of what came first, and where the real power is.

What comes first happens quickly and so close to home, that it is easy to miss. YOU .... attack yourself....... BEFORE. ... the entire world happens.

"Only the self-accused condemn."

You accuse yourself FIRST. You attack your invulnerability FIRST. You try to undermine your immortality FIRST. You position yourself as afraid FIRST. You make yourself a victim FIRST. You see yourself as lacking FIRST. You condemn yourself FIRST. You accuse yourself of sin FIRST. You do everything to yourself FIRST.

THEN ..... having attacked yourself, the whole thing starts to cascade into projection and blame and dissociation and denial and displacement and various other ways to "disown" responsibility for what you have done to yourself.

"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."

It then becomes possible to become confused as to WHO did this to you. You deny that you did it to you. You pretend that someone else did it to you. You shift the responsibility. You hide from your own self attack. You don't want to look at the fact that YOU are trying to self destruct. All self attack is an attempt to kill God's son - which is YOU - which is suicide. And eventually this results in suffering, sickness, and death, ALL OF WHICH are self inflicted.

"It means that you cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness." "YOU CAN BUT HURT YOURSELF. This has been oft repeated, but is difficult to grasp as yet."

"For you HAVE hurt yourself, and made your Self your enemy. And now you MUST believe you are not you, but something alien to yourself and "something else," a "something" to be feared instead of loved."

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

This doesn't have ANYTHING to do with anyone else, or the body, or the world, or spacetime. It's entirely to do with. ... do you love yourself or not? Do you accept and live in your IMMORTAL nature which is given by God, or do you DENY that you are immortal and TRY to make yourself mortal? The only ambition of trying not to be mortal, is that you try to destroy (kill) yourself. But since your immortal self cannot die, you confuse yourself with a body and kill it instead, as a representation of yourself dying.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves"

"Yet you CANNOT crucify God's Son, for the Will of God cannot die"

"What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF."

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

The attack upon YOURSELF, is all the only problem. You thinking that you attack others, is YOUR problem of being confused, and you are mistaken. You thinking that others attack you, is you being confused, and you are mistaken. NO ONE has ever attacked you against your will. You have never suffered against your will. You have never been sick against your will. You have never died against your will.

"Would you not rather live than choose to die?"

"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."

Salvation, and the secret of salvation, is simply that ANYTHING you experience other than immortality, YOU are doing to yourself. You are the SOLE cause of it. There are no external causes of suffering. There are no external causes of sickness or death. "There are no accidents in salvation." Nothing in the world can do ANYTHING to you against your will. No one can vioalte you or offend you or hurt you against your will. You CANNOT BE A VICTIM unless you deliberately decide to be one.

So this really has nothing at all to do with anyone else. It is entirely to do with .... are you going to forgive yourself, or not? Are you going to love yourself, or not? There is another subtle part to this though. Your soul and your mind are two different things. Your soul is your self, your identity in christ. But your mind is a medium that your soul uses for expression. Your soul does NOT need salvation because it is permanently immortal. It has never been attacked and never will. But your MIND is confused and HAS tried to hurt itself. It DOES need "healing" or correction.

This means that, even your own self attack, even your mind's efforts to destroy you, even your belief in sin and evil, even your death wish, in truth has NO EFFECT on your immortal soul. Nothing changes about the truth of you. Even your self induced suffering is not REAL suffering. Even your self inflicted pain is not real pain. And as you try to kill yourself off, you as the son of God is totally unaffected.

This means that EVEN IF you attack yourself, you are not REALLY attacking yourself. You have not REALLY ever done anything to yourself. "I am still as God created me."

Recognize first that ALL attack is SELF attack. This is not easy when you have slipped down the slipper slope into projection. It has to all come back to YOU being totally responsible for sin. BUT, you must not stop at being responsible for sin because it is not real. You need swift correction, so that you will recognize you HAVE NOT even sinned against yourself. You must admit that YOU are the ONLY cause of ALL your suffering, and decide to STOP HURTING YOURSELF. And then you can receive healing.

This simple truth, that YOU are the only one hurting yourself, and YOU can decide to love yourself instead. .. is the CORE of A Course in Miracles. Once you love yourself, or. .. seek first the Kingdom of God (which is you) .... your way will be made straight. Everythign else will fall into line naturally, including performing miracles, healing the body, and undoing the world.

"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."

"When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will rest you, but YOU cannot. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW, for if you did, you could never have grown weary. Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

All that I do I do unto myself.

If I attack, I suffer. But if I

forgive, salvation will be given me."

"As prayer is always for yourself, so is forgiveness given you. It is impossible to forgive another, for it is only your sins you see in him."

"I repeat again that if you ATTACK error, you will hurt yourself."

"To see a body as anything EXCEPT a means of pure extension is to limit your mind and HURT YOURSELF."

"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."

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

"When he thinks that he is hurt in any way, it is because he has forgotten who he is, and that he is as You created him." "If ever I am sad or hurt or ill, I have forgotten what You think, and put my little, meaningless ideas in place of where Your Thoughts belong, and where They are. I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"I will not hurt myself today."

"His thoughts can frighten him, but since these thoughts belong to him alone, he has the power to change them, and exchange each fear thought for a happy thought of love. He crucified himself. Yet God has planned that His beloved Son will be redeemed."

"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."

Your mind has the ability to be either constructive (creative) or destructive. Using the mind for destructive purposes is what the entire ego thought system is about. The whole world was made in an attempt to destroy God and Heaven.

The mind, in its healing and accepting of atonement, has to be restored to being PURELY CONSTRUCTIVE. That means that any destructive tendencies or attitudes have to be healed and corrected.

A destructive tendency is anything that emphasizes the SEPARATION that has seemed to come in between you and others, or you and God, in any kind of relationship. An attempt to DESTROY relationship has produced a WORLD, the inner contents of a seeming "gap", like the pits of hell. And it is into this world that you seem to go when your mind becomes destructive.

If you desire to create, you desire to extend God's love and life and power. This extending goes out without limit and is shared with everyone fully. It is a full embracing of all your brothers in love and light. It is a complete joining and union with them.

This extension of creation and the shining of light are miraculous. It represents health and union and harmony and peace and perfection. To extend God is to be in support of The Kingdom and thus to fully support your brothers with love and His life-giving force.

This isn't merely a state of equality, it's a state of GIVING in which you are constantly maintaining the perfection, innocence and immortality of your brother, as your brother's keeper. It is a way of INCREASING what He has, therefore denying lack or weakness. Being constructive is to GIVE power, to GIVE life, to GIVE love, and to thus MAINTAIN eternal life through constant supply.

"Miracles supply a lack. They are given by those who temporarily have more to those who temporarily have less."

Becoming destructive, on the other hand, is an effort to do the opposite. It is a desire NOT to share, not to extend, not to create, not to love. It is a rejection of eternal life and thus entry into what seems like a world of mortality and death - a dream of death. Attempting TO DESTROY, is to insert some kind of separate illusion in between you and others, to focus on it, to give it reality and truth, and to believe in its existence.

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

This focusing on destruction is what makes the world of bodies and forms and objects. A world of sin. It is how the planet is held together. It's what makes sickness and death seem possible and real. It materializes as seeming vulnerability and attack and all forms of illness. It falls short of joining with your brother in love, and instead dwells upon what we call "his body", emphasizing its reality and its faults, to try to believe that your brother is NOT an immortal being but a mortal object of attackable flesh and bones.

While our focus is deceived by, tempted by, attacked by, joining with, focusing on, making real, giving truth to, agreeing with, the world of bodies, which comes IN BETWEEN you and your brother's real selves, we are being destructive. This destruction could be mixed in with some FORM of support or help, such as feelings of sympathy and sorrow, compassion, caring, concern, worry, trying to fix their bodies directly, grief when the bodies are harmed or lost etc. All of which are really DESTRUCTIVE attitudes aimed at emphasizing the REALITY of suffering rather than being truly helpful.

To be truly helpful, we have to look at the ways we buy into the dream, the illusion of spacetime, the world, and the bodies of ourselves and others, believing they are total reality, and instead learn to LOOK PAST them to the light of truth. The real truth about others is that THEY ARE PERMANENTLY IMMORTAL, and they cannot EVER have a fault or a weakness or a sickness or any kind of suffering. That is what must be given reality, truth and strength.

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK."

And to overlook means to NOT look at, or to not see, what is being overlooked. In effect to be blind to it, through the proper use of denial. To reject that it is EVEN THERE, putting our WHOLE focus on the extension of love and the recognition of the total truth about another.

"The world you see (the world of bodies) must be denied, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision (the ability to SEE your brother as he really is)."

Vision does not focus on the body or the world or the things seeming to happen on the canvas of spacetime, in efforts to be support and truly helpful. To HEAL requires looking PAST these things to the ACTUAL truth, and not being hung up on what the gap in between seems to claim. To look out FROM love, TOWARD love, completely skipping over everything IN the gap of the world, so that THERE IS NO GAP. There is no gap, because there is no world.

"Forgiveness does not look upon bodies and mistake them for the Son of God. It looks beyond bodies. That is its holiness. That is how it heals."

We have to examine, where is it that I am buying the bullshit lies of this world, the bodies of others, the appearance of things. And why am I thus AGREEING that these things are true and real, instead of rejecting their falsehood? We have to learn to look PAST these things to the reality of the immortality of our brothers IF we are to OFFER THEM immortality. And only by looking WITH love can you look AT love, which is BEYOND the body.

"Never was love in the world of dreams."

Love erases the dream. It heals the dream away. It shines it away. It closes wounds. It undoes tears. It repairs malfunctions and interference and terror and pain. Because unity has no separations, sins or guilts within it, and is perfectly smooth and harmonious and loving and strong.

To STRENGTHEN your brother is to constructively support him. To GIVE LIFE to your brother is to constructively support him. To offer him HIMSELF, equal with the love in you, is to remind him of who he really is. To EMPOWER him is to put him in touch with the innate power that GOD GAVE him already. And to deny HIS denial of the truth about him, weakens HIS belief in his own separateness, and thus HEALS the rift between you.

"The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept Atonement himself. This means that he knows that mind is the only creative level, and that its errors ARE healed by the Atonement. Once he accepts this, HIS mind can only heal. By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others. The message which he then gives to others is the truth that THEIR MINDS are really similarly constructive, and that their own miscreations cannot hurt them."

To be truly helpful is to resurrect. It is to literally SUPPORT the true nature of your brother. To uphold it. To sustain it. To reinforce it. To brighten it. To enliven it. And to ensure it.

"Do not allow your brother to be sick."

Your brother CANNOT BE sick because he is immortal. Believe only this and he wil be healed completely. Buy into his sickness and you merely become sick along with him, and now you both are weak because you suffer together, and there is no hope because you are not giving any. You must not buy into the sob story ego bullshit of your brother or loved one. It is NOT TRUE of them. It's entirely false. And the only story you should be believing is the story of his IMMORTAL CREATION and PERMANENCE, AUTHORED by God.

We are learning to be truly supportive and truly helpful. Putting aside our DESTRUCTIVE uses of mind, our ego, and embracing ONLY constructive, creative powers, which are miraculous.

The really big problem we have isn't so much to do with the characteristics of the ego. The big problem that we've confused who we are with it. Our sense of 'self' has become caught up in it. Our identity has been redefined by it. We actually believe that IT is who we are.

This is where we run into all manner of problems, and again, not even touching on the ego's death wish or all of its lies and deceptions, just the mere FACT of you having 'attached your self' to the ego presents major issues.

So just to clarify, there is YOU, and then there are two thought systems. There is the entire ego and its thought system, and then there is Holy Spirit and His thought system. YOU are either identified with and absorbed in one or the other. You, as the 'decision maker', float back and forth between them, but spend most of your time in ego land.

So who 'you' are, is really actually a combination of TWO things, your 'self', and either God or the ego. When you are identified with the ego, you THINK that you are 'one identity', but in fact you are two identities. You+ego. It's either that, or you+God. In God you actually can become ONE, but with the ego, you are always still separate and split and confused about who you really are, because you can't be fully one with the ego.

The problem now is, that you will try to become more spiritual. Now this alone leads to hellish problems. You will be holding on tight to the ego, while at the same time, attempting to become spiritual or to move in the direction of spirit. This is a major issue because your sense of identity is still very tied to the ego, so any efforts you make you 'stop being ego', will be experienced by the 'you' that is identified with the ego, as 'you attacking yourself'. The part of you tied to it will resist the truth, will not want to wake up, will retaliate and attempt to protect itself from the truth that the other part of you is exposing yourself to, and you will terrorize yourself!

What this also leads to is another major issue. Attempting to become spiritual WITHOUT dis-identifying from the ego, will cause you to attempt to bring the ego along WITH you in that transformation. You will try to make IT be more spiritual, because you think it is who you are. You'll attempt to transform the ego self, to pull the ego self into a new kind of thought system that it completely rejects and is incompatible with. It will resist strongly and it will not be able to stay there. So while you stay identified with the ego, you will constantly be pulled back into the ego after any endeavor to reach the light of truth. You will open up a little bit to truth, then the ego will act like a bungie cord, pulling you back down to its 'level' of consciousness.

So basically you have a major identity crisis. Who you think you are is so attached to the ego and its thoughts, that whenever you try to wake up, you think that you're being attacked. And really you are. If you are going to hold onto the ego while simultaneously trying to become more truthful/honest, you are going to SUFFER. You will spiritualize the ego. You will experience constant ego 'rebounds', which really is the ego-attached you pulling YOURSELF back to the ego that you trust, as if it is yourself. 'You', who think you are the ego, do NOT want to wake up, because the ego doesn't, and cannot.

This is basically the issue of what you are experiencing on 'level 1', which is the ego's level. Your identification WITH everything happening on level 1 ie ego thought system, attaches you to it. If you want to get OUT of the ego's thought system, and get to level 2 (Holy Spirit), it is going to be IMPOSSIBLE for you to make any lasting progress unless you are willing to LET GO OF THE EGO. Transforming the ego will not work because it cannot be turned into holiness. Leaping high in the air trying to grab the fruits of truth will only gravitate you crashing back to the ground again. The ego can't come with you to heaven.

So to really make progress here, you are going to have to realize, at some point, you have to stop all of your efforts to make your ego-identified self be spiritual. You, who YOU REALLY are, is already capable of 'being spiritual' IF you will attach to the Holy Spirit. You only need to let go of the ego's 'hand' and hold the Holy Spirit's 'hand', and hey-presto, you will SHARE the thought system of spirituality. You will enter into it. You will experience it. And your sharing of it will identify you with it and make it yours - not exclusively yours but still yours.

In essence you 'need do nothing' in order to qualify for entry to the 'spiritual universe'. YOU, who you really are, cannot change, because YOU are immortal spirit. You, as immortal spirit, have gotten lost in thinking you and the ego are the same self. That is all. You only need to be willing to SURRENDER the ego, let go of the ego, dis-identify from the ego, drop the ego, stop believing you are the ego, and remember who you really are (in Holy Spirit's mind), and you're done. All you're doing is getting divorced from the ego and marrying Holy Spirit, and along with that your whole sense of 'self' will change, away from the confusion of 'I am a separate ego' to 'I am shared immortal holy spirit'.

So really, YOU do not change at all. You just leave and surrender a mind that you thought was you, realizing YOU continue on without it and that you are NOT it, and enter into (return to) a mind based on God's mind where you have a whole different identity to associate with. This has little to do with who or what you 'are', and more to do with 'who you are with'. When you are with the ego, you think you're it. When you're with God, you tune into your real identity as His Creation.

You are free to leave the ego at any time. Nothing is keeping you in it but your decision to stay. There is another option and the ego is not your Self.

"The miracle establishes you dream a dream, and that its content is not true. This is a crucial step in dealing with illusions."

"Nothing at all has happened but that you have put yourself to sleep, and dreamed a dream in which you were an alien to yourself, and but a part of someone ELSE'S dream."

The VITAL thing thing to realize, which is brought to light by the Atonement principle, and seen with true forgiveness, is this.

IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO SIN. You cannot do it in reality. You are literally incapable of changing God. You are literally incapable of making effects in God, stopping His will, changing who you are, corrupting your innocence, becoming sinful or dying. LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE.

You HAVE NOT sinned. You HAVE NOT separated. You cannot leave God. You cannot do anything to change reality whatsoever. God's Kingdom is totally the same as it always has been. His Kingdom cannot be assailed, it is permanent. NOTHING HAS CHANGED. You are 100% incapable of separation or sin or death. This is literally absolutely true. You simply HAVE NOT DONE, what you think you have done, and you ARE NOT doing it now.

So the question remains, what exactly IS this "state" that you are in? If it is impossible to sin or be separate, why does it seem like you are?

Simply, because you cannot ACTUALLY sin or attack reality or kill yourself, you have ONLY IMAGINED that it is possible. And that means, you are simply IN DENIAL, and you have made the ERROR of BELIEVING that you can do what you cannot do, that the impossible is possible, that you have done what you have not done, and you think something unreal is real.

So it's not like, you actually DID separate or sin, and that now you need to undo all that and heal it. You DIDN'T do it. You HAVE NOT produced real consequences. NOTHING REAL HAS HAPPENED AT ALL because nothing real can be threatened. So it has not been threatened. Whatsoever.

All that's "happened" is you've pretended to be ABLE to do what you CANNOT do, pretending to have done what you CANNOT POSSIBLY have done, and now you are "dreaming", literally "wishful thinking", having a fantasy, that you've convinced yourself you actually DID do it. That you are doing it now. That you are PROVING that it is real and possible. But you're not. You're failing to prove it. Reality is unaffected. You are just delusional.

So it's not that you're inside a real separation trying to get out. It's ONLY that you BELIEVE you are, you THINK you are, and you are MISTAKEN in believing and thinking you are, because in truth YOU ARE NOT. You have not done anything real whatsoever. You're just someone who believes they have committed a crime that they HAVE NOT committed. You think you sinned, but you didn't. You think you had a power that you do not have. You think you've CAUSED something REAL to happen against God, but you DID NOT.

LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE.

All you have is a case of BEING MISTAKEN. All you have is a case of having MADE THE ERROR, of believing, that you can and have done something that you shouldn't have done. It's not even that you DID make a real mistake. You just THINK you did.

It's like, a child who does something and they think they broke something, and they become upset and start crying, and hurting themselves, because they feel bad about what they did. And there's the adult trying to reassure them, that what they THINK they did, it totally does not matter, they DIDN'T cause any real harm, nothing has really been affected, and if they will just open their eyes and LOOK, they will SEE that it's TRUE, that NOTHING HAS GONE WRONG.

It's the recognition that everything is STILL AS GOD CREATED IT. Everything is still perfect, holy, whole, innocent, unharmed, safe, protected, undefiled, unattacked, completely happy, and totally healed. Because it's only your MISTAKEN BELIEF that ITS NOT, that needs to be undone. You are just mistaken. Just very deluded and deceived, in believing something is true that isn't. YOU ARE JUST CONFUSED.

What you think you've done, you HAVE NOT DONE. What you think was possible, IS NOT POSSIBLE. You're merely in a state of denial, pretense, trying to convince yourself that you ACTUALLY CAN DO what you cannot do. You're using all kinds of illusory dreams of weapons against yourself and others to TRY to bring about the death of God's son, to try to attack, to try to produce PROOF that you ACTUALLY HAVE sinned and that you ACTUALLY DO deserve to die. But not only have you not sinned, YOU CANNOT DIE. And even your attempts to prove it with a DREAM, wherein the dream body seems to die, STILL does not prove it. Because you carry on.

"You have made a bargain that you cannot keep." You literally are NOT CAPABLE of proving to be true, what is NEVER true. You literally CANNOT destroy the Son of God. So this whole ENTIRE dream world, designed to try to demonstrate and prove that God's Son can be anything less than immortal, is TOTALLY FUTILE. It DOES NOT WORK. Death does not work. Death is FAILURE, failure to make illusions real, failure to prove death overcomes life, and failure to have ANY REAL EFFECTS WHATSOEVER.

So basically, there you are, an innocent IMMORTAL BEING, who can NEVER stop being immortal, PRETENDING to be mortal, pretending to suffer against your will, pretending to be a victim, pretending that a dream world is choosing everything for you against your will, and pretending that you can die. ALL TOTALLY FICTIONAL. All fake. All made-up. All illusions. Because NOTHING can change the sheer FACT of what you are, a totally immortal spirit being that IS STILL AS GOD CREATED IT. Which you can NEVER CHANGE. EVER.

"I am still as God created me" is atonement thinking. This is a forgiving perception. It is a recognition that only the truth is true. It is a remembering that NOTHING HAS REALLY HAPPENED. Nothing has gone wrong. You are totally safe and loved in Heaven. You HAVE NOT SINNED WHATSOEVER. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING REAL HAS BEEN AFFECTED!!! Not even a tiny bit! You're just sleeping and dreaming of being a sinner. You'll wake up to realize and remember, that dream was so ridiculous, it's ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE for you to sin!

Absolutely EVERYTHING In this ENTIRE WORLD, this whole universe, is UTTERLY RIDICULOUS NONSENSE. Not one single thing about it is true. It is the dream of death, a TOTAL FICTION, absolutely bullshit in every way imaginable. It is a state of denial, a state of unconsciousness, a state of dreaming that you're exiled from Heaven.

You are having nothing more than a bad dream of death, in which terrible things seem to happen, impossible things, unthinkable things. And yet when you wake up, you will know, without a doubt, the ENTIRE THING was totally impossible. And you will thank God that NOT ONE SINGLE THING IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAS EVER TRUE.

This is atonement. This recognition is forgiveness. This truth, that you HAVEN'T done anything, that NOTHING happened. That THERE IS NO WORLD, NO EARTH, NO SPECIAL THINGS, there is NO DREAM, there is ONLY HEAVEN. "Only the creations of light are real" "There is no life outside of heaven." Therefore you are JUST MISTAKEN to believe otherwise, and recognizing this is a forgiving attitude.

You ARE forgiven, fully, because you LITERALLY have NOT DONE ANYTHING!! Your only choice now is whether to recognize and accept this truth, or whether to stay in denial and pretend you can and should suffer. And it's not God's will that you suffer in any way.

"Freedom and peace and joy stand there, beside the bier on which they sleep, and call them to come forth and waken from their dream of death."

It is difficult to learn that there is not really anything I can do to force healing or awakening onto others. Love isn't forceful.

If I see someone suffering, and if I've become mistaken in believing that this is real or true, then I will try to save them from it. But I've already attacked them by seeing them as less than immortal and buying into the illusion of them having a real problem. So then having attacked them, I also now try to become the hero savior who has come to free them from the very sickness that I have projected onto them.

I can offer love and healing, if there is willingness or readiness to receive. Jesus said to me a while ago "since when was loving someone a crime?". Love can heal. Love can produce miracles. But if the person does not want these things, love doesn't intrude.

In ACIM Jesus speaks of how love does not come where it is not welcome. It doesn't intrude on the alter upon which you placed other idols. It doesn't force change.

If God, unconditional love, forced healing onto us, the entire world would have been dissolved into light instantaneously. So this leaves people asking, why does God 'allow' suffering and death? The short answer is, because He loves us. Yes, God allows death because He loves us. And that's justification for many people as to why God sucks or doesn't exist. BUT... that's the short answer.

The longer answer is, death and suffering are not REAL, and our belief/experience that these things are real is actually our sickness, our mistaken perception, which God's love would want to HEAL, so that we can return to an awareness that we have divine health, that we are immortal, and that we cannot die. That's why God doesn't stop us from destroying ourselves (up to a point) - he knows death is not real and nothing can truly hurt us. All suffering is an illusion of suffering in a state of unconsciousness.

God would awaken us to realize our immortality and invulnerability. He would awaken us to love. So we can't just say God sucks or doesn't exist just because we suffer and die. We have to realize we are the ones who choose to suffer and die. As Jesus explains in ACIM, "no-one dies without their own consent". So let's stop blaming God for that one.

God does love us because death and suffering are not real. Thank God death and suffering are not real. Thank God He has created us eternal regardless of how things appear in the world. And thank God it is still possible to choose love instead of suffering. God wants us to realize that in REALITY we do not suffer or die and nothing has happened. If we're not perceiving and experiencing that reality, it's because we are mistaken and need healing. So we need to choose to receive that healing from God.

Choose again!

I’ll say this straight and try not to be too insensitive.

If someone is sick they are deceived. All sickness is an illusion. Death is a lie. If someone seems to be sick, they are lying. Sickness is dishonesty and you should NOT believe them!

If you have a loved one, someone close to you, and they have a sickness, you may be triggered by this idea. But the truth is that even this person that you care for, if they are demonstrating anything less than immortality, they are deceiving themselves. They are pretending to be something they’re not. They’re trying to portray themselves as mortal because they believe they’re guilty and deserve to suffer.

This is what they’re doing. They’re trying to die. Trying to prove that they don’t have eternal life. They’re in denial and have forgotten who they are. They don’t know themselves and believe they’ve changed into something of their own making. They’ve lost touch with the truth and are temporarily insane. Their sickness is also completely deliberate and chosen and serving a purpose they think they want.

To recognize this must accompany also the realization that the sick person, or what appears to be sick, is not how they really are. The sickness is false. It is fake sickness. There is no true or real sickness in God’s creation. All sickness is a deception and a form of denial, an attempt to block life and defend against God. It’s all based on guilt and self attack. A person who is sick is trying to destroy themselves. All sickness is suicide.

The truth is that, given the person is actually immortal, endless, eternal, unchangeable, permanent and perfect, they cannot really be sick. The sickness is not compatible with their immortality. They literally are not really sick. They just appear to have a body that appears to be suffering. And their mind may be temporarily confused. But their soul, their spirit, their self, cannot be sick because it is eternal. So the sickness must be a deception, a cover-up, a decoy, a distraction and a false belief.

What this reveals is that anyone in our life that is suffering or sick in any way to any degree, is an immortal being who is temporarily pretending to be mortal, trying to prove they can die, and trying to deceive themselves and others. They have moved into lies and deceit and denial. They aren’t being completely honest because they’re not admitting to who they really are as God created them. So they are in a sense lost and confused.

This means that is now your task to be willing to blatantly recognize that not only is the sick person faking it, in the biggest picture, and are attempting to portray something which is NOT TRUE, so your job is to hold true to the real truth about them, for them. This means offering resurrection to them by remembering who they really are, for them, as God created them. Holding to the light in them that is immortal and cannot die.

This requires NOT joining with them in their suffering. NOT joining in with supporting, believing, or accepting their lies of sickness. Their victimhood and their sorry state. It is not true of them. They are trying to convince you that they are being poorly treated and victimized against their will, while simultaneously CAUSING every single thing they’re manifesting. They are deceptive and mistrusting and are lying to you. They are NOT victims, they are mis-creating their own suffering to serve their ego goal of death. Do not go into pity when someone is lying to you.

You have to side with the truth about them for them, even if it is AGAINST what they believe. Even if it is OPPOSITE to what they are trying to accomplish. If they are sick, they truly need help from a state of truth, not through commiseration and sympathy. They don’t need false empathy and they don’t need you to support the sickness. You are supposed to NOT BELIEVE IT. This sickness is a FALSE CLAIM they are making and they are in error. They need help to get out of this claim and see sense.

I think that, probably, the only way to fully heal something in someone is to be willing to FULLY COMMIT to the TOTAL rejection of all sickness. To decide to no longer believe in sickness of any kind, in any form. To become completely intolerant of it. Jesus reflects this in his statement:

“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.”

Here he states that if you really GO ALL THE WAY, which means recognizing only the immortal christ self in people and not for a minute siding with, believing, supporting, or enabling any form of sickness, then this will put you in a position to HEAL it. You become unable to TOLERATE sickness. That doesn’t mean you get pissed off and upset about it and lost in despair over it, it means you reject all sickness and withdraw all power from it and never again fall for the bullshit lie that someone is presenting when they “are sick”.

We have to stop believing in sickness. We have to stop believing that people are victims, when they are in fact choosing every single speck of suffering. We have to grant acknowledgement of the POWER that people have, the freedom, to choose whether to live or die, and their inherent capability to induce both sickness and health. We have to stop giving fuel to the suffering and stop making it real. We must focus only on LIFE.

“The patient could merely rise up without their aid and say, "I have no use for this." There is no form of sickness that would not be cured at once.”

We must acknowledge that people ARE NOT REALLY SICK. There is no real sickness anywhere. Sickness is entirely an illusion, and it shows pictures of things happening which are IMPOSSIBLE IN REALITY. We have to stop falling for the temptation and the deception. We have to see someone’s attempt to be sick as a MISTAKE they are making. They are choosing poorly and that is all.

“The ACCEPTANCE of peace is the denial of illusion, and sickness IS an illusion. Yet every Son of God has the power to deny illusions ANYWHERE in the Kingdom, merely by denying them completely in himself.”

We must deny death in order to raise the dead! We have to stop feeding the monster and take away all its power. A sick person has merely FORGOTTEN WHO THEY ARE. They are out of touch with the truth, and are therefore out of touch with reality, which is insanity. If they knew who they were, they would love themselves and could NOT BE SICK. If they are insisting on LYING about their immortality, postulating they are weak and suffering and destructible, then it is YOUR job to DENY THE DENIAL OF THE TRUTH.

YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO BE SICK! YOU CANNOT DIE!

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

“If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP. Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS.”

“***Do not allow your brother to be sick***, for if he is, have YOU abandoned him to his own dream, by SHARING it with him. He has not seen the cause of sickness where it is, and YOU have overlooked the gap between you, where the sickness has been bred. Thus are you JOINED in sickness, to preserve the little gap unhealed, where sickness is kept carefully protected, cherished, and upheld by firm belief, lest God should come to bridge the little gap that leads to Him. Fight not His coming with illusions, for it is His coming that you WANT above all things that seem to glisten in the dream. The end of dreaming is the end of FEAR, and love was NEVER in the world of dreams.”

“Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take.”

As an immortal being, you should be accustomed to everything always being perfect. You live forever, everyone you know lives forever. There’s no sickness or suffering of any kind. No death, no destruction. Nothing ever goes wrong, no problems, no situations to solve or things to fix. Nothing ever malfunctions, there’s always perfect happiness.

So then consider, what is this fucked up state that we’ve gotten ourselves into? This nightmare that we’re having. Truly it is a nightmare when we suddenly start to regard there as being something wrong with someone. Something isn’t working. Someone is partly broken. Somehow things are happening that should never happen. Stuff starts showing up out of nowhere which should be impossible. Horrors and traumas and tragedies suddenly erupt seeming to topple all sense of immortality. Sudden sicknesses take hold of the eternal and render them inept. What was created to live forever is suddenly destroying itself.

What kind of madness is this? This is the state of mind, and world, and identity, which we have opted to enter into, instead of being as God created us. It is an insane nightmare, in which things which absolutely should never be happening seem to be happening all the time. It is so incredibly alien to us. It is so wrong. It is so not of God and not one single speck of this cruel world could ever be even conceived of by the immortal beings of heaven. How horrifying that anything could even remotely go wrong, anything would break down, anything could suffer or die in any way. Truly a nightmare, and completely unnatural. This world is not my home.

"Principle 23 ... YOU are a miracle. God creates only "that which, or one who, is of surpassing excellence or merit". Man is capable of this kind of creation, too, being in the image and likeness of his own Creator. Anything else is only his own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the Creations of Light are real."

“Pain is but witness to the Son's mistakes in what he thinks he is. It is a dream of fierce retaliation for a crime that could not be committed; for attack on what is wholly unassailable. It is a nightmare of abandonment by an Eternal Love Which could not leave the Son whom It created out of love.”

“Your wildest misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your blackest nightmares all mean nothing. They will not prevail against the peace God wills for you. The Holy Spirit WILL restore your sanity, because insanity is NOT the Will of God.”

“Learn that even the darkest nightmare that disturbed the mind of God's sleeping Son, holds no power over him. He WILL learn the lesson of awaking. God watches over him, and light surrounds him.”

“Let us not save nightmares, for they are not fitting offerings for Christ, and so they are not fit gifts for YOU. Take off the covers, and look at what you are afraid of. Only the ANTICIPATION will frighten you, for the reality of nothingness cannot be frightening.”

The only thing that we need to really do is to surrender to the will of God. To accept it. To accept the truth. This is the same thing as accepting the atonement.

Here's the fact of it all.

God's will is the truth. You can try to deny it, but you cannot change it.

You have immortality and perfection already because God created you immortal and perfect. This is why you need do nothing. You are already complete. You already have eternal life. There is nothing left to do. You cannot add anything to this or take anything away.

So anything else you are doing, any other attitude you have, it's really a form of DENIAL. Denial is the opposite of acceptance. Either you are willing to put aside and drop and let go of EVERY STORY that you've built to defend against the truth (which has made you sick), or you will continue to have fake experiences of suffering.

You can't change God's will. God has not changed his mind about you. It's rock solid, set in stone forever. More permanent than sin. More unchangeable than death.

So..... what is it we are doing? We're saying, oh, I'm not worthy of love, or... I've got some "reason" why I am not the way God created me... or, something's wrong with me, or I want things to be different to God's creation, or I don't want God's love I want something else, or... I think I can make something better, or I prefer my dream of death, or whatever... all these other "alternatives" which pretend to be desirable, wanted, chosen, possible, plausible, a replacement for the only truth.

All of it is false, all of it is a lie, all of it is denial and none of it works.

Only the truth is true. Only God's truth is true. There is absolutely ZERO room for negotiation. God's will cannot be opposed. You cannot create an alternative to heaven. There is nothing you want more than to share God. Nothing else can make you happier. There is no other source of love or life.

What are you going to do? Keep trying to find salvation somewhere else? Keep trying to accept something less satisfying? Keep looking for love in all the places that it does not exist?

At some point we have to simply SURRENDER and GIVE UP this futile search and ACCEPT that, all along, God's Will has been the only will.

This is what the prodigal son story is about.... finally surrendering and ADMITTING YOU ARE MISTAKEN and then giving up your futile attempts ... returning to God and ALLOWING HIM to be as He is. To be your truth. To let go of every other authority problem.

To those who say the course is not about surrender, because it never mentions surrender.... it is ENTIRELY about surrender. Letting go of the ego, giving up the fight, accepting the truth. It's all surrendering of what is not true, and accepting what is.

Can you just be honest and admit the truth that God does love you and you are loved and you are immortal already?

We do not recognize an illusion when we see one. Since birth we've been looking at this world believing it's real. It seems real enough. But "there is nothing so blinding as perception of form."

The problem is, we don't have something MORE real to compare it to. There is no frame of reference to evaluate it or contrast it. If you could see something truly real, it would frame this world AS an illusion, it's illusory nature would become obvious, and you would be able to tell that this world is clearly false and unreal. But you have to have a sense of what true and real things are like in order to be able to compare and contrast, that this illusion is opposite to that.

Think for a moment then about reality, about God, about Heaven, about the nature and quality of infinite immortal being. Contemplate what God is like. The eternal nature, the endlessness, the freedom from sickness and death, the inability to create anything less than perfection. Then ask yourself, is this thing you are looking at, THAT? Does it match up? Does it correlate? Does it seem like something God would create, something immortal, unlimited, perfect, beautiful and pure?

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

With something to compare it to, it becomes more obvious that the things of this world, the stuff you've been looking at since birth, MUST BE an illusion. It must be something manufactured, artificial, pretend, fake, unreal, deceptive. It cannot really exist. There is no cancer in God. There is no insanity in God. There is no dog shit in God. There is no crying in God. There is no attack in God. There is no fear or threat or danger in God. Can this appearance of sin and attack exist WITHIN God's perfect being? Not even slightly. So what is it you're looking at?

It has to be something that is not really there. It has to be a lie, an illusion, a deception and a temptation to believe in something unreal. It's some kind of hallucination. It's make believe fairytale dreaming. It can't exist. It can't really be there at all. It seems to be but it's not. It is really nothing, pretending to be something. The impossible, pretending to be possible. It can't exist in God. It has no real cause. It hasn't been created. Remind yourself of this, and it will become clearer and more RECOGNIZED, that what you're seeing is an ILLUSION, some kind of invented puff of smoke masquerading as something else. It can't be real. It can't exist. It's not there. It's gone.

"Illusions recognized must disappear."

There is only God and His Kingdom. "Only the creations of light are real."

Only ego can only attack itself. It cannot attack what is not inside of itself.

If you are outside of the ego, you cannot be attacked. You are immortal and invulnerable.

If you identify with ego, labeling your sense of self as being "made of" something ego .... sin, guilt, fear, sickness, unworthiness, etc... then you can be attacked. Because THAT illusion can be attacked, because it IS attack.

The ego can only attack that which is PART OF its thought system. It is like a dog which runs wild in a yard, barking and screaming, threatening to bite, but the yard is fenced in, and so long as you are not inside the fence, the dog can do nothing.

Identifying with/as something illusory, ie ego, you put yourself inside the yard. Now your "self" is inside the realm of the ego's thought system. And it will attack you, because all illusions are thoughts of war. The ego is a mindset of self-attack, inner conflict, a war with yourself.

The Kingdom of God is outside of the realm of the ego, or rather, the ego is nowhere that God's Creation is. The Kingdom of God therefore cannot be attacked. The mind of the ego cannot enter Heaven. As soon as it approaches the light it is dispelled and dissolved.

Darkness cannot exist where there is light. And the ego "self" cannot be taken into the light, or into heaven. Trying to do so will merely make it either resist or pretend that it is becoming spiritual. Darkness has no effect on light, but the belief that darkness can hide light is part of the ego's insanity.

So if you want to be immortal, all you need to do is recognize your identity has nothing to do with ego, is not made of ego in any way, has no illusions in it, and is outside of the ego thought system. Then you cannot be touched.

There is then NOTHING the ego can do to attack you or hurt you, to make you sick, to make you die, to make you suffer in any way. You are utterly OUT OF REACH. You cannot be sick or die and you do not depend whatsoever on the ego's forms of supply or sustaining of life. You are sustained by the love of God. The love of God doesn't just warm your heart amidst a dreary world, it POWERS YOU and PROTECTS YOU.

What is innocent and sinless cannot be sinned against. Perfect invulnerability is not only possible is the ONLY real possibility.

Immortality is permanent and real. Mortality is a lie. Immortality is not an exception, it is perfectly natural. Mortality is UNNATURAL.

While your physical body is clearly anchored in THIS world, your true self is clearly anchored in ANOTHER world. Your soul, your holy self, is entirely LOCATED in God's Kingdom.

"The soul never leaves the sight of God."

The only transition you make is between being BODY (physical) identified, which is the same as believing "I am in the physical realm", or being spirit (soul) identified, which is the same as "I am in God's Kingdom now".

But you cannot think of yourself as a soul if you think of yourself as anchored at the physical level. If YOU are IN THIS WORLD, you cannot be in the Kingdom. Your body is here, but your SELF is not.

The course becomes more clear and obviously telling us this, if you notice how it asks us to BE the way that God created us.

We're not asked to merely stay entirely OUTSIDE of the Kingdom until the last second where we pass through the pearly gates. We're asked to APPROACH the Kingdom, while in a body, and to RELOCATE our mind INSIDE the Kingdom as far as possible, PRIOR to the final awakening.

"You are safe in God, dreaming of exile" tells you that you ARE IN GOD, and being in God is your safety. The course also tells you the Son of God cannot be happy anywhere in the world UNLESS he knows he is with God. To be WITH God is really to be located IN HEAVEN.

If you think of Heaven as a place beyond this world, which it is, or if you think in terms of "two levels" where Heaven is above and Earth is below, which is accurate, there is temptation to TRAP yourself in this world. You think your body is here, and therefore your self is here. This is body identification.

What we're asked to really do is to lift our mind/self up out of the body, identify with our spirit/soul which is not even in a body, shift our mind into the service of the soul, LOCATE ourselves in God, EXPERIENCE intimacy and love with God, return to ONENESS with Creation, and to do all this as far as possible WHILE we're still having a body.

It's easy to think of Heaven as on the other side of a dimensional division, or a boundary of separation, the gap, which holds heaven and earth apart. But this tempts us to believe we are not IN heaven UNTIL God takes the last step. This is inappropriate. In order to BECOME more loving, at peace, happy, joyful, powerful, under no laws but God's, returning to your true nature, etc you HAVE to start moving INTO heaven, into your spiritual identity, right from the start.

In fact, the only way to lift up OUT of false perception ("the world is false perception") is to move back towards God, re-enter the truth, position yourself IN the light, CENTER yourself in God, locate yourself IN heaven, be surrounded with divinity, and therefore be practically 100% aware of Heaven's presence, even if you are temporarily still in a body.

You are an immortal being, and you cannot die. But this does not mean you're going to be mortal UNTIL God takes you home. Instead, the course is asking you to RECLAIM YOUR IMMORTAL NATURE NOW, live out from that nature while you're here, demonstrate you are under God's laws only while you're here, BE the miraculousness of the soul HERE, and therefore heal the body and repurpose it into a symbol of eternal life.

He's asking us to return to our HEAVENLY NATURE, as fully as possible, in order to become "ready" to take that final 1% step to undo the last threads of the illusion of death and accept the atonement. The atonement is love and light, so to approach it you have to enter into the realm of love and light almost fully immersed. But you WILL NOT BE WILLING to accept the atonement without a HUGE amount of PREPARTION before hand, leading up to it. "Miracles are everyone's right, but purification is necessary first."

We cannot even be loving, in this world, unless we are willing to be closer to God while we're here. We can't be the light of the world unless our mind is plugged into spirit and we are literally radiating holiness and light into the world. We cannot perform miracles unless we're going to tap into the unlimited miraculous power of God WHILE we're here. To be miracle minded is to be aligned with and IN the mindset and thought system of heaven itself.

Perhaps we can frame it this way. The physical world is false perception, the lower battlefield of unconsciousness and death. ANY attempt to even START to awaken, to become more spiritual rather than unconscious, requires us to begin re-identifying with spirit. This is why Jesus says:

"Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight."

In pain, we are in the darkness of making the world real and experiencing it as a living hell. If we want to be happier and so on, we're going to have to APPROACH THE LIGHT. This will entail shifting your sense of WHERE you are, from hell to heaven.

The journey begins as you emerge from the painful state and START to move towards God. And this means you are slightly releasing your identification with the body and physicality, and are beginning to open up a spiritual sight which is the eyes of Christ - and Christ is IN heaven.

So even if our body is here in this world, our mind/self/identity must go through a journey BACK to heaven, even from the beginning of the awakening process, such that we should be thinking of ourselves AS WE ARE IN HEAVEN, in order to live out from that truth.

We can't BE loving people if we are not coming FROM LOVE. Love IS GOD. And in this way we are bringing the laws and the love of ANOTHER world TO THIS WORLD. And in order to have a holier relationship with others, while here, we must start relating HOW WE RELATE IN HEAVEN. Holy Relationship mirrors heaven's relationships. Or in other words, we must relate here how we would treat each other IN GOD, as if we ARE in God right now.

We then shine the light of heaven THROUGH the body. We extend love from ANOTHER world through the body. We bring the Holy Spirit's healing TO the world. We atune to our IMMORTAL NATURE while still in a body, thus forcing the body to DEPICT a symbolic representation of eternal life WHILE HERE. You cannot do that if you think of yourself as IN or OF this world.

You must BRING another world TO this world. You must BE AS YOU ARE IN HEAVEN, while visiting hell. You then operate under MIRACULOUS laws, which break the laws of this world while you're here.

This is why it's important to start now to identify yourself AS your soul, to begin operating AS IMMORTAL, to extend God's love here, to shine Heaven's light into the darkness, and to be as close as possible to how God created you BEFORE you get to heaven.

"But the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT. And what you call with love WILL come to you."

"The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one."

"You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you can see His manifestations. And unless you do, you will not realize He is there. Miracles are His witnesses, and speak for his Presence. What you cannot see becomes real to you only through the witnesses who speak for it. For you can be AWARE of what you cannot see, and it can become compellingly real to you, as its presence becomes manifest THROUGH you. Do His work, for you SHARE in His function. As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares His with you on earth."

Is there a power OTHER than the mind that can cause things to happen to us? What causes sickness? What makes death happen? Do we actually have any control over this world? Do we have a power, to such an extent, that we can actually determine what happens or doesn't happen? Can we actually CHOOSE to cause or not cause sickness and death?

This is an important issue because if we are not the ones orchestrating everything that occurs, everything we experience, then that places us in a rather vulnerable position. If there is a power or cause or law or something that drives stuff to occur, without our consent, without our choosing it, this basically means we are capable of being victims. Stuff can happen to us against our will.

It may seem SUPER radical to suggest that you could be in a position of having so much deliberateness, so much choice, so much power, that you could be orchestrating an entire dream. That the things that happen are what YOU decide will happen. That nothing else happens, because you haven't chosen it. It really then boils down to, are you actually able to choose not to suffer, to not be sick, to not die? Can you choose that events don't occur at all? Do you have the power to CAUSE these to not happen, and do you have the power to cause them TO happen?

This then really becomes a question of RESPONSIBILITY. Who or what is responsible, in every case, for what happens in your life? Do you shift responsibility and therefore "blame" onto others, onto the body or the world itself? For what seems to happen TO you? Who is responsible for whether you are attacked or not? Who is responsible for whether your body becomes sick, or is healed, or just carries on being sick without hope of relief? Because ultimately someone or some "thing" HAS to be the cause. It's either you, or it's something else. There are NO effects without causes.

If you look at the teachings of ACIM closely you will see that there is a huge theme of EMPOWERMENT. This empowerment is saying that you are so powerful that you literally are the dreamer of the dream. It says that you are ruler of the universe. It says that you can be attacked by nothing but your thoughts. It says you cannot die without your own consent. It says that you are not the victim of the world you see. All of these themes point towards you having POWER OVER what happens. YOU CHOOSE!

"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."

"Here again is the paradox often referred to in the course. To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. As God created you, you have all power."

Indeed it leads to what ACIM calls "the secret of salvation". This is quite a radical passage because it basically says that unless you were to go into a kind of unconscious state of denial in which you disown power and see the dream as "happening against your will", NOTHING In the world can do anything to you - no matter how vicious it seems. And in fact, that the secret to being SAVED FROM all forms of suffering, is to realize and own fully that you are "doing it to yourself." That takes great OWNERSHIP of power.

We immediately start to bark with objections about how this can't be true in all situations. But the passage tells us that no matter who is the victim or victimizer, it is true. No matter who seems to do what to whom, or what the apparent severity, it is still true. So it's then telling us that despite any appearances, despite what may look like external causes or separate people acting in certain ways, no matter what it looks like on the surface, it is ALWAYS TRUE that you are doing it to yourself.

And it calls this the "secret of salvation" because it talks of how this is the ONE LESSON the holy spirit is teaching to SAVE YOU from ALL forms of suffering. That the cause of ALL forms of suffering, no matter what form it takes, including physical sickness, is the fact that you are the one doing it to yourself. And because you are doing it yourself, you can change your mind and STOP doing it.

"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace. I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise."

Because in truth, really, UNLESS you are actually the one with the power to CAUSE anything to happen, you would not be in a position to be able to USE that power to NOT cause it to happen, or to undo it. It is because you DO cause it, that there is IS hope for salvation. There is a way out of hell and suffering and sickness and death BECAUSE you are the one that keeps putting it in place. And if you weren't the one putting it in place, you'd be stuck having to tolerate it, experience it, suffer from it, and go through it, without any hope of relief, ie no salvation.

This is quite a radical teaching and it is extremely central to the entire A Course in Miracles view of cause and effect, of who causes what, and of how POWERFUL you are. It rests on the fact that you are an immortal being, a permanent changeless being, who is always the same and is incapable of change or of being changed. A being that is NOT AFFECTED by the world.

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

Forgiveness rests on this immortal fact, because obviously if you are immortal nothing can happen to you, so you have no grounds for playing at being a victim, no grounds for believing that something is happening against your will, and no grounds for suffering. If you are immortal then you quite literally are invulnerable to the entire world, and there is not a single thing in all the world that has even the slightest power to cause anything that you do not want. In fact it means you have power OVER DEATH, because you cannot die.

This is what the entire teaching of ACIM is leading to. The total identification with spirit as Christ, the immortal son of God. The total owning of RESPONSIBILITY FOR BEING CAUSAL - a causal CREATOR. The total reclaiming of absolute unlimited POWER, which can do literally anything. The reclaiming of the power to work miracles, to heal sickness and to prevent death, and to change the world if needed. It is asking of you to reclaim a role and position of nothing LESS than TOTAL ABSOLUTE POWER.

By having such a power, a power so great that literally the entire dream is being dreamed up BY your mind, a power that puts the world in place and makes it spin, a power that materializes bodies, a power that causes events to transpire, we're talking about you being extremely DELIBERATE and CHOOSING everything that occurs or is experienced. And this does mean without exception. Not one single thing occurs that you do not choose, and because the power of decision is yours, you CAN CHOOSE not to have the body be sick, or die. YOU make the world go round.

This isn't a course in leaving any room open for some kind of fictional "alien will", a separate power, an external power, some kind of power the "dream" seems to have over you, some victim consciousness, some kind of external causation that can do things to you against your will, some kind of power that puts sickness into your body without your asking for it, or some kind of power other than your choice that seems to make death happen.

These are all the views that the EGO has, in its sense of weakness and powerlessness and vulnerability and fear. It sees itself as utterly at war with a separated-off power not within itself, that does things to it against its desires. And it sees itself as having no control or real power over anything, so instead to uses "force" and "doing" to try to make things happen.

"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the FEAR OF AWAKENING. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of TRYING NOT TO KNOW by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual."

We are being asked to own up to being immortal beings. Beings who are purely CAUSAL and CREATIVE. Beings who express from love and whose expressions come out as what you want, and as what you create and thus as what happens or exists. Where you are constantly choosing WHAT shows up and what occurs. There is no room in the mind of a creator/co-creator for stuff happening "by some other means", or of your choices being unheard, or of your decisions lacking power, or of your causation lacking effects.

This is a course in TAKING BACK YOUR POWER. And that means and includes the total responsibility and ownership of being THE CAUSE OF all your suffering, in every form it takes, INCLUDING the condition of the body, all of its forms and sickness and suffering, and even over death itself. You even have the power to literally move mountains and to make worlds. Only in this extreme of absolute ownership of the POWER OF GOD, which is your inheritance, is victimhood and vulnerability and pain and misery snuffed out forever. There is no power OTHER THAN the power of God that you share with him.

The question is whether you are willing to go all the way to accept this power, to take on this role and position of being ruler of the universe, whether you are willing to OWN this power and regain access to USE it consciously. Whether you are ready to let go of all victimhood roles and all sense of not choosing or not being the one who makes things happen. It's putting you in the hot-seat. If you are to reach the resurrection and FINISH the curriculum, you MUST gain the absolute power over death, which gives you the ability to cancel and reverse and prevent it EVEN on a physical level.

"I raised the dead by KNOWING that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God Created. Why do you believe that it is harder for me to inspire the dis-spirited or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles: YOU do."

If you believe that sickness happens through some other reason, by some other cause, something in the world or body, something environmental, something someone else does to you, if events happen on their own chaotically or randomly, if death chooses for you when you will die, if sickness happens to the body, if sickness can remain within the body against the mind's choice, and if you believe that you do NOT have the power to do anything about this, that IS an egoic position of victimhood and powerlessness. And we are all-too comfortable playing this role.

It means you are "playing the game of death", as an immortal being, PRETENDING that you do NOT have the power of God, and trying to pull off a stunt of making it look AS IF you are not the one causing everything to occur. When it appears you did not choose something, it is an illusion. You are ALWAYS choosing what you experience, what you feel, what happens with the body, what events transpire. NOTHING happens without your consent. This is because you are an infinitely powerful being with an extremely powerful unlimited mind capable of creating entire worlds.

"There are no accidents in salvation."

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

Owning up to this power - the shared Power of God - which is UNLIMITED, and there is NOTHING that this power (thus your holiness) cannot do .... places you in a position of being co-creator with God. For a creator there is nothing that comes IN to you from the outside, there is ONLY an outflowing from the inside outward. An extension so strong it cannot be stopped. The unlimited will of God.

You cannot have things coming at you, attacking you, changing you, affecting you, choosing for you. YOU are the master. You dominate everything. You are the ultimate cause. YOU are in charge of your destiny. You are NEVER a victim, and NOTHING happens without your choosing it and causing it. OWN THIS, and you will be free from suffering and death forever.

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will rest you, but YOU cannot. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW, for if you did, you could never have grown weary. Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son. Pain is not of Him, for He knows no attack, and His peace surrounds you silently."

"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."

"The Holy Spirit will repeat this ONE inclusive lesson of deliverance, until it has been learned, REGARDLESS of the form of suffering that brings you pain. Whatever hurt you bring to Him, He will make answer with this very simple truth. For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the SINGLE cause of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

"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."

"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance, and limits of any kind. Your holiness is totally unlimited in its power because it establishes you as a Son of God, at one with the Mind of his Creator. Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do."

"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."

In terms of cause and effect, God who is cause created us as his effect, yet shared his causal ability with us, making us also able to cause. We are an effect of God, but we are also a co-creator and cause of our own creations.

God is cause. We are cause. And nothing can alter what we are or make us an effect, other than God, because we are sustained by God's constant will. We are affected by nothing, having been given eternal life, maintained forever by God himself.

The idea of the separation from God, introduced the idea of a breakdown in cause and effect. That means, a breakdown in the relationship between God and his creation/son. It suggests that causes are separate from their effects.

This also produced the belief that you are not caused by God. And also that you can cause God - which is the authority problem - a denial of the causal power of authorship. And therefore that you can cause what God created, thus changing what God created. And since you were a creation of God's, it began the belief that you could change yourself and redefine yourself, plus make-up a new father.

In this process, your recognition of being a creator was denied, you disowned God as cause and thus disowned causation, and began to see yourself as not causal. You began to see yourself as an effect, or affected by, or changed by. You began to believe thigns could happen to you against God's will and against your will. As the course says...

"Sickness and death entered the mind of God's Son against His Will."

In other words, you began to see yourself as at the effect of something other than God, and other than yourself, as though that which has been created (or dreamed/mis-created) has turned around and has begun to create, cause, define and affect what you are.

This introduces level confusion, as well as the reversal of the true and the false, and the reversal of cause and effect. You now see yourself as an effect and not a cause, and you deny causing anything. This means you are trying to "be affected", and to portray yourself as something that can be affected, so that you can change yourself into what you wish to be.

This produced the body, which is a sort of outside picture of the idea of a self that can be at the effect of its environment, a self that can be an effect and not a cause, with no power to cause at all, and acted upon by the world. This body presents the "face of innocence", which hides the idea that you're trying to be a victim, ie trying to be affected, by the world.

"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."

So now there is this artificial you, which looks like a body, and which is "acted upon" by the world, in which the arrows or direction of causation begins out there somewhere, external and beyond the body and the self/mind, and comes in and acts upon the body/self/mind and causes it to change. Causes it to be affected. And thus the face of innocence, the surface of the body, becomes the canvas on which "effects" are painted to make it seem like you are caused by an alien will outside yourself.

Another way to put this is that, as soon as cause and effect were reversed, you introduced the idea of being "affectable" rather than immortal, that you could change and be changed. And this was the beginning of being a victim. And this is also exactly the beginning of the ego thought system.

To be a victim is to be ego. To be a victim is to be at the effect. To be a victim is to be an effect, not a cause. Victimhood is the denial and refusal to admit to being the cause. Victimhood is irresponsibility and a complete displacement of the responsibility for causing anything, portraying itself as helpless and powerless and at the mercy of anyone and anything.

And this shows up as the face of innocence - the innocent victim that seems not to ask for attack but is still attacked and can then justify anger and revenge. A self that won't take responsibility for causing anything, in an attempt to disown responsibility for sinning against God. To deny and disown all responsibility is to displace and project it onto others and the world, so that the guilty self can pretend to be exonerated.

If you are an effect, you are an ego. If you are an effect, you are a victim. If you are an effect, cause and effect have been reversed. This effectively means that if you swap cause and effect back around and claim total responsibility for being the cause of everything you experience, then you can no longer be a victim, and that also means you can no longer be an ego.

Ego is made of effects. It can only exist as a victim. It requires powerlessness and a disowning of causal power. It must see itself as deprived and lacking and less than whole. It cannot survive when you are powerful, it cannot survive when you are responsible, it cannot survive when you are the cause of everything. It depends on you remaining a powerless victim, and depends on cause and effect staying reversed. To be responsible is to own and know yourself as God created you!

Backwards peception or false perception is another name for ego and another name for being at the effect of the world. Backwards perception is the reversal of cause and effect, in which you are always affected by something seemingly against your will, while secretly choosing it. True perception is the restoration of cause and effect into their proper sequence, in which you are now the cause and the dreamer and a victim of nothing, totally invulnerable, incapable of suffering or blame.

So you can see that to put it simply, with the authority problem which is the breakdown and reversal of cause and effect, as soon as you begin to identify with/as being an effect/affected/victimized, as soon as you give away your power, as soon as you regard yourself as not the cause of what you experience, you are producing an egoic thought system and are losing your mind.

To reclaim total responsibility for the power of God and for causation and creative authorship and being absolutely incapable of being caused by anything but God, denying the power of anything not of God any power to affect or hurt you, which is the proper use of denial, you simply need to own up to being the immortal victimless powerful causer and chooser of what you experience. If nothing can happen to you, you cannot be an ego. If you are purely causal, you are the immortal son of God.

"Father, I was created in Your Mind, a holy Thought that never left its home. I am forever Your Effect, and You forever and forever are my Cause. As You created me I have remained. Where You established me I still abide, and all Your attributes abide in me because it is Your Will to have a Son so like his Cause that Cause and Its Effect are indistinguishable. Let me know that I am an Effect of God, and so I have the power to create like You. And as it is in Heaven, so on earth. Your plan I follow here, and at the end I know that You will gather Your Effects into the tranquil Heaven of Your Love, where earth will disappear, and separate things unite in glory as the Son of God."

Who am I?

What you are, is immortal spirit. You are capable of experiencing, because you have awareness, and you perceive reality. You share the Will of God.

The ego is an illusion. It is not capable of experiencing, it has no awareness of its own, it does not perceive and has no will of its own.

The ego is nothing more than a device, a tool, a machine, which if you choose, you can pick up and USE.

Since the ego is the opposite of who you are, it is impossible for you to use it while you are being yourself. To use it, you must block awareness of your true self.

Once you decide to associate yourself with the ego, it's like picking up a pair of dark-tinted sunglasses. As you put them on and perceive through them, they show you a dark world.

Yet, there you are, as innocent, shining, immortal spirit, wearing a pair of shades. With the glasses on, you can no longer see your illuminating brilliance because the dark glasses seem to filter your perception.

While wearing the ego, you will contribute your experiential awareness, your will and your power, and "bring it to life". You will extend yourself through it.

However, because it is a mechanism for distortion, you will experience a shift in perception from truth to lies, a darkening of your awareness, a loss of your real identity, and a shutting out of God.

In this state it will seem as though the ego is now who you are. Seeing through it, whatever it is designed to see, will become your perception. If it believes in being sinful, you will see yourself as sinful. If it believes in a guilty self that must die, you will believe that about yourself.

Your sense of Self - identity - is brought with you as you wear the ego, and your USE of it appears to modify your sense of self. Your take on an identity unlike your real identity and believe it is you.

Your belief in what the ego shows you causes you to forget who you are, you no longer recognize yourself or the truth, and you now perceive the truth of your very own real self as your enemy.

When the truth comes along to remind you of the fact that you can just drop the ego glasses and return to full awareness, you will resist it. You have chosen to take on the ego's perceptive mechanism, and believe that what it perceives is true reality.

You will see darkness in the truth which is not there, because the ego glasses show you a dark version of the world. And you will reject it and want to get away from it, because it will look frightening.

You will see it as saying that the ego self does not really exist, and you - aligned with the ego - will interpret this to mean that YOU do not exist. And you will defend against that by producing sickness.

Being in the ego you will defend the ego because you think that the ego is your self. You will side with it, protect it, reinforce it, and not want to let it go. You think that doing so is letting your self go. You are not really interested in protecting the ego, only in protecting your SELF, but you think that you and it are the same.

If you are believing you are the ego self, you will believe you're a sinful guilty self. That this is true of you. It's not, but while you are identified with the ego you'll agree with it.

ALL you need to do is to learn what is the difference between your REAL identity and the identity you have when you're wearing the ego filter. This is the difference between God's truth and the ego's truth.

The ego isn't anything. If you were to realize you are not it, and accept what you really are, taking off those sunglasses, you would easily and instantly see yourself correctly and know it to be true. The ego would have no defense against this.

It has no will of its own, no power of its own, no purpose of its own and no life of its own. It is borrowing yours for as long as you choose to keep using it. As soon as you drop it, it is a lifeless machine that is not even functioning. It definitely is not experiencing anything, because the ability to experience is coming from your immortal spirit.

This is why you need to learn to withdraw belief that everything about the ego is TRUTH, or REAL, because while you believe that, you will see your sense of Self as being tied to it. You'll believe that its perception is your perception. You'll see how it sees, and your identity will be its identity. And that will produce tremendous resistance to awakening. Not because YOU are resistant, but because your USE of it makes you confused.

Also when you've tied yourself to the ego thought system, if you start to try to become spiritual WITHOUT letting go of the ego, and WITHOUT undoing the belief that what IT sees is reality, you will produce a "spiritual ego". You will spiritualize the illusions the ego sees, will give them special value, and will polarize your experience.

You'll then believe that you're becoming more yourself or more spiritual, but if you're not letting go of USING and identifying with the ego, all you're doing is changing the ego from one state to another, it is NOT really becoming spiritual, and you are just spinning your wheels.

The ego cannot EVER become spiritual because it doesn't even have a life of its own. It does not exist as anything other than an illusory device for changing perception. That's all it does, like a pair of sunglasses. It is lifeless. No will, no life, no power, nothing.

YOU are the one who gives those properties TO it and tries to MAKE IT be your reality. Your MAKING of the ego is what seems to animate it and transform yourself into it. It has no power over what you are and is completely meaningless without you.

So you need to get past the spiritualization of the dream and the ego, which will show up ANYWHERE in your experience where you're both holding onto some ego and trying to be spiritual at the same time.

The ONLY true way to become spiritual is through the letting go, surrendering, relinquishing, and stoping using of the ego entirely. That is true awakening FROM it, not with it. It cannot awaken because it is not anything. A pair of sunglasses cannot wake up. But the person wearing the sunglasses can take them off and see the light of truth.

So really it all boils down to this. Just discerning who you are. Are you the real truth as God created it, OR, do you really believe that you ARE this ego identity which has no real life and is an idea of death? You cannot change your ego self into your spiritual self, but you can surrender your USE of the ego.

Using the ego is merely an act of not being true, not being honest, not being real, and not being who you are. It is dishonesty. It is denial. It is unconsciousness.

Nothing about the ego can STOP you from waking up. The sunglasses aren't glued to your head. YOU are entirely in the driver's seat, you are the one who is putting the filter over your vision, and you are the one who is trying to PUT power and will and life and reality INTO the ego. You are the one who is trying to MAKE IT your Self.

So you're doing it to yourself. And once you take the ego off your identity and stop BELIEVING that you are IT, by stopping believing that you are everything that is ITS truth (sinful, guilty, fearful, separate etc), that's all that's needed to return to the awareness of your true identity as God's Son.

What has happened to you while you wore sunglasses? Nothing. You just looked cool for a while. You take them off, you're still you. Nothing happened.

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."

"There is no world. This is the central lesson the course would attempt to teach."

You may not realize what this implies. But consider this.

It means that this entire world, planet Earth, its surrounding environment, the sun, all the stars and galaxies, which you made, you are dreaming of. And that means none of them really exist.

It means the entire history of the human civilization is fiction. It means there is no planet. It means your body is an illusion. It means that everything you think exists in the world is absolutely and literally nothingness.

Essentially, there is not really a dream. And everything that seems to be in the dream is not really anything at all. There is NOTHING HAPPENING. There is NOTHING HERE.

This is the proper use of denial. The recognition that what is false is false, what is true is true. What is illusion is not real. And death itself is something you made up.

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

The trees are not really there. The cars are not really there. The houses are not really there. The planet is not really there. It's all a huge giant dream. Dreams do not carry over when you wake up from them, because they depend entirely on you being unconscious. Dreams require you to be asleep, ie in denial of reality, so that you can imagine something UNLIKE reality. Whatever you make up in the dream simply stops being MADE when you wake up from dreaming. It switches off.

This is why this is such a huge, immensely radical and totally amazing lesson to learn. It means you cannot be fully awake while maintaining a dream body. "The body is a dream". "The body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist." This is literally factually true. The body IS NOTHING. There is no real body. There is no world here.

That's how much of an illusion this world is. And this is why it's such a challenge to come to really believe and recognize this truth, as the culmination of the entire curriculum. It means you have to learn not to be deceived by ANYTHING you see or sense. It means you have to realize all your body senses were made to NOT KNOW reality. It means you have to realize everything you THINK exists, is happening, or has ever happened in this world, IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Nothing but an illusion. Nothing but a dream. A fantasy fairytale imagined universe in which NOTHING REALLY HAPPENS.

No-one is ever really sick. There is no real death. You made it up. You are an immortal spirit being who God has established as permanently real and perfect forever, who cannot change nor can you change what you are. You are temporarily in denial, wanting to believe that this isn't true, and in your denial you are trying to block awareness of the truth by dreaming of a UNIVERSE in which all manner of other stuff seems true and real. And none of it is.

Literally, ONLY the Kingdom of God is real. This world you made is NOT real, whatsoever. ONLY God's world is real. The world you made is total fiction, illusion, unreality, nothing. Literally NOTHING. Made of nothingness.

"The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came."

That means you're here sitting there reading this crap thinking this is all real and happening, that even this message is happening, and it is not really happening.

"The world you made is an illusion of a world, God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as himself."

Nothing in this world is eternal. Nothing. It is all temporary, fleeting, transitioning, changing, illusory. That's WHY it's an illusion. Miracles demonstrate that illusions ARE illusions because they CAN be changed. Anything that changes is not real. Nothing real can be threatened or changed. Anything that ever seemed to change or be affected or hurt was not real. Nothing real can be attacked ever. You are reality. You are the Son of God. You are immortal. You cannot be hurt. Pretending that you can is futile nonsense.

You cannot even die. You can confuse yourself with things that do. You can pretend to go through it. But it has NO EFFECT on who you really are. It does not even touch your spirit at all. It is totally immaterial, inconsequential. You made up death in your denial of the fact that you are immortal and have eternal life. You are PRETENDING you can suffer.

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

You cannot be hurt. But you keep trying to prove it. You cannot die, but you keep trying to prove it. You cannot be attacked in any way, but you keep believing you can and have. This is confusion. You are mistaken. All beliefs in space and time are a mistake. There is no world here. Only God's Kingdom exists. Only the HOLY TRINITY is real.

There is no world. Sums up the entire truth about this realm. All of it is NOTHING. It's not even really here. It's all fiction. Do not believe it. The world is a lie. This isn't being negative about the world. It's factual. The world is not negative or positive. It is NOTHING. The body is not negative or positive. IT IS NOTHING.

"You cannot endow the body with attributes of Christ. Holiness is positive while the body is merely natural." (paraphrase). And when you think of the body and the world being NEUTRAL, you should NOT be thinking of them as being as SOMETHING. THEY ARE NOTHING. Neutrality means it has NO ATTRIBUTES AT ALL. The neutral world is NOT a world. The neutral body is NOT a body. You can't use neutrality to KEEP what does not exist.

We're hanging out on a fake planet interacting with imaginary characters played by sleeping brothers, pretending that things are happening, that we have important stuff to do, that there are places to go and things to see and do, important experiences to be had, magnificent illusions to sense, worlds to explore and accomplishments to be made. THERE IS NOTHING HERE. This is why ultimately "I need do nothing" - an atonement-level thought, in recognition of the fact that there is literally NO WORLD and NO SEPARATION and NO ILLUSIONS and therefore nothing has happened and there's nothing to do about it.

It's kind of like, you live in Heaven, but you're temporarily on a vacation to a fake imaginary planet Earth, and you're hanging out there for a LONG time, and kind of forgot to go back home. But some day you will go back home and leave this world, and never come back.

In the physical world, the ego has cleverly set things up so that cause and effect seem separate.

It is even a "law" of physics that each action has an equal and opposite reaction. Or that if you put some energy in, some energy comes out. Or that if you cause some object to move, it will have to move.

This whole world is set up to show you a picture of causes having effects.

Object A moves and hits object B and therefore object B now gains some energy and moves.

And to your perception, this looks as though some parts of the world are causes and some parts of the world are effects.

And this is pretty malleable because in any given situation something which was causing an effect on something else can, itself, become the effect of something else.

So this world, in how it appears, as physical matter that moves through time and space, is MEANT to show you a picture of cause and effect being separate.

And that means, if cause is separate from effect, YOU can be caused by this world and affected by it.

It also seems to mean that you can do stuff to this world which does not affect you. This is how you get away with murder.

The illusion that something "made something happen" here, shows your mind a very convincing picture which seems to train it to believe e.g. the body is sick because it was attacked by the wrong food, or the body is sick because the weather changed, or the body is sick because someone just cut your leg off.

Well, that's a pretty darn convincing illusion right there, portraying and "proving" that your leg is powerless over a chainsaw and it is now laying on the floor in a bloody mess.

Except that..... ... you, as immortal spirit, and not a body, and not a part of this world, DO have the power to overcome even this convincing illusion.

You could, if you so chose, manifest an entirely new body. You could undo all of the effects of the dismembered leg.

You could make the illusion appear as though nothing happened.

You could even in fact become so invulnerable "in" your body that it is impossible even for your body to be moved or hurt or damaged in any way at all, even if someone lets off a nuclear bomb in your vicinity!

What God creates is permanent. Therefore it is invulnerable. And therefore it cannot be hurt. And therefore it is immortal. And that is what you are. So ....

All of this world with its ILLUSION that there are causes and powers and wills outside of you that can do something to you or make accidents happen or harm you in any way, IT IS NOT REAL and IT CAN BE OVERCOME.

And when you overcome it, this will be thought of as miraculous. Because it is, in a certain context. But miracles are natural. They are everyone's birthright. And when they're not happening something has gone wrong.

You cannot be hurt by a dream that isn't really there.

If you are immortal, nothing can victimize you.

In order to see yourself as victimized, you have to pretend to be mortal.

To be mortal, you have to attack your own immortality.

Having attacked your immortality you will perceive yourself as vulnerable and weak.

In weakness you will believe that you are vulnerable to attack and have been attacked.

And having been attacked, and having denied that you set this up yourself, you will accuse someone else of doing it.

Then you will be lost in projection believing you are being affected by the world and the people in it.

But the secret of salvation simply reminds you that your own attack thoughts - death thoughts - are attacking your own invulnerability.

And therefore what you have done to position yourself as mortal, as a victim, is entirely your own doing from the inside out, and what appears to be done from the outside in is absolutely nothing.

You have simply tried to pretend you can die, and then you've blamed it on the world. You're even willing to make the body suffer and die if it means accusing everyone else of sin.

This is all a disguise and a game of death that you play to pretend you can be a weak helpless victim.

In truth you cannot be weak or helpless or a victim. You are immortal and permanent and unchangeable and have the power of God in you.

You can never be a victim unless you victimize yourself. And what God created can never be hurt.

"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."

"Turning the other cheek does NOT mean that you should submit to violence without protest. It means that you cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness. Show him that he CANNOT hurt you, and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself."

"Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son."

"They were not created to enable you to HURT yourselves through them. They were created to CREATE with you."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"His holiness gives life to you, who CANNOT die because his sinlessness is known to God, and can no more be sacrificed by you than can the light in you be blotted out because he sees it not."

"Now do we live, for now we cannot die."

"Yet you CANNOT crucify God's Son, for the Will of God cannot die. His Son HAS BEEN redeemed from his own crucifixion, and you cannot assign to death whom God has given eternal life."

"What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF. Yet God's Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM."

"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. "

God created you perfect. It's a done deal. You're already complete. You cannot add to yourself or take away. You can't be changed. You are permanently as God created you. He didn't leave anything out or fail to share anything or leave you less than completed. You can't be perfected or improved upon. You're already absolutely divine.

So the one lie is, anything that tells you otherwise. Anything of the ego that suggests, you need to do this or that, go here or there, learn this or that, attain this or that, become this or that. It's much more a case of, sinking into and accepting, owning up to, admitting to, become re-awakened to, what is ALREADY THERE underneath all this bullshit that we've dumped on top to PRETEND we are not immortal.

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

But in truth you are unhurtable, invulnerable, immortal. So all this time spent trying to prove otherwise, is futile. It doesn't change anything, because it's literally impossible to change your soul. All we can do is deny it and pretend it's not divine.

So we have this divine self in us, as us. It's all we can really be. And so what is all this other stuff? All the seeking, the searching, the figuring out, the unraveling, all this work and effort, all the effort of striving to belief, trying to convince ourselves, isn't absolutely all of it completely pointless? The truth about what we are can only be accepted or denied, not changed.

It seems then ultimately the entire thing about awakening to our divine holy self is simply that we stop doing everything ELSE that is taking us AWAY from it. If we would stop weighing ourselves down we'd float right up to the surface. If we'd stop attacking ourselves we'd be perfect already. If we'd stop resisting the truth we'd just melt into being ourselves. If we'd get rid of all this ego stuff, which is the attempt to be something we're not, we'd simply return to being what we really are already.

It seems counter intuitive because it's more like retracing your steps and going backwards, going within, returning to, rather than building something new. The whole effort to "become" is an ego effort to DEFINE what you are. Or moreso to redefine it. Which is always a lie because you can't be changed.

So every opinion about ourselves can't be true, unless it aligns with our nature as God created us. "I am still as God created me" states this perfectly. Simply, nothing has happened to you, nothing has changed you, and this whole dream has been an excursion into nothing. We simply need to accept that WE ALREADY ARE perfect in God and stop trying to prove otherwise.

This is why the Atonement is simply a matter of ACCEPTING what is already true about you, and nothing else.

""I am as God created me."

This single thought, held firmly in the mind, would save the world. From time to time we will repeat it, as we reach another stage in learning. It will mean far more to you as you advance. These words are sacred, for they are the words God gave in answer to the world you made. By them it disappears, and all things seen within its misty clouds and vaporous illusions vanish as these words are spoken. For they come from God.

Here is the Word by which the Son became His Father's happiness, His Love, and His completion. Here creation is proclaimed, and honored as it is. There is no dream these words will not dispel; no thought of sin and no illusion that the dream contains that will not fade away before their might. They are the trumpet of awakening that sounds around the world. The dead awake in answer to its call. And those who live and hear this sound will never look on death.

Holy indeed is he who makes these words his own; arising with them in his mind, recalling them throughout the day, at night bringing them with him as he goes to sleep. His dreams are happy and his rest secure; his safety certain and his body healed, because he sleeps and wakens with the truth before him always. He will save the world because he gives the world what he receives each time he practices the words of truth."

"You, then, have two conflicting evaluations of yourself in your minds, and they CANNOT BOTH BE TRUE. You do not yet realize how COMPLETELY different these evaluations are, because you do not understand how lofty the Holy Spirit's perception of you really is."

It is vital to have a firm grip of what the truth is, in order to be able to make a clear comparison with what is false. The light of heaven, the immortal soul, the truth of the laws of God, the nature of reality, must be very clearly discerned. In light of this truth, all things which are not of God become very obvious. But you have to see IN AND FROM the light of truth in order to tell what everything is.

You cannot have clarity or see clearly without being able to clearly discern what things are. You cannot clearly discern whether you are a body or not unless you can get a clear view of who and what you really are. In light of that, with everything seen in its proper place, you can then clearly see that the body is totally opposite to what you are. Now it is recognized as not the same, and clearly not your self.

In order to find recognition, which is enlightenment, you must use contrast. It needs to become extremely clear to you the difference between reality and unreality, truth and illusions, spirit and form, immortality and mortality, innocence and guilt, health and suffering, eternal life and death. You can't find clarity if you cannot recognize what things are and why they are not the same.

In the ego states of confusion, there is a great loss of clarity and a total lack of recognition. All of its reasoning leads to total confusion about everything, in which it cannot tell what is true or false, it does not know whether something is real or not, it does not recognize who or what you really are, or are not, and it is incapable of telling anything apart. It is so out of touch with what is actually real, distinct from what is not, that it has lost touch with reality and is insane.

You need an anchor. You need something very very dependable and firm and unchanging. You need a fixed perspective. You need a light which does not waver and does not lie. You need even a conceptual or theoretical foundation of what the truth is like, what is of God and what isn't, what reality's nature is, what is true of you, and who you really are. Even if at least in theory you can build up a picture of the qualities and aspects of what is true of you, you can hold onto that and then use it to compare.

Comparison then becomes a very valuable tool when used AGAINST the ego. The ego would use it make all things part of the same soup, within which it uses comparison to produce inequality and specialness, to upset the balance and to produce war. This is a horizontal use of comparison. When you use comparison vertically to compare between reality and illusions, or heaven and earth, or spirit and bodies, or eternal immortality vs sickness and death, it becomes fare more constructive.

I found a great deal of clarification by simply focusing on heaven and investigating the qualities of reality. Building in my mind a description of God and or creation, or the holographic principles of a shared existence, looking at cause-effect relationships in truth and the nature of an immortal life. This really helped me to greatly "compare" this clear picture of the light, with the darkness, in order to be able to tell which is which. And this is what we have to do. This is what the "sorting out" is all about.

For me lately the fleshing out of "what is true" has for me been converging ever more upon "who am I". Recognizing that I need to learn to know myself, to acknowledge my original self as God created me, to recognize my immortality and permanence, my invulnerability and unchangeability. A sense of self which is rock-solid fixed and unalterable, an IDENTITY that I can not only latch onto but identify WITH, and recognize it as the truth about me.

This also provides for me now a basis for recognizing the truth about others. By accessing the christ in me and opening to the holy spirit, learning of my immortal nature behind everything, which is non-physical, I can also think similarly of my brothers. I can now compare and contrast and see that, in comparison to who people are in the light of God, the body and its form cannot be who they are. Sickness cannot be true of their immortal nature. Death cannot be happening to them.

This also reveals that all physical form is a lie, the whole world is nothing but an illusory appearance, something appearing to be something it's not. Something appearing to show something as if it's true, which cannot be true. And the reason I can discern it cannot be true is because I have an increasingly clear grasp of what the truth MUST BE. By very strongly and intensely focusing on God's truth about me and others, I can REJECT and properly deny the illusory lies of apparent matter when I am presented with it. I NEED the clear handle on the light in order to recognize the darkness for what it is.

As the course says, the Holy Spirit also uses contrasts, and that you need contrast in order to correctly discern anything. You need to be able to COMPARE God's truth to the world's truth and recognize just how OPPOSITE they are, how they are totally unlike, and how they are INCOMPATIBLE. And it is in the light of bringing these two opposites into awareness that your mind becomes able to see. ... that it must reject one of them, THEY CANNOT BOTH BE TRUE. When placed side by side and compared and are seen to be opposites, you CANNOT confuse them OR accept both of them. Only one can be true.

It is the totally clear CATEGORIZATION of all things true into the "true" box, and all things false into the "false" or unreal box, that gives you the recognition of enlightenment. The GOAL here then is to sort out what is true and what is false, what is of God and what is not, what is God's law and what isn't, what is real and what is unreal, what is immortal and what is mortal. Everything that gets in the way of this or makes it seem like the two are unclear and not different, is CONFUSION. And to become SANE again is nothing more or less than undoing your confusion about which is which.

We are to completely separate out the true from the false, so that ONLY THE TRUTH IS TRUE, and NOTHING ELSE IS TRUE. And that is a matter of comparing and contrasting until it becomes COMPLETELY black and white. Clearly discerning what is and what is not, is what this ENTIRE course is about. Increasing the CONTRAST between the two so that you can make a CLEAR choice and RECOGNIZE that reality is real, and unreality is not. Only in that intensely black-and-white contrast can you be CERTAIN, and therefore free from fear.

"You have need of contrast only here. Contrast and differences are necessary teaching aids, for by them you learn what to avoid, and what to seek."

"You can only GO BEYOND it, and look back from a point where SANITY exists, and SEE THE CONTRAST. Only BY this contrast, can insanity be judged as insane."

"They ARE together, and when they are SEEN together, ALL attempts to KEEP both truth AND illusion in the mind, where both MUST be, are recognized as DEDICATION TO ILLUSION. And GIVEN UP when BROUGHT to truth, and seen as totally UNRECONCILABLE with truth, in ANY aspect, or in any WAY."

"The Holy Spirit points quietly to the contrast, knowing that you will finally let Him judge the difference FOR you, allowing Him to demonstrate which MUST be true."

"For you will NEED no contrast to help you realize that THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT, and ONLY this."

"ou who are steadfastly devoted to misery, MUST first recognize that you ARE miserable and NOT happy. The Holy Spirit cannot teach WITHOUT this contrast, for you believe that misery IS happiness."

"The contrast between what is true, and what is not, is PERFECTLY apparent, yet you do NOT see it."

"And changing concepts IS salvation's task. For it must deal in contrasts, not in truth, which has no opposite and cannot change."

"In contrast, the Soul reacts in the same way to everything it knows is true, and does not respond at all to anything else."

"Nothing can show the contrast better than the experience of both a holy and an unholy relationship."

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

"If sin is real then happiness must be illusion, for they cannot both be true."

"Now need you but to learn that BOTH of you are innocent OR guilty. The one thing that is impossible is that you be UNLIKE each other; that they BOTH be true."

"What you can decide BETWEEN is fixed, because there are no alternatives, EXCEPT truth and illusion. And there is no overlap between them, because they are opposites which CANNOT be reconciled, and CANNOT both be true. You are guilty OR guiltless, bound OR free, happy OR unhappy."

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal. This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world."

"Let us try today to realize that only the truth is true."

"He made a clean distinction, still obscure to us, between the false and true."

"The real world can ACTUALLY BE PERCEIVED. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing ELSE. For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM."

"There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time."

"They are all true OR all false. It is absolutely essential that you understand completely that behavior is erratic until a firm commitment to one or the other is made."

"That is why I always choose between truth and illusion; between what is there and what is not. The light has come. I can but choose the light, for it has no alternative. It has replaced the darkness, and the dark is gone."

"What COULD you choose between, but life or death, waking or sleeping, war or peace, your dream or your reality?"

"Now MUST you choose between yourself and this ILLUSION of yourself. NOT both, but ONE."

"The real and the unreal are all there is to choose between, and nothing more than these."

"And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven."

"This is the world of opposites. And you must choose between them every instant while this world retains reality for you."

"You will have to choose between TOTAL freedom and TOTAL bondage, for there are no alternatives but these."

"You ALWAYS choose between YOUR weakness and the strength of Christ in you."

"Remember that you ALWAYS choose between truth and illusion, between the REAL Atonement that would heal, and the ego's "atonement," that would destroy."

"Consider what temptation is, and see the real alternatives you choose between. There ARE but two. Be not deceived by what appears as many choices. There is hell or Heaven. And of these you choose but ONE."

"Some see it suddenly on point of death, and rise to teach it. 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."

When God created you, He created you perfect. You were created whole, complete, absolutely divine and lacking nothing. He created you incapable of sin, capable only of extending love and joy.

It is IMPOSSIBLE for you to change what you are, what God created, your identity, your nature, or anything about you.

It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for you to BE anything other than the perfect divine soul that God intended for you to be.

God does not create you at one 'moment in time'. There is no time. God is ETERNALLY EXPRESSING YOU. You are constantly and permanently being radiated by God, and whatever God expresses is what you are, and you HAVE NO SAY in changing that.

You are the EFFECT OF GOD, The Son of God, and His Will has absolute power over your creation, your existence, and your nature. What you are is a reflection of His own perfection, and you CANNOT CHANGE IT. And you HAVE NOT changed it.

You ARE still as God created you. Your soul is STILL perfect. It has not changed, it has not sinned, it has not been damaged, it has not been lost, it is not unconscious, it is not asleep or deluded, it has no ego, and nothing can happen to it.

Regardless of what it looks like to you, right now, in time, your soul - your REAL SELF - ALREADY EXISTS IN PERFECTION. You have ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED being "perfectly spiritual". You have ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED being divine, holy, perfect. You are already beyond the atonement. You are ALREADY IN HEAVEN WITH GOD. Right now.

So if there is anything else going on in your mind, any other beliefs to the contrary, any suggestions that you are lacking or not there yet, any delusion that something has gone wrong or something is wrong with you, or that you need to "do something" to become better or more spiritual or more pure and holy, or that you are not forgiven yet, or you didn't atone yet.... ALL of that is ego bullshit lies.

ACCEPTING the atonement means accepting this fact. It means, accepting that NOTHING HAS HAPPENED, nothing changed, you did not go anywhere, you did not die or suffer, you did not sin or become guilty, you did not stop being with God, you are literally incapable of willing against God or yourself, and you are STILL exactly as God created you. You WILL ALWAYS BE as God created you, and there is literally NOTHING you can ever do to change that.

Even if it seems this is not true of you, and you are this ego identity who lacks and suffers and has a long way to go and all this crap... it's not true. The spiritual self that you are trying to become, IS ALREADY IN YOU. Your higher self, your holy self, your spirit, your soul, you real identity, your christ self, you as a son of God, your heavenly identity, is already here, already fully complete, already perfectly awake and aware, already absolutely cured and healed, already in perfect divine happiness and health, and ALREADY EXISTS.

Even if it seems you will become this holy self "in the future" or "you are not there yet", THAT is a lie. Your holy self is ALREADY HOLY. So while you are contemplating what you need to do to get back to God, you never left. Right now, this second, you are DONE. You are DONE with the entire spiritual path. And seemingly, at the same time, you SEEM to be not done with it. Your holy self can talk to you right now. Your holy self is, in a sense, your future self. But it is really your real PAST self, because it existed BEFORE TIME and did not stop existing.

I think this is really important to recognize because this can be very powerful in putting everything into its proper perspective. I've talked before about how you need to get some idea of TRUTH into your awareness in order to have a reference point, to compare things to, and to put things into their proper perspective. Remembering that you are ALREADY AS GOD CREATED YOU PERFECT, reflect on the nature of your soul, and acknowledge your EXISTING PERFECTION, this can really cut through the ego bullshit like nobody's business.

So like, there I am, feeling sorry for myself, feeling guilty, thinking I sinned, but wait... I am still as God created me, I am still perfectly innocent and with God, so how can it be true that I have done anything at all? How can it be true that I sinned or am guilty? What IS this guilt and sin but simply FALSE? It is a lie. I am not sinful or guilty, and I do not need to "become" innocent again because I already am. I already am perfectly holy, nothing has happened, and this other stuff must be ego illusions.

See the entire ego thought system, all of the separation from God, and everything to do with sin and death, is A LIE, and it's all an attempt to COVER UP WHAT IS ALREADY TRUE. And what is already true has already been established by God, is permanent, YOU cannot create or invent it or make it happen by yourself, all you can do is ACCEPT IT. And that means SURRENDERING every effort you have ever made to deny it, to try to make something else true, or to try to make it untrue.

When you stare the truth in the face like this, and you acknowledge, yes, I need do nothing because I AM STILL as God created me, it forces you to have to ADMIT, that everything else you've been believing is FALSE, it's a lie, you've basically just being trying to deny and not accept or allow this to be true, to try to claim that something else is true, but it's not. It's almost brutal in how the acknowledgement of this truth shows you that you LITERALLY CANNOT CHANGE THE TRUTH, you HAVE NOT CHANGED THE TRUTH, and YOU NEVER WILL.

There is absolutely ZERO ROOM for you to have any power to do that. And the entire separation from God is ALL about your belief that it is POSSIBLE to do that. That you could somehow bring about a sin, or make guilt real, or produce a real sickness, or create death, or will against God, or defile Heaven, or make God convinced that you are not worthy, or make yourself unworthy, or whatever else. It is ALL A LIE. You do not have that power at all. Not even a tiny bit. Either you accept God's truth and ADMIT you are ABSOLUTELY INCAPABLE of changing it, or you will be in denial.

The problem is not whether you are spiritual enough or not. The problem is that you ARE spiritual enough and you keep pretending not to be.

Remember this is not a course in love because the meaning of love cannot be taught. It's a course in UNDOING THE BLOCKS TO THE AWARENESS OF LOVE'S PRESENCE, because the love is ALREADY THERE and you are simply not aware that it is already there. You have denied that it's there. Blocks to love make it seem like WHAT IS TRUE, is not true, or that it has gone away, or love is lost, or you have stopped being as God created you. That's their purpose. To deny the truth. They do not CHANGE the truth, they merely cover it up to PRETEND that it is not true already. Death is a form of denial, an attempt to claim that you do not have eternal life ALREADY. YOU DO. YOU ARE ALREADY IMMORTAL. You can't NOT be immortal!

So as Jesus says, the course is not about establishing love, or making you more spiritual, or necessarily about waking up or having to do anything at all. It is about a RECOGNITION of the ENLIGHTENED SELF that YOU ALREADY ARE, RIGHT NOW, which is merely hiding behind walls and clouds of FAKE SHIT, which you tried to use to cover up the EXISTING TRUTH, which God has already PERMANENTLY established. The course is ONLY about undoing your beliefs that you aren't ALREADY IMMORTAL, or ALREADY INNOCENT, or ALREADY WITH GOD, or ALREADY A PERFECTLY DIVINE SOUL.

So let's say this. Right now, accept that you are still as God created you, a perfect soul. You are in heaven NOW. You are already DONE with any supposed "ego goal" of trying to GET THERE. You are already FINISHED with making yourself innocent. You are already COMPLETE in the establishing of your perfection in the eyes of God. God has not changed his mind about you. He still sees you as perfect because HE IS CONSTANTLY EXTENDING YOU as perfect. You did not create yourself, and therefore you have NO SAY in changing what God has created. You have NO ABILITY WHATSOEVER to overthrow God's will by undoing OR CHANGING his creation in any way, and YOU HAVE NOT. You're done already. Already perfect. Already complete. Already whole. Already happy. Already loved. Already innocent. Already safe. Already divine.

Everything else is what needs to be let go. All the beliefs about this not being true. All the attempts to make out that you are mortal or can suffer or be sick or die. It's bullshit. You who ARE IMMORTAL ALREADY cannot ever die or even suffer a tiny bit. You are permanent. All of this pretending that things have gone wrong, it has to go. All of this pretending that you can be dead, it has to go. All of this disbelief or rather, UNWILLINGNESS to accept, allow, welcome or acknowledge, THE TRUTH, which already is perfectly established, has to go. All of this desire to NOT ACCEPT the atonement - the truth - has to go. All reluctance, unwillingness, denial, rejection, choosing away from, unconsciousness, hiding, secret sins and hates, it all has to go. Because it is never true and cannot ever exist.

And in fact, this entire world, does not exist. It has not been created. It has not happened. If it's not part of heaven, it does not exist, is not real, and has not been created. The entire history of human civilization is a bullshit lie. This world holds NOTHING that you want. Your heart is with God, NOW. This world that we "made" was NOT really made, it is not even here, it does not exist at all, and NOTHING IS HAPPENING. Nor has anything happened. No-one has ever died, there has never been a real war, all sickness is bullshit, death is imaginary, YOU CAN'T STOP BEING IMMORTAL.

So we need to learn, basically, since enlightenment is a recognition and not a change, to recognize and acknowledge what ALREADY IS TRUE, what God has ALREADY ESTABLISHED, and give thanks for the fact that WE ARE ALREADY SAVED and are ALREADY IN HEAVEN, NOW. All the other ego pursuits, the spiritual path, processes, techniques... unless they UNDO and REMOVE the fake lies that the truth is not already true, it is ego. Unless it moves you INWARD back closer to WHAT YOU ALREADY ARE, it is ego. Unless it makes you aware that you are ALREADY PERFECT and therefore do not need to SEEK, it is ego. Unless it produces GRATITUDE for what God has already given, it is ego.

You are already done making yourself perfect. God accomplished that already. It's not your job. It's not what the course is for at all. The only purpose of the course is to help you to let go of what is FALSE, and merely ACKNOWLEDGE what is ALREADY TRUE. You're sitting in heaven right now, happy as heck, totally overjoyed and celebrating that nothing can ever go wrong, and completely in love with God. Everything else... bullshit.

Some quotes:

"God and the Souls He created are completely dependent on each other. The creation of the Soul has already been perfectly accomplished... He created them perfectly. He gave them His peace so they could not be shaken and would be unable to be deceived."

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in him. The next point, too, has already been made, but bears repetition here. The Soul, because of its own likeness to its Creator, is creative. No Child of God is capable of losing this ability, because it is inherent in what he IS."

"Spirit is in a state of grace forever. Your reality is only spirit. Therefore you are in a state of grace forever."

"Be vigilant only for God and His Kingdom. As long as belief in God and His Kingdom is assailed by any doubts in your minds, His perfect accomplishment is not apparent to you. This is why you must be vigilant on God's behalf.The ego speaks against His creation and therefore does engender doubt."

"Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God."

"The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance."

CLAIM YOUR INHERITANCE! IT IS ALREADY YOURS!

There is no death, there is only immortal eternal life which lives forever through perfect unlimited extension. It is impossible to ever die or to cause death. Only life exists, and death is nothing.

All forms of sickness, unhappiness and suffering are forms of death. They are a denial of eternal life. They are attempts to assert that you or another can be changed through attack (sin), and made to be mortal.

We are all immortal permanent creations and this is our only reality. You have never changed nor have you ever been changed, nor have you ever changed another. We remain exactly as God created us as we will always remain forever.

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

"There is no death, and we renounce it now in every form, for their salvation and our own as well. God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death and see the life beyond."

"His Word has promised peace. It has also promised that there is no death; that resurrection must occur, and that rebirth is man's inheritance."

"God says there is no death; your judgment sees but death as the inevitable end of life."

"There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. It does not have degrees. It is the one condition in which all that God created share. Like all His Thoughts, it has no opposite. There is no death because what God created shares His Life. There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist. There is no death because the Father and the Son are One."

"There is no death, because the living share the Function their Creator gave to them. Life's function CANNOT be to die. It must be life's EXTENSION, that it be as One forever and forever, WITHOUT end."

"All living hearts are tranquil, with a stir of deep anticipation, for the time of everlasting things is now at hand. There is no death. The Son of God is free. And in His freedom is the end of fear."

"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."

"When hatred rests upon a thing, it calls for death as surely as God's Voice proclaims there is no death."

"Salvation seeks to prove there IS no death, and ONLY life exists."

"There IS no death, but there IS a belief in death."

"There is no death. This sword does not exist."

"In the dreams HE brings, there IS no murder, and there IS no death."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. The ancient Calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto his own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear. Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

"Death is a human affirmation of a belief in hate. That is why the Bible says "There is no death," and that is why I demonstrated that death does not exist."

"The world attempts a thousand compromises, and will attempt a thousand more. Not one can be acceptable to God's teachers, because not one could be acceptable to God. He did not make death because He did not make fear. Both are equally meaningless to Him."

Here's your secret. It's a bigger secret than that you tried to kill God's son. And it's a bigger secret than that you attacked God and still want to be separate.

The biggest secret of all, is that you are actually already Christ.

Christ is your true identity. It's who you are.

Now, let's talk about the secret. See, you are trying to disguise who you are. You're trying not to admit who you are. You're trying to deny it and cover it up and pretend you are someone else. Just as you are trying to deny that God loves you, you're denying that you ARE as God created you.

So, here's a useful forgiveness practice. How about we call this... OWNING UP TO WHO YOU ARE. This contains elements of 'taking full responsibility', but also essentially ties it all together in one simple package.

How about you admit to your real identity, and how about you admit to what the truth is about you? How about you come clean and own up to being Christ and to being completely innocent? How about you drop all the pretense that you are someone or something else, or that you have need for all of your pain and misery and problems... which are ALL just cover-ups. Right?

Every single problem in your life, every upset, every unworthiness, every bad experience, every false identity, and every attack you've ever been through, is all part of you denying who you really are. Let's be honest now. Let's own up to who we really are.

I am willing to admit I am Christ.

I am willing to admit that I am not really [your ego name] and in fact I'm God's holy son. Actually it's true that I'm innocent and holy and forgiven completely and have never done anything wrong.

I admit that I am God's child and cannot sin. I have my hands in the air and I CONFESS, I am absolutely immortal spirit and I have never been able to die and I never will die. And I also admit that I am not the little ego self that I keep trying to convince everyone of, including myself, that I am. I am not this separate self I am One.

I admit that I made up this entire illusion to cover up my identity and that I've been in disguise and undercover this whole time, trying to make out that I am some kind of unworthy unlovable nothing, so that nobody will notice what my real identity is. I admit that I have always known who I really am and I've always been Christ.

You're right, I've been pretending this whole time that I'm not with God and that I don't belong with God. It's not true. I've been bluffing this entire time, all these lifetimes, pretending not to be Christ. I've portrayed myself as all kinds of pretend bodies and people and identities to perpetrate a huge conspiracy that I'm someone else and that God' Son no longer exists.

I've been 'undercover boss' this whole time, hiding in the shadows and lurking and not owning up to my power and not claiming my true identity. I admit it, I'm actually God's creation and God has created me permanent and real and I am not any of the illusions that I've been saying I am.

My cover is blown and you caught me out, I'm really ultimately guiltless and sinless and I haven't even separated from God. My whole life story is just a big distraction to get everyone to believe that something happened to me and that I didn't want anything to do with it. I orchestrated the whole thing. I made it all up myself and fooled you all, and even tried to fool myself. I've been in disguise, concealed behind layers of denial and pretend forgetfulness.

Yup. I'm Christ. I confess. I own up to it. It's who and what I am. I am immortal spirit and I always was and nothing has happened to change anything about me. Of course God loves me, He has this whole time, I was just lying when I said He didn't. The lid is off, the cat is out of the bag.

Like, hellllooooooooooo. I'm Christ, ok. ... you got me.

"If I defend myself I am attacked."

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

"Defense do what they would defend."

"In my defenselessness lies my safety."

It's interesting but, when we try to defend ourselves, under the belief that we are making ourselves more protected, more safe, more secure, we ACTUALLY are undermining ourselves and attacking ourselves. So now self attack masquerades as self defense.

The ego splits off the illusion of attack and defense because it splits cause and effect. It tries to make out that attacks are not defenses, and defense are not attacks. That you can cause in order to not be caused. Or you can defend in order to not be caused. But both attack and defend are forms of the same ego plot to weaken you.

A defense automatically presumes that you need defending, because there is something weakened, vulnerable and wrong with you. That you are frail and fragile and attackable. Without this belief in being attackable, you cannot have defenses, and there would be no point defending something that isn't attackable in the first place.

Therefore the defenses undermine your integrity and require you to believe that you need them, due to being attacked already, and therefore your defenses attack you. It's the same as with e.g. virus protection software. It is designed to save you, but the belief in viruses causes the eruption of enemies.

And so defenses are attempts at saving yourself from attack, but in fact are themselves attacks. So they cannot work. And all they do is paint an illusion that you are safer without in any way undoing the belief that you are weak or vulnerable. You then think you are safer because of the illusion of protection, but you have not really increased your belief in invulnerability whatsoever.

To be truly defenseless requires you to be convinced that you cannot be attacked, which requires you to recognize that you are immortal.

"You are immortal and you cannot die."

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

When you defend yourself, you make yourself sick. Defenses are self-attack. You think you need to be defended and this attacks the body, making it sick. Sickness is a defense against the truth, or in other words, sickness is a self attack masquerading as being attacked by something else in an attempt to defend yourself. Attempting to defend yourself weakens you and makes you sick.

If you defend yourself, you undermine your immortality.

"The body is hardly worth the least defense."

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

"The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible.

Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. 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. Give instant remedy, should this occur, ****by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer.**** Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself:

"I have forgotten what I really am, For I mistook my body for myself. Sickness is a defence against the truth, But I am not a body. And my mind Cannot attack. So I can not be sick.""

---

"The "self" that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and ***hardly worth the least defense***, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?

Defend the body and you have attacked your mind. For you have seen in it the faults, the weaknesses, the limits and the lacks from which you think the body must be saved. You will not see the mind as separate from bodily conditions. And you will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from the conception of the mind as limited and fragile, and apart from other minds and separate from its Source."

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

Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not."

In the separation from God, we attempted to make a world completely opposite to God, in every way possible. Where God expressed eternal life, we wanted death. Whether God was permanent, we wanted everything to change. Where God was immortal, we wanted everything to be attackable. Where God was innocent, we wanted everything to be sinful.

We projected out a world, made from the idea of sin and death. "Without the idea of death there is no world." This isn't merely a substitute for heaven, it is heaven's OPPOSITE. Everything about it is opposite. A world more like hell than heaven, where the immortal come to die and the existing come to cease existing.

"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."

Having made a world opposite to heaven, which is "the hell you made", planet Earth, we then populated it with bodies. The body has a very specific design to serve the purpose of trying to make this unreal world seem real. The body was made to deceive us, not just a little bit, but completely. It reports everything that's false (the whole world) as if it is true.

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

It takes illusions and presents them as if they are totally real. It sees things happening which are absolutely impossible in reality, and looks upon them as if they are really happening. It witnesses sins and attacks and wars and murders as if they are absolutely proven, with evidence to back it up as the bodies lay on the ground to show you their truth. And everything the body senses is reported as though absolute undeniable fact.

The body doesn't especially care whether to judge or not, it just judges all the time. It is locked into false perception. "These eyes made not to see will never see." The way the body sees the world, through physical and biological means, based on the "rejection of light" as photons bounce off illusory objects, is entirely designed to give credit to illusions. It is an illusion-detector, which having sensed illusions presents them to the mind as though they are totally real. And it can see nothing else.

"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see BEYOND what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and NOT see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see ONLY illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside FORM of nothing. To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

The body is actually incapable of seeing actual reality, at all. "The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen." If you think about that for a moment, the body is 180-degrees opposite to the truth, everything it reports is a lie, everything it sees or senses is 100% locked into being blinded by form, and it is absolutely incapable of being "awake" to any kind of real truth. It has its head shoved into a darkened box, permanently.

So then we place ourselves in these bodies and we peer out at a seeming world and the body shows us what's happening. It shows us things which cannot happen, states which are impossible, events which must be nowhere, and people seeming to walk around as if they live there. And not one single shred of this is true or real, or even really exists.

So when we use the body, when we listen to the body's input, when we take its sensory messages and decide what they mean, it is very very easy to be deceived. Not even just a little deceived, but 100% completely deceived. What the body shows you is absolutely TOTALLY OPPOSITE to what is true and real. The body cannot discern, and it never forgives. It is blind, and all it can see is an unreal world, masquerading as though reality.

It's the most bizarre thing, and this is why it's such a challenge for us to wake up. We actually need to find a way to recognize in the mind, that everything the body reports is false. We have to find a way to categorize every sensory input as not true, not real, and not happening. The body CANNOT tell the truth.

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal.

"This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. And of these two but one is real."

This is SO strange to us. Basically we are immortal beings in heaven who temporarily are placing a part of our minds inside these body devices. The devices show a COMPLETELY BACKWARDS view. They turn reality upside down, they swap all opposites, they make everything that's impossible seem possible, and everything truly possible seem impossible. They hide all real meaning, shut down vision, make it impossible to see reality at all, and lock your entire focus onto the form of objects. As if the form that something takes IS its meaning. They are prisons for the mind, and their every perception is back to front.

Through the body's eyes, every single thing you see is fixated on its form, it shape, its physical behavior. As if you have COMPLETELY failed to forgive, have entered into the most extreme false perception, have had your mind strapped into virtual-reality goggles, and are forced to look at scenes of a world that doesn't even exist. It's like having your head totally buried in the sand. An extreme denial of reality. As if you judged the whole world from a perspective of separation and sin, accused it of being entirely devoid of light, and rendered it a living hell.

That's what the body is equipped to do, and that is all it can do. Its limited senses cannot be expanded. Its eyesight is incapable of seeing reality, ever. It cannot detect real light. It cannot even really think, it has no mind, and can make no decisions. It's like a lifeless automaton, a zombie, with no real life of its own, inert and mute and blind and incapable. The body was made like this on purpose to LIMIT those who are immortal and unlimited.

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin, and it was MADE to limit the UNlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical; for it was made to limit YOU."

"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.""

There is no way to transform the body into a detector of reality. There is no way to change its senses or how they work. There is no way to make it wake up. There is no way to get it to be aware of God. It exists solely as a device for separation and will always be a device for separation. In and of itself, it is just a piece of machinery designed to make hell seem real and completely ignore heaven. It is a "hell validator", utterly biased and completely incapable of questioning anything it senses. "To sense is not to know" - to sense, is to reject all real knowledge.

The only hope that we really have, is the fact that we are not the body, and our mind is free to decide what meaning to give to everything the body tells us. It is the mind that decides whether to believe what it is being shown by the senses. It is the mind that decides whether to give it reality or not. It is up to the mind to be the one to either recognize the body's inputs as true, or as false.

The body cannot determine this for us, because it's going to keep feeding us absolute BULLSHIT forever. We have to decide mentally what to do with everything the body claims, because the body is permanently anchored to the battlefield.

"Jesus remains a Savior because he saw the false without accepting it as true. And Christ needed his form that He might appear to men and save them from their own illusions."

Think about that for a minute. Jesus, as mind, entirely dependent on God, able to see and experience God through spiritual vision, believing he was under no laws but God's, still temporarily utilized a "reality inverter" body, so that he could meet with other embodied people and help save them from their bodies.

And all this time, everything that Jesus saw THROUGH the body, registered to his mind as FALSE. Every single thing he looked at that was physical, his mind said "that is not true". Every sight, every body, every sickness, every situation or location, his mind recognized "that's an illusion, it's false". All sickness was recognized as unreal, all physical ailments as false, all damage as fake, he even recognized that dead bodies were not "really dead".

Can you imagine how profound that is to be seemingly in a world, not of it, and so OPPOSITE to its nature, feeling like it is not your home and you do not belong there at all, that you basically "disagree" with every single thing the body seems to report. Where not one thing you witness to is considered real or true. An entire world regarded as unreality and as false to your awareness. Where the body is used/repurposed ONLY so that you can interact with other embodied people, to use it against itself to undo itself and point away from bodies entirely.

That's where we are heading. Lifting our minds up out of believing what our bodies are telling us, out of hell, out of seeing the world as true or real, and into a state of totally dismissing the entire world as a false unreal world. That's actually forgiveness, because forgiveness recognizes illusions as illusions. The world IS an illusion of a world, and recognizing it for what it IS is to forgive it. And "a world forgiven cannot last" because "illusions recognized must disappear."

We are to simultaneously forgive the world, AND recognize it as FALSE, and NOT believe anything that seems to happen in it, and look upon it through forgiving eyes so that we are not tempted or deceived by any of it. To not believe ANYTHING the body reports, using its inputs ONLY to navigate the physical realm temporarily, knowing the entire place is an illusion. Firmly rooted in ANOTHER WORLD, in another reality, another kingdom, under God's laws only, completely denying the physical world and all it entails.

It is the body that seems to make forgiveness difficult. But only if the mind believes what the body is reporting. The mind does not have to go along with the body's reports. It's like, you have to learn how to receive reports from "the field", handed to you on pieces of paper, take the input and assess it, recognize that none of what it says is true, dismiss it, and then use it temporarily only for the purpose of getting others to leave the world with you.

The body is saying "there's a war out there". Your mind has to be saying "war is impossible, there is no war." So long as you use the body it will STILL report lies to the mind, and the mind is going to have to learn to be COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to how the body functions.

To use denial properly to deny the denial of the truth, which is the basis of miracles. To deny that the world is real or true. "The world you see must be denied, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision." And so we need to develop ANOTHER WAY TO SEE that CAN see reality and DOES recognize the truth and doesn't invert everything back to front.

"Beyond this world there is a world I want.

I choose to see that world instead of this,

For here is nothing that I really want."

"The denial of God is the ego's religion."

At the soul level, everyone is immortal and holy. There is no problem, no unhappiness, no sickness, no death.

At the mind level, which is part of the soul, and perhaps only part of the mind at that, there is denial present.

This denial is the rejection of reality, God, truth, sanity, Self, health and holiness.

So in effect you've got holy immortal beings whose minds are experiencing temporary insanity, who are pretending to be mortal and want to die.

They are actively denying God. Denying love. Denying health. Denying life. Denying who they are.

All sickness is simply denial of health. And this comes about purely as denial of the truth.

"Sickness is a defense (denial) against the truth"

It is our job as miracle workers, as healers, as not-denyers, to primarily NOT deny what the deniers are denying. Rather to accept God, health, happiness, life, immortality, etc.

We do this by in turn denying the denial of the truth. We deny that God IS denied. We deny that there is no health. We deny that sickness and death exist. We reject everything not of God.

"It denies the ability of anything which is not of God to effect you in any way. This is the PROPER use of denial."

"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you."

Once you have denied the denial of God, you have stepped out of the ego's religion. The ego's religion is one of death, being the denial of life. It worships the God of sickness.

"Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival. But consider what this means to YOU. UNLESS you are sick you cannot keep the gods you made, for only in sickness could you possibly WANT them. Blasphemy (everything ego), then, is SELF-destructive, not God destructive."

By denying the denial of God, and thus ASSERTING the support and acceptance of LIFE, you become miraculous. You refuse to accept that the denial of truth is true, or that the unreality of sickness is in fact real. You remember God's religion of life.

Those who deny themselves are blocking their own identity and their own health and happiness. This denial is the sole cause of all sickness. It is a repression of life, a resistance against immortality, a defense against truth, and a rejection of divine order.

Thus your task as a miracle worker now becomes to not buy into the denial, reject the denial, reverse the denial, and thus shine a light of the truth into the mind of those who are in denial, to undo their denial for them.

"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."

Denying health is a denial of light, placing you in darkness. Denying God denies innocence and asserts sin, producing guilt, which gives rise to sickness. Without the denial of God there can be no sin, no evil, no guilt, and no death.

The denial of death is the acceptance of eternal life. It is as simple as that. Resurrection and atonement are simply acts of accepting and extending God's Will. By being raised from the dead you become able to raise the dead. There is nothing more complicated to it.

Deny death by asserting that only immortality is real. No one can truly be sick. There is no real death. No one is really suffering. All of this can be undone because what is not life does not exist.

You might ask what does miraculousness mean, because God is also miraculous and all living beings in reality are miraculous in nature. There are references to "God's miracles" and "You are a miracle" for example, referring to creations in heaven. There is of course other context to do with miracles "in this world" or on this level, used for healing and such.

But miraculousness itself is a little trickier to describe. It has something to do with the golden rule relationship between multiple beings in a holographic system. It's the way by which for example God can create multiple sons and each of the sons contains the whole of God and is whole in and of itself and shares the same whole, yet is still a created thing absolutely created in its own right. That it can be one and many simultaneously - there is a transcendental nature to that which goes beyond non-duality and duality. It's what most people would describe as a paradoxical thing - seemingly impossible.

For example there is this line which mentions the miraculous power of the soul:

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

This is talking about a transcendental holographic ability of the soul in which even if it were to have literally everything for itself, there WOULD STILL be absolutely everything accessible to everyone else at the same time. Its possible for the soul to be the whole and have the whole and give and share the whole, and each soul can have the whole all at once simultaneously, without any sense of compromise or taking turns or lack or whatever else. The soul transcends these ideas because it's part of the holographic principle in the mind of God, in which the whole is in every part and every part is whole.

To boil that down, if you ask yourself about what makes it possible for God who is everything to create another whole being, whereby that being IS distinct and a whole being in its own right, yet STILL is 100% one with God and sharing everything with God, WITHOUT losing its distinctiveness. .... how those two things can be true at once - oneness and manyness. .... trying to put your finger on what that quality is, that possibility, that nature of God that allows this to happen, it is quite literally MIRACULOUS, and it defies absolutely all explanation.

Personally I believe it to be somehow related to the INFINITE nature of God which makes everything possible, such as in the will of God being able to do anything, even things which seem utterly impossible to us. The creation of many sons of God IS a miracle and is made possibly BY miraculousness - the miraculous nature of God. God is literally miraculous - and the miraculous-ness is driven by the holographic inter-relationships and symbiotic harmony of God and his creations, which are living thoughts, who are many and one at the same time.

Another aspect to this is that it's all about LIFE. Pure life. God is pure life. Life without the slightest notion of death or change or suffering of any kind. Pure immortality. God's eternal nature. Totally 100% life forever. The essence of life itself. THAT is GIVEN in the creation whereby God literally creates his children simply by WILLING IT, through an act of GIVING LIFE. He thus extends and creates literal beings that are ALIVE - souls, that are so immortal and alive that they live forever.

"ALL miracles mean Life, and God is the giver of Life."

On Earth, what we call miracles reflects that, something that kind of emanates out of the mind from a state of LOVE, in which there is unconditional giving - maximal service - where a person who is "more alive" or whose mind is more aware of being purely immortal, gives LIFE ITSELF to those who seem to be trying to play dead or who are in darkness or suffering. That giving of LIFE (could call it love, light, power etc), literally resurrects and heals and returns people to life, and can do the same to their bodies as well. Because there is NOTHING your holiness cannot do, literally.

Here from the CoA edition or Notes... "Remember a miracle is a spark of Life. It shines through the darkness and brings in the light. You must begin to forget and remember."

Don't think of miracles as a STATE therefore. There is a state of miracle mindedness and miracle readiness, but that is not MIRACLE DOING or MIRACLE WORKING. Working a miracle HAS to be an act of GIVING TO ANOTHER, or to CREATE ANOTHER. A spark of LIFE has to come out of you and enter another to enlighten their mind and heal it. It's the most open loving unconditional pure blessing that you can give to anyone. It literally reverses death and sickness and makes them impossible, REPLACING them with life itself. There is massive power in this because it uses the power of God.

You being in darkness and shifting your perception up to a greater level of "being alive" is in a sense a miracle that you work for yourself, but the purpose of doing that is purification so that you can become able to GIVE miracles to others.

"He MUST heal his perception in this respect. He MUST work a miracle on behalf of himself here (See the point about miracles as a perception corrector) before he can effect miracles as creative energizers, which they are."

You can only give the miracles you have received, meaning that as you heal you become an instrument for healing, because you become more alive and more loving and more able to GIVE what you have received. The more you give the more you receive also and miracles benefit both the giver and the receiver by increase the total amount of love - which is through a similar mechanism to how the kingdom of God increases and how ideas of love strengthen when they are given away - giving and receiving are one - thats part of what miraculousness means.

Ultimately the performing of miracles CREATES LIFE that has eternal life and lives forever. You create your creations in heaven with God and your brothers through miraculous acts of life-giving power. On earth you can't use it to create because of the separation/ego etc, but you can use it to restore and heal which is a similar use of giving life. And this is what RESURRECTION is all about.

Recall this about miracles GIVING LIFE:

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."

What you have to give, what is within you, is LIFE ITSELF. Pure essence of livingness, shared with and given by God. Awareness, presence, being, vision, creative power etc. You GIVE YOURSELF. You GIVE GOD. You GIVE LIFE to others. That is miracle working as a "creative energiser", which you become able to do when you have done sufficient purification through "working a miracle for yourself" ie focusing on resurrecting your mind and moving yourself back closer to identification with your immortal spirit.

The so-called "shift in perception" is a SIDE EFFECT of temporary changes in the mind, it is in and of itself not a miracle. "Those who speak of "the miracle OF healing" are combining two orders of reality inappropriately. Healing is NOT a miracle. The Atonement, or the final miracle, is a REMEDY. It is purely a means, while any type of healing is a result."

A shift in perception may be called an EFFECT of a miracle, a healing result, it itself is not a miracle. A miracle is a spark of life from the power of God extended through you from God which has the power to extend to others through you, CAUSING perception to shift IF it is needed. Miracles have a whole lot to do with CAUSATION, not passive states of perception.

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.

It's "pride month" which is a sort of pro-queer celebration and revenge-quest rolled into one. People should be happy to be who they really are, without the need for any validation from anyone. It's not necessary to have other people treat us in a certain way or agree with us or even respect us. Insecure people depend on others for making themselves okay. Immortal beings laugh in the face of all judgements and opinions. The world doesn't do anything to us and other people do not define who or what we are.

Often I hear things along the lines of - the straight heteronormative people have told us this, done that to us, treated us this way, and so now we're going to be extremely "loud and proud" as a kind of counter-protest. That isn't really pride, it's an ego thing pretending to be pride. If people were really proud of who they are they wouldn't feel a need to go to war over it because they'd know that no-one and nothing can take it away from them. The pride must be pretty fragile and NOT pride if it depends on other people to reinforce it.

So as usual like most things in the world there's a whole lot of special-relationship bullshit and ego dynamics around this. Many of the pride posts I've seen are nothing short of seeking revenge against perceived persecutors. People trying to insist on their 'right to exist' as a special kind of person. People 'fighting' for something. Nothing natural has to be fought for, it's given by God with no strings attached.

If we get into any kind of need to have other people change to see us, accept us, recognize us, validate us, respect us, treat us well, stop abusing us, etc... anything at all, we're saying that we do not want to be fully ourselves, do not not accept ourselves, and are shifting responsibility for that onto someone else. We don't want that, it's not an improvement. We should all be happy and proud of who and what we are on the basis that we are perfect in God and have no need to get love and appreciation from anything outside of us.

I know there has been a lot of history and conflict surrounding this, and yes still a lot of people are horrendous and murderous in their attitudes about queer people. But ultimately we have to be responsible for our own choice of whether to be happy or not. If we give anyone the power to determine that for us then we give power away and are asking to be victimized. And then going on a sassy middle-finger quest to try to pretend not to care, isn't exactly a solid foundation.

We should not be wanting or needing other people to 'treat us well' in order for us to be happy and who we really are. This is the problem with the world, everyone's expecting everyone else to "do to them" what they want, to "make them happy", to "cause them" to be this way or that way, which is "positive victimhood". It's a way of giving away power and hoping that the world will treat you nice. If you need the world to treat you a certain way your entire mental health is pretty fragile.

You are an immortal being, you do not NEED anyone to treat you nice. You are invulnerable, you do not NEED people to validate you or be respectful toward you. Let them be as vicious as they want, it's not supposed to affect you in any way if you are owning who you are. There is no strength in surrounding yourself with only the people that treat you well. You are not 'treated' well or not well. You are the one who chooses everything you experience.

"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."

"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."

There are two worlds. The Kingdom of God, which really exists, and the world we made to oppose the Kingdom as an assertion of death and non-existence.

The Kingdom of God is a permanent, real world. It is Creation, in which everything is alive and has eternal life. All is immortal, perfect, loving and at peace. Nothing can ever happen to this world or anything in it, except through the joyful extension of God's will to create and share and celebrate.

The world we made, was made as an opposite to the Kingdom. It is encapsulated by spacetime and takes on the form of everything material, physical, energetic etc. All of it is an illusion, a dream, an imagined world, where strange things seem to happen and impossibilities seem possible.

"Heaven remains your one alternative to the strange world you made."

"Earth, Heaven's opposite in EVERY way."

The simple but seemingly difficult challenge for us, is to put all of our attention, belief, trust, identity and intimacy into the hands of the Kingdom, and NOT into the hands of the world we made. To overlook the world we made and look past it with Christ Vision TO the Kingdom is our goal.

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK."

"Therefore, the Holy Spirit's third lesson is: "Be vigilant ONLY for God and HIS Kingdom."

"This is why you MUST be vigilant ON GOD'S BEHALF. The ego speaks AGAINST His Creation, and therefore DOES engender doubt. You cannot go BEYOND belief UNTIL you believe wholly."

"Vigilance is not necessary for truth, but it IS necessary AGAINST ILLUSION. Truth is WITHOUT illusions, and therefore WITHIN the Kingdom. Everything OUTSIDE the Kingdom IS ILLUSION."

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it seems like life; at worst, death."

This seems difficult because it's asking us no less than to identify as being something beyond all bodies, to recognize others as not bodies at all, to find nothing in the world we made that we value or want, to recognize the world has nothing to offer, to let go of all delusions about the world being real, to fall for absolutely no temptations to believe otherwise, and to completely transition to identifying and recognizing ourselves as ONLY spirit.

We are OF another world. We seem to be IN this world. But we need to become absolutely clear that there is no world here. This doesn't seem to be easy and in fact seems difficult given the sheer extent of how much we believe in, react to, identify with, and are convinced by the illusory world presented to us. But it IS our final goal, in the atonement, to completely peel ourselves away from this fake world and all it seems to offer or suggest, and put our hearts entirely into the hands of God.

"God commended His Spirit to you, and asks that you commend yours to Him."

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father. By doing this, the mind awakens from its sleep, and the Soul remembers its Creator. All sense of Separation disappears, and level confusion vanishes."

This means we have to literally wean off the world. We have to want the Kingdom with all our willingness and hearts and minds. We have to recognize that immortality is the only truth and mortality is a completely powerless fiction. That only God's truth, as His Living Kingdom, is true and real and acceptable and attractive. We must believe strongly and fully in the reality of God's creation and our immortality, and disbelieve and overlook all suggestion to the contrary.

To do this we have to learn also that we are not a physical body, nor is anyone else a physical body. We have been very confused that people are their bodies, and when things happen to bodies we recoil and react as if the person is affected. This only means we are confused in thinking these immortal beings are susceptible to suffering. Bodies must be overlooked. The world must be overcome. We must attune to the spirit world and return to it through truth and sanity and recognition.

Only the Kingdom of God really exists. Only the Holy Trinity is real. Only the creations of light are real. There is no world here.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself."

One of the ways the ego deceives you is to make it seem like you are not yourself. It wants to suggest that something has changed about you, since God created you whole, and that you are now missing something.

The only way it can make it seem like you are missing something is to HIDE it or conceal it. It's not actually capable of getting rid of your real self, because God made you PERMANENT. There is no real way the ego can stop you from existing or take away your reality.

The ONLY trick the ego has is to pretend that there is something about you that is missing, by trying to BLOCK YOUR AWARENESS from being aware that it exists. It does this by applying distortions to your perception which seem to make it hard to SEE what is really right in front of you and obvious.

These blocks to the AWARENESS of God's presence are the only problem. They need to be removed, in order for you to become AWARE again that you DO still have everything that God gave you, you ARE still immortal, you HAVE NOT been changed and NOTHING is missing.

So what the ego does, is it covers you up a little bit, maybe with a lie or a deception or some darkness or a temptation or some other mechanism of illusion. It makes an illusion that makes it seem like something's gone wrong, something's happening, there's been a loss, or an emptiness, or a hole has been made in the Son of God, or something's been taken away, or whatever.

So this ego PRANKSTER tries to TRICK you into believing that it's actually TRUE that something about you is missing. It tries to get you to believe that it's true you've lost your love, or your power, or your strength, or your sanity, or your connection to God, or your peace, or your identity, or whatever. As soon as you believe it's lie and fall for its trick, you are now in a state of confusion.

Confused, and convinced that you actually HAVE lost some part of yourself, and that this part of yourself IS NOT where it should be - ie within you - where God placed it - what do you do now? Perceiving a lack, you feel a need, and that need automatically asks to be fulfilled because it's a magnetic belief in 'not having' which draws itself in the direction of 'getting' - ie re-acquiring.

So now you go off, distracted, looking everywhere you can possibly look, EXCEPT for where this missing thing IS, which is in you, because its' not really missing AT ALL it's just being covered up, and what results will you encounter? You'll look high and low and everywhere in-between, everywhere EXCEPT underneath the blanket that hides it. And it won't be there. And you will not find it, because it's not anywhere that you're looking.

This is how the ego has you "seek and do not find".

It's also how the ego has you "seek for salvation" (a solution to the problem of something having gone wrong), outside of yourself, in places where you will never find it, even though you have this big HOPE of finding it there. The ego would want you to keep DOING stuff to trying to REPLACE what you think you lost, even though it's not reall lost. And all this doing will entail 'trying' really hard to accomplish what you ultimately cannot accomplish. And the more effort you put into 'finding' what you think you do not have, the less it will work and the more frustrated you'll be.

So all you need really to do is to LOOK AT the ego's smokescreen, QUESTION the ego's bullshit deception that says you are lacking something, figure out that what it says you're lacking is just HIDDEN, look at what is hiding it and how it is functioning, STOP DOING IT - ie UN-DO the action of hiding it, and lo and behold.. abracadabra.... IT IS REVEALED TO YOU!

Eureka! You found it. It is already in you. It always was. It was never lost. It wasn't removed. It wasn't really damaged. Nothing really happened to it. This LOVE that you are, is still perfectly intact, perfectly whole, perfectly at peace, perfectly happy, perfectly powerful and immortal and innocent. It has never changed. And so as you remove this BLOCK to awareness, instead of trying to REPLACE what the block says is missing, you simply uncover the truth of what is, what always was and what always will be.

There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing lacking in you. There is nothing missing from you. You have not been hurt. You have not been damaged. You have not sinned. You are not guilty. AAAAAAALL this other stuff that says otherwise is just a COVER for your immaculate divine innocence and invulnerability. And all your worries about all this other bullshit is all because you think it's telling you the truth. None of it is true. The only truth is that you are STILL as God created you, even if you've been hiding it underneath layer upon layer of illusions.

It's going to be a wonderful day when you finally realize that you are still as God created you and nothing has happened.

"Anger is never justified." - ACIM

Anger is not natural. It is very common, but not natural or healthy. Anger isn't really a valid feeling. It's actually a device for projecting something. Usually we use it to project guilt or some other hurt. It's a way of hurling stuff out of the mind and trying to pin it on someone or something else. It's a form of irresponsibility.

Anger is also caused by something other than itself, so it's not like some kind of core feeling or inherent central nature. It's a reaction to something else, twice removed from the problem, and only comes about when denial is also being used.

If you have a pain or hurt or guilt or whatever and you try to deny it, you're trying to dissociate yourself from it, disown it, and want to get it out of your awareness/mind. You do that by projecting it and trying to associate it with someone or something else. And the main skapegoating device used to accomplish this is anger.

Behind anger there is always something else going on. Deeper than the anger there is some kind of hurt or pain or fear. It's very easy for fears and hurts and guilts to transform into what appears to be anger, but this ins't their true form. Anger is always a way of hiding something else.

Not because you actually have anger, but because denying deeper feelings leads to an attempt to project those pains or put them out of your mind, which hurls them outward in a kind of broadcast. If you deny being afraid, you will feel angry instead. If you deny feeling guilty you'll become angry. If you deny that you feel hurt or at a loss or deprived in some way it can turn into anger. But the anger always comes after a perceived attack.

The anger is not a primary core feeling, it's a secondary layer on top of it designed to cover feelings up. You first see yourself as hurt or attacked, you then justify that because you didn't seem to ask for it (weren't aware of how you chose it) you are justified in being angry, and then you use that justification to hurl the blame outward.

Ego likes to use anger because it splits the mind and increases separation and insanity. While you are in denial and projecting pain outwardly your mind is dissociating and splitting and trying to pretend that the pain is not inside itself. But ideas do not leave the mind that conceive of them, so it stays in the mind in a disguised form, hidden behind a layer of denial.

Essentially anger doesn't work. It's an attempt to get rid of something deeper while keeping it. It doesn't make the pain go away. It doesn't heal anything. All it does is disguise and hide and make it seem like it doesn't belong to you. It's just a projected form of denial that says "this is not mine."

Anger is always unjustified because it's always based on a lie. But while the lie is kept in place, it seems as though the only problem solving solution is to project the pain. This won't work, but the mind will believe it's working, but that it needs to intensify the projection in order to get more pain out.

By becoming even more angry your mind reasons that it will be saved, or that by pinning the blame for the wound on something else you can be alleviated of the pain. This leads to a closed kind of scenario in which it seems all you can do is rage more to try to induce more relief, and the more you rage the better off you'll be. But this doesn't actually work because the mind is just splitting and becoming more and more insane. Ans besides, rage is not peace and attack will never induce healing.

Anger never ever works. It is a faulty coping mechanism. It's an attempt not to solve the real problem and to keep it hidden. Behind the anger if you look you'll always find something deeper like some kind of feeling of hurt or loss or guilt or fear. Something that came before it. And all you're doing is using the anger to try to make it go away. Anger is like an absence of feeling, ultimately an absence of love.

Feelings of hurt and attack and pain are always based on faulty perceptions that something outside of you has done something against your will, and that you are suffering as a result. This can NEVER be true because you are an immortal being that is permanently perfect and can never be attacked. Nothing real can be threatened.

So it always starts off with your mind going into a self attack, insinuating that you are not invulnerable, disowning the power of decision and pretending you are not the one causing your own experience, projecting out that responsibility onto others and the world, accusing them of sin, resulting in a perception that they're attacking you and you didn't ask for it, leading to hurt and pain which your mind itself puts into you to correspond to the projection, which pictures you as a victim, which justifies being angry, so then you project out anger in retaliation against the feedback loop of your own projected belief. It's pretty convoluted and crazy and a bottomless pit of hell.

You have to get further into your mind and find out the real deeper causes of things, the root issue behind all problems. It's never to do with what the world has done to you and always to do with your choice to perceive yourself unfairly treated, hurt, attacked, vulnerable etc... some kind of victim role that isn't true of your immortal nature. In that sense you are always and only the one who attacks yourself, undermining yourself first and then blaming it on the world. "Only the self-accused condemn."

This is why anger is totally unfounded and completely irrelevant in all scenarios and situations. You simply have no reason to be upset if you are immortal being that can never be hurt, made guilty, caused to be afraid or hurt for any reason. If you are not happy or at peace you have made a wrong decision and have chosen to see yourself as deprived. And no amount of blaming that on anyone or anything will make it go away. But you can always choose again.

When I used to do ACIM, it was always about me being here on Earth trying to forgive stuff. People were across from me in bodies, as bodies. I was a body. The focus was on me being here anchored in a body trying to somehow get closer to reality.

But then there was a big change and turning point, namely that my wife left her body and wend to heaven. But this was by no means the end of our interactions together, and instead she became a kind of anchor in heaven.

Since then my focus has noticeably shifted in how I deal with the course. I see it as telling me that I should be locating myself as IN heaven, and not of this world. Even if my body seems to be here, I should regard myself as with God. Physically on earth, mentally in heaven.

I see this also as relating to the topic of 'who I am really'. I am not a body, I am free. Well, where am I if I'm not a body - I'm in heaven. If I am Christ, where is Christ? Not on Earth. Christ IS heaven. If I am immortal spirit and recognize and identify myself as spirit, where is spirit? It's not on earth, it's in heaven, as heaven.

So for me now the focus has shifted quite a bit in terms of how I am 'oriented'. I am becoming increasingly more 'centered' in heaven, identifying as part of heaven, while my body continues to seem to exist on Earth.

I liken it to what it would be like if I was an angel in heaven, and came to Earth for a visit but was still entirely of the same nature and mindset that I was in heaven. Still believing I am with God, still in the light, still a spirit being, not confused about who or what I am. In the world, but not of it.

I think this is important because we need to realize we are not Earth people, we are not bodies or humans, we are not anchored here. Just because bodies are here it gives a flavour of ... everything I do is from the perspective of being here. But this isn't the proper perspective. To get above the battlefield mind has to see itself as NOT in a body, NOT outside the Kingdom, NOT separate from God.

I focus now much more on affirming and recognising who I really am - immortal spirit, where I really am - in heaven with God, how I really am - perfectly innocent and invulnerable. Lifting up and away from all the sense of the bullshit of the world, all the ideas of "something is going wrong", all the illusions of suffering and of being even someone or something that can suffer. Uncovering my true self.

We need to be above the world, looking down, not looking up from below. Believing we are firmly WITHIN God, not outside of God.

"You have been assured that the Kingdom of God is within you, and can never be lost."

"That is why we made no distinction before between HAVING the Kingdom of God and BEING the Kingdom of God."

"Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world has to offer. The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it CAN blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it."

"Because you are all the Kingdom of God, I can lead you back to your own creations"

"To be IN the Kingdom is merely to focus your full attention ON it."

"The Kingdom CANNOT be found alone, and you who ARE the Kingdom cannot find YOURSELVES alone."

"You ARE the Kingdom of Heaven, but you have let the belief in darkness enter your minds, and so you need a new light."

"You who ARE the Kingdom are not concerned with seeming. Reality is yours because you ARE reality."

Whatever you are experiencing, comes from whatever mindset you have. Either you're in the ego mindset and thus experiencing a physical world of bodies, or you're in the Holy Spirit's mindset and on the spiritual level.

Thoughts/attitudes/beliefs/truth on the Holy Spirits level is completely incompatible with the ego's level. Never the two shall meet. So the ego is really confined inside its bubble of private insanity.

Within the ego's bubble, it starts to believe it can ACCESS and thus experience, what it is like in the Holy Spirit's world. It actually wants to do this because it wants to become more powerful, to have more domination and control, and to wield what would seem to be the kind of 'special' powers that Holy Spirit apparently has access to.

Except the ego has a problem. It cannot leave its mindset. It can't *actually* get into the Holy Spirit's mind. So it pretends that it can. And as always, it uses separation to do this (the same old story, separate in the name of joining).

The ego takes its own mindset and separates it even further, dividing it into 'good' and 'bad' parts. All still within the ego thought system. So now it labels some parts of itself/the world as good and some parts as bad. It sort of creates the illusion that it can 'borrow' some goodness from the bad stuff and attribute it to the good stuff, to make the good stuff seem extra special and sparkly and important and valuable. And of course that means taking some of the 'bad' that you'd find in this stuff and attributing it to the 'bad stuff' so that it seems extra bad - a repository for nasty dark judgements and hate and so on.

This creates the persona - the spiritualizing portion of the ego mind which tries to focus only on the 'good' interpretion of the world, and simultaneously creates the 'shadow', which is whats left of all the stuff that is 'not good'. For something to seem good, something else HAS to seem bad. To have special love there has to be special hate. To idol worship there has to be 'the enemy' who clearly do not get what's so special about the idol. And to have all the 'spiritual behavior' you must relegate 'unspiritual behavior' to the shadow. You try to hide everything bad IN the shadow, AS the shadow, and you then try to get RID OF the shadow. Tuck it away, hide it, destroy it. And then guess what happens?

The shadow part of the ego mind, the bad stuff, now takes the symbolic form of all of the enemies, attackers, victimizers, causes of sickness and so on. The 'goodies two shoes' part is the facade of special love and special appearances which 'saves face' and makes it seem like you are MORE spiritual ie more SPECIAL than you are. ie, if you sweep all of the sins under the carpet it LOOKS LIKE you're more innocent than you are. The ego's use of the persona is what gives extra weight to the idea that your persona is valuable, important, special, wanted, loveable (in an ego way), desirable, innocent (ego innocence) etc. And so the 'good ego mind' and the 'bad ego mind' are now AT WAR. Reinforcing the good reinforces the bad because it's like a seesaw - you take less load off the good end to make it seem 'lighter', the bad end gets badder and 'heavier/darker'.

So this ego attempt to divide itself and be at war with itself, which creates the persona and the shadow in conflict with each other (e.g. person who everyone always thought was 'good' gets unfairly attacked or sick etc), allows the ego to lend special meaning to some parts of its mindset - a glow of specialness - sacredness - holiness - spirituality. Not genuine holiness or genuine spirituality, but a fake APPEARANCE of it. A facade. This can take the form of huge sacrifices or changes in behavior, level confusion, trying to be good, trying to not be bad, trying to ATTAIN very lofty levels of 'spiritual advancement and capabilities' that make it look like you're very advanced and special.

Since the ego cannot leave its own mindset and cannot actually become spiritual, it just fakes it. It pretends it is spiritual. And it fools itself. And this is what YOU do. This is what I do. This is where we TRY to attain experiences and mindsets which are OUTSIDE of what THIS mindset (our current ego mindset) can achieve. Our ego mind tries to 'be spiritual', while KEEPING the ego mindset. This is because the ego wants to live in two minds. It wants to take the ego self TO the Holy Spirit and to KEEP it and to at the same time TAKE ON the Holy Spirit's power. Obviously this cannot be achieved because the Holy Spirit's mind completely dispels the duality that the ego is based on, and completely undoes it. But that doesn't stop our ego from trying!

So whenever you are KEEPING the ego mindset and are trying to INCLUDE spiritual mindsets in some way, you are spiritualizing.

Whenever you try to express, quote, espouse, affirm or act is if you are being or accessing spiritual truths which are WAY higher than the ego's mindset, and you cannot actually ACCESS and experience the level of mind where those truths can be EXPERIENCED, then you are spiritualizing.

So let's see... course quotes and concepts... for example the idea of oneness. You could say to someone like, "it doesnt matter because we are all one". Bullshit. This isn't an EXPERIENCE of the truth of that statement. You can only experience that at a level ABOVE the holy spirit in the mind of HEAVEN. That's the only place where this truth is experiential. Remember, truth is what you can experience. If you cannot experience it, you're kidding yourself every time you make statements about it AS IF you are living it.

Or how about even saying, "I am immortal spirit"... well.. not as an ego you're not. Who is saying you are immortal spirit? It's the ego. You can only BE immortal spirit when you have completely let go of the entire ego mindset. So this information is just... information from another world, from another dimension, another state of mind. Thus it has no PRACTICAL USE for you here, on the ego level, because you cannot EXPERIENCE it here. So it remains lofty. It remains a concept. And then if you spend time just regurgitating the concept, stating it, quoting it, because it 'sounds spiritual', then you are spiritualizing.

You're taking very high truths from very high levels of mind, which require AT LEAST a total atunement to Holy Spirit's mindset AND a total relinquishment of the ego's way of experiencing, and are trying to bring them INTO the ego's mindset. This is spiritualizing. Adding spiritual value to a valueless system. Borrowing spiritual truth from a level of mind that is beyond where you are at. That's faking it. That's spiritualizing your ego. And what happens then is that the best you can do is quote these things and say them and affirm them as if doing so is EXPERIENCING them when in fact you cannot experience them yet, and so they remain MENTAL, and that makes them INTELLECTUAL. Thus you end up intellectualizing the course's truths, you intellectualize higher levels of reality and you pretend that doing so means you are experiencing them here and now. You're not. The ego is deceiving you and trying to be special. And this makes these truths BECOME nothing more than specialness. And then you end up sounding like a bliss ninny, lol

Anyway. I'm sort of expressing this as it's coming to me.

You need to be realistic about the level that you're on, what mind you are IN, the scope of that mind, what is OUTSIDE that mind, what you can actually EXPERIENCE right now, and stop hitting yourself over the head with these lofty spiritualizing ego-inflating truths which you can't even experience yet. You need to focus only on the truths which you can PRACTICALLY APPLY, ie BE EXPERIENCED, to help you to transition your EXPERIENCE from what you are experiencing now in the ego mind to what Holy Spirit will allow you to experience in his mind. If it does not involve your experience, and if it is not practical and you can't actually USE it to change your experience, it is intellectual ego noise trying to spiritualize itself.

I know that I have done this over any over again, believing that if I could just say the correct thing or think the correct thought or understand the correct concept or say it in a special way, that meant that I am BEING IT. I believed that my intellect had the capability of experiencing the truth. Hah. It doesn't. The intellect is only activated when you are not able to LIVE the truth, but are trying to incorporate it into your experience, so you can inject it into your THOUGHTS, which are fantasies, and you can pretend you are living it, but really you are not. If it's stuck in your mind and isn't in your heart or in your feeling or in your actual direct experience of 'reality', then it's not really your truth right now. And if you accumulate a lot of that 'information', no matter how spiritual it is or how lofty the metaphysics, if you are not EXPERIENCING it, then you are spiritualizing your ego. This is what I have done over and over again.

All you are capable of is letting go of the ego mind and the way of experiencing that that mind gives you, and transitioning your experience of reality to the holy spirit's mind where you can experience HIS level of truth fully. Where you can LIVE IT. A course in miracles is all about LIVING the truth and PRACTICING it and PRACTICALLY EXPERIENCING it. The rest is just ego noise.

All physical forms, all appearances, all physical conditions, all sicknesses, every illness, all disease, even physical death, ..... are all al lie. A MASSIVE lie.

To be a miracle worker requires that you stop believing in sickness. In yourself, in others, in the world. Physical sickness is TEMPTATION. If we for a second believe it is real or true, we are lost and powerless. Seeing this AND believing it is real, is a state of false perception.

In truth, in reality, no one is sick. Everyone is IMMORTAL. SICKNESS IS IMPOSSIBLE.

When something we call sickness "shows up", and our physical eyes show it to us as if it's there, we are blinded by it. Don't underestimate this for a second. Believing it even a little bit is blindness and deception. The sickness is not really THERE.

How can an IMMORTAL BEING be sick? Ever?!!

In order to be a HEALING FORCE, your mind has to get to the point where it ASSERTS LIFE. This is what resurrection means. The assertion of life. You ASSERT LIFE towards everyone. Which means you denounce sickness, death, damage, malfunction, disease, and death. You shine it away. You push past it. You ignore it. It's all a lie.

"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."

Imagine if you will what it will be like to approach everyone from a TRULY FORGIVING attitude which does not see ANY TRUTH in sickness. Which looks beyond all physical forms, all appearances, all matter, no matter what form it takes, how severe it looks, what people think of it, what seemed to cause it, or any other justification for its seriousness.

Imagine what it will be like to be so SURE and CERTAIN that only life is true, that you laugh in the face of even the NOTION that sickness even EXISTS. You laugh in the face of death. You take nothing physical seriously. And you utterly recognize the complete LIE that all sickness represents.

You don't buy into it for a second. You don't believe ANYONE that claims to be sick. And you completely disagree with ALL assertions supporting the idea that sickness is EVEN THERE, yet alone an explanation of what it is or how it came about.

THERE IS NO SICKNESS. This is what our attitude has to be IN ORDER TO HEAL. Healing obliterates sickness. It's a LIGHT, which shines away darkness. Light says to the darkness, YOU ARE NOT THERE. And it SHINES it away.

It removes it. Sickness, in all its forms, all its behaviors, even the concept of sickness, has to be DENIED correctly. This denial doesn't mean turning a blind eye, it means giving absolutely no support to it, no belief in it, giving it no power, and stripping it of every illusion. Rejecting sickness completely as utter bullshit!

This I am sure is how JESUS saw people. He looked completely past all physical forms. He looked beyond bodies. He was joyously loving and certain of the truth that nothing real can be threatened. He laughed in the face of death. He cancelled every manifestation of illness. Even in the face of the death of another he didn't believe for a SECOND that death was occurring.

And this ultimately leads to an attitude of THERE IS NO DEATH. Because death is sickness. And death and sickness are absolute lies. There is no death because ONLY LIFE is real. And asserting, enforcing, powerfully expressing, that THERE IS ONLY LIFE, completely obliterates and undoes and reverses and heals all sickness and all death. This is how the dead are raised. This is how the sick are healed.

The resurrection is the assertion of life. The recognition that life is real and true. The recognition that anything that IS NOT LIFE, which is all forms, all bodies, all galaxies, all illusions of matter, is exactly that - NOT ANYTHING. Nothing at all. It holds no truth. Not one single ATOM has any truth to it. Not one single quantum flux is even remotely real. Even space and time are fictional beliefs!

To heal others, one must adopt this completely "stern", powerful attitude. This utter REFUSAL to ACCEPT that sickness is real. Because what you accept you will accept into YOUR MIND, and this will make your mind sick and dream of real sickness. Sickness has to BE DENIED. This is the whole thing with false perception and the seeing of two worlds.

"The world you see must be denied for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."

"You cannot see both worlds." "Sight of one denies the other."

When you are in false perception you are dreaming of hell and suffering and sickness and death in a dark nightmare of despair. This is a failure to overlook illusions. It's falling for temptation. What is the opposite? The opposite is not believing a SINGLE THING your body says is really happening, not believing it's true that ANY appearance of sickness has ANY validity. Recognizing clearly that illusions of sickness hold NO TRUTH AND NO POWER TO RESIST HEALING. And looking PAST all forms to the light of Christ.

As miracle workers we are to BRUSH OFF sickness and all notions that there EVEN IS such a thing as sickness. We are to UTTERLY DENY it in every way. The entire system of magical solutions. The entire institution of "treatment". The entire thought system of suffering. The entire IDEA, the tiny mad idea, that impossible sickness is possible. Immortal beings can never be sick or die. So what is a sick body trying to claim, that sickness and death CAN happen because you are NOT immortal? It's a LIE.

Completely withdrawing ALL BELIEF in sickness similarly entails the TOTAL RELINQUISHMENT of all temptation to believe that ANYONE is truly sick. You cannot heal someone by believing they are sick! You are useless to them when you join in false empathy and make their dreams of sin real. You have to actually NOT CONSENT to join them in their suffering.

Otherwise you are NOT supporting them, you are weakening them AND contributing to their sickness through attack. Believing someone is sick is a DESIRE TO SEE THEM SICK. Believing in real sickness and real death is an attack thought. It's an attempt to MAKE TRUE and make real, that your brother is LESS THAN HOLY. It's an attack on his health.

You compound his own sickness and ADD TO it, holding him in a psychological PRISON, by AGREEING with him that he is not immortal in any way. That he is affected, suffering, weakened and vulnerable, able to be threatened by death. Not only does he suffer by his own self attack and pretend sickness, but he suffers even further because you won't ACKNOWLEDGE the immortality and safety and wholeness that is true of him.

Seeing your brother AS whole, and recognizing his wholeness, is required to HEAL him. You have to see WITH wholeness, which means NOT seeing or believing sickness, attack, suffering or death.

"Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles."

This requires that you not even believe what your physical senses are showing you, because they are lies. "To sense is not to know". The body's senses were designed as LIE AGREEMENT DEVICES, to MAKE the world seem real. "Only the body makes the world seem real." And yet "the body is a dream." So even if you SEE physical sickness, even if you HEAR the pain, even if you FEEL the wound, even if you SMELL the rotting flesh, these are all LIES posed by the ego to TEMPT YOU TO BELIEVE THAT HELL IS REAL.

The correct attitude of a miracle worker is the perspective that THERE IS NO DEATH. There is no sickness or suffering. There is no sin or guilt. There is no fear. There is no attack or damage. None of this is happening. The miracle worker recognizes THE TRUTH, God's truth, as THE ONLY TRUTH, and NOTHING ELSE IS TRUE. Meaning that anything which even HINTS at suggesting something else is true, MUST be completely denied, rejected, disbelieved, not invested in, not trusted, not had faith in, not wanted, not desired, and not fallen for.

The miracle worker approaches another with TOTAL CORRECTED PERCEPTION. This perception frames ALL physical illusions AS FALSE. Utterly false. 100% false. Not a single shred of truth to them. Illusions cannot be real BECAUSE they can be changed. They can be made to appear sick, or well, and so they CAN be "healed", and can be changed. Miracles prove this.

"That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind shows the mind must be STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

Our attitude towards "the sick" should be. ... well... YOU believe you are sick, I DO NOT. I do NOT join you in sickness. I will not validate it. I will not add to it. I will not give it any reality. You are deceived in believing you are sick. You are MISTAKEN. You cannot be sick and you are not sick. This supposed sickness is totally illusion and IS NO THERE. It's a bullshit lie. There is no sickness IN YOU. Get up and walk motherfucker!!! Of course, in a loving way.

By seeing only life in another, they are resurrected. You give life to them through miracles.

"Miracles mean LIFE and God is the giver of life."

You can only GIVE life to another by NOT giving death to them. If you ASSIGN "that's death" or "that's sickness" to someone, you are GIVING them death. You are giving them a diagnosis. You are making it real. In fact you are CURSING them.

"Curse God and die, but not by Him Who made not death, but only in the dreams."

""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.**** This distortion ***makes them vulnerable to the curse of others***, since ****they have already cursed themselves****. ********The miracle worker can only bless********, and this undoes the curse and frees the soul from prison."

When someone curses themselves, it accuses themselves of sin in some way, becoming guilty and IN NEED OF punishment, they set up a psycho-energetic state of seeming vulnerability in which they ACCEPT make-believe "laws of causality", forms of victimhood, in which they weaken themselves and become "sensitive to" or susceptible to certain forms of external causes. And thus they "allow" or rather, do not resist, and in fact AGREE WITH, the seeming external attacks of others. So when someone else tries to "curse them" (any kind of attack), they RECEIVE it and take it upon themselves, using their self-attack as a weapon to INCREASE their own suffering. They use others to hurt themselves more by trying to GET punishment from other people's expressions.

NOT cursing, but rather setting your brother free and UNDOING their curse, is miracle working. If we make someone's sickness real and BELIEVE IN SICKNESS AT ALL, we are directly CURSING people. We are MAKING THEM sick. We are CAUSING sickness. We are projecting sickness. If someone has made themselves sick through their own mistake and judgement, this makes them BELIEVE the are vulnerable. And this now OPENS them to forms of attack which SEEM capable of attacking that vulnerability. ie, that someone can COMPOUND their self attack by ADDING TO their sickness. Amplifying it.

Your fear about another's sickness is murderous. It is an attack. Anything that is not loving is an attack and fear is the opposite of, or lack of love. Either you heal, or you hurt. Either you love or you hate. You are doing one or the other at all times. If you teach love you will heal others and UNDO THEIR CURSE! If you teach cursing, you will HARM others and imprison them in their cursed state and make it WORSE. Feeling bad about someone being sick MAKES them sicker.

Ultimately we have to weed out all the reasons and beliefs as to why we believe sickness is real, bodies are real, suffering is real, guilt is real. This includes NOT BELIEVING a dam thing that the world seems to contain. ALL BODIES ARE ILLUSIONS. And everything the BODY sees is an illusion. "The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen." The body is LITERALLY incapable of seeing reality. It does not look at a REAL world, it looks at A WORLD OF LIES. And to lie is to sin.

"The world of bodies is the world of sin (lies)."

And then we become purified, prepared, to be able to SEE ONLY LOVE, GIVE ONLY LIFE, TEACH ONLY RESURRECTION, and completely OVERRIDE all manifestations of sickness and death. We have to flat out REFUSE to participate in anyone's belief OR proof that they are sick.

Even if they are CONVINCED. Even if they have 100 medical records and have seen 50 doctors. Even if they were at the emergency room or in the ICU. Even if they almost died. It is ALL AL LIE. And if we BUY INTO IT, FALL FOR IT, ARE DECEIVED BY IT, we will be of NO use in helping or healing, left only to commiserate and sympathize in weakness and mutual sadness.

We have to purge ourselves of ALL belief in death in ALL its forms. And "Sickness is but a little death." Even UNHAPPINESS is a form of death. Anything short of TOTAL JOY AND LOVE is a form of death. And all of it has to be REJECTED AS FALSE.

You do not know anyone who is really sick.

You have never met a sick person.

All hospitals are filled with liars.

No-one can ever die.

THERE IS NO SICKNESS AND THERE IS NO DEATH! That is what you must teach! That is how you HEAL!

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

All sickness, all death, all upsets, all war, all destruction, all horrors, all terror, all guilt, all fear, all hatred, all deception, all darkness and all insanity, are all stemming from one place.

You.

They are coming out of you, because you are expressive and creative, but a part of your mind has become inverted, turned inside out. Everything that flows through this obstruction takes on opposite meaning, as though having asked for a flower, you had asked for an army.

All sickness that befalls you is also coming from you. You are choosing it, but you do not see how you are choosing it, and so you are "tempted" to believe that it is being caused by make-believe causes outside of you. Fictional enemies and forces beyond control seem to conspire against you, as you describe the world as a danger and perceive it as unsafe.

Every fearful, angry or upsetting reaction that you experience, you are putting into yourself. You create it with your own mind. You do not create it in response to an external threat. It accompanies the threat, and you create both of them simultaneously. A mind which pictures an external threat must believe it is in danger and must experience fear or reactions of horror, and as such the mind then manifests not only the danger but the reaction to it. Both of them are chosen by you.

Every single blame that you've ever made towards other people, events, circumstances, life, God, nature, the neighbor's dog, the weather, whatever, absolutely NONE of those things are really the cause of any of what you have experienced.

If we are going to really strip this ego down and take a firm look at the truth, then we're at some point going to have to realize that ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAS HAPPENED TO US. Nobody who we have accused of causing us ANYTHING has ever been the true cause of that experience. Nothing that we have ever claimed as having happened TO US, has ever really been the cause of anything at all. We are adept at finding blame and projection for every sin all over the place, left right and center, and in every place other than within ourselves. "We but accuse our brother of our OWN sin.' ACIM

You can only be a victim if you perceive that there is ONE, EVEN JUST ONE case of something outside of you doing something to you. It is enough for your mind to invert and perceive causality as outside of you, and effects of that cause inside of you. Reactions are nothing but you producing effects WITHIN which were meant to be WITHOUT, as a result of this reversal of cause and effect, and you experiencing effects makes you suffer. You make yourself suffer.

Nobody has EVER done anything to you. This is the testimony that Jesus wants us to be able to express, not just in words or ideas but to actually live it, and to experience it, and to express it, such that we are actually IMMORTAL, completely immune to everything, unable to be destroyed or harmed or upset whatsoever. And to demonstrate this is to show that it has been learned.

That entire huge list of all the people who did stuff to you over the years? It's all a lie.

You need to remove from your mind the aspect which is distorting your creative impulses. It inverts and reverses the intentions of what you would create, turning life into death. It is because of this ego distortion that you seem to create sickness out of nowhere and then, seeing not the cause of it, think that it was put there by some other force. Thus you then believe that the body can become sick on its own, or as the result of the environment. It is YOUR MIND that is making it sick and nothing else.

Therefore, you HAVE every capacity to bring about complete and total immortality, to reverse and undo every sickness, to overcome death, and to be completely free from every form of suffering. You already have this in you. And this power is already working and operating. But you are MISUSING IT, attempting to use it to create a world which is not real, to project a sense of sin onto causes that don't exist, to blame everyone but you for owning it, and to remain unaware of God's presence. Only sickness can result from distorted ideas about the truth.

This is why your mind needs to be corrected. There is NO OTHER CAUSE for your sickness but you. There is NO OTHER SOURCE of suffering but you. There is NO OTHER POWER greater than the power of God which you share in and extend freely, with unlimited supply. There is NO OTHER WILL other than God's will, which you also share entirely. And there is NO OTHER WAY TO LIVE besides extending His eternal life in every way.

It is time to let go of every accusation you have made, every sin you have tried to scapegoat onto someone else, every form of blame and projection, every judgement as though someone else chose for you, every effort to get other people to change so that you don't have to, and every attempt to disown who you are. You are God's beloved child, you are immortal, and you have no enemy.

Let yourself be lifted into the truth of being. This world is not real. You are not at the effect of causes separate from your own. And there is no reason to be afraid, for only love is real.

ACIM reiterates many times that WE ALONE ARE THE CAUSE of our own suffering. We are not ever at the effect of the world. We are the cause of the world, the dream, and everything we feel and think and experience. Nothing happens without our consent, and we cannot even be hurt unless we ourselves hurt ourselves.

When you take this to the extreme, it means that YOU ALONE are responsible for EVERYTHING you experience, and NO ONE ELSE has anything to do with it whatsoever. There are no causes in the world, your brothers NEVER cause you (God is the cause of you), and you cannot suffer unless you choose to.

You can't even die unless you choose to. NOTHING can happen without your decision. And Jesus is completely literal about this. If you do not CHOOSE to suffer, suffering CANNOT happen to you. Sickness cannot happen, nor can death. You have automatic innate power over death and suffering at all times, and ONLY YOU can bring them upon yourself.

"If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it."

This puts 100% of the responsibility on your shoulders. Which means that if you are ever tempted to believe that something is happening for a reason OTHER than your own contribution, you are in a state of being mistaken, and now you need correction. Because it is ONLY your contribution that is causing everything.

This sounds easy enough. You just need to realize and recognize that every time you are unhappy, upset, suffering, in pain, sick, angry etc, it is because you are making it happen. If you would just stop hurting yourself you'd be totally invulnerable and healthy and happy all the time. No joke.

What becomes seemingly difficult is the many ways that we might not recognize what we're doing, or that we're even doing anything at all. We can become so used to blame, and reaction, and emotional triggers, and powerlessness, and believing other people actually do stuff, and that it seems impossible we can be responsible for everything.

In fact it runs very deeply. Every single thought you have, every attitude, every belief, are all part of the confusion that "its not me doing it" and "they are doing it to me." In every way, it is really you, who are an immortal being who can never even be changed at all, becoming confused and believing that something outside of you is changing you against your will. This can NEVER be true.

Every time that we lose sight of being THE CAUSE, we fall into temptation. We deny the truth and project causality outside of us. And this is the same as projecting sin. Then we find others or the world to be the cause of us. And this is a defense against the healing God placed in our minds. It's a way to avoid being healed by displacing the problem and its source outside of ourselves.

We talk about teaching others, and helping others, and having relationships, and performing miracles and so on, but the foundation of all this is simply YOU BEING YOU. Are you attacking yourself, or aren't you? If you aren't, you are not under attack. If you are, you are your ONLY worst enemy. This is all due to the suicidal self-destructiveness which comes from believing you are sinful. Are you trying to destroy yourself and others, or are you extending creation?

If you were to temporarily remove the entire planet, and all the people on it, and leave just you floating in space by yourself, whatever is going on in your experience is SOLELY caused by you. There is nothing else to cause it. This really tells you that ALL your forgiveness work is ENTIRELY an inside job. IT has nothing to do with others. It's you versus yourself. Is you trying to master yourself. It's your mind playing tricks on itself. It's you alone affecting yourself insanely.

Weaning off of all the reasons, excuses, explanations, justifications, beliefs, projections, and all other forms of displacement of responsibility, is not easy. We have a lot of habits formed, a lot of assumptions made, and a lot of belief in being vulnerable. We position ourselves as victims on a minute-by-minute basis. We might think it's not even POSSIBLE to question whether these things are happening to us. That things can seem so extreme and lopsided that it seems impossible we can be the one causing it.

But even those things which seem convincing, tempting us, secretly our dissociated choice, we have to dig out ALL of them, to question every single mental activity which is leading you away from your invulnerability. Even the notion that if you are being responsible, other people can still do stuff to you, cannot be true. Even the notion that even if you're doing your best, you will still die, cannot be true. Even death itself CANNOT have power over you if you decide NOT to die. "You are immortal and you cannot die."

The aim here is that you become "strong in the truth". That you stand in your own light. That you know yourself and be true to yourself. That you be so certain of what you ARE, that you don't for a second displace yourself, make a bodily identity, project cause outside of yourself, or believe any temptation that you are threatened by the world. This is how you be the light of the world, by going WITHIN to the light that is in you, so that it can extend.

Ultimately it boils down to one simple thing. You are the one who is making your life hell. It's not anyone else, and its not the world. It's not your neighbors, not your boss, your politicians, your celebrities. It's not certain races or countries or the weather or food or where you live. It's not external activities or events or space or time. It's just YOU. You are the one who is doing it to yourself. Holy fuck!

Salvation has been placed IN YOUR MIND by God because he knows that the PROBLEM is in your mind. And so the solution is in your mind. Your mind is what needs to be corrected, and that is all. This will take care of everything else. You are the one who is against you. You are the one who keeps giving YOUR power away to others. You are the one who keeps losing yourself and confusing yourself with things which are not you. And you are the one who can use the power of your decision to get out of it.

"You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do.""It means that nothing outside yourself can save you; nothing outside yourself can give you peace. But it also means that nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace in any way.""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."

"Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way"

"Who could be hurt in such a war, unless he hurts himself?"

"Nothing can hurt you, unless you give it the power to do so."

"If you will listen to His voice, you will know that you cannot either hurt or be hurt"

"You cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness."

"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."

"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."

"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."

To say A Course in Miracles presents a radical teaching is an understatement. It includes:

a) You are immortal

b) There in no death

c) Nothing happens to you that you don't choose

d) There are no victims

e) There is no reason for any fear

f) There is no world

g) You are not a human body

h) The physical universe is hell

i) All sickness is a choice

j) All death is suicide

k) You are not a separate person

l) All of history and time has not happened

m) There has never been war, nobody ever died

n) What you do to others you literally do to yourself

o) You are a child of God equal to Jesus

p) You are responsible for everything

q) You always get everything you ask for and nothing else

r) You can't forgive anyone but yourself

s) You are only Spirit, nothing else

t) Suffering is not real

u) Nothing has ever happened to you, or at all

v) You are just pretending to be separate from God

w) You are in Heaven already, dreaming of exile

x) Sin, guilt and fear are never called for or justified

y) Everyone shares the same One identity and mind

z) Only God is real

to name a few.

Gradually over time I am becoming more and more aware that, in truth, nothing has ever gone wrong. And in fact, it is absolutely impossible for anything to really go wrong.

Everything about God's reality is permanent and unchanging. This seems like a tiny little fact, but is everything.

It means that the Kingdom of God cannot be changed, all forms of suffering and death are fictional, you literally are incapable of sin, everything real is still exactly as God created it, nothing can attack reality, and nothing has ever happened to you. It also means you are permanently in a state of enlightenment and resurrection and eternal life.

"Believe in the Resurrection because it has BEEN accomplished, and IT HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED IN YOU. This is as true now as it will ever be, for the resurrection is the Will of God, Which knows no time and no exceptions."

The problem we have is that we *currently* are so immersed in an experience that seems totally contrary to this, so surrounded by it all day long, that we think of this truth as distant and difficult to stay in touch with. Like it's some far off possibility that we can't access. And so the ego and all its stories of things going wrong, suffering, murder and death seem all too "real" and true.

But gradually we shift towards allegiance to the truth and discover something. It is not a matter of there being a war between the light and the dark. Instead, the darkness is at war with ITSELF and the light is UNTOUCHED. Everything real is as immaculate and perfect and innocent as it has always been, because that is God's will and NOTHING can change God's will in any real way.

We've bought into the lies of dreaming all too strongly and have become convinced of them. We seem to believe that what we are is not something real or permanent, and that we can be changed. That somehow we did sin and changed from being innocent to being a sinner. And then we think that we really are having sickness, suffering, problems and death, as though these things can really happen or DO something to us.

Underneath all of these LIES we are still perfectly innocent, holy, immortal, invulnerable, unaffected, unchanged, perfect, eternal, happy, loved and loving, in divine health forever, free form fear and death, and incapable of separation.

So the question arises, simply, which of these two "realities" are you going to believe in and be allegiant to? Are you going to recognize that it is ACTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE for anything to be affected or die, or are you going to keep believing that death CAN affect God's creation? That's the choice that you have. The illusion that there is an opposite to life, or whether there is ONLY life.

Slowly but surely I find more and more evidence and reason telling me of the IMMORTALITY and invulnerability of all things God created. The utter IMPOSSIBILITY of anything the ego claims. It is impossible to sin. It is impossible to oppose God's will. It is impossible to die. It is impossible for God's Son to suffer. It is impossible that you have "real reasons" to be afraid. All of it is a dream. A fiction. A huge massive lie, like a cover-up.

It is VERY reassuring to realize then that THE TRUTH IS that everything real is still exactly the way God created it. What you are is real and cannot be changed or hurt or affected in any way. What your brother is cannot sin against you or be sinned against. It is literally absolutely impossible for you to sin AT ALL. Sin is NOT real. It is fake sin. Just as guilt is fake guilt, fear is fake fear, sickness is fake sickness, and death is fake death.

What a relief it is to realize the sheer PROTECTION of God's Kingdom. Nothing real can or has been threatened whatsoever. Anything else MUST be unreal and not truly happening. Even the worst war and most horrific death MUST be a total bullshit lie with NO TRUTH in it whatsoever.

No illusion can assail the creations of God. Darkness cannot blot out the light. The ego cannot replace the Sons of God with death. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for you to sin against or leave God or oppose His will. We must remember that anything that says otherwise MUST be a fictional illusion, just some kind of lie or tall tale or deception, a form of denial, because in truth it is IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO DIE.

What you ARE, in reality, is deathless, ageless, timeless, spaceless, immortal, invincible, invulnerable, eternal, impenetrable, unchangeable, permanent, fixed forever, and totally beyond any threat or danger.

So the challenge we are faced with is the contrasting and clarifying of these two positions. One says you are forever immortal and nothing else can ever be true. The other says you are mortal and weak and afraid and must suffer and can actually die. Only one of these two can be true. And if God's version is the truth, the other must be TOTALLY false.

Coming to realize that God's creation is always PERMANENT and utterly beyond all damage or conflict has tremendous peace to it. The sheer impossibility of it being hurt in any way. It is so powerful. Like an immovable object, it asserts itself and simply IS, forever, and nothing else can ever change it. In the face of it, the ego has absolutely no room to even EXIST.

Do you think Heaven is concerned? Is heaven trembling in fear at what the ego or the darkness might do? Is there really upset over what has happened? Has even one of God's children ever been really threatened? Are we not ETERNALLY SAFE FOREVER IN GOD? Can lies and illusions and little shadows of despair ever truly DO ANYTHING to anything real? Is heaven at war with the ego? Is the Holy Spirit fighting with the ego? He simply RECOGNIZES that THERE IS NO REAL EGO. So what's there to worry about?

We're busy freaking out that everything has gone to shit, and in reality, NOTHING HAS HAPPENED! We keep fearing that we're becoming sick and old and dead and this is impossible. We keep worrying about what's becoming of the world and yet it doesn't even exist. We are so concerned that we've gone off the rails and will never get home, but we're already still there! How bizarre this grand illusion that so many things have gone wrong, when in fact NOT ONE SINGLE THING HAS GONE WRONG AND NEVER WILL.

How much PEACE there is in realizing this freedom from FICTIONS of suffering. God, His Kingdom and His Holy Sons are not merely hiding away from the world hoping not to be attacked by it. Rather, they know that the world is TOTALLY FICTIONAL and does not really exist at all. There IS NO THREAT, there IS NO DANGER, there IS NO ATTACK, there IS NO DEATH. All of this worldly stuff, it's just totally bullshit. All of it. None of it is true! The secret to salvation is that THERE IS NOTHING TO BE SAVED FROM!!!!

ONLY THE TRUTH IS TRUE. ONLY THE CREATIONS OF LIGHT ARE REAL. ONLY THE KINGDOM OF GOD EXISTS. THERE IS NO WORLD. NOTHING REAL CAN BE THREATENED. NOTHING UNREAL EXISTS.

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

The body is not alive, and the body is not dead.

Life is eternal permanent life which sees no death.

The body seems to symbolise life by seeming to be what we call alive, for a while.

Then the body seems to symbolise what we call death.

But at no time is the body really alive, or dead. It is not permanent and does not last forever.

When it comes into being it is not really life or a life form. And while it seems to live it is not really alive. And when it seems to die it is not really dead.

But by not being really dead this does not mean that it is actually alive either. The body is not either alive, or dead.

The body is actually nothing, because it is an illusion in a dream. It sometimes seems like life, and sometimes it seems like death, but these are both made up meanings and labels given to something which is not really anything.

"In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death."

A person (body) who is dead was not alive prior to the death. The death is not the end of life, because the body was not really life to begin with.

A body in a dead state is actually not really any different to a body in a living state. Even when the body was seeming to be alive it was not really alive, and it was not really the person.

"As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego. EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth."

The coming and going of a body says nothing whatsoever about the immortal spirit beings who temporarily use them from time to time. A person is no more alive or dead at any time because a person - a spirit being - can only be alive forever, and never dies.

"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"

In a world of bodies in which we are deceived and believe that bodies are people and bodies are alive and bodies must avoid death at all costs, we fear the end of the body. But we only fear its end when we are identified with the body and think we are the body.

Anyone who believes they are a body will be afraid because the body can be attacked, the body is always in a state of change and instability, and the body eventually will likely die. Or at least, will transform its form into a state that we have decided to arbitrarily call death. A death that we make out to be an enemy to be avoided at all costs.

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

"They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams."

There is then a resistance against the "death state" happening, because it's in the interests of body-identified people to stay in their bodies for as long as possible. And to keep others in their bodies for as long as possible. Leaving the body or the world is seen as a "very bad thing".

There is then a fear of the death state and a resistance against it happening and an attempt to avoid it at all costs. This entails digging in heels, pulling all the strings, being in denial, living in fear, and trying not to "die".

"As long as you believe that, to be with a body, is companionship, you will be COMPELLED to attempt to keep your brother IN his body, HELD THERE BY GUILT."

But all this really does is increase a sense of separation between the state of the seemingly living body and the state of the dead body, which increases the belief that an illusory world is real. It comes from body identification and an unwillingness to recognize that bodies were never alive in the first place.

When you are constantly trying to avoid "the end", you're doing so to preserve you "being in a body", and the deadly ending is seen as the termination of your self. If bodies are real then a person dying is seen as their extinction, beyond which they stop existing. They go down with the ship. There is no hope there. And if you see a person AS a body that dies, you MUST experience loss.

But by identifying a person as a spiritual immortal being who can never die, and who lives forever in life, and never really was a body, and never could be "alive" as one or dead as one, your mind is lifted out of the hellish nightmare of fearing death.

To fear death is really also to fear life, because you can't do one without the other. And if you are fearing life you are not really living. And living doesn't mean being a body as much as possible. It means being a body as little as possible, and eventually not at all.

No one who appears to be a body has ever really died, or lived. Bodies are not alive. They are illusions of life. Your mindset should not be catering to the social norm of trying to preserve body incarnation for as long as possible.

It should be recognising that souls use bodies only so long as they are useful for serving the soul's long-term multi-lifetime goal of reunion with God. When the body is no longer serving that purpose, the soul should leave, and this should not be seen as a tragedy.

Bodies are not the central core or heart of a person nor should everything revolve around whether they are there or not. They are temporarily vehicles to be used as tools for a while and then put aside while the soul moves on to something else.

When a person leaves the body they absolutely do not end or die or stop in any way. They are immortal timeless endless beings who live forever, and were never really the encounter suits that they appeared to animate while they showed up here. Bodies are not real, they are dream figures in a dream world. People are not bodies. Bodies do not really exist at all.

"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all."

"I am not a body I am free."

"Freedom must be impossible as long as you perceive a body as yourself. The body is a limit. Who would seek for freedom in a body looks for it where it can not be found. The mind can be made free when it no longer sees itself as in a body, firmly tied to it, and sheltered by its presence."

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

"The world is not left by death but by truth, and truth CAN be known by all those for whom the Kingdom was created, and for whom it waits."

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is NOT in Heaven is not ANYWHERE."

What you believe is true, you will believe is true of you, and therefore defines what you are. You become one with whatever you believe is true. If you believe and trust God's truth, you will identify with your soul/spirit. If you believe and trust the ego, the body and the world, you will believe you are these things.

In order to identify with spirit, you have to believe that spirit's qualities are true of you. And you also have to believe that the ego/body/world's properties are NOT a part of what you are. Therefore, all of the ego reactions, upset emotions, hurts, angers, fears, guilts, shames, losses, loneliness, desperation, angst etc must all be a part of something which you are NOT.

Your sense of what I am and what is my self, my identity, has to be separated out from all the things that are not of God. You have to tell yourself that you're not the body, nor are you the ego reactions or emotions or thoughts. Whatever the ego is, as nebulous and hidden as it seems to be, only the ego can actually suffer, only the ego can be guilty, and only the ego can seem to die.

You have to tell yourself that these things are not a part of yourself. You as immortal spirit cannot suffer, cannot be upset, cannot be unhappy, cannot be sick or dead, cannot be afraid or guilty, cannot have loss or grief, cannot be threatened or damaged, cannot sin or be evil, and can have no part of the body or the world.

Jesus tells us that he has nothing that does not come from God, and that this is the only difference between us. Because we believe we have and are something that does not come from God. We think we are bodies and egos and the world. We think we are upsets and stress and turmoil. We think it is us that is having and experiencing and being these things. But it isn't a part of who we really are, all of these upsets are an illusion.

How can you be upset when you are immortal and perfect? How can you have loss and grief when you have everything? How can you have suffering of any kind when you are invulnerable and eternal? You have to identify with being that which is perfect forever, flawless and immortal and unassailable, strong and innocent and powerful.

Your whole sense of self - of what am I, what is true of me, has to filter out and reject any experience or thought or feeling that is not in line with God's creation.

You remain as God created you. You are perfect spirit. You are holy and pure. There is no ego in you, no body in you, no earth in you. You are not of this world. You are of God, and anything not of God is not you.

"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The main difference between us as yet is that I have NOTHING ELSE. This leaves me in a state of true holiness, which is only a POTENTIAL in you."

"Identify with love, and you are home. Identify with love, and find your Self."

"Identity in Christ is fully recognized as set forever, beyond all change and incorruptible."

"There are those who have reached God directly, retaining no trace of worldly limits and remembering their own Identity perfectly."

"You will identify with what you think will make you safe. Whatever it may be, you will believe that it is one with you."

"Identify with love, and you are home. Identify with love, and find your Self."

"I will identify with what I think is refuge and security."

"Try to identify with the part of your mind where stillness and peace reign forever."

"Identify with fear, and you will be a stranger to yourself."

"To identify with the ego is to attack yourself, and MAKE YOURSELF POOR."

"It follows, then, that if you identify WITH the ego, you MUST perceive yourself as guilty."

"The belief in hell is inescapable to those who identify with the ego."

"Guilt is the only need the ego has, and, as long as you identify WITH it, guilt will remain ATTRACTIVE to you."

"You who identify with your egos cannot believe that God loves you."

"My true Identity abides in You."

"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."

"Father, my thanks to You for what I am; for keeping my identity untouched and sinless in the midst of all the thoughts of sin my foolish mind made up."

"Let me remember You created me. Let me remember my Identity."

"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. Deny your own identity and you assail the universe alone, without a friend, a tiny particle of dust against the legions of your enemies. Deny your own identity and look on evil, sin and death, and watch despair snatch from your fingers every scrap of hope, leaving you nothing but the wish to die."

"Identity in Christ is fully recognized as set forever, beyond all change and incorruptible."

"Identity in dreams is meaningless BECAUSE the dreamer and the dream are one."

"Then I lose myself in my Identity, and recognize that Christ is but my Self."

"Thanks be to You for Your eternal gifts, and thanks to You for my Identity."

"What could we seek but our Identity?"

"Your altar stands serene and undefiled. It is the holy altar to my Self, and there I find my true Identity."

"But we have listened to Your Voice, and learned exactly what to do to be restored to Heaven and our true Identity."

"My true identity is so secure, so lofty, sinless, glorious and great, wholly beneficent and free from guilt, that Heaven looks to It to give it light."

"In this equality is Christ restored as one Identity, in Which all Sons of God acknowledge that they all are one."

"Identity and function are the same, and BY your function do you know yourself."

"In a split mind, identity MUST seem to be divided."

"And we have already learned that this identity is shared."

"Your goal is to find out who you are, having denied your identity by attacking creation and its Creator."

"By seeking after such things the mind associates itself with the body, obscuring its identity and losing sight of what it really is."

"For self-condemnation is a decision about identity, and no-one doubts what he believes he is."

"Here you understand the Word, the Name Which God has given you; the One Identity Which all things share; the one acknowledgment of what is true."

"There are those who have reached God directly, retaining no trace of worldly limits and remembering their own Identity perfectly." "Again, how simple is salvation! It is merely a statement of your true identity."

"But there is need for help beyond yourself as you are circumscribed by false beliefs about your Identity, Which God alone established in reality."

"Today we will again give thanks for our identity in God. Our home is safe, protection guaranteed in all we do, power and strength available to us in all our undertakings. We can fail in nothing."

"Remember if you SHARE an evil dream, you will believe you ARE the dream you share. And, fearing it, you will not WANT to know your own identity, because you think that IT is fearful."

"Those who have joined their brothers HAVE detached themselves from their belief that their identity lies in the ego. "

"Do you not WANT to know your own identity?"

"Remember always that your identity is shared, and that its sharing IS its reality."

"Be confident that you have never lost your identity and the extension which maintains it in wholeness and peace."

"They do not realize that, to deny God, is to deny their own identity"

I notice myself wavering back and forth in trust, between believing the ego's temptations that something is going wrong, versus recognizing the truth that nothing can go wrong.

On the one hand, the truth says we are all immortal and invulnerable and sinless and holy, in perfect health and guaranteed happiness, alive forever in God and incapable of suffering.

Then on the other hand, stuff happens in the world and it tempts me to believe that something can't be healed or undone or fixed, something is irreversible, something bad has happened or there is no hope.

I sometimes notice that I'm buying into this ego victimhood illusions stuff, and then remember that the truth says something much more permanent and hope-filled. But I'm still tentative about trusting it fully. There is always this ego allegiance which says, "well... I'm not quite sure, what about..."

Sometimes the truth seems unbelievable. Sometimes the idea of immortality, eternal life, divine health, perfect holiness, invulnerability, being cause not effect, etc, seems so high and lofty, it seems difficult to really deeply believe it, at all times.

It's a matter of trust. I don't fully trust it yet. But some part of me has opened up to it and has trusted it to some degree, because at least at times I doubt my ego beliefs which speak the total opposite and make problems real.

I can see the clarity and light in siding with the truth and the promise it holds, which seems in the long term to be a beacon of certainty and joy, but in the meantime I dip in and out of it, sometimes much more miraculously-minded and sometimes just coasting along unconsciously.

I like in the course when Jesus says, comfortingly, "at least you are no longer wholly insane". lol

Regardless of how much ego you have right now, your true enlightened holy immortal self is already in you. It is merely HIDDEN behind ego blocks to awareness. You are STILL as God created you. Even right now you can part the seas of the mind and access the love of God.

"I rest in God."

"There is a place in you where this whole world has been forgotten. Where no memory of sin and of illusion linger still. There is a place in you which time has left, and echoes of eternity are heard. There is a resting place so still no sound except a hymn to Heaven rises up to gladden God the Father and the Son."

"This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true."

"If Love created you like Itself this Self must be in you. And somewhere in your mind It is there for you to find."

"There is a place in you which time has left, and echoes of eternity are heard. There is a resting place so still no sound except a hymn to Heaven rises up to gladden God the Father and the Son."

"And be you thankful that there IS a place where truth and beauty wait for you. Go on to meet them gladly, and learn how much awaits you, for the simple willingness to give up nothing, BECAUSE it is nothing."

"God, and the power of God, will take their rightful place in you, and you will experience the full communication of ideas with ideas."

"There is a place in you where there is perfect peace. There is a place in you where nothing is impossible. There is a place in you where the strength of God abides."

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."

What do you mean, you're not treating me exactly the way that I expect you to? How dare you! lol

"Respect" is a term that egos love to use. It's supposed to be a sign of treating someone right. But there's more going on than meets the eye.

When someone is in ego, they have a lot of insecurities. They're carrying guilt and shame, living in fear, feeling unworthy of love, etc. They are not treating themselves and others with love.

As a result, the person becomes irresponsible, disowning themselves and their power. They project causality outside themselves and attach it to other people. They then expect other people to be the ones who act responsibly toward them.

This is the same as the ego's form of "forgiveness to destroy", in which others are expected to change while the person stays the same.

Effectively the whole world revolves around the person as the ruler of their kingdom, as though they are sitting on a throne and everyone must worship them. If the inferior external people do not measure up or treat them right, anger and murder become justified.

You'll notice that people who NEED "respect" from others, also become intimidating, aggressive, abusive, threatening and violent. Especially if the respect is not given, as they see it.

Only a victim needs respect. Only an attacker demands respect. Only an unloving and truly "disrespectful" person wants others to respect them.

This idea of respect is completely backwards. It says that everyone else is to blame for your suffering, and its all their fault, they're sinners, and they have to change their wicked ways in order for you to be happy.

If they treat you how you think you want to be treated, you'll consider them "respecting you". But what that means is they are agreeing with your evaluation of yourself as some kind of important special figure.

If they go along with your inflated ego, they are "respecting" it, effectively worshipping it like a God. This triggers the special love. If they don't go along with your control and your dominance and your threat of revenge, out comes the special hate.

An immortal innocent holy son of God does not need the respect of others. It does not matter what other people do in their attempts to "treat" you in any way at all, because you cannot BE "treated". You choose what you experience, not them.

Someone who has taken full responsibility for causing everything they experience, including all of their feelings, cannot be caused by others. Not do they have a lack of love, or a need to coerce others into giving it to them.

A self-loving person doesn't become a terrorist, or an intimidator, or a crime boss, or a ruler over people, or a dictator, or a tyrant, or any kind of threatening person who DEMANDS that others AGREE with their evaluation of themselves.

You would actually be doing a service to someone who believes something FALSE about themselves, such as that they don't deserve love, and instead giving them that love.

Giving love is the higher "form" of true respect, but isn't there as some kind of idol worship. It's an agreement as to the true higher nature of a person in spirit, rather than pandering to their ego.

Yes we all want to be "respected" or at least "not attacked", preferably. But this is only a short-term goal. In the big picture we should be working towards NOT NEEDING people to treat us a certain way. We are supposed to meet whatever happens with forgiveness, not revenge.

Yes, sure, let's all be "reasonably respectful" to each other.. as in, how about let's not be trying to murder each other. But at the same time, we have to be careful not to believe that this "treatment" of people is there in order to appease their egos. It's not TRULY respectful of a person to insinuate that they need to be treated a certain way in order to avoid them being "hurt".

We are immortal beings who ultimately cannot be hurt, cannot be upset, cannot be offended, cannot be terrorized, cannot be attacked and cannot be destroyed. This has to be central and foremost in our view of ourselves and others. Recognizing this in others is the only sign of true respect and love.

"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." UrT27I10

"We have emphasized that the miracle, or the EXPRESSION of Atonement, is always a sign of real respect from the worthy TO the worthy. This worth IS re-established by the Atonement." UrT2E3

"An Elder Brother is entitled to respect for his greater experience, and a reasonable amount of obedience for his greater wisdom. He is also entitled to love, because he is a brother, and also to devotion, if he is devoted. It is only my own devotion that entitles me to yours. But you will notice that I have knelt at your altar as readily as I would ever have you kneel at mine." UrT1B40X

"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." UrW190L5

We may not realize it, but from birth onward most of us came to believe that we are our body. That literally, this physical object with arms and legs is our own self. There's my toes, there's my fingers, there's my face, there's "me". Parents talked about "you" this way. You talked about you this way, asking yourself, what am I?

And we look upon this strange thing in the mirror and cannot quite fathom what it is why or how we came to be this strangely shaped creature of extraordinary complexity, the likes of which we have no idea how it functions.

What we have to realize is that this is the false starting point, and this is the state of imprisonment. Believing we are a body is completely a mistake. A total error in perception. And in fact the body was made with and in order to produce false perception.

The body's eyes cannot see, the ears cannot hear, all its senses are back to front and it reports on illusions as if they're real. The body is a lie machine. And yet there we are starting out by believing every word it says, everything it does, everything it seems to tell us, even to the extent of believing it is our own self. And we are CLOSE to it that we think everything it experiences WE are experiencing directly.

So invested is this belief that we are a body, that we have taken something which is utterly not a body whatsoever and have tried to smush it together and bind it and join it and strap them together into one lump, to call it myself. We may not realize, there is a YOU, and then there is a BODY, and the two are not the same

In fact, the you that you really are is SO UNLIKE the body in every single way that if you were to catch sight of it you'd be astonished that you ever thought you could be a lump of flesh and bones. But since the body itself was made to block awareness of this, to act as a temptation device and a way to deceive ourselves, we're quite lost in it.

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

We did a VERY good job of deceiving ourselves. To such an extent that almost all conscious recognition of not being a body is blotted out by the body. And so as we attempt to become more spiritual or to reawaken, we're going to run up against a very basic fact.

The body is NOT who you are at all, but you heavily believe IT IS YOU. And on the basis of believing it is you, and backed up by everyone else believing their body is their self also, you have spent years upon years of reinforcing this "uniting" of self and body, regarding it as yourself, talking about it as if it's your self, worshipping it, cleaning it, feeding it, sexing it, using it in various ways, all under the seemingly clever guise that this is YOU doing this stuff, it's YOU looking in the mirror, and it's YOU that's gorgeous today.

When you look at society, look at the news, look at how people talk about bodies. Almost every reference to a person is ACTUALLY a reference to their body. "Joe did this"... well no, joe's body did. Joe is not a body. This is pretty serious, how far reaching this is. We've gone really really far into this distortion. Every single way that we confuse ourselves with "our own body" - and by the way you don't really HAVE a body as a spirit - is a mistaken false perception of ourselves. It's delusional. It's like saying you are your jeans and t-shirt and shoes.

We've become lost in our bodies. Tangled up in form. Confused about who and what we are. Deceived by appearances. Tempted to regard this object in the mirror as though it is our self and to then preen it and decorate it and worship it and feel bad about it all based on the belief that it is you. This is the big problem that needs correction. This is body identification - whereby the Son of God is trying to prove he is NOT a spirit, NOT a mind, and ONLY a body. It's the complete opposite of awakening.

So if we're on a spiritual path to God, then we're going to have realize, that any progress towards that goal will have to entail learning that YOU ARE NOT A BODY. In fact, you're not even remotely a body, nor do you really have one. You are immortal spirit. "You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do."

By confusing your IDENTITY with the human body and thinking of it as "my self", you are confused, and confusion is fear. And this is also level confusion. And it is also sickness. And it is a way to defend against the truth. And it's a choice to suffer. It's a form of self attack, and an attack on others, to regard yourself as physical.

To emphasize the qualities, characteristics, gender, sexual persuasion, desirable or undesirable features, shape, size, color, ethic origin, hairstyle, musculature, skinniness, sexiness, attractiveness, ugliness, or any other attribute of the body as being something that determines or says ANYTHING about YOU, is delusional. It is confusion about who and what you are.

But we are addicted to using the body like some kind of idol worship figure that we hold in very high regard (or low) as a statement of "what I am like". Yet nothing about the body applies to you at all. We can get lost in how proud we are to be a woman or a man or gay or straight or white or black or pretty much anything else. NONE of it is true of you! You are made of light. You are a spirit being. You have immortality. Your body is an entire LAYER of illusions covering over your real self. It's just a picture that you show to the world to pretend you are not yourself.

"The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it"

"The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards."

"The body is the idea of who you are not."

"For what you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

"Can you who see yourselves WITHIN a body, know yourself AS AN IDEA?"

"Freedom must be impossible as long as you perceive a body as yourself."

"The ego regards the body as its home, and DOES try to satisfy itself through the body."

"The body is the symbol of the ego, as the ego is the symbol of separation. And both are nothing more than attempts to LIMIT communication, and thereby TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE."

"Only by assigning to the mind the properties OF THE BODY, does separation SEEM to be possible."

"A PERSON conceives of himself as separate, largely because he perceives OF himself as bounded by a body."

"The body IS separate, and therefore CANNOT be part of you."

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

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"The man was an illusion, for he seemed to be a separate being, walking by himself, within a body that appeared to hold his self from Self, as all illusions do."

This means that all the ways that we believe and act as if we ARE the body, as though its prowess rubs off on us, as though we get credit or discredit for how the body looks, as though anything about it AT ALL says anything about you AT ALL, has to be undone. We have to be willing to let go of all the ways we have confused ourselves WITH it, so that we can come to the recognition that we are DISTINCT from it, and that it is NOT ourselves.

In a sense, we have to "separate out" what is REALLY YOU, your real self, and what is an illusion. "The body is a dream", so it is an illusion. IF you are confusing it with your sense of self, you are losing sight of your real self. Not being clear about WHAT you are - immortal spirit - you are unclear about what is real and what is an illusion. You cannot BE a body if you are to be real.

This means that your ENTIRE sense of identity - self - what you are - has to SHIFT away from the body, TOWARDS SPIRIT. To become spirit-identified. That is the goal. To let go of the body entirely. To be completely clear it is not you, and you do not need it, because it is not part of who and what you are. God did not create it, so it is not really part of your real self., and does not exist in reality or heaven.

The proper use of denial is to not BELIEVE that the body is real, and to therefore deny its existence, recognizing it is not yourself or anything real. The improper use of denial is to BELIEVE the body is real, while trying to deny it exists, which is actually a double denial. To believe bodies exists is a denial of your spirit. To then sacrifice the body is denial on top of denial. We have to carefully dismantle our belief that the body is real in the first place, shift our sense of identity back to its natural God-given state, and then accept the atonement truth that we are still THE SPIRIT that God created, NOT a body whatsoever.

Upon realizing you are spirit, clearly, and with no delusion about being a body, you may for a while be using the body. But now the body is merely a TOOL. Similar to how a carpenter would use a hammer to construct a chair, he would not for a moment become delusional and believe that he IS the hammer. It's just a device, an instrument, a piece of machinery. You can operate it and make it do stuff but at no time do you believe it is YOUR SELF.

And having recognized that your entire fulfillment comes from remembering who you ARE, you would no longer seek to use the body to GET anything, to "pleasure you", or to enter into illusions of joining at a physical level - knowing it is not possible, or necessary. "Minds need not bodies to communicate."

Full-on spirit-identification, christ-identification, son of God identification, sets you free from death, from the world, and from all bodies forever. You are not a body, you are free, because you are still as God created you. And those who know themselves are not confused about whether they are a walking flesh prison or not. Shifting to spirit means shifting away from EVERY sense of identity associated with the body form. Race, gender, sex, age, genetics, ancestry, shape, color, features, all of it.

You are only what God created. You are a shining star in heaven's womb. How could you be anything but God's divine creation.

There is a reason why you are immortal, by which I mean, completely invulnerable.

You have to understand what threat is, what danger is, what causes fear, and who is doing the attacking.

Believing that other people are capable of causing you to be hurt, is actually a mistaken perception and is not true.

It is actually you who attacks yourself, every time. Only you are capable of introducing 'separation' into your own mind, which is the root cause of all attack, all war, all sickness, all death.

Without that separation in your mind, that 'split', you literally return to wholeness, divine health, invulnerability and complete immortality.

And this is because the 'secret' is, that all forms of attack are self-attack, and all forms of suffering are self-induced. And it is actually impossible to suffer as a result of a cause outside of you, without you playing along and *pretending* that there can be harm.

The ultimate truth then is simply.... that in God's reality, where we live, there is ONLY immortality, there is ONLY invulnerability, and it's not even POSSIBLE to actually be hurt by something separate.

So while people may think, yeah, immortality is a stupid idea that is impossible and everyone dies.... well.... carry on choosing to die until you get it. Immortality is NATURAL. Mortality is unnatural.

In the separation, we tried to invent a world which was completely opposite to God's Kingdom. This resulted in false perception, and also the reversal of cause and effect.

The son, who is an effect of God, who is our cause, tried to be the cause of God, to create effects in Him. This was a kind of role reversal, and is the idea of original sin or the authority problem.

In this effort to oppose God, we dreamed of a world opposite to God. Given that God is truth, this world had to be false. And in opposing knowledge we invented perception. So simultaneously in the making of the world we entered directly into false perception. This world was made to also be completely opposite to God's world.

"The world is false perception."

"Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

So all this was happening at once in the separation:

* The complete opposition to the truth producing a false world* The opposition to knowledge producing false perception* Cause and effect are reversed, making the effect (dream) seem causal

We entered a state of unconsciousness, in which we dreamed of a false world, which was opposite to Heaven, AND in which cause and effect were reversed.This reversal of causality or "backwards perception", is what made you necessarily believe that the false world you made is NOT an effect of you dreaming, but instead is a CAUSE. ie that the world seem so have a LIFE of its own, or an alien will. And it also made you believe that you are NOT the dreamer or cause of the world, but rather the EFFECT of it. So you instantly went into a victim role, which is played out in physical matter and the "laws of physics."

Forgiveness, salvation, atonement, true perception etc, is what you arrive at when you REVERSE all this. It requires that you recognize the world is false, not true. It requires that you recognize the dream is coming FROM you not TO you. It requires the re-reversal of cause and effect (which is also level confusion), so that you recognize you are the NOT AFFECTED by the world in ANY WAY. You see yourself as cause, not effect ("This is a course in cause, not effect"). And you thus position your vantage point as a reflection of heaven.

If you look at how life typically is on the level of form, you can see all the ways that we made ourselves AT THE EFFECT of the very dream that we dreamed. This includes all victimhood roles, all reactions, all ego emotions, all of the senses of the body, and every way that the world seems capable of doing something to you.

It means vulnerability, the need for defenses, perceiving oneself as unfairly treated, fear of threats and dangers, grief and loss relating to parts of the dream which you value and lose, and all manner of suffering. It also includes any and all kinds of sickness and death, because death is nothing more than the firm belief that the WORLD is entirely the CAUSE of you and you are COMPLETELY AFFECTED by it with no will or power to do anything to stop it.

Every ego emotion, is a reaction, an EFFECT, produced by your mind, in response to your mind's parallel belief that THE WORLD is the cause of you. By believing the world is real and true, you give it power over you. And then you experience effects. So some person get's killed, you feel anger and sad and lost. Someone attacks you and you feel threatened. Some war breaks out and you fear for your life. Some plague spreads around the world and you worry about your continuation. Someone seems able to hurt you and you become angry at them.

The list of victim roles and the seeming reactions that it produces is endless. All of them are ways by which you believe you are CAUSED BY the world. That the world oppresses you, hurts you, changes you, defines you, dreams you, makes you what you are, decides your fate, ends your life against your will, destroys you, does things that "you like", gives you things "you want", and generally acts as the CAUSE OF everything you are. All of that is false perception and backwards causality.

So that means that all ego emotions are fake. Some people would say its "natural" or "healthy psychology" that you would feel loss or grief when someone dies. Or that it's normal to feel sad when something doesn't work out. Or that it's sane and rational to be angry because of what someone did to you. Or that you should feel happy because of the gifts someone gave you. Or that anyone would feel depressed if they had to go through what you went through. But ALL of that is complete bullshit. It is all part of believing that you are AT THE EFFECT of a dream which, in and of itself, has NO POWER to do anything.

This carries over to the body senses. "To sense is not to know". The body's senses are ways of BEING SUSCEPTIBLE or "sensitive to" the dream. They can only operate by BEING AFFECTED by the environment. You touch something and it relays a message to you, changing you, affecting you. You smell a bad smell and recoil. You see ugly sights and are driven to anger. You hear the sounds of hell and it frightens you. The physical senses were all designed to make the world seem real, to PROVE that you are AFFECTED BY the world, to sense what is there, and to lock in false perceptions. Even pleasure, which is interpreted as "being affected positively", is a form of victimhood and powerlessness.

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

Every physical sense is a form of vulnerability, susceptibility, effects, victimhood, the ability to be caused by something outside of you, and a way for you to "get" from the world. And the body was designed this way so that it would permanently be locked into a victim role and a false way of perceiving.

"These eyes made not to see will never see.""The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen.""Everything the body sees is a form of conflict.""The body sees only the forms of error.""Nothing so blinding as perception of form."

The body essentially was built on the idea of sin ("the body is the idea of sin made flesh") and on the reversal of causality. It was meant to be at the EFFECT OF the dream. It testifies to the ways in which the dream CAUSES you. And so the body is a lie.

Your function of forgiveness operates in an opposite direction to the seeming nature of the body, its senses, and to ALL beliefs and perceptions that the world can ever do anything to you.

In truth, you are immortal and you cannot die. You cannot be affected. You cannot be hurt or changed or made to suffer. Nothing can happen against your will. The dream has no power to oppress you or make you ill or sad or weak or frail. Nothing in the world can force you to be sick, or make you dead. Nothing can happen without you choosing it to. You cannot die without electing to. You cannot facilitate sickness without backwards perceptions. And literally you are beyond the reach of every illusion.

To recognize this is to completely reverse cause and effect in the dream, which means completely opposing and breaking all the laws of spacetime. All the laws of physics are completely backwards because they are designed to make the dream function AS IF the world is the CAUSE OF events. As if the world is first-hand reality. But the world is an EFFECT.

"Perception is a RESULT, not a cause." "The world IS perception."It is by COMPLETELY recognizing that the world CAUSES NOTHING and cannot do ANYTHING to you, that you return to a state of invulnerability, producing in the interim the INCORRUPTIBILITY OF THE BODY, in which the body becomes a symbol of eternal life and is devoid of all signs and symptoms of "being affected by the world." This includes the healing and prevention of any attack by anyone or anything. A demonstration of immortality and power over death.

Resurrection, which is the "surmounting of death", is the state of being THE CAUSE, and not the effect of the world. It is awareness of dreaming. And as the Course says, "For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming." This is the secret of salvation. The fact that the world IS NEVER the cause of ANYTHING. And the fact that YOU are the cause of everything, because YOU are the one dreaming it. And if someone seems to play a role in your dream of victimizing, or of being a victim, the truth is that NOTHING can affect you unless you make it do so.

Once you recognize that you are CAUSING the dream, and that the world CANNOT produce effects in you, ALL the ego emotional reactions must cease forever. You can no longer have reason to justify anger, to be sad or upset, to be unhappy, to have loss or grief, or even to be happy as a "result of" what the world "does to you". Not even through special relationships or idols you worship or valued objects or career success or any kind of INPUT coming from the world to CAUSE you to feel a certain way.

The only TRUE feelings are those which come OUT of you CAUSALLY, and extend through you. This includes love and joy and peace and happiness. You GIVE these through causation and sharing. They come out of you and extend. They are not the RESULT or EFFECT of anything in the world. The world cannot give you happiness OR unhappiness. They are not there because of what someone does for you or what you GET from the world. Positive or negative. Victim or reward.

"It takes great learning to both recognize and accept that the world has nothing to give.""This world holds nothing that I want""Teachers of God are willing to give up all the pleasures of the world."

This is why we have to learn that we are ONLY extenders of God's spirit, we are only GIVERS of life and love and happiness and joy, and we are CAUSAL. We are co-creators with God. We are not to need, require, depend on, want, desire, be attached to, or react to, ANYTHING in the world. ANYTHING AT ALL! Why would you need to when a) you are immortal and have everything and b) have inherited everything you need from God and c) can only be happy and at peace when you GIVE what you want to receive?

You cannot GET happiness from the world. You cannot GET freedom from the world. The world cannot give you life or immortality or invulnerability or protection or safety or love or peace or joy. It has no ABILITY to give, because the world has absolutely ZERO causality. It is NOT a cause. The world is ONLY an effect. It is your dream, that you are putting there."It is not a cause, but an EFFECT."

"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."

This is the essence of A Course in Miracles. BE THE CAUSE. BE THE POWER. Do not give power to a dream which is nothing but an effect of you. Do not believe in being affected BY anything or anyone in the world. God is the only cause of you and your brothers. Your brothers are NEVER the cause of each other, and you have never caused or been caused by them. Nothing real can be changed or threatened or made different by the world and its contents.

You are to reach a point of resurrection in which you CANNOT BE AFFECTED by the world. Where even the body CANNOT be sick OR die. Where your mind is so certain of its strength and power that there is NOTHING your holiness cannot DO (cause). Where you are so fully EXPRESSING love that you are miraculous all the time. Where you extend and inherit the power and love of God every second of every day. Where so much light and joy is flooding OUT of you through giving and thus receiving, that nothing from the OUTSIDE is able to come IN to you. Making you completely safe and invulnerable.

You are to cease believing that anything or anyone in the ENTIRE world, in the whole universe of spacetime, EVER has a power or causation over you, making you change, making you suffer, making you die, making you happy OR unhappy. You are to be BEYOND this dream and beyond this world. You are PRIOR to the dream. You are beyond sickness and death. You are immortal spirit and NOTHING can change that. All it requires is your total acceptance of this truth, the reclaiming of your immortal rights, and your willingness to express and know your true self. It is nothing short of reclaiming eternal life.

I used to think that "false empathy" meant when you are basically empathizing with someone, sympathizing, or sort of getting into their emotional drama etc....

Now I see it is more than that. It means really `joining` with someone in, and agreeing about, ANY kind of ego scenario, relating to ANY appearance or ANY illusion that covers up the immortal, God-created Real Self.

If a person comes along and is in any way demonstrating belief in being anything less than God created them, perfectly whole and holy and innocent and invulnerable, then that's an ego drama. If I go along with it, buy into it, join with them in it, participate in it, take it seriously, listen to it, judge it, engage with it or any of that, that's me entering into false empathy.

It's kind of like a false Oneness... a false joining, that says, I will join with you in a subjective illusion and pretend it is objectively real, and the two of us will then be 'infected' with this ego attitude and at least we'll agree with each other that this it the truth.

Real empathy then would entail absolutely not joining in ANY ego whatsoever, overlooking all ego, persona, and appearances, not believing in or taking seriously ANY presentation that runs against that (including anyone seeming to be sick, diseased, afraid, upset, etc)... holding the light, holding the truth, being a beacon, a leader, and strength that invites the other person to remember who they really are.

Everything in the ego's mindset looks like one thing but is actually something completely opposite.

e.g.

What we call attack, is actually retreat.

God cannot be attacked. When you try to attack God, if you were to go punch God in the face, guess what happens? Every effort you make to throw your fist forward, it's as though your fist goes nowhere, and instead the rest of your body is pushed backwards. I'm just using this as a 'visual' to make my point.

Metaphysically, energetically, mentally, any form of attack is really a withdrawal of cowardice and fear, a recoil into darkness and AWAY from love.

How can love be attacked when attack is a movement away from love?

This is why we are immortal.

Immortality cannot be attacked. Nothing real can be threatened. Illusions cannot assail the Kingdom of Heaven.

This isn' just information. This is the composition of reality.

Love is, and ego is not.

Love is, and attack is not.

Viciousness and terror goes hand in hand with being terrified. Torrorism IS fear.

Everything the ego does looks like one thing - attack - outward expression and forward motion towards harm - but is in fact the exact opposite - recoil away from and withdrawal from love.

Love is therefore always perfectly protected.

"The Kingdom is perfectly united and perfectly protected, and the ego will not prevail against it. Amen" - ACIM

This is why you cannot be really hurt. This is why nobody else can do anything to you. This is why you are permanently invulnerable. This is why you have IMMORTALITY and can never die.

There is no death, silly.

God has created you as an infinite, immortal soul, who is perfectly complete and lacking nothing.

There is nothing that you need to add to yourself to improve yourself or to make yourself in any way better than God created.

You are lacking nothing at all. You are perfect.

God created you as a beautiful soul filled with love and joy and perfectly creative. Fully equipped to exist in Heaven and to extend love forever. You need nothing else.

When Jesus says "There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else." he is talking about the fact that He is simply being ONLY the Self that God created. He has not added anything or taken anything away. He is being his normal, natural God-created self.

This perfect self is hiding underneath every idea of imperfection, lack, separation, limitation and death. God already has created you with perfection, to be perfect, forever. You are flawless.

And since you are created from creativity and from love, you are endowed with creativity and love. You are permanently miraculous. There is nothing that you cannot create with the power of the mind, in accordance with God's will, to increase the Kingdom.

Somewhere inside you, you know this. There is a place in which your soul is already within you, perfectly holy, undefiled, unchanged, unaffected, perfectly sane, happy and at peace. It's already there. God creates only permanent creations which cannot change.

Your soul is divine, forever. "Spirit is in a state of grace forever."

"I am as God created me.

I will remain forever as I was

Created by the Changeless like Himself.

And I am one with Him, and He with me."

The truth is that you are incapable of change. You cannot change yourself. No one else can change you. The world cannot change you. Even God cannot change you. You are exactly and precisely as you were created to be, and have never changed at all.

You have dreamed that change is possible, and this has produced dreams where you changed into something you're not. Dreams where you transitioned from innocence to guilt, from wholeness to destruction, from eternal life to death. But all of these must be a fantasy if God's will be that you are unchangeable forever.

It is because you cannot be changed by anything, that you are immortal. You are permanent and you will live forever. Since you cannot be changed, you cannot be attacked or hurt, threatened or destroyed. You cannot become corrupt or turn to evil. Nor can you alter your real identity and nature. Unchangeable, unchanged, and unchanging, you must still be exactly as God created you to be. You must still be exactly the original self that was given, without the slightest degradation or aging or decay or transformation. Without growth or withering. Without a change of any kind.

Your complete lack of change guarantees permanent peace. If nothing can disturb you, your peace cannot be disturbed. If nothing can attack and change you, you have no reason for worry. If there is no power in all of existence capable of redefining you, you are not in danger of being overthrown, rewritten, altered, abused, hurt or forgotten.

You are absolute and fixed. You are infinite and unlimited. You are immortal and endless. You do not falter, you do not fail. You do not have good days and bad days. You do not cease, and you do not begin. There is nothing you can do to destroy yourself or anyone else. And nothing in all existence can ever bring an end to your life.

"You have NOT attacked God, and you DO love Him. Can you change your reality? No-one can will to destroy himself. When you think you are attacking your SELF, it is a sure sign that you hate what you think you are. And this, and ONLY this, can BE attacked by you. What you THINK you are CAN be hateful, and what this strange image makes you do can be very destructive. The destruction is no more real than the image, but those who make idols DO worship them. The idols are nothing, but their worshippers are the Sons of God in sickness."

This is what you have to remember and attune to if you want to be at peace. Only the immortal can afford to rest eternally, certain of their endless indestructibility and invulnerability. Sure of their absolute perfect protection by the laws of God. Convinced that nothing in the world of dreams can alter them in any way, upset them, disturb them, horrify them, harm them or destroy them.

You are completely unchangeable. The only meaningful change possible, now that you have dreamed of change being possible, is to change your mind about the belief that change is possible. This means learning to accept that you really cannot change yourself, and you have never changed yourself. That you cannot change others either, except to restore to them the full awareness and expression of who they already are as given by God.

Forgiveness looks upon the unchangeable and changes it not. It is a direct recognition of reality and truth. It sees only the truth that sin has never been possible, because to sin is to change. If God's creation were capable of being changed, in effect attacked, this indeed would be a sin. Believing such a change has been accomplished must be a mistake. God's Kingdom has never even for a moment lost anything, nor has it been even mildly influenced.

Real life is always real because reality is changeless. It is precisely because it never changes that it has reality at all. To change is to be conditional and to depend on something other than what is. The truth never changes and this is why it is true. It withstands all assaults and all attempts to modify or define it. You cannot define what is true. What is true is of God. You can but accept its changelessness and be at peace.

"Reality is changeless. It is this that MAKES it real, and KEEPS it separate from all appearances. It MUST transcend all form to be itself. It CANNOT change."

"Your brother has a changelessness in him beyond appearance and deception both."

"BECAUSE reality is changeless is a miracle already there to heal all things that change, and offer them to you to see in happy form, devoid of fear."

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen."

"Nothing is asked of you but to ACCEPT the Changeless and Eternal that abide in him, for YOUR Identity is there."

"Who uses but Christ's vision finds a peace so deep and quiet, undisturbable and wholly changeless, that the world contains no counterpart."

"Give thanks as well that you are changeless, for the Son He loves is changeless as Himself."

"What is timeless IS ALWAYS THERE because its BEING is eternally changeless."

"You are still My holy Son, forever innocent, forever loving and forever loved, as limitless as Your Creator, and completely changeless and forever pure."

"Put all your faith in the Love of God within you, eternal, changeless and forever unfailing."

"If you could realize NOTHING is changeless BUT the Will of God, this course would not be difficult for you."

"This in no way contradicts the changelessness of mind as GOD created it. But YOU think that you HAVE changed it, as long as you learn through the ego."

"When you heal, that is exactly what you ARE learning (doing). You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by perceiving (knowing) that he could NOT have changed his mind. That is how you perceive the Holy Spirit in him. It is ONLY the Holy Spirit in him that never changes His mind."

"And now God's KNOWLEDGE, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its Kingdom."

"When ANYTHING threatens your peace of mind, ask yourself "Has God changed His Mind about me?" Then ACCEPT His decision, for it is indeed changeless, and refuse to change your mind about YOURSELF."

"Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly but yet within Themselves, for They are everywhere."

"Nothing that God knows not exists. And what He knows exists forever, changelessly."

"Teaching aims at change, but God created ONLY the changeless."

"The miracle reminds you of a Cause forever present, perfectly untouched by time and interference. NEVER changed from what It IS. And YOU are Its effects, as changeless and as perfect as Itself."

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

"What is in him is changeless, and YOUR changelessness is recognized in its acknowledgment."

"His changeless state is BEYOND time, for his purity remains forever beyond attack, and without variability."

"The Christ revealed to you NOW has no past, for He is changeless. AND IN HIS CHANGELESSNESS LIES YOUR RELEASE."

"Yet love must be forever like itself, changeless forever, and forever WITHOUT alternative. And so it is."

"Yet in your mind is One Who KNOWS it is unbroken, and forever changeless."

"It is impossible that God lose His identity, for if He did, YOU WOULD LOSE YOURS. And BEING yours, He cannot change Himself, for your identity IS changeless. The miracle ACKNOWLEDGES His changelessness, by seeing His Son as he always was, and NOT as he would make himself."

"His Will does not vacillate, being changeless forever."

"The Soul always remains changeless, because it never leaves the sight of God."

What is true is true. God's truth and reality are the only truth and reality. God's truth is permanent and cannot be changed or damaged. This means that you can either accept tit, or you can PRETEND it is not true, but you cannot change it into something truly false.

This means you can accept or deny it, and you have no other options. Denial does not make the truth change or go away, it merely is an attempt to hide FROM it, pretending it is not there, while it still is there.

When we went into the separation from God, all we did was enter a state of denial. An attempt to shut out God from our awareness and bury our head in the sand pretending that God does not exist. The world was made in an effort to be somewhere where could doesn't exist, made in a thought of denial and completely insane.

This denial comes about through the belief that sin is real, which induces guilt. Guilt then becomes a block to the awareness of love, because you can only be guilty if you are unforgivable.

"The world was made as a place where God could enter not."

"For it is guilt that has obscured the Father to you, and it is guilt that has driven you insane."

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

So we made a world, opposite to God's world, made of denial, built on guilt and sin, in a state of insanity, attempting to go unconscious to God and therefore deny our own existence, aiming towards a state of self destruction and death.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son."

"We CANNOT be united in crucifixion and in death."

"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."

"The hell you made."

So we end up with a hellish world which is a state of the DENIAL OF GOD.

What we essentially did is we took our natural ability to DENY ILLUSIONS, to deny death, to deny attack and fear and sin and guilt, and we flipped it on its head. We used denial AGAINST reality instead of FOR the protection of it.

We're now in a position where this must be reversed. The world, and the body, are MADE OF denial. They are the denial of reality. They are the denial of the Kingdom. It now becomes our task to flip denial back around and USE IT properly, as a corrective device, to UNDO the "denial of God". To use denial in its proper way, as a defense and a protection AGAINST illusions, and as a way to keep illusions OUT of our minds.

The ego, our belief in the world of sin, is the denial of truth. This denial is in turn an ASSERTION that the opposite of the truth is true. That the opposite of eternal life, which is death, is true. False denial is therefore the ASSERTION of death. It's an attempt to EXPRESS death, to make death real, to make death happen, and to make death permanent.

The opposite to this assertion of death is the assertion of LIFE. And this is what resurrection means. And by asserting life we do the complete opposite to denying the truth. This runs AGAINST THE GRAIN of the world, against every way the world is set up, against all its forms and natures and laws, and VIOLATES every law of space and time.

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely."

To use denial correctly, ie the proper use of denial, you are to DENY that every aspect of the world of illusions is real. You are to DENY, reject, not believe, assert against, oppose, cancel, undermine, question, remove faith in, stop trusting, detach from, overlook, forgive, and let go of, all of the insane manifestations of the denial of God. And that includes the rejection of death.

"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it."

"It denies the ability of anything which is not of God to effect you in any way. This is the PROPER use of denial. It is not used to HIDE anything, but it IS used to correct error. It brings ALL error into the light, and since error and darkness are the same, it abolishes error automatically."

An improper use of denial happens when you first of all believe that something about the world is TRUE. Such as the belief that the body really exists. If you hold this belief, AND THEN claim that it does not exist in an attempt to "deny its existence", but without letting go of the denial of God that PRODUCES the body.... your belief in it, you are simultaneously denying God while trying to deny the body. This is now a denial UPON a denial, and is now twice removed from reality. It's a double-denial and this is what an IMPROPER use of denial means - using denial to make denial worse.

"The body is merely a fact. Its ABILITIES can, and frequently are, overevaluated. However, it is almost impossible to deny its existence. Those who do are engaging in a particularly unworthy form of denial." This does not mean bodies are REAL just because they are "facts", it just means the body is what it is and is an inherent part of the dream. It only means that if you PRETEND not to believe in them while YOU STILL HAVE ONE, you are probably in a double-denial. True denial would erase the body completely.

You have to be willing to question the ORIGINAL denial of God, the assertion of death, the belief that bodies really exist, the belief that the world is real. If you KEEP these beliefs while DECEIVING yourself, lying to yourself, that you believe the opposite, then you are IN DENIAL about being in denial. And that is how the ego operates. It is worse and not an improvement. The ego is always about INCREASING denial of the truth this way.

The body and the world and sickness and death MUST be denied, but they must be CORRECTLY and HONESTLY denied. That means recognizing how the world and body etc ARE denials of God's truth, and then DENYING them any power, reality, truth, belief, withdrawing all investment in them, cancelling your belief in them, and therefore UNDOING them. Doing this is ATONING, because "to atone is to undo." This is also why miracles UNDO. They cancel ie DENY illusions of death any existence.

"The miracle does nothing. All it does (which IS a kind of doing) is to UNdo. And thus it ***cancels*** out the interference to what HAS BEEN done. It does not add, but merely ***takes away.***"

"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."

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER."

It's important to realize that when you attempt to "cancel a sickness", that you don't get lost in making it real. If you assert, for example, that "that sickness does not exist.", which has some cancelling/denying properties to it, you ARE first of all making the sickness REAL and then are attempting to DENY the existence of the sickness. This is a double-bind and is an improper use of denial. In effect you work against yourself by asserting BOTH positions at once.

When you make statements of asserting the cancellation of sin/attack/death etc, if your focus is on what you see/dream of as "the apparent sickness", the physical real-seeming problem, know that your cancellation efforts are in fact attempts to CORRECT YOUR OWN MIND.

By reminding yourself of why what you see is NOT THERE, you are attempting to move from false perception TO true perception. You are trying to use denial to undo your own mistaken perceptions. This is important to do, but it is not the end of the story.

If you see a sickness and then work on "cancelling" your belief in it, this is an act of receiving CORRECTION for your own false perceptions. It's an attempt to correct your faulty beliefs and remove YOUR denial of the truth. This prepares you because it opens the way for true perception and for love to extend, but it should not really be mistaken for healing of ANOTHER person.

Focusing on someone's sickness and using cancellation/denial to try to "deprogram it", you're really just battling with your own false perceptions try to to get your own mind corrected so that you can SEE and RECOGNIZE that the sickness is not there. But this effort is one of moving UP TOWARD forgiveness/true perception, and isn't itself an EXPRESSION of healing love.

Once you have cancelled out your OWN mistaken judgements, and have used proper denial to remove your wrong beliefs and projections, moving into forgiveness, you regain vision. You become able to express love. You become able to extend. Your miracle working power THEN switches on. Because it is the expression of love and the ASSERTION OF LIFE that actually heals.

To atone and forgive and cancel and undo is really an act of flattening out, diminishing, depleting, taking power away from, what has been projected by you. This is preparation. Or you could say, this is your own purification. It's necessary in order to get your mind into a miracle minded state. But once you're IN that state, that's when the light starts to radiate unhindered, when you recognize that illusions ARE illusions, and when you can now GIVE life to another.

In the Song of Prayer, Jesus says, "forgive first, then pray." This is what it means. Cancel out all of YOUR beliefs in the reality and existence of the "real sickness" first, to purify your mind and perception, so that you can attain whole mindedness. "The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness." THEN you can pray to God to receive the love that you then can express as a miracle.

"Through prayer love is received. Through miracles love is expressed."

So you use a form of denial to get your mind back into the forgiving state. Then you are ready to ASSERT LIFE, and thus BE the resurrection. And now you can GIVE the strength and power of God's love, because you have opened yourself up to it. HIS love then does the healing for your brother through extension.

"They heal because they deny body-identification and affirm Soul-identification."

The assertion of LIFE is more than just to say, that you don't believe death exists. It's more than just the UNDOING of the idea of sickness. It's the active powerful forceful EXPRESSION of ACTUAL LIFE. The radiation of light into your brother's mind. The recognition of his holy christ self, and the willingness to extend love to him.

To assert life means to believe that ONLY LIFE IS TRUE. Add this means the COMPLETE REJECTION of the idea of sickness and death. Not merely to believe the IDEA that there is no death, but to actually BE THE LIFE that OVERRIDES it.

What this really boils down to is, we need to learn how to approach people from the perspective that they ARE AS GOD CREATED THEM. Even if they seem to be in a body. Our BELIEF about them must ONLY be that they are still as God created them. NOT off on some distant plane of existence, in some other dimension, but HERE AND NOW!

My brother, I do not believe you are a body. My brother, you are Christ. My brother, you are immortal. My brother, you cannot be sick or die. My brother, there is no sickness. My brother, you are still perfectly innocent. My brother, you are always happy. My brother, you deserve God's love. These kind of sentiments must be expressed and shared and given. Towards the person standing in front of you.

In a sense, we are to treat people NOW, while we're here, the way we WOULD treat them if we were in heaven. This is what holy relationship is about. It is a reflection of heaven's real relationships. You are to believe that the only things true of your brother are what GOD defined as true of him. And you are to relate to him in recognition that HE IS THAT NOW. From that perspective.

If he is pretending to suffer and be sick and die, you should be DISMISSING his attempt to prove his sinfulness and LAUGH in the face of his efforts to destroy what cannot be destroyed. You are to REMIND HIM of what is true of him. And that includes the FIRM CONVICTION that he is immortal and NOT SICK, HAS no faults, IS not sinful, CANNOT be hurt, HAS NEVER attacked, is UNFOUNDED in his guilt, and IS LITERALLY immortal and sane right now.

To do this requires YOUR denial that what the physical senses show is true. It requires YOU not being deceived by illusions. It requires YOU recognizing your brother's innocence and holiness. It requires YOU not being deluded to think he is a body, or you. It requires YOU to ASSERT that THERE IS ONLY ETERNAL LIFE, and anything else you might assert has to be dropped. And by affirming the truth about him only, devoid of ego bullshit, you INFUSE him with his own light and heal him.

"Teach only love, for that is what you are."

You must not believe that ANYONE is sick. Sickness is a lie. You must believe that everyone is immortal and can never die. There is no death, the son of God is free. EXPRESS THIS. Treat everyone like they are permanently alive, and recognize in this light that anything ELSE to the contrary must be a ridiculous lie. By affirming ONLY LIFE, you are the resurrection and the life, and you now SUPPORT AND HEAL your brother of HIS self-inflicted suffering.

By NOT SUPPORTING your brother's delusions about being sick or dead, or unhappy or depressed, or suffering or victimized, you WEAKEN his belief that these things are true of him and REMIND HIM of what is true. Your remembering IS HIS.

"Do not allow your brother not to remember (that he is immortal innocent spirit), for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN. To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember."

Use true denial OF denial, to reject what is not true, and assert what is true. The world, the body, sickness, suffering, death, MUST all be denied. Even the notion that any of these things EXISTS must be denied. There literally IS no real death or sickness. There is no real sin or guilt. This whole world is a LIE. It is the denial of truth. It is utterly FALSE!

You must not believe its ASSERTIONS that sickness, malfunction, damage, attack, vulnerability, corrosion, decay, or any other kind of imperfection exists. They were illusions made to blind you and keep you in hell.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world, God did not create it. For what He creates must be eternal as Himself."

REJECT THE WORLD. DENY IT ANY TRUTH. REJECT DEATH. CHOOSE LIFE. ASSERT RESURRECTION. HEAL YOUR BROTHER. REMIND HIM OF HIS IMMORTALITY.

When someone seems to die, it is an opportunity. Either you can experience the death as a symbol of separation, or as meaning nothing has happened at all (the atonement).

When you experience it as separation, you will resist it and a you'll think of it as being an end. You'll think something has been lost. Someone bad has happened. Something sad has occurred. Something of value has ended. Because these all take the illusion of 'an end' and believe it is real. IF something really has ended, then all of these experiences would be appropriate. So it really depends on how you see things.

Its possible when someone 'dies' to not have an experience of there having been an end at all. You can think of it as the person transitioning to a different place, that they continue on, and there hasn't been an end at all. Just like a change of rooms, or moving to a different location. Nothing is lost, there hasn't become an absence of value, separation hasn't been increased, the person hasn't been diminished, who and what they are hasn't had anything happen to them, and, essentially, its nothing to be upset about. You can see things this way, but only if you really are ready and willing to do so, which means having to question separation and all of its forms, which can take a lot of time and forgiveness.

So it's okay if you are in the 'something really happened' camp, having the feelings, feeling grief and loss and separation. Those are normal 'natural' feelings to have IF you are perceiving that "real death" has happened. But this isn't the only way to interpret death. It's also possible to recognize that nothing has happened. The person is not affected. They are Christ. They are immortal spirit. They are not a body. They never were a body. They have not ended and nothing has really come to an end at all. It's just a continuation of life - eternal life. That's the only real truth about it. And when you can experience it in this way, not believing in separation and not USING it to separate, you can be free of the 'side effects' of grief, loss, sadness, loneliness, anger etc... ALL of which arise out of *believing in* separation, which is a choice.

So when we get REAAAALLY honest and spiritual about this... it is in fact our OWN belief in separation which creates all sense of grief and loss. It is our own belief in it that gives it its power. The perceptions we have of something 'real' being lost or ending IS an optional way to perceive and you do not HAVE to perceive this way. There is another way. You can choose not to believe in separation at all and you can choose not to use death as an attack or a demonstration that ends are real.

So we have to admit that, even though when we perceive someone has died, which WILL make us very upset because we think separation has happened, WE are the one who is actually choosing to perceive separation and to USE the death to reinforce our belief in separation. AND, the use of it for that purpose IS in fact using it to prove that GOD IS DEAD... which is not exactly an insignificant side-effect. In fact it is the ego's secret intention, to make sure that all of the grief and upset and anger and abandonment that stems from 'they left me' or 'they died' is actually secretly WANTED, because it reinforces the belief that we are separate from God and this is precisely what our little ego wants to accomplish. So while we are in grief, we MUST also be secretly glad that the person or whatever has 'really died', and that there has really been a separation, because without that belief in separation you CANNOT GRIEVE. There is no loss.

This is all very hard to accept, of course. But that doesn't mean it is impossible, and it IS what is REQUIRED to come to if we are to FULLY accept Holy Spirit's healing and Jesus's truth and God's reality. We HAVE to be willing to stop using death to drive a wedge between ourselves and others. We have to stop using it as an ATTACK on them AND on ourselves.

In fact, when we use death to make a demonstration/statement about how the person 'does not exist', that is an ATTACK on that person. That isn't exactly a way of honoring them, and it isn't a way of respecting them or acknowledging their life or their innocence. Why do we launch automatically into an attitude of "you're dead" as soon as the person croaks? It's kind of like kicking the door shut as they leave, having just thrown them under the bus. Hardly loving or appreciative of who they are OR the fact that they are immortal. We effectively "celebrate the fact they died", regardless of the fact that we do it with tears and grief and sadness, when instead we should be celebrating that they are ALIVE. Maybe if we celebrated their immortality they WOULD NOT DIE and instead be HEALED? Hmmm, fancy that. So yes, now you're responsible for their death because you did not offer them healing. ;-)

We have to stop making out that it's ALL terrible and bad that a person 'really died' because we're only being dishonest about our ego motives. And we have to stop making out that when bodies 'die', there is an end of any kind. Ends are separations and separations are NOT REAL.

Jesus said, "let the dead bury the dead". This means, the people who believe in death - who are thus already dead themselves - are the only ones who VALUE it and are the only ones who GRIEVE and are the only ones who BELIEVE it has really happened and therefore they are the only ones who NEED a funeral. And when you think about it, although we love to hark on about the specialness of a person at a funeral - and I know this will push some buttons so I apologize - but let's be truthful. .. we must simultaneously be glad that the person is dead because if death is real that means we WANTED it. There is no escaping that. Either we support death or we don't. Either we say "yes death happened" or "there is only life". Which will you choose? And what you choose will completely determine the 'reactions' that you'll have when such events seem to transpire.

I am writing this partly because my Grandfather died yesterday. And I was thinking that I would or should feel upset, and Jesus stopped me, and he asked, "why?"... or more to the point, it was an assertion of strength that... NO.. you do not have to enter into perceptions of grief and loss and separation. You don't. It's optional. I can choose to focus on the TRUTH, which is that my "grandfather" is actually secretly CHRIST and he is completely immortal and innocent and nothing has ever happened to him, and he has never died, and he was never a body. If I DON'T perceive and believe this (without being in denial either - this is about honesty), then I am literally also saying that I AM DEAD AS WELL... or that I DIED WITH HIM.

To the ego what happens to others does not happen to us, due to the sense of separation - "he is dead, but I am alive, poor sod, rather him than me". But in truth, we are all joined and we are all ONE. And what we believe is true of others we HAVE to believe it applies to us also, whether consciously or unconsciously. So if I believe, ok, yes, that person is dead and separation is real and there has been a great big loss... then... that's what I'm saying about MYSELF, and it's what I'm saying about my relationship with God!

Because ultimately, all 'deaths' are symbolic expressions of the ego's attempt to destroy God, at which it chuckles with a sinister laugh and wrings its hands in glee. So I will not be party to that - to MY OWN death vicariously through that of another. I will not be party to the support of the idea of death and I will not be party to reinforcing the idea that the Son of God can be killed or that God is dead. And that means, I will only acknowledge our shared eternal life - that we are invulnerable and everlasting and DEATH HAS NOT OCCURRED.

So thanks Granddad for all the life and death that you demonstrated, but it's not true and I'm not buying it. And I know you still exist, so your cover is blown and death didn't work. Oh well.

God is life. "I can see peace instead of this". And I believe my Gramps would be proud of my standing up FOR him by supporting his LIFE rather than making his illusion of death into a big drama. I do not feel upset and I don't believe I'm in denial. Nothing has happened and death doesn't mean anything.

Mind in its natural state, experiences a sense of safety. This safety is based on the fact that the mind doesn't see itself as at the effect of anything external. It does not believe in being caused against its will. It does not have backwards/false perception. It also does not position itself as a victim or at the effect of the world.

This produces a kind of internally supported strength, in which the mind is not undermining itself and it recognizes it has nothing to fear. It feels "self contained", whole, and undivided. This internal unity is experienced as protection and as immortality. The mind doesn't see itself as vulnerable to anything because it recognizes it cannot be attacked or threatened.

Reality cannot be attacked because reality is permanent truth. It is inherently immortal and exists forever. Anything real, which includes you and your mind, has eternal life. Permanence is your natural condition. And the mind in its sane state is in touch with this permanence, and so recognizes it can never be altered by anything, rendering it invulnerable.

If the mind decides to move into ego, it is moving into positioning itself as a victim. It begins to see itself as at the effect of external forces, and made to suffer against its will. Perception reverses because cause is seen as coming from the world towards the self rather than the other way around. And this brings with it all manner of threat and danger, based on the idea that causes outside of you can do something to you against your will.

This then results in a change in the internal experience of the sense of safety and invulnerability. It's as though the mind "breaks open" its shell of protection, and develops a "wound". The wound seems open and bleeding, psychologically. This wounded part of the mind feels exposed, raw, accessible, attackable and threatened.

When this happens you feel like you are vulnerable. It's as though you open up a doorway and take off your protective armor, and now it seems possible that the things of the world can come into you, past your boundaries, and directly attack the core of your being. This is because your sense of identity has shifted from immortal spirit to the mortal body.

Your sense of self sees itself as self conscious and descended onto the battlefield, identified with a body, viewing itself as frail and weak and limited and incapable, and it now seems as if others have power over you. This produces a feeling like your insides are opening up, have become brittle and thin. And you'll feel like people have direct access to who and what you are as an attackable thing.

This feeling of being vulnerable to attack, living in fear, feels like being very exposed and unsafe. It's as though you, who are supposed to be walking around inside a perfect suit of protection, have lost your armor and are now a weak helpless thing that anyone can attack at will. This makes you afraid and threatened and there is a constant feeling of dread and stress. And the ego is in this state all the time.

You may also find that you then conflict with someone or they try to attack you. Because of your identification with that which can be attacked, as a victim, your mind actually believes in horizontal cause and effect. Out of the exposed vulnerable wound in the mind, you form a kind of psychological artificial "bridge" to the other person. Or maybe better described as a "bond" or "cords of fear." It's as if by believing that the other person is the cause of you, you are "tied to" their will power, causally and psychologically.

By believing that someone else has power to attack and affect you, your mind sees itself as being controlled by, caused by, influenced by, some external power. And that produces a sense that you are being tossed around on the waves. You'll try to forget about the encounter but you won't be able to drop it, because you haven't forgiven it. And fear thoughts about it will keep being generated by your mind in response to the perceptual belief that you are being attacked by them.

These fear cords will feel like areas of exposure within yourself, as though you have opened up a direct line to the person and they can cross that bridge and attack your insides directly. By hanging onto the belief in their ability to cause you, you maintain this bridge across which flows attack and keeps you in a constant state of fear.

These bridges of fear are dismantled through a correction process of forgiveness, in which you recognize and affirm that you are NOT at the effect of that person. They are not causing you, cannot attack you, have no power over you, and are not guilty of anything. This actually psychologically dismantles these horizontal cause-effect fear cords and you can feel them disappearing or "closing off".

The removal of this psychological "funnel of attack" seems to "close off" your mind to this idea of external causes. It's like sealing up a wound or fixing a mental leak. And as the sense of exposure and threat is closed up, the closing up feels like the formation of a barrier of protection. And then you feel safer because you are no longer "bleeding mind", and no longer believe that something external has direct access to your innermost self.

Through forgiveness then, the undoing of false beliefs in being caused by things outside of you, you gradually "close up" the exposed wounds, and the mind stops "bulging out" and returns to a "deflated" state, where you feel much safer and more protected. Fear diminishes and you feel like external things can no longer come into you. They can't access you because you are not on the battlefield, you are not an illusion or a body or an attackable thing.

Eventually with practice this should result in a "sealing up" of those psychological woulds, breaking down of those bridges of horizontal causation, and a growing sense of being surrounded by naturally protective walls of truth. Invulnerability increases and you feel more like you are "out of reach" of illusory attacks. You no longer believe the world CAN do anything to you, not even death or sickness.

You sort of, reabsorb into heaven, into God's womb, into a deeply immersive sense of safety, protection, harmlessness, integration, wholeness, peace and fearlessness. Because in spirit identification, in truth, you are actually unattackable and immortal. You resume your sense of being invulnerable because you see yourself as innocent and harmless. And the more you can feel this sense of innocence and safety, the less you feel like the world can even get anywhere near to what you are. And where there is perfect safety there is perfect peace.

"As long as belief in God and His Kingdom is assailed by ANY doubts in your minds, His perfect Accomplishment is NOT apparent to you. This is why you MUST be vigilant ON GOD'S BEHALF."

"It is only your awareness that NEEDS protection, because your BEING cannot be assailed. But a real sense of being CANNOT be yours while you are doubtful of what you ARE. THIS IS WHY VIGILANCE IS ESSENTIAL. Doubts ABOUT being MUST not enter your mind, or you CANNOT know what you are with certainty."

"The Kingdom is perfectly united and perfectly protected, and the ego will not prevail against it. Amen"

"Now are the lilies of his innocence untouched by guilt, and perfectly protected from the cold chill of fear and withering blight of sin alike."

"You always choose between your weakness and the strength of Christ in you."

"The strength of the Soul leaves no room for intrusions."

"The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible. ... Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. 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. Give instant remedy, should this occur, by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer. Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself: "I have forgotten what I really am, For I mistook my body for myself. Sickness is a defence against the truth, But I am not a body. And my mind Cannot attack. So I can not be sick."

Picture yourself in the spiritual realm (non physical world) standing at a console where you are planning your next lifetime.

You look at possible life events in a brochure which precicely and specifically tells you exactly what will happen and what the results of this will be.

You find one you don't like the look of, some tragedy or a sickness or a guilt trip, and you almost want to skip past it. But then you take a look at the list of benefits that arise from the experience.

These include an increased ability to love yourself, an enhanced sense of compassion for others, a greater awareness of who you really are, the opportunity to help others to learn how to care more, and perhaps an increased sense of joy once you finally learn to let go of the experience.

You weigh up your options. You say, well, the experience sounds like it SUCKS, but the payoff is huge. So then you say, well, what's there to lose, since I'm immortal spirit and can't really be hurt.

From that vantage point, you decide that the benefits are worth the hassle, so you say yep, sign me up. I'll go on that trip.

Then you incarnate, and so it unfolds. And you forget you chose it. And then it happens and you think it sucks, which it does. But then you start to learn the benefits of the experience and move past it, and you gain great spiritual rewards from it.

Later, looking back, you acknowledge yes, I got exactly what I wanted, I came away with a gift and I am much richer for it. I'm more aware now and I am closer to God. I am grateful.

Then you pick up the brochure again and go on another trip, and another, and another, until you pretty much run out of benefits that you can gain from it. You pick your last trip, knowing that it's the final one and that you just need to clean up some loose ends.

Off you go. It all happens. You wake up and receive the gift of reunion with God. And it's all been worth it.

I think one of the things that blocks us from healing others, is that we become deceived by their appearances. We look at the body and think that’s the person. We see signs of sickness. We see the person’s ego and it acts like a wall. We may see them as ONLY a body and ONLY an ego.

All of this is designed to block your sight so that you do NOT see the truth. The truth is really that the person is a perfect immortal being - the Christ - son of God - immaculate and perfect, with no flaws and no sickness. Technically speaking, no one actually needs any healing at all, because we HAVE NOT CHANGED since God created us. But we need to see this before we can help the MIND to come out of its confusion.

That’s hidden “behind” the illusory appearance that there’s something wrong with the person, they’re ill, they’re suffering, they are broken, they need treatment, they are in a dire situation which is threatening their existence, they need rescuing etc.

If we buy into all of these views of seeing their body, their ego, and stopping there, we can’t really be of much healing help. WE need to be able to affirm and reinforce the truth - that they are actually completely NOT sick, that they are absolutely whole and healed already, and that all of these appearances are NOT true.

To do this really requires us to embrace the idea that we ourselves are an immortal being of light with no imperfections, so that we can also then realize that other people must be that as well. By claiming ownership of being Christ, the son of God, flawless and permanent and eternal, we can then extend this to others.

If we haven’t claimed that for ourselves, how can we have it to give it? If we become deceived by beliefs that people are sick bodies, how can we see ourselves as incapable of sickness? Whatever applies to us applies to everyone. If you BELIEVE the sickness is TRUE of someone, you are reinforcing it.

The course says we should BEGIN by perceiving light. What does that mean but to see PAST all of the illusions and lies, past the body, past sickness, past their ego identity, to the truth that someone IS NOT sick at all. To acknowledge they are absolutely a divine perfect radiant being of light that has never changed.

This is seeing them as they really are. By focus on this we can JOIN with their mind at this level, and therefore prevent sickness in the mind. We are asked to extend the truth, the light, the love, the power of God, to another, and to continually keep extending it, so that the other is reminded and enlightened to their own pre-existing truth.

Healing is not about you putting in place the things that are missing, or making up for something lost, or trying to repair something that seems broken. The supposed “evidence” for ”sickness happening” is a deception and a lie in the first place, so why would we react to that? It’s a trap that leads to false empathy and mutual suffering.

It’s more about recognizing that there is no sickness, expressing only LIFE and only the belief in immortality, so that this REPLACES the illusion of “not life” and thus sickness. When we are overflowing with ONLY LIFE and NON-SICKNESS, we can give that life to others and resurrect them.

“The miracle-worker begins by PERCEIVING light, and translates HIS perception into sureness by continually extending it, and ACCEPTING ITS ACKNOWLEDGMENT. Its EFFECTS assure him IT IS THERE. The therapist does not heal; he LETS HEALING BE. HE can point to darkness, but he CANNOT bring light OF HIMSELF, for light is NOT of him. But being FOR him, it MUST be for his patient.”

“But do not give it power to REPLACE the changeless in him in your sight of him. There is no false appearance but will fade, if you request a miracle instead. There is no pain from which he is not free, if you would have him be but what he is. Why should you fear to see the Christ in him? You but behold yourself in what you see. As he is healed are YOU made free of guilt, and his appearance IS your own to you.”

Check out this epic quote:

”When you heal, that is exactly what you ARE learning (doing). You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by perceiving (knowing) that he could NOT have changed his mind. That is how you perceive the Holy Spirit in him. It is ONLY the Holy Spirit in him that never changes His mind. He himself must think he CAN, or he would not perceive himself as sick. He therefore does not know what his self IS. If YOU see only the changeless in him, you have not really changed him at all. But by changing your mind about HIS FOR him, you help him undo the change his ego thinks it has made in him.“

It's a good day not to try to be anything. How about we spend time acknowledging what is already true.

It is so easy to get into the mindset of the ego which says something is missing or lacking and that you need to go 'do' something in order to fix it. We can spend most of our time 'trying' to find answers and seeking for salvation.

What ACIM is telling us is that all truth is already established by God, it is already present, you are already perfect, and everything else is a lie. So with that information at hand, what we should really be focussing on is removing the blocks that keep us from being aware of WHAT ALREADY IS, rather than looking at it as having to go 'add' stuff that seems to be missing.

The ego trick is to assume that when stuff is missing, it's because it is really not there, and therefore you need to look SOMEWHERE ELSE to find it. It's kind of like a case of hide-and-seek. The ego throws a blanket of illusions over your car keys so that when you go and you look at where you think you left them, instead of seeing the car keys there's this 'cloaking device' in the way which distorts your vision and prevents you from seeing what is there. So you think, hmm, my car keys are not where I left them they must be somewhere else. And off you go hunting for them, looking for them everywhere except where they are. The problem is not that the keys are actually missing, the problem is they they are in plain sight but they are hidden behind some blockages/deceptions.

Its the same with you. Everything that you already are, as created by God, is already perfect and whole and missing nothing, except that it is covered up by a cloaking device which disguises your perception from being able to SEE it. So that gives you the impression that it's not there, and that you are not spiritual enough yet, or not good enough, or not loveable enough, and that all this love isn't true of you, so then you go off looking for it somewhere else. Well guess what happens when you go looking for something somewhere else - everywhere else - except where the thing is, because it's just hidden? YOU DO NOT FIND IT.

So, let's stop looking for shit where it does not exist. Instead, focus on acknowledging the pre-existing presence of what IS here right now. Let's UNCOVER what is hidden and covered up by ego lies, and let's ACKNOWLEDGE and RECOGNIZE what is true already. If you like, think of it as taking an inventory of what is already true and good about you, and the love that you already are.

You are already perfectly whole and loveabe and beautiful and innocent and holy.

You are already safe and invulnerable and immortal and protected.

You have already made huge strides in healing and awakening.

You have already learned a great deal that UN-does the bullshit distractions of the ego, for which you should be commended.

You are ALREADY as God created you and STILL as God created you and have not deviated from that.

All that you are is already present here right now even if it seems to be outside your present awareness. You are already an ascended master, you're just not aware of it.

You already deserve God's unconditional, unwavering love, all the time, and there is absolutely no outstanding debt that you owe or thing you have to do to make up for something you didn't do, to deserve or invoke that love. It's already being given fully.

All things you think you ever did have already been overlooked, forgiven and undone. It's just a matter of YOU now playing catch up. Holy Spirit already sees you with perfect forgiveness and has already forgiven you COMPLETELY.

You already deserve unconditional love and you are already recognized as innocent. All sins and crimes have been absolved and there has been no consequence from any of them that you need to be worried about 'cleaning up' or 'atoning for'.

You are already intimately connected to and joined with God in fullness and totality. There is nothing stopping you from being with God and there is no lack of anything in you that God put in place. You are complete and whole and finished and lacking nothing at all.

God already created you perfect and your perfection is already solidly in place and cannot be changed by you or anyone.

Nothing can happen to you, nothing has happened to you, nothing will happen to you, because God created you immortal and permanent and unchangeable. Everything else you think has happened that you think is not resolved IS already resolved because it HAS NOT HAPPENED.

All of your problems are solved. You do not have any REAL problems. Your imaginary problems are keeping you from being aware that you have no problems. Let them go.

Underneath your belief that you need to go seeking for what's missing outside of you, is everything inside of you which is everything you need and you aren't coming up short or empty handed. You already have 100% abundant supply and God sustains you all all through the day even if you didn't realize it.

You ARE forgiven, already, in light of the fact, and the truth, that you have not ever done anything wrong, in reality, there have been no real consequences, and nobody has been harmed. Your nightmare that you have done something terribly wrong or deserve punishment is complete bullshit and totally untrue. God already loves you and always will.

We're asked to demonstrate that nothing our brother does has the ability to affect us.

We're asked to show by example that our brother has no ability to hurt us or harm us or upset us or offend us.

If we demonstrate this, we are showing the truth to our brother who, if they are attempting to do something to cause us to be upset, must be mistaken about what the truth is. Truth cannot be attacked and attempting to do so is utterly wasted.

This demonstration shows them what the truth is, by demonstrating that the True Self is beyond the reach of all ego attacks and all ways that the ego targets individuals.

What cannot be affected by the world reveals that what our brother does has no effects. This proves to them that regardless of what they think they did, even if they did it seemingly intentionally, it has had no effects at all and so did not happen.

This is a demonstration that they did not really sin, or that whatever sin they seemed to do had no power to do anything to anyone. This literally requires complete invulnerability and demonstrates immortality.

If you can be sick or upset or offended or hurt by anyone or anything, you are demonstrating that you are less than immortal. "Sickness is an attempt to demonstrate that you can be hurt". - ACIM

If you cannot be hurt and are not hurt because you realize that you can only hurt yourself and you stop doing so, then nothing anyone attempts to do can hurt you. If their attempts to hurt you fails, or in other words, their attempts to sin do not produce any effects, this proves to them that sin can be undone and that nothing has happened.

This demonstration of innocence proves their innocence as well as your own. It teaches that forgiveness is called for and is present and is given, and that whatever they thought they did or whatever reason they seemed to have for doing it, it is completely irrelevant and nonsense and false and unreal.

This educates your brother that they are innocent in spite of what they think they did, which may be shocking to them but it will set them free. It will heal their mind and show them that what they believe about themselves cannot be true. They do not have the power to affect the Son of God. They do not have the power to destroy God's Creation. They have no authority over Christ and who they thought they were is not who they must be.

Be a living demonstration that this is your complete, whole truth, at all times, in order to be the salvation of the world. If you choose to go into upset and offense and reactions and fear and suffering, you are failing to fulfill this function and are in denial about who and what you really are. You are not being true to yourself. Only by being true to yourself can you be the truth to others.

You are not saving the world when you are offended by what other people do and feel hurt by it and react based on that, even if it is with good intentions or an attempt to help. You are not the salvation of the world if you keep attacking yourself and hurting yourself and then are accusing others of putting this hurt into you and are using that to justify retaliation or judgement. You are not anyone's savior if you are upset by anything anyone does or says or attempts to make happen.

These are all false attempts at salvation, designed to make it look like you care and want to save the world from suffering, but is really an attack. It is an attack on yourself and on the other person when you take their attempted attack seriously, fail to overlook it, and fail to demonstrate that it is meaningless. When you take it seriously and react to it and then try to fight with it to stop it, you are delusional and are fighting with your own self-attacking perceptions. This isn't helping anyone. It is the ego's version of salvation and is a complete lie.

You are the salvation of the world only when you demonstrate that the world IS saved from attack because attack is impossible. You are the salvation of the world only when you demonstrate that there has been no sin, can be no sin, sin has no effects, everyone is equally innocent, and God loves everyone just the same. You are only a savior when you are able to show that you are unharmed, unharmable, harmless and cannot be harming to others, because regardless of what transpires, it does not change you whatsoever.

You are immortal. You are the light of the world. You only function is salvation.

Taking TOTAL responsibility for EVERYTHING you experience is the ONLY way to find salvation! It is the meaning of forgiveness.

Throughout ACIM there is a simple theme. You are doing this to yourself. You are responsible for everything you experience. Whatever you're feeling, you chose to feel it. Nothing in the world is causing anything that you expeirence at all. And this means you have to own up to full responsibility for choosing all your suffering, in order to stop suffering. It means you have the POWER to make yourself suffer, and to stop the suffering.

This also means that it is impossible for you to be in a victim role, its impossible for the world to hurt you or attack you, no-one is EVER doing anything to you, no one is EVER responsible for causing you to feel anything at all, nothing happens without your consent, you can't even die without your own consent, your own thoughts are the only thing that can attack you, and if you would stop hurting yourself you would never be hurt.

This simple fact of your TOTAL RESPONSIBILITY for everything you experience, is the central truth that all forgiveness is based on. It is really owning up to the fact that YOU ARE IMMORTAL. And because you are immortal and eternal, you never change, you cannot change yourself, and nothing can change you. Any seeming changes you experience YOU must have decided to pretend to have, and nothing OTHER than your own mind can cause these to appear.

If you were to say, there are no other people in the world, you are the only person left in existence, and absolutely nothing happens except what YOU decide, you'd be close to the truth. This is not to say people don't exist, but this is the kind of mindset you need. You can't blame anyone for anything. You are THE CAUSE OF EVERYTHING. And this is described as the Holy Spirit's ONE all-inclusive lesson, which would eradicate ALL forms of suffering.

If you want to know about what forgiveness means, here it is. Forgiveness is simply the total ownership of the power of God, in which you are purely causal, and in which you recognize your immortality and that of everyone. Since we are all immortal, no-one can sin or attack or hurt anyone including themselves. And this means that no-one can be blamed, no one is a victimiser or a victim, and nothing is happening to anyone. In this view, there is no sin, and everyone is innocent and forgiven. It is the recognition that there is nothing TO forgive because nothing real can be changed, and therefore you need do nothing.

It's as simple as the fact that, if you are suffering in ANY way, you ARE the one who is choosing to suffer in this way. As an immortal being, NOTHING can happen to you or change you in any way. Which means no-one can be responsible for ANYTHING you experience, and nothing in the world does anything to you at all. It therefore means that if you seem to be experiencing any kind of suffering, YOU must have chosen it and put it in place yourself. And because you have that power, you can also undo it.

This includes all states of unhappiness, all sense of fear and threat, all sicknesses and pain, all bodily conditions, cancer and disease and death, all forms of attack, all grief and loss, all despair and depression, every kind of victimhood, all roles, all states of stress and upset, every offence, every hurt, YOU MUST have put it in place yourself.

Sometimes it is very hard to RECOGNIZE that this is true, and indeed this is all about recognition. Because without recognition you will not see that you are the cause - that the cause is in your mind. And then you will seek somewhere else, outside of you, in someone else, for the cause of your suffering, to explain how it got there, having disowned responsibility.

Without recognizing what you are doing to yourself, you will just keep doing it to yourself. And this lack of recognition will turn into projection and blame and victimhood and more suffering. If you do not take total responsibility, you will require someone or something else to be responsible. And then you will want someone or something else to change in order for you to be better off, which is the ego's "forgiveness to destroy." You would seek to destroy another in order to make yourself feel better.

This is also why anger is never justified because it's always a reaction to a faulty perception that someone ELSE is responsible, someone ELSE is having the guilt, someone ELSE has the power of causation and has caused you against your will. This is a disowning of YOUR power and making yourself a victim of your own power. Through projection your mind splits and dissociates from your power and puts it outside of you, and then subjects yourself to it, and now you are affecting yourself and at war with yourself, but you will believe that someone else is doing it. This all hides the fact that YOU are responsible for it.

All effects you experience, you put there. All forms of sickness, you chose on purpose. All suffering, you wanted. All guilt you intentionally chose. All fear you subjected yourself to by threatening yourself. All shame you piled upon yourself. All sense of unworthiness you deliberately tried to convince yourself of to keep God and thus power and responsibility away from you. All unhappiness and loss and despair you wanted on purpose to justify why you were powerless and not responsible.

The ego exclaims, someone else did this, not me! I'm not the guilty one, they are! Look at what's wrong with them, look at their sins and errors, I can't be the one at fault, this isn't my doing, I am not the criminal here, other people are accusing me falsely, other people are blaming me, they are all doing it to me, they're out to get me, they're so evil and wrong and guilty, how can they think they are better than me when they are just as bad if not worse, it's not me at all, poor me I am suffering as a victim because of other people and the world, they are all responsible for my happiness, they are all choosing wrongly and choosing unhappiness for me, why won't they just love me and worship me and make me happy against my will?!

That is unforgiveness because it is powerlessness and irresponsible. There is no ownership of CAUSATION in that view. It is false perception. Only by OWNING CAUSE and BEING THE CAUSE can you be free from suffering, reclaim your immortality and eternal life, enter a state of forgiveness, re-identify as the pure Christ being that God created you to be, recognize there is no sin, reclaim innocence, and therefore find SALVATION from suffering and death forever.

YOU ARE DOING THIS TO YOURSELF!!!!!!!!! STOP IT!!!!!!! TAKE YOUR POWER BACK!!!!!!!!! OWN UP TO WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!!!!! LOOK AT WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!!!!!! CHOOSE AGAIN!!!!!!!

"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."

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

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

"And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"YOU CAN BUT HURT YOURSELF."

"When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself."

"Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son."

"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace. I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise."

"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it was. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one."

"You are not the victim of the world you see because you invented it."

"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."

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do. -- My holiness is unlimited in its power to heal, because it is unlimited in its power to save."

"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."

Why do we try to keep bodies from dying? This is a very deep question. ACIM tells us we are immortal beings, incapable of sickness or death. That God has created us to live forever, because nothing real can ever be threatened.

It also tells us that we "play a game of death" by pretending to be something which can seem to die - a body. By believing we are mortal, our mind enters into identification with the body. We believe the body is our self, something vulnerable and limited and capable of being attacked.

"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." UrW191L9

Identifying as a body brings immediate fear. The body is fundamentally vulnerable and can be destroyed. If you are a body, you can never be safe. We know this, deep down. It produces a compulsion to then try to preserve and protect the body, believing that if the body dies we will die.

Anything which now seems to threaten the body is a threat to our existence. If the body becomes sick we are terrified that we're going to end. If a body dies, we feel it is the loss of someone real. This "fear of death" now turns into an entire death-worshipping culture in which we are constantly trying to keep bodies from dying. Constantly trying to deny that we believe they WILL die, and us along with them. Fearing whenever sickness strikes.

All our laws are set up to preserve bodies, to protect bodies, to defend them, to keep them going. We see sicknesses as defeat. We see death as total failure. We see all forms of attack as a threat to our existence and our health. We don't even live in a safe environment, surrounded by danger constantly. And yet we constantly try to surround the body with protections and shelter, all of which are guaranteed to fail.

"The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus." UrW153L1

If someone becomes sick, we feel afraid for their life, wanting their body ("self") to keep going. If someone is attacked, we rally around them and try to make them better. If someone is in a war, we see it as a tragedy, and how dare so many people be killed. Always essentially exalting the body, preserving the body, keeping the body going, worshipping the body, wanting the body to last forever. Wanting to avoid anything happening to "body-people" ever.

But the whole compulsion to have the body last forever is driven by the fact that bodies CANNOT last forever, the sheer terror this produces when you identify with it, and the NEED that arises to protect it to "save your life". We're not then trying to keep real people alive, we're trying to preserve a fake body person so that an otherwise immortal being can keep pretending to be mortal while denying they are mortal.

This applies not only to bodies but to the entire world and all physical life forms. Every single thing in this universe was made to be mortal, to lack, to lose, to suffer and to die. All the world's roads lead to death eventually, and all bodies and planets will die. That's just how it is, because this world depends on denying eternal life.

"Without the idea of death there is no world. All dreams will end with this one. This is salvation's final goal; the end of all illusions. And in death are all illusions born. What can be born of death and still have life? But what is born of God and still can die?" UrM28A6

That fact is that we spend our entire lives trying to keep bodies going for as long as possible, avoiding all attacks, avoiding the weather, avoiding sicknesses, trying to end suffering, trying to stop the bodies from dying. But why? It is not necessary to stop bodies dying, because it has NO EFFECT on the immortality of the soul. Maybe we should stop resisting death so much, because resisting death induces it.

From the perspective of the immortal soul, the soul simply USES the world and the body for its higher purposes, as it attempts to awaken from the dream of death. It comes and goes, into one body, out of it, into another, until it learns its lessons. From its perspective, the body's purpose is to SERVE the soul's goal of reunion with God. And the body has no purpose or life of its own.

"Everyone can use his body best by enlarging man's perception, so he can see the real VISION." UrT1B40J

As far as the soul is concerned, it knows that certain lifetimes cannot last, and will not be the lifetime in which it awakens from the dream of death. It determines to use a body for a certain amount of time and for a certain purpose, and then puts it aside. It was never necessarily the goal to resurrect the body in that lifetime or to make it healthy. It was not a part of the plan or "useful" for the soul's lessons at that time.

Yet when we are so heavily focused on bodies and believing people are bodies, with "one lifetime and then you die", we constantly and obsessively try to avoid the body's demise at all costs. It is a faulty approach because it identifies the person with their body, trying to keep them in it for as long as possible. And always to avoid the fear of "ending".

You'll do everything you can to fix the body and save the body, thinking that by doing this you will avoid loss and death. But this isn't how the soul uses the body at all. Instead of letting souls be free, we imprison them in bodies for as long as possible, not wanting the body to go because it would mean the loss of a body-person. A body that a person is not.

"As long as you believe that, to be with a body, is companionship, you will be COMPELLED to attempt to keep your brother IN his body, HELD THERE BY GUILT." URT15H12

"The test of EVERYTHING on earth is simply this: "What is it FOR?" UrT24H6

"I am not a body I am free, for I am still as God created me." UrW219

The big question then is what is the body FOR, and how is it being USED, and WHY it is being used this way, and for what purpose? The body is NOT an end in itself or something to be kept for its own sake. The ultimate goal for the soul is reunion with God and total spiritual awakening to heaven's reality. Its goal IS NOT to keep bodies living for as long as possible. The soul does not care about bodies whatsoever, because it knows they don't even really exist.

Sometimes bodies no longer serve the soul, no longer function well enough, and become unhelpful. When bodies become severely sick and disabled they may no longer prove "useful", and the soul will want to move on to a new one. Sometimes it is simply "time" for a soul to leave a body, even if the body is NOT in a state of health or a symbol of eternal life, because it is no longer realistic or feasible to keep using that same body for awakening. This isn't a failure, bodies just don't last long enough for the soul to fulfill its very long road to awakening.

We need to drop the idea of constantly defending, fixing, saving, trying to cure, and trying to preserve bodies as if they are supposed to be eternal entities. They were never designed to last forever. They are not made of immortal spirit. They are always temporary at best. The mind attacks them and they break down and die, and this does not matter in the big picture. There will be a "second coming" of the soul, and another, and another.

But more importantly, the mindset and belief that people ARE bodies is the whole problem. This leads to an automatic sense of threat to your existence, which leads to automatic fear, which leads to a compulsion to "not die". Thinking of bodies as people, as though when anything "happens to" a body it's an awful tragedy which should never have happened and is real and must be avoided, is not in any way forgiveness. It is being "blinded by perception of form". It is a guilty worshipping of an idol and a mistaken sense of who and what someone is and what's important.

Actual souls CANNOT BE HURT, cannot suffer, and cannot die. All suffering and sickness and death is an illusion. That's the soul's view of bodies. Souls do not care whatsoever for whether bodies carry on or not. They are valueless and meaningless and are nothing. They are not worth anything. They are just tools that we're using temporarily towards an end. The end is not death. The end is transcendence of bodies and a permanent awakening to spiritual reality.

"The "self" that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?" UrW135L9

You'll continue to see that the world will remain obsessed with body preservation, worshipping of babies, attempts to avoid death, and the frankly inhumane notion that letting someone die is never in their best interests. People should be allowed to come and go as they will. Sometimes it is better to depart than to stay. And they do anyway, because a death is always consented and planned by the soul. It does not care about keeping bodies going or avoiding death, and death can be a liberation.

Avoiding death isn't really a miraculous viewpoint. Trying to have bodies always be resurrected and healthy isn't really a miraculous viewpoint. Making death real and then trying to rescue a person from it, is not a miracle-minded viewpoint.

These things are okay if they happen as side effects of the mind healing, and indeed we are to demonstrate symbolic bodies representing eternal life. But not because bodies are important whatsoever, and in an attempt to avoid death, or to try to use miracles as a way to DENY that we believe we are going to die. To falsely resurrect bodies in the name of body preservation is anti-miraculous. Resurrecting the MIND, such that bodies may also be healed indirectly is miraculous. Mind's belief in bodies must end.

"Whenever you attempt to reach a goal in which the body's betterment is cast as major beneficiary, you try to bring about your death." UrT29H4

Let the bodies go. Let them die if they're going to die. Someone dying does NOT always mean it's the worst possible outcome or a total tragedy or even something to be upset about. Don't mistake bodies for people or for souls or beings. They are nothing but artificial pictures, empty voids, vehicles and tools, used temporarily by a higher power and worth nothing in themselves. They have no meaning and no life of their own, and nothing worth keeping. They are only useful until they're not.

We need to drop the idea that "staying in a body" is the only valid and sane choice. Or that we need to preserve the body in order to protect the self. Souls leave bodies when the body is no longer useful, and never again do they give the slightest interest in what becomes of the corpse. Souls will use up a bazillion bodies and throw them on a scrapheap, across countless lifetimes, it if means being able to eventually wake up from bodies entirely.

"The ultimate purpose of the body is to render itself unnecessary. Learning to do this is the only real reason for its creation." UrT1B40J

Something which I've been finding very helpful lately, is to focus on "already" being as God created me.

It's a recognition, that what God created has already been established, has not changed, and therefore all I need to do is acknowledge and accept it.

This is quite different from trying to "become" it or to "seek" for it outside of myself, or away from what I already am.

There is a bit of a knack to this because our ego thinking is so used to moving away from Self, away from God, away from what already is.

Even all of our spiritual "searching" or trying to find oneself, is for the most part based on believing that we are not spiritual "yet", and so becoming spiritual is in the future, and so there are steps we need to take to get there.

Enlightenment is but a recognition and not a change at all. It is a recognition of what is, of what is true, of what already exists.

It completely aligns with the atonement, which asserts that nothing has even happened. We didn't even START to really separate form God, we haven't gone anywhere, we haven't even begun to sin, our innocence is still totally intact, and we are STILL completely perfect as God created us.

For me getting in touch with this has been greatly amplified by acceptance that God created many Sons, that I am a Son of God, and that I have a soul. I've started to be more and more curious about my soul and thus my "true self", in its pristine state - absolutely perfect, lacking nothing, joyful, loving, powerful, peaceful, etc.

Sometimes when I am in the midst of ego confusion and I think shit, I've got to do all kinds of stuff to get out of this, if I then remember... wait a minute, I am already as God created me, I am still as God created me, inside of me there is already a perfect self which has nothing wrong with it. It cuts through the entire ego bullshit like a knife. Simply because, if the end goal is ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED, then all this bullshit about "something is wrong" is shown to be completely pointless, meaningless, futile and ridiculous.

It's like, holy shit, I AM ALREADY PERFECT. I am already the way God created me. My soul is already in heaven. My real self is already completely awakened.

And that can be a bit of a mind fuck as well because here I am believing that awakening is a long process, it takes time, I have stuff to undo, there is forgiveness to be done, healing that isn't finished, etc... and yet, IT IS ALREADY COMPLETE because it never even really started.

It almost seems like, we've come to believe that being perfectly awakened is 'hard' or rare or difficult, when in fact, the totally hilarious thing is... we ALREADY ARE.

Underneath all the bullshit that says "you are not awake", you are aware. Underneath all the bullshit that says "you are not perfect", you are already totally perfect.

You have this 'higher self', this soul or spirit, which is already immortal, it's already innocent, it's already in perfect health, it's already accepted eternal life, it's already in heaven with God, it's already holy, it's already free of all sin and guilt and fear and death, and it needs to "do nothing" because it is already absolutely divine. Like... it's already a done deal!

So it's never a question of, well, I might not wake up or there's lots to do or I haven't finished yet, bla bla bla... it's it hilarious that the END GOAL is already DONE? Because all of this stuff that seemed to happen to undo our divine state, has not actually happened at all!

So our awakened self is ALREADY HERE. Your higher self is ALREADY "with you". Your immortal spirit is ALREADY perfectly in a state of grace forever. You CANNOT die and have never died. And all this other "stuff" is an illusion.

So here you find yourself seemingly "in time", with a whole bucketload of stuff that you think you need to "do" in order to "become spiritual" when in fact, inside of you, you are already ABSOLUTELY IMMACULATE and totally as God intended and have not changed at all. And that perfect self is just seemingly hidden from view behind all these layers of ego nonsense. All the ego nonsenses does is claim that you are not what you already are.

You can already talk to your ascended-master self. You can already tap into your perfect soul. You already are FINISHED. You are already with God. You are already in heaven. Isn't that hilarious? The only "job" that we seem to have is UNDOING the false beliefs that this isn't true, that we have work to do, that there is stuff to forgive and heal, that something went wrong, that we're off the rails and can't get home, that we don't deserve to be what we actually already are, lol. ... just all these cover-ups for the underlying ALREADY ESTABLISHED TRUTH.

I am as God created me, NOW, ALREADY, and ALWAYS HAVE BEEN. The "end goal" is IN THE PAST. It has ALWAYS BEEN. So all this other stuff, it's all a lie. You are already guaranteed to be with God because YOU ARE. Literally. Right now. Behind all the nonsense and FAKE unconsciousness, you are already done, already finished "waking up".

YOU NEVER REALLY SLEPT!

You are harmless and cannot be harmed.

You walk around completely safe and invulnerable, impenetrable, immune, immortal.

All of your needs are met. You are whole and complete. You need nothing from outside of you at all. You have everything because you have God.

You know who you are and you are completely innocent. There is no trace of sin or guilt or fear in you. You are joyful all the time.

You know that nobody has ever done anything to you, to any degree. You also know that you have never done anything to anyone else.

You don't need any help, you do nothing alone, and you are completely provided for. God looks after you permanently.

You know you have not changed. Nothing has influenced you and you are as immaculately yourself as you have always been in God's Creation.

You need not change nor grow nor evolve because you are already flawless and complete. You lack nothing and have no faults or limitations.

Your mind is perfectly clear, serene, aware and present. You recognize your true self in everything you witness.

You have no special needs or special interests. Everyone is your calm friend and supporter. You heal because you are healed and you share everything with everyone.

All you have was given you by God and you are not attached to anything else, because what God gave you is completely satisfying and freely given, to be extended to all.

No longer are you confused or lost or deceived by an ego. There is no ego here. You are yourself, free to be.

This is what you've always been. This is what will continue forever. Anything not aligned with this is the ego and is not true.

We pick out something in the world as a reason to be upset. And we use it to basically say, this little insignificant thing has the power to destroy God's son.

It could be anything. Maybe you got mud on your trouser leg. Maybe your favorite pen broke. Maybe you ran out of underwear. Maybe you dripped ice-cream on your new t-shirt. Whatever it is, we take this thing and we get all upset about it. And in that upset we're basically saying, this little thing has so much power it can make God's Son lose his peace and destroy him.

So here we are, trading God's love for ice-cream, trading God's love for a pair of trousers, trading God's love for a piece of molded plastic. Stupid little stuff. Meaningless, worthless stuff.

We give value to these stupid things in the world like they are important, and the more important we make them the more we take them seriously. And the more seriously we take it the smaller we make ourselves because we diminish our real value. And then the smaller we get the more vulnerable we become, because we're saying our value/worth/strength/integrity is able to be affect by a fricking pencil, or a piece of chewing gum, or a bit of dirt.

Each time, we're saying, this thing has the power to stop me from waking up, it is a sin that cannot be healed, it is able to prevent God's Will, and it has the power to destroy God's son.

We have to put things in perspective. We have to remember who we really are. We are the creation of God, a huge, powerful, creative being of light, with the power to create worlds, absolutely endless and unlimited, immortal, everlasting, eternal, and here we are CLAIMING that a badly made sandwich is MORE IMPORTANT, or a broken car door is WORTH BEING UPSET ABOUT, or the neighbors dog shitting on the lawn is evidence that God's son has been destroying by a pooping dog.

When you really put it in perspective, the stuff we think has power over us is so insignificantly RIDICULOUS, it's a wonder we can take it seriously at all.

Oh wait... someone just switched the tv channel, and someone just made a noise when I was trying to nap, and someone left the toilet seat up... yup... all things worthy of the IMMENSE son of God being upset about and losing peace over. All things so powerful that they can destroy God's son and remove his peace. Ahhhh.

This world is ridiculous.

If you are fully and completely responsible for yourself, for everything you feel, everything you experience, and every causality, then

1) You will not have any reactions because reactions require you to see yourself as a victim

2) You will not see yourself as victimized or caused by anyone or anything else

3) You will be free and invulnerable and immortal

You will know that you and what you experience are kind of .... enclosed... insulated.... invulnerable to.... detached from... shielded from.... protected from.... everything that is 'out there'. It will be like you're walking around completely invulnerable to everything, unaffected by anyone.

"Be passerby"

So if you see that this is kind of the 'goal' of total responsibility and acceptance of yourself and unconditionally being the love you are, then you can see what happens when you DON'T do this.

Without this responsibility you disown, you victimize, you see yourself threatened and vulnerable, you become imprisoned, you develop reactions, you go unconscious, you disown your feelings, you accuse everyone else of being the "reason why" your life now sucks, and you disassociate from your Self, trying to get others to live your life for you. And then instead of being yourself, you will try to be THEM, because now you are reflecting outward what is within - if you are not yourself, and you're expecting others to be you for you, you will start to become other people and lose yourself.

So no matter the situation, no matter what's happening, no matter who is doing what to whom, we need to get to this place of true responsibility where nothing outside of us is seen as the cause of anything we experience, other than God. We need to disengage. Detach from the drama that involves others.

All of the 'involvement' with others in an ego way creases an ego dependency relationship where it feels like you are joined to the other person and are exposed to them and that they can do stuff to you directly. That's the opposite of invulnerability. And that's doing stuff to yourself through them.

The idea is simple. There is only one lesson. This one lesson sets you free from every form of suffering. It's simply this:

Take full responsibility for everything that you are experiencing.

What is this based on? It's based on the fact that you are an immortal being that cannot be changed by anything, because you are the will of God.

This means that nothing in this entire "universe" of spacetime, nothing in the world, can do even the slightest thing to CAUSE you in any way.

You have never changed, you have not changed yourself, God has never changed you, and you will never change. You are always the same and always perfect.

Because of this, it's not POSSIBLE for anyone or anything to do anything to you. This is the basis of forgiveness. Recognizing that sin cannot happen, guilt is impossible, and everything is perfect still.

If you are immortal then the ONLY way by which something can SEEM to happen to you, is YOU using your own mind and free will to put in place what seem to be illusions of suffering.

Because the truth is that you cannot suffer at all. Not even slightly. You yourself have to literally warp your own mind and dream your own dream and invent your own suffering, which is even fake suffering, in order to experience what seems like suffering at all.

It cannot be put in place by anyone else because no-one else has power over your infinite will. It cannot be caused by the world or anyone in it. Nothing that seems to happen can be the reason why you are experiencing what you are experiencing.

So it goes back to the secret of salvation, no matter how it looks, no matter who seems to be the cause, no matter what anyone appears be trying to do to you, no matter what reactions you seemed to have that you thought they caused, it is NEVER true that anyone BUT YOU is the cause of your suffering.

"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."

"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."

This means you can never pin blame on anyone or anything other than yourself. You can never truly believe that anyone or anything is the cause of you, other than God. God is the ONLY cause of you in all existence. There is NO OTHER POWER that can cause anything at all. Whatever happens is what you desire.

"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 all tied together. You are ruler of the universe because anything that happens is by your will alone. Forgiveness is based on your immortality and the fact nothing can happen against your will. The secret of salvation reminds you that you can be saved only by admitting that YOU are the one willing it. And only by identifying with Christ can you fully claim responsibility for what you really are.

If in any way you are believing that what you are experiencing now, right now, is the result of, something other than yourself in any way, you are mistaken. You are deceived. If you think any person did this to you you are wrong. If you think the world or the body or the emotions or thoughts are doing it to you, you are wrong.

ONLY YOU can make yourself suffer.

"It means that you cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness. Show him that he CANNOT hurt you, and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself."

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

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

"Father, Your Son can not be hurt. And if we think we suffer, we but fail to know our one Identity we share with You."

"Truth will correct all errors in my mind. I am mistaken when I think I can Be hurt in any way. I am God's Son, Whose Self rests safely in the Mind of God."

"Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep, abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset?"

"For once you understand it is impossible that you be hurt except by your own thoughts, the fear of God must disappear."

"The Son of God could NEVER sin, but he CAN wish for what would hurt him. And he HAS the power to think he CAN BE hurt. What could this be EXCEPT a misperception of himself?"

"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. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."

"If you will listen to His voice, you will know that you cannot either hurt or BE hurt, but that many need your blessing to help them hear this for themselves."

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

"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."

"Your Name replaces every thought of sin, and who is sinless cannot suffer pain."

"How can he fear or doubt or fail to know he cannot suffer, be endangered, or experience unhappiness, when he belongs to You, beloved and loving, in the safety of Your Fatherly embrace?"

"Herein lies my claim to all good and only good. I am blessed as a Son of God. All good things are mine because God intended them for me. I cannot suffer any loss or deprivation or pain because of who I am."

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed."

"Love CANNOT suffer, because it cannot attack."

"Joy is the inevitable result of gentleness. Gentleness means that fear is now impossible, and what could come to interfere with joy? The open hands of gentleness are always filled. The gentle have no pain. They cannot suffer."

"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."

"The Holy Spirit will repeat this ONE inclusive lesson of deliverance, until it has been learned, REGARDLESS of the form of suffering that brings you pain. Whatever hurt you bring to Him, He will make answer with this very simple truth. For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the SINGLE cause of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

All this time, I and most of us have been seeking the truth from the bottom up. That means, we find ourselves in the midst of the illusion, lost and confused, scrambling in the dark, trying to find our way to the light.

But everything about the darkness has been lying to us, painting a picture the opposite of the truth. The darkness makes it appear that we have become sinners, or fallen from grace, or changed into a limited confused person, or have developed an ego and changed our identity. This is not true.

As you move "upward" closer to the truth, you will gradually open up to greater awareness and insight into the nature of the truth. And gradually you will start to "take root" in the truth. Another way to put it is you "attach" to the truth or identify with it more, having un-attached from ego lies. Jesus once said to me "you are growing stronger in the truth". So as we undo the lies and the ego, the darkness starts to clear and we can see more clearly and accurately.

At some point you start to get this sense that the ego has been lying all this time, and in fact, not only have you not really been changed into a sinful corrupt evil being, but the person you were before the separation is actually still your true nature.

So now we flip things around. If you look at the truth from the top down, we put Heaven first as the only real truth and everything else is a lie. If you can recognize that you were created perfect from the outset, you are incapable of sin, nothing has gone wrong, you have not left God, you are permanent, you can't change yourself from God's intention, your real self has not changed at all, etc.... then you'll start to get this picture... .that actually you literally ARE still as God created you, and everything else the ego says is just an attempt to COVER IT OVER with a bunch of lies and denial.

So this is quite a different focus. Acknowledging that inside of you, even if it's buried, you literally ARE already innocent, holy, awake, with God, in heaven, having eternal life, unaffected and unchanged, sinless and guiltless, already free of every ego illusion, and nothing has happened to you. And this is true NOW, and it has ALWAYS BEEN TRUE.

So now you start to put things into their proper perspective. If it's true that you are STILL as God created you, and you are PERMANENTLY as God created you, then everything else cannot be true of you. It can't be true that you have changed, or fallen from grace, or sinned, or become a different identity, or that you have removed your light, or lost yourself, or become corrupted or damaged, or anything else the ego makes up.

Not only have you ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED PERFECTION because God created you perfect to begin with, and you are incapable of changing God's Will, but this also means then that the "spiritual goal" of trying to become enlightened is, itself, unnecessary really, because you already ARE PERFECT LIGHT right now. Anything else which suggests otherwise, must be an illusion or a lie.

So it's like, you were created 100% perfect and whole and complete by God, so utterly perfect that you could not possibly be improved upon or added to. And that self is PERMANENT. It does not go to sleep, it does not really dream or enter a dream, it does not go insane, it does not sin and it does not become affected by anything. Only a TINY PART of that self seems to have dreamed and seems to have entered the dream temporarily, but really it hasn't.

So all this other stuff, the ego stories, the notion that you stopped being perfect and are not this limited, weak, fearful ego self stuck in a body, not sure how to get home or if it's even possible, not even remembering what Home IS or how to get there, forgetting who you are and not even sure if you exist, all this stuff is actually just designed to BLOCK OUT the truth that is ALREADY present, your divine immortal self, which is already DONE, TOTALLY DONE, with any need for awakening, because it is not asleep in the first place.

To think that anything can have happened to you is a lie. To think that you can have changed into someone you are not is a lie. To think that you actually turned into a body is a lie. To think that you are sick or suffering is a lie. To think that you can die is a lie. To think that you replaced what God made with something else is a lie. To think that you changed God's mind or will is a lie. None of this has happened. This entire world we're in is a lie. The human race is a lie. This planet is a lie. ONLY HEAVEN IS REAL. Only the creations of light are real.

So all this while, you think that you are just this little self who is struggling to get to God for the first time.. welll... it's not the first time. You've ALWAYS been with God and can't leave God. So is it the fact that you are away from God and need to go home that you're trying to accomplish, or is it the fact that you actually have NOT left God and the suggestion that you have is, itself, a lie that needs to be undone?

All you need to do here is REMOVE AND UNDO layers of lies and denials which are fictional which are layered ON TOP OF your perfect immortal self, your divine permanent unchangeable self, which is ALREADY PERFECT, in order to reveal and expose your real self once again. Enlightenment is a recognition of who you already are in God, not a change into something you weren't before. The ego has lied to tell you that you changed in the first place and must change again to become what you are not. Which is impossible.

You're already with God. It's a done deal. You can't not be perfect. But like Jesus said, He has nothing that does not come from God - ie He is fully as God created Him to be and has not tried to change that into something else, to deny it or to cover it up. All that we're doing is still coming up with a story about how we have changed God's creation into something else and now have a huge pile of stuff to "do" to fix it. But really we need do nothing but accept what is already true. It is already fixed. "Let me recognize that my problems have already been solved".

We simply need to remove the layers of denial and lies and hiding and avoidance and accept what is already true. This is what it means to accept the atonement. To ACCEPT that God's truth is true. It has nothing to do with accepting life's circumstances or accepting the world or accepting events or whatever else. They don't exist. It's only to do with being vigilant for God's kingdom ONLY and accepting NOTHING ELSE into your mind, because what you accept into your mind becomes real to you. So if you only accept that God's Creation is truth, then you will stop making illusions real and return to full awareness of who you are.

You are not in the business of making yourself. You are not in the business of establishing yourself. You are not in the business of transforming yourself. You are not in the business of producing a perfect self. GOD ALREADY DID IT. You are only in the business of UN-LEARNING the lies you told yourself so that you can admit the truth and become aware again that you already, and still, are perfect as God created you, and it has not changed, and it will never change.

If it is true that we are still as God created us, and we are still immortal spirit, and nothing has happened, then if we were to fully express this truth in this world, we would show up in a "perfect" healthy form with no sign of corruption or decay or sickness.

Jesus asks that we do this, because if we are not showing up this way, we are demonstrating that we can be hurt, and so are accusing our brother and ourselves of sin.

So let's say that you have this `perfect self` which is SUPPOSED to be expressing and showing up here temporarily, to prove that Heaven is real and God's laws override the ego. So now, if that is not happening, if there is a problem showing up or a sickness or some kind of symptom, then we have attempted to ADD on top of our perfection, something artificial, and are now seeking outside of ourselves, and this is materializing as visible symptoms of decay and sickness and damage.

So now we need to reverse that, undo that, and allow our true light to shine. If our true light is not shining, then we have blocks to awareness. If form seems to demonstrate that we are not divinely healthy, then something is blocking awareness. It means we're trying to prove otherwise.

What you use the body for it becomes to you. If you use it to project attack then it is attacked and it becomes sick and shows up as physical sickness. If you use it to bring the word of God (the word being, the nature of God), to those who seem to have it not, the body is being used for extending love and so is restored to perfect health and demonstrates perfection

This "symbol of immortality" as Jesus puts it, proves that you cannot have been affected against your will, therefore your brother is innocent. And your immaculate body teaches him that he cannot have attacked you, since there are no effects.

Are you willing to bring forth a "living demonstration" that God's laws are true, and that you can be affected by nothing?

"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally"

In the separation from God, each of us has condemned ourselves. We've accused ourselves of sin, and condemned ourselves to suffer. We want ourselves to be punished, murdered, and destroyed. Ultimately this is a death wish, in which we have become suicidal because we don't believe we deserve to live or to be loved by God. You might be thinking, suicidal? I'm not suicidal. Well think again.

At the same time as trying to destroy yourself to prove you don't exist in God, your true self is utterly sinless, guiltless, innocent, holy and pure. You have never sinned or hurt or commit a crime or broke a law. You have never done anything to anyone, and no-one has ever attacked you. You are immortal and eternal and endless and permanent. And no harm can come to you because God himself protects you.

"The Thought of God protects you, cares for you"

The problem is, there is a seeming "gap" between what is really true of you, and what you currently BELIEVE. And if you are not in touch with your utter immaculate sinlessness, then some part of you DOES believe you are condemned to hell. God isn't doing this condemnation, nor are your brothers.

It's all an inside job of your own self attack. It is your self destruction. And this is suicidal. Even though death isn't real, this needs to be undone because the belief in your non-existence keeps you from being happy.

Looking at what you are doing to yourself is not pretty. If you are not accepting your sinlessness, it means you are believing you are sinful. It means you don't love yourself. It means you actively attack yourself and are trying to destroy yourself. Such as in "my attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability." It means you don't really like yourself, yet alone love yourself with the love of God.

So now if you think about it in terms of the "relationship" that you have "with yourself", as if you could relate to yourself like a third party, how do you really feel about yourself? What is your honest current attitude towards yourself? If it's not one of total unconditional perfect love, then it isn't a very healthy relationship.

If there is a belief in being sinful, or evil, or a monster, or unworthy, or not good enough, or you resent yourself, or are angry at yourself, or keep judging yourself, or see yourself as weak, or hurt yourself emotionally or physically, or keep being abusive towards yourself, there are all signs of a breakdown in relationship.

And what that ultimately means is that you have not forgiven yourself. You're in this relationship with someone that you don't want to be with. And that is going to split your mind and hurt your mind. If you don't love yourself and embrace yourself with acceptance then how can you possibly relate to yourself at all?

Think of yourself as in the shoes of a person that you don't like in a similar way. If you don't like that person you don't want to be near them. You don't want to give them things. You don't want to share with them or spend time with them. You don't want them to exist. You don't care if they get hurt or suffer. You want them to suffer. And you may even feel so bitter towards them that you wish they were dead. Is that the relationship you are having with YOURSELF?

You have to look deep within yourself with much honesty to find this out. And it's probably going to be somewhat painful or even scary. You may not actually even realize or recognize that you have it in for yourself, or want yourself to suffer, because you may be so used to a general level of background destructiveness that you think it's totally normal. You might not have even seen how much you hate yourself.

"You who think you hate your bodies, deceive yourselves. YOU HATE YOUR MINDS, for guilt has entered into them, and they would remain separate, which they CANNOT DO."

"You HATE the prison that you made, and would destroy it."

"You are afraid of Him, and do not see you hate and fear your Self as enemy."

"And why do you attack them anywhere except you hate yourself?"

"But if you hate part of your own Soul, ALL your understanding is lost, because you are looking on what God creates AS YOURSELF without love."

"You do not realize how much you hate each other. You will not get rid of this until you DO realize it, for UNTIL then, you will think you want to get rid of EACH OTHER and KEEP THE HATRED. "

So you have to look at this stuff. And typically you need a strong contrast in order to recognize it. Get in touch with what it means to be sinless. That your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. Get a feel for total pure innocence and the complete absence of all attack, even slight annoyances. And then in that light, look at how you feel about yourself.

Do you still feel like attacking? Do you still feel a need or requirement to judge and blame? Do you condemn others to hide your self condemnation? Are you constantly fighting with people? Do you feel unhappy most of the time? If you have any of the "symptoms" of the ego, which is anything not of God, then certainly there is room for improvement in your relationship with yourself.

First you need to recognize that you even DO hate yourself, before you can be willing to take steps to heal that relationship. And you can't see that unless you have some kind of higher truth about you to compare it to. Your utter pure sinlessness in God, your immortal innocence, the guarantee of eternal life, can act as a contrast and at reality-tester to find out just how you really do feel about yourself. And once you find that out, you have healing work to be done upon yourself. You need correction and forgiveness. You need to FORGIVE YOURSELF, in order to recognize you are sinless and free.

"You have condemned yourself, but condemnation is not of God."

"You who believe you have condemned the Son of God"

"But in the dream of judgment, you attack and ARE condemned."

"And unless He had given you a way to remember, you would have condemned yourselves to oblivion."

"Now has the mind condemned itself to seek without finding; to be forever dissatisfied and discontented; to know not what it really wants to find."

"If the Son of God is guilty, then is he condemned, and he DESERVES no mercy from the God of justice."

"Guilt is ALWAYS in your OWN mind, WHICH HAS CONDEMNED ITSELF. Project it not, for while you do, it cannot BE undone."

"The delusional can be very destructive, for they do not recognize they have condemned THEMSELVES."

"It is not God Who has condemned His Son. But ONLY you, to save his specialness, and kill his Self."

"Remember, then, that whenever you look without and react unfavorably to what you see, you have judged yourself unworthy, and have condemned yourself to death."

"You have handled this wish TO KILL YOURSELF by NOT KNOWING WHO YOU ARE, and identifying with something ELSE. You have projected guilt blindly and indiscriminately, but you have NOT uncovered its source. For the ego DOES want to kill you, and if you identify WITH it, you MUST believe ITS GOAL IS YOURS."

You don't need to die. You need to forgive yourself.

"Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all." UrW188L1

Enlightenment is merely you recognizing "the facts" and recognizing that they are true. And accepting them, because they are so obvious. No more confusion or deception or lies, just reality. How are things really, what exists, what are you really?

"no-one can be angry at a fact" UrM18A4

Just the facts. What is true. What is real. What is actual.

Where are you, what are you, what exists, what doesn't. Just you recognizing it, seeing it, realising it.

There's no attack upon the ego or the world in this because they are recognised as not existing, nothing you really have to do to deal with them, and it's very simple. When they're seen for the nothingness they are they are just nothing to you.

You just acknowledge how things really are. That's all.

Everything is in its proper perspective and place. You see clearly that there is no world. That you are squarely in God, only the kingdom exists, and you are immortal.

"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." UrW132L7

It's like, you finally get a look at what you actually are without any clothes or disguises or denial. Just a good hard look at the truth of you. You know yourself as you really are.

The truth is that only God and his creation exists, of which you are a part, and nothing unreal exists. If you could just purely recognize that fact you'd be enlightened.

It's like just sort of seeing "what is". No more deception, confusion, delusion, wishful thinking, denial, trying to convince yourself of lies, trying to turn yourself into something you're not etc.

If you could go to reality right now and take a look in the light as to what is true - what's really there, you'd just see that there's God and his kingdom - your brothers, you and your creations, angels etc. ... this all exists, its what you are ... and .. .there is no spacetime. The world is recognised as totally false, unreal, untrue, nothing.

So you're done. Just looking at the simple facts. Acceptance of reality, recognition of the truth. Not some conceptual truth - factual experienced truth. What is. What is not.

Not much different than when you go somewhere to visit some people and you arrive and they're there and you're there and the place is there and that's all there is to it.

Enlightenment is just you coming home to live in God in total honesty and willingness and acceptance.

An interesting insight I had is that what we see as causing us, we literally take to mean it is causing us to exist. If we are the effect of it, we are whatever it decides we are.

When we are caused by God, we are forever an effect of God. Whatever God wills us to be we are that. God has total authority and privilege in this and we have absolutely no say in it.

Fortunately God's idea of us and what he wants us to be is very loving and beautiful, and so we are created and "forced to be" perfect happy immortal beings forever.

But if you switch your idea of what causes you to anything else, anything of the world, the body, the ego, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, a similar thing happens. Your SELF is once again defined by it.

So let's say the world does something to "you", someone attacks your body or something, you might see it as not changing YOU but maybe changing your body or causing upsetting feelings. But you assume that YOU are still you.

However, this can't be true, because if you perceive that these external things are CAUSING you at all, you MUST believe you are their effect. YOU, your self, your identity, is the effect of them. And they have the power to change you, alter you, upset you, affect you, modify you according to their will.

This is part of how the mind shifts its IDENTITY from being identified with spirit/Christ to identifying with other things like the the ego or body. When we try to become one with these things, or we give them power, or we see ourselves as caused BY them, our very sense of SELF actually changes.

You begin to see yourself kind of like through the eyes of this other thing, the thing you gave power to. However it's treating you, whatever it's doing to you, is redefining you. You now become the effect of it and your whole sense of identity repositions as a victim and a sufferer and that which is attacked and weakened.

When we look for things to forgive, we might say that a person did this or that to us, or something in the world is upsetting us. But it's not just that it does something to upset us, it does something to CHANGE us, and that literally changes our sense of who we are.

When you believe the world, which is your dream, is dreaming you, and it has power to affect you or change what you are, your sense of self shifts from an immortal being to a temporary mortal suffering entity. The mind shifts its view of itself as though it's now being caused BY the world, and loses track of the soul. As if what causes you CREATES you.

Who you see yourself as, the role you play, how you are positioned, who you are in the drama or story, all becomes defined BY the causes you perceive to be having an effect on you. This can happen even with emotions and thoughts where you start developing a sort of sense of being a suffering person who the emotions or thoughts are happening to.

To wake up from this we have to become clear that we're not only not affected by anything in the whole world, but that nothing in the world has any power to CHANGE us in any way. Otherwise it has the power to change our SELF, and convert our identity into something we're not. Even a slight upset emotion is a change in identity, a twinge of unhappiness, a minor fear, it's all going to change your view of what is true of you.

So we have to learn to stop making ourselves CAUSED BY anything other than God. Nothing in the world does ANYTHING to us. We are UNCHANGEABLE, and nothing anywhere can change us except for God - who has no intention of ever changing his mind about us. We have to let ourselves be only what he wants us to be, and accept the truth of ourselves, in order to recognize WHO we really are.

"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." W191L9

"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it was. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea." M6C3

"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." URW190L5

"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

"You are safe in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of waking to reality."

The world we're in offers no safety. It is a world of threat, danger, risk, attack, conflict, vulnerability and damage.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"The world was made as an attack on God."

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

"The world provides no safety."

We may attempt to make the world safe, but only by shifting illusions. We build barricades, walls, buildings, wear clothing and shoes, make cars and houses, use safety devices, take precautionary medicines, try to eat right etc, in efforts to hold attack at a distance.

This is an attempt to create an illusion of safety in a world which is fundamentally a realm of attack. And sooner or later it will find a way to penetrate all your defenses, resulting in inevitable death.

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not escape from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

"W-pI.153.1. You who feel threatened by this changing world, its twists of fortune and its bitter jests, its brief relationships and all the "gifts" it merely lends to take away again; attend this lesson well. 2 The world provides no safety. 3 It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. 4 It attacks, and then attacks again. 5 No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus.

W-pI.153.2. The world gives rise but to defensiveness. 2 For threat brings anger, anger makes attack seem reasonable, honestly provoked, and righteous in the name of self-defense. 3 Yet is defensiveness a double threat. 4 For it attests to weakness, and sets up a system of defense that cannot work. 5 Now are the weak still further undermined, for there is treachery without and still a greater treachery within. 6 The mind is now confused, and knows not where to turn to find escape from its imaginings."

The reality of God is not like this. Heaven is a realm of total safety. In God, there can never be a threat, danger, attack, hurt, suffering of any kind, damage, degradation, vulnerability, risk, difficulty or any kind of death. No precautionary measures are needed, no defenses, no planning of the future, no carefulness, no concern and no fear.

In God you are safe. In God you cannot be hurt. In God there is nothing to be afraid of. You are safe in God right now.

It is helpful to just dwell on this for a while. Dwell on the fact you are safe in God. Feel what that feels like to be completely safe. It does not require any special defenses, it doesn't require you to hide in the darkness trying to protect yourself, it doesn't require you to be afraid of the next attack so as to help yourself plan for it, nor do you ever have to run away in fear.

In God you are completely safe and protected, beyond all violence, beyond all sickness, beyond all death. In God you are embraced in a warm and gentle love which holds you safely in its arms forever. In God you cannot be touched by even a twinge of concern for your life. And to think that your eternal permanent immortal life could ever by threatened at all, is clearly insanity.

"Nothing real can be threatened."

"It is only your awareness that NEEDS protection, because your BEING cannot be assailed. "

"Rather teach your own perfect immunity, which IS the Truth in you, and KNOW that it cannot be assailed. Do not protect it yourselves, or you have believed that it IS assailable."

"And can he be assailed by dreams?"

Being in the safety of God is nothing like this world. It is a state far beyond the reach of the ego. There is no war that can even encroach upon it. There is no threat or danger of sickness, suffering, decay or malfunction. There is no need for any protections or to hide from anything. Everything can be fully joyfully gladly expressed out in the open without fear of attack or murder.

You are completely safe in God right now. The world is nothing but a dream of exile, a dream of being not in God's safety. As you develop your awareness of your safety in God, even while in this world, you can experience a sense of safety even in the midsts of the world's attacks. For this safety recognizes you cannot be attacked, because you are immortal.

Then although you walk in the valley of the shadow of death, no evil shall you fear.

"I am in danger nowhere in the world.

W-pII.244.1. Your Son is safe wherever he may be, for You are there with him. 2 He need but call upon Your Name, and he will recollect his safety and Your Love, for they are one. 3 How can he fear or doubt or fail to know he cannot suffer, be endangered, or experience unhappiness, when he belongs to You, beloved and loving, in the safety of Your Fatherly embrace?

W-pII.244.2. And there we are in truth. 2 No storms can come into the hallowed haven of our home. 3 In God we are secure. 4 For what can come to threaten God Himself, or make afraid what will forever be a part of Him?"

I've been trying to find away to describe forgiveness in a way that is fully encompassing. I'm getting closer.

First of all we were in heaven and everything was, and still is, perfect and whole and innocent and beautiful and immortal.

Then we did the separation idea which is an attempt to dream that you are exiled from heaven and outside of God, in a mortal realm of death and suffering.

God created the Holy Spirit to answer this insane world and provide a template/example of how to live and see in such a way that a) hell is forgiven and overlooked and not believed in, and b) the way to heaven is opened up.

ACIM refers to "the real world" as something you reach or see just prior to heaven. It also refers to "the forgiven world", the world you made but seen from a different perspective.

The question is, how do you move from false perception to true perception, and what is the nature of this true perception? How do you look at hell and not regard it as hell?

The really mind-bending part I think is in trying to understand how you can be in this hellish cruel world and not regard it as real. Or the question of, how do you love something which is driven toward attack and sin and death.

I think what we have to realize is, Jesus is trying to get us to accept ONLY and align with, the nature of heaven. He wants us to be heaven-like. This entails several aspects:

1) "Be vigilant only for the Kingdom", meaning to put your full attention on accepting it as the ONLY truth and not believing anything else.

2) "I am under no laws but God's", meaning you recognize that you operate within and from God and by His laws, completely ignoring the laws of spacetime.

3) "Teach only love for that is what you are", meaning you are being the way you would be in heaven, loving and giving and joyful and appreciative.

4) "I am still as God created me", meaning you recognize your identity as Christ which is IN heaven, and live out from that Christ nature, expressing Christ at all times.

5) "The power to work miracles belongs to you" and "To recognize that all power is of God is to gain all power", meaning that you are plugged into Spirit and the Holy Spirit is mechanizing miracles through you, you are effortlessly able to break the laws of the world and "there is nothing my holiness cannot do."

6) "Only the truth is true and nothing else is true", meaning we believe and accept fully only God's truth and ways, and completely reject and deny and see as false anything that is against this truth. Which includes all aspects of the false world of hell.

The list really goes on, because the course says a lot about this. But I think overall if we focus on trying to "be heaven like" while in this world, accepting only God's truth as true, bringing Heaven's light and love into this world to heal, being "in it but not of this world", we will achieve "the real world".

The real world is a reflection of heaven, aligned with heaven, symbolizing heaven. It is a state of mind. And that state of mind is very close to being heavenly. So we need to get our minds into a heaven-like state as much as possible in dreaming.

As we do this, as we become "the light of the world", as we express miracles from God, as we extend God's love here and be as God created us, identified with spirit not body, and are essentially acting from beyond the laws of spacetime, our attitude towards hell and cruelty will automatically take on its "new perspective".

The true perception we are steering toward and HOW it looks and WHAT it sees are really determined by you "embedding" yourself in heaven. Being true to God's truth. Being aligned with God's will. Being an extender of God's love. Being a doer of God's will. etc... Like, if you might imagine, an angel of light who has briefly stepped into this dimension, retaining all its heavenly brightness and power, not of this world but acting in it temporarily.

It's by recognizing that the real world is a reflection of heaven, and that therefore true perception is aligned with knowledge, that we can see "what kind of seeing" we need to be having, "what kind of attitude" we need to be having about the world.

When we are coming from love and light and truth we just WILL see the world in a forgiving way. What seemed to be dark and cruel and twisted, will be loved and shone away. What seemed to be attack and threat and danger, will be rendered harmless. It's hard to imagine HOW that can be possible or what that "looks like", but it is automatically taken care of when your mind is approaching oneness with God.

We are to be heaven's representatives here in this realm. We are to be teachers of God who teach (give, extend, express, symbolize) God here in this realm. We are to demonstrate that we are entirely driven by, orchestrated by, willing with, in unison with, on the side of, accepting of, God and his mighty companions.

And we are to live as though we are in heaven already, perfect already, immortal already, while having these bodies, to symbolize and represent innocence, harmlessness and an eternal life to those who are tired of the drudgery the world has to offer.

There are aspects of the Truth that are just so mind-blowing in how they completely fly in the face of conventional truth. It's like, what they claim is so opposite to what we've been raised to believe, that it just seems so radical and almost difficult to grasp ahold of. A massive weight of contrary opinion seems to scream from all the mouths of the world that it can't be true. Yet it is, and it peeks out from behind the clouds of confusion with a boldness and rightness that just begs for someone to grab ahold of it, side with it and represent it.

The truth is...

The ego does not exist at all.

The physical world does not exist at all.

Nothing has really happened here, it's an illusion of things happening.

There is no such thing as real sin.

There is no such thing as real sickness or death.

Nobody has ever really died because bodies are not real.

You are permanently innocent in God's eyes.

God does not even believe in sin whatsoever.

The entirety of the history of the universe is a made-up story with absolutely no truth to it.

There is no truth in the world whatsoever because it is not real.

You are not a body because the body does not exist at all.

You are immortal and permanently real.

So many voices chime in to claim things which are contrary to this, to sing a song of dire endings and false beginnings. So many are joined in the chorus of death's dirge, exalting the body and worshipping the death of God and His Son. Believing in sickness, perpetuating suffering, making sin real and judging it. And mental illness in everyone who believes in the ego. What a crazy world, if it were real!

Lift yourself up to the light of truth and claim it no matter what the world says and no matter what anyone else believes. Your allegiance must be wholly unto God with no other authority can take His place.

The Son of God invented death.

And the Son of God cannot die.

So whenever there seems to be death, the Son of God must be pretending to die, all the while underneath that He is laughing at how everyone (really other parts of Himself) is falling for believing that it's really happening.

The Son of God loves to play with death like a toy, pretending that it's real, make-believing that it can happen. Yet it is just a performance, just for show, inside His own mind, between Him and Himself, acting as though he is both the performer on the stage and the audience watching.

Nobody can really die. So why do we take it so seriously? It's because we keep falling for our own illusion, our belief that how things appear is how they are. We don't see the Son of God playing at pretending to be dead.

How can an immortal being suffer or die? It's impossible. It has to be fake. There can't be such a thing as real death.

Those who seem to go through with it and leave their bodies seemingly never to return.... well, fooled us... they'll be back in some other disguise you may not recognize. Maybe a Japanese farmer, maybe a tribeswoman in Africa, maybe an American psychopath, or a French truffle collector, who knows.

All this play and pretense that death is possible, deceived by illusions and exploring the many ways to pretend that you can die when you can't. It's a tragic-seeming performance, only when you don't recognize who is doing the acting. It's a starring role, Christ Himself giving the best performance of His life.

And at some point this will all be confessed and admitted to and acknowledged, and then nobody will ever believe again that death was ever really possible, or that anyone has ever really died. And then we (the Son of God in His collective wholeness) will remember to laugh.

1) You already have eternal life because God creates only that which is permanent and lives forever.

2) It is not possible to change eternal life or to bring an end to it.

3) You do have the freedom however to DENY whether you have eternal life by PRETENDING that you don't.

4) Denial of eternal life does not stop it. All it does is it puts you into a mindset of blocking out awareness of the fact that eternal life is still there, causing you to HIDE it from your awareness as if to pretend it is not there.

5) Denial of eternal life shows up as death. It's a fictional attempt to make it SEEM as if eternal life is not true, doesn't exist, or has ended.

6) Death as "denial of life" is not END OF LIFE, it is an illusion PRETENDING that real eternal life can be affected in any way whatsoever.

7) You can become quite accomplished in making it look like you are mortal and can die. But it is fake. And it can therefore be easily reversed, because it has no truth in it. Death is a lie.

8) Given that you already have eternal life and are just pretending otherwise, at some point you might as well stop being in denial and just return to being eternal. Immortality is your natural inheritance.

9) When you stop being in DENIAL of eternal life, you will simply accept it and "live with it" and experience it, allowing it to be your truth without resistance or denial.

10) When you accept the atonement you are accepting the pre-existing truth that you already have eternal life, it cannot be removed, it's always been true of you, and you literally are incapable of really dying. In this, you are accepting that you are immortal and therefore CANNOT die and never did. And in this acceptance, death is recognized as and becomes impossible for you.

The things of this world change. Change is impermanence. Change is mortality. Change is death.

If you associate your self with being one of these things, you are forced to have to believe that you are something that can die.

This will induce the immediate fear of death, and you will not be able to let it go while you believe you are something mortal.

In this world, most people believe that they are bodies, and that everyone else is a body. Bodies are mortal. They grow and change and shift and generally speaking end up in a state we call death. And yet even that isn't the cessation of change, because they go on to transform into food for other creatures and become the building blocks of further forms which appear to be reborn. And on it goes.

The problem is, if your or someone else's identity is wrapped up in something mortal and changing, you are locked into a fear state. You cannot believe you are a body and deny that you MUST therefore believe that you will change and die. That you'll stop being you.

Even every moment in which the body changes and moves is like a death - who you were as a child, almost unrecognisably transformed into an adult, and an old person, and a corpse. Who can you be in all of that when it keeps shifting and changing?

When a person believes they are a body, their mind is sick. The mind in its natural state recognises that your SELF is immortal spirit. Something that does not change, something that never dies. And in that there is safety and security and nothing to fear.

But believing in being a body makes the mind narrow and limited, as an attack upon immortality. And now this attack turns to sickness, and the body is attacked and made to be sick and corrupt and malfunctioning. And then it dies. Seemingly the inevitable consequence of being one at all.

Knowing that the mortal body can die, and believing that you or a loved one is a body, you are forced into a state of mind where you fear their death and your own. Their mortality becomes your mortality. Just by believing they are a body, you believe they will die. And this induces a fear of loss. A certainty that they WILL be lost, and there is no escape, and no solution to the calamity of being mortal.

This fear will then lead to all manner of panic and desperation, searching for answers, trying to find causes, even efforts to heal. Efforts to work miracles. Efforts to raise the dead and heal the sick. Efforts to be a miracle worker overcoming the forces of death with your power.

But this is a kind of miracle-working effort rooted in the unhealed healer. Anyone who believes they are a body is unhealed. And so the unhealed healer feels compelled by fear to save and fix those who are broken, yet simultaneously knowing they cannot be saved, and knowing that their demise is already written, if they be something that can die. A hopeless lost cause from the outset.

In this state we put up a fight, we resist death, we try to stop it happening. We'll do anything to keep a person in their body, as a body, because we believe that is what they are. And that to lose the body is a loss of the person, a true real loss in reality.

So we think that if we do everything we can to stop it happening, to prevent further sickness, to put up barricades against death, to defend against the evil medical system interfering and making things worse, to stop others from meddling or to deny help, and to enact attempts to solve the problem or to make the problem go away, are all the result of an insane compulsion to stop death happening.

But this resistance is really a form of attachment. It's a way of trying to keep the person going in a body by making the body real and associating them with the physical. This is how we hold on psychologically, through identification. And the more we believe they are a body the more we will interpret physical change as a threat, and will fear death even more.

Unless someone is going to reach a state in which they are so miraculous and healed that their body becomes incapable of sickness or death, which is quite advanced, generally speaking the body is going to become sick and die. The result of the choice to be unhealed leads to the inevitable consequence of death and dissolution.

This could be seen as acceptable, if a person would not resist this, and would not think of the person as a body. As just recognizing that bodies are doing what bodies do in their mortal ways. If it is recognised that people are not bodies, there need be no resistance or fear of the body changing. After all, change is all the body CAN do. It is constantly dying and transforming and becoming something else.

If we resist and fear the physical changing, interpreting it as a threat and a potential end to someone's life and existence, we'll create so much control and resistance and heroism and trying to be a saviour and healer and all manner of "not letting go". This is not a surrendered state or a healing state, it's a state of alarm and stress and fear and panic and horror. All unnecessary.

A person wanting to keep another person going at all costs, to prevent their departure to higher realms, to stop all sickness happening, and to ward off death itself, is really in a special relationship with the body. It's part of the belief and identification that the person is their body, and not an immortal being. And should anything happen to that precious treasured body, it is taken to mean an actual assault upon the persons reality and existence. Every change becomes a blow and insult to peace.

This whole attitude of resistance and fear of death is a layer of interpretation on top of what actually physically happens. Regardless of whether it's right or not for the body to reach a death state, you can either resist its changes or you can accept them. In order to accept them you have to let go.

Letting go means not believing that a person is something mortal, or that they can be attacked, or that they can ever die. It means not confusing the body for the person. And not minding or needing or depending on the body "staying alive" in order to be happy. It means recognizing physical things are always coming and going and transforming their state, and nothing physical is everlasting.

To surrender and let the death happen is far better than fighting against it. Because in truth you cannot win by fighting anything. To attack death is to fuel it. To resist sickness is to reinforce it. To want to heal and rescue the body-self is to imprison a person in a body further and bind them with sickness and guilt.

We must detach from the physical in all ways, including our own sense of identity and that of others. We must let go of believing that physical things will not change, because they are made of change and change is all they can do. We need to recognize that people are permanent souls that cannot change, because permanence is all they can do. And separate out the two.

We then can "let death be", without resistance, without fear, without attacking it, without feeling offended by it, without making it an enemy, without scapegoating it or hating it, or feeling reluctant or unwelcome toward it. This doesn't mean we have to condone it or choose it or support it, because it's still the result of an unhealed mind. But if it IS going to happen, we must not put up an egoic fight against it.

Resistance is futile. You cannot heal something by resisting it. It may seem paradoxical but actually by accepting something you let it go and let it be, but at the same time this gives you freedom, which opens you up to love and power, and makes you capable of healing. You can't heal a sickness by trying to make it real and then fighting against it. You have to not mind it first, and allow it, and then you are in a better position to help.

I used to see myself a rising up against sickness and death, becoming the kind of miracle worker that would be on some kind of crusade of revenge to conquer it and overpower it and make it stop. This never worked. And it's a good thing it didn't, otherwise I wouldn't have learned that this isn't how healing works. You can't stop death by trying to stop death. It has to be recognised as nothing and of no consequence or importance.

You stop it by letting it be nothing, recognised as nothing, unimportant and not worth resisting, and you allow it to be, SO THAT you can be aligned and identified with spirit, have access to God's power, recognize others as immortal, reinforce the LIFE in them, and thus give the life of resurrection and healing. It's kind of about getting your priorities straight. Death doesn't matter. Why fear something that has no effect on anything real?

I'm noticing quite a lot of ways in which our "sympathies" about victims are being uprooted in ACIM.

Where we might've bought into and felt sorry for someone who is going through difficulties or having pains or a sickness etc, we're instead being asked to recognize the big picture.

In general, we are immortal beings who are perfect and have no real needs. Jesus then frames all forms of suffering as "the game of death", in which we deliberately choose to suffer in a very wide variety of forms, in order to try to convince ourselves and others that guilt is real, sin is real, we're bodies, we're victims, we didnt' chose it, etc.

There is a huge displacement of responsibility, a huge lack of recognition, a huge disowning of power, and a presenting of oneself in a role of a victim which makes it look like we're totally helpless and didn't choose anything. But all of this is an ego disguise to cover up the secret of salvation, that we're doing it to ourselves.

So that then reframes all suffering as self-chosen, and it means that we're playing a game at trying to portray ourselves as victimized and powerless, as if we didn't choose it and don't want it, while simultaneously denying God and rejecting immortality and trying to make out that we're something dying.

A suffering person puts on a disguise in which they portray themselves with the appearance of a victim who is going through something terrible, in order to hide the other side of the coin which is the denied and disowned responsibility, choose, causation and power, that put the thing there in the first place. It's like someone presenting a lie about themselves, deceiving themselves with it, and then trying to convince everyone else. But if you see only the surface appearance you won't see the deeper fact of how they are using their power to do this.

When we then look upon someone suffering from false perception, we'll fail to recognize the truth of what the person is really trying to pull off - an illusion of being unfairly treated - and will instead enter into false empathy, where we sympathise and go into the suffering and believe in it and then react to it with egoic impulses to fix and stop the problem, having made it real.

When we buy into suffering we're not really helping or healing, and then we're not being miraculous. To be miraculous you have to assert God's truth, which is eternal life, immortality, perfection, no problems, no needs, the impossibility of sickness, the responsible ownership of power and the power of decision, the fact that we can be hurt by nothing but our own thoughts, etc.

If we want to heal someone for example we have to NOT believe in what they are believing in, otherwise we will enter into it with them and now both of us are lost. We have to believe they are NOT suffering and are NOT sick, otherwise we can't give them anything OTHER than sickness and suffering. If someone seems to be suffering, they're not really suffering. Not in truth. Nothing real can be threatened. There is no real suffering, no real sickness, no real death. It's all an illusion made by our egos, like putting on a performance in a play and pretending.

So if you knew and recognized that someone is a perfectly capable powerful immortal being, Christ even, who has been given all the power in heaven and earth, and can do absolutely anything, and here they are presenting themselves as weak and suffering and victimized and helpless, and you knew this was an "act" in a fictional story, would you believe it and buy into it? Or would you see through the appearance and remind them that this is not the truth of them?

It is not forgiveness to be deceived by people who seem to be suffering. Yes, ok, we need to be sensitive and compassionate and have empathy and so on, and it may not be appropriate to even reveal any of this to them directly. But nevertheless for our own sanity AND for theirs, we must uphold a position of NOT believing in the lie that we are something mortal, a sick and suffering self that has had things happen to it that it didn't put there. Everyone who suffers and dies choose it, including ourselves.

To be forgiving is to be miraculous, because it means that you overlook and see right through the guilty assertion that "there is something wrong", you recognise that in truth NOTHING is wrong, and therefore you do not BELIEVE the lies that are being presented. And people who are suffering and sick and afraid and unhappy and dying and so on are NOT being honest, they are lying to themselves about what is true of them. It is your job as a miracle worker to NOT buy into it, but to recognize it as a lie and not be deceived.

In order to then be truly helpful you have to be in a position where you are believing only God's laws, God's truth, God's perfection and God's reality. That means that you believe everyone is inherently immortal, invulnerable, powerful, perfect, innocent and has nothing wrong with them. And that means you cannot believe that sickness is real or true or exists, or that suffering is real or true or exists. Such things are not POSSIBLE in God. Believing in them causes and choose and reinforces them, which is the mindset of the unhealed healer.

To be a healed healer entails not believing in suffering or sickness or death in any form it appears, because you recognize it is not true and not possible at all in God. And so it must be a lie, and you will not be deceived by it. Instead, you will assert the only truth of unconditional love, which is that the other person is already perfect, and you will affirm this in them, and hold that space for them strongly, in the light, in which you see the perfection in them and refuse to accept anything else as true of them. This makes it very hard for their mind to buy into its own lies because in your joined mind you are looking right through them.

To then assert ONLY LIFE, is the expression of love that has power and life in it, which is the giving of a miracle of resurrection. It then truly helps and truly heals, because it gives what is truly asked for - a call for love is given love. You can only give this by NOT believing the lies of sickness and suffering, and instead recognizing that only immortality is true, and the person is not really dying, and they do not really have a problem, and they are not really sick or even a body. This assertion of life gives life only, and does not give death or the belief in death, and so is only a blessing and can only help.

So we need to be aware of the fact that sympathising is ego, and false empathy does not heal, and buying into someone's pity part does not help them, and even if people are convinced with a long story about what has happened to them and how awful it is and so on, you must not buy into it if you are to be truly helpful. Yes you can have compassion for where they are at, what they believe, what seems real to them, and what they are experiencing, but not at the expense of adding extra weight to it buy believing it's true and real under God's laws.

Everyone in the world has a serious case of self-deception, which is ego, and that results in all forms of suffering. And people will always complain about the suffering and seem to not want it and to have not chosen it, but that's all part of the deception and the giving away of power and responsibility. It's how we play the game and role of being a helpless victim. It is not empowering to someone to just join them in misery, it's only empowering to give them power, which comes from God, through love and healing.

As such, those who we sympathize with and who we feel sorry for and who we think are seriously definitely stuck in some situation that no-one can do anything about, are all temptations to regard ourselves and our brothers stuck in a hell of our own making, a hell that we don't want to admit to having chosen, or having power over. But we always have the power to choose otherwise.

"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."

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth."

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

The ego is your attempt not to accept being with God. It is an attempt to deny God's presence. But the ego can't make God go away, or get rid of Him.

So its only real tool is to pretend. Denial is the name of the game. It's like an ostrich hiding its head in the sand. The ego does not want to accept what is 'really here', only what it has imagined.

So you are right inside God exactly where God put you, but you imagine yourself to be in some far off land suffering and alone. "You are still in Heaven, dreaming of exile".

Everything about your ego state of self-imposed imprisonment and isolation speaks of your not wanting to accept what is real. The ego shuts out God, shuts out reality, shuts out love.

So then the ego CAN ONLY experience unlove, and loneliness, and fear, and darkness, because it is hell-bent on shutting out light and love. It cannot, and never will, be able to feel good about being what it is. It is made of fear.

The only way to become unafraid, is not to gain power over things or to become confident or bold or have a stronger attitude. The only way is to lift the blocks to awareness to REVEAL that you are in fact in a very very safe happy place immersed in God right now.

It's a bit like on The Truman Show (movie) where the guy lives in a fake world inside a dome and everyone outside watches his actions on a tv show, and he doesn't realize he is inside a fake world, but toward the end he finally bumps into the outer perimeter of 'the sky' with his boat and eventually finds an exit door to get out of there. Thus he removed the block to awareness and now comes to realize that there is something outside of his little isolated world that he could not see before. Reality. Symbolically speaking.

If we want to feel happier we have to remove our blocks to awareness simply so that we can FEAST EYES ON GOD, experience the forgiven world, and realize that everything is still okay. Nothing's happened, nothing's really gone wrong, and nobody's been hurt.This is all about 'lifting the veil of illusions'. Learning to see. Becoming able to have Vision again. And to become able to discern and witness the presence of God by overlooking all of the illusory blocks that try to shut down your awareness.

This is why we call it 'waking up', spiritually - it's literally a matter of becoming more aware than you were of what's really here, hiding behind the dream that you thought was all there is. ..... God. Right where you left Him. And you're still unchanged from how He created you. Still innocent. Still immortal. Still loved.

"This is the world of time, where all things end."

This should be fairly easy to understand. Time is the idea that what seems to be here now, cannot remain. It must change. It must stop being what it is.

This leads to realizing that time does not allow anything to be permanent. Everything becomes temporary. That means everything is forced to come to an end. Which means everything dies. And both birth and "death" are now part of a whole system of death, in which everything has the mark of death upon it, even from the outset of "new life".

Time is the very thing which seems to produce growth and change. It is the seeming driving force behind the beautiful flowers that grow from seed and bloom and share their fragrance for a little while, before time just as easily forces them to stop being this way, enforcing death and decay.

Time does not allow anything to remain as it is. It is an attack upon the idea of eternal life. It is a notion that what has always existed no longer exists, being the destruction of God himself. It essentially places God into the past and kills him off and converts him into some other mangled form. And even if it reflects glimpses of God it will only offer them temporarily.

The world, by which I mean planet Earth, but also the solar system, the galaxy and all the galaxies/interstellar objects, are all governed by time. Every particle of matter is governed by time. This means that everything in this system HAS to change, which produces a constant state of movement and the impossibility of perfect stillness. Nothing is ever allowed to rest and be truly at peace. Even the rocks sitting there for many years are gradually being changed and converted against their will. Nothing in the world or this "universe" can escape this.

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

Since time enforces change, it enforces ends, which means it enforces death. Don't be deceived in thinking there are exceptions to this. Absolutely everything in the world has the mark of death upon it and will die, unless perhaps there is an interventional miracle from another world beyond the laws of time and space.

Time wants you dead. The very thing which seems to allow your body to move and change is also the very thing which is seeking its destruction. Time is the very thing which permits birth but also death. It is not picky about what state anything is in. Jesus is telling me to use the word "unscrupulous" here.

In a world of time, all things end. There can at best be seeming periods in which things seem to be fairly consistent, fairly constant, or even long-lasting, but they are never endless, and a time will come when they will end. These temporary illusions of almost-permanence mask the fact that the whole system is still gradually destroying itself. And if you fall for the illusion of believing that its presentation of "life" is at its maximum, you are blind to the fact that even the living are partly dead.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, their life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning."

Since there is no real eternal life outside of heaven, and Earth is a realm technically "outside" of heaven, or at least believed to be, it is not a world where there is real life, or maximum life. It is a world of death. This is because separation from heaven means the inducing of time and space, which is delay or avoidance or denial of reality.

So this whole system is set up for death. All the time it is devouring itself. All the time it is working on destroying itself. Sometimes it presents illusions of birth and newness and growth and prosperity, only to GUARANTEE that at some point it will just as easily take it all away without blinking an eyelid. And to some that may come as a shock or surprise, or something long put-off and avoided, as if it is not going to happen. But look at how everything you ever had in the world came to an end.

Essentially change is death. Although of course in this world it seems that you must change in order to "live", because the whole system is backwards. But change does not allow the immortal to remain immortal, and the eternal are brought into question by it. Without time you would live forever, but with time you are destined to be destroyed.

Jesus suggests that there is no hope of escape from death IN the world. You cannot stay IN time, and have there be no death. Time and space are both attacks on reality's nature. They cannot be combined or coexist. You cannot keep time, along with bodies moving and growing and so on, and still expect there to be no death. "Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

Read it carefully because it's telling you that there is NO WAY EVER to escape from problems WITHIN the world. The only way ultimately is to transcend it, rise above it, and eventually leave it. The whole system of spacetime will always entail death and destruction. It will not ever be heaven or offer eternal life. It cannot therefore save you and cannot save you from itself.

You HAVE to find a better way - another world, not of you, which God created perfect. The ONLY HOPE that you truly have is that this world is not real and is thankfully NOT doing what it appears to be doing. Do not be deceived into thinking that this world can ever be dressed up as a living world or a permanent world or a world of hope or a world of salvation and happiness. It is nothing and will never be true. All you really want is God.

"It might be worth a little time to think once more about the value of this world. Perhaps you will concede there is no loss in letting go all thought of value here. The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

A glossary of christianity terms reinterpreted and clarified by Jesus in A Course in Miracles.

Here are some elements of ACIM which may sound christianity-oriented, but of course Jesus redefines and clarifies their meaning.

1. Heaven - is the kingdom of God which God created one with Him and which is immortal and eternal. You are part of it, as is everyone. It is reality. It is a living creation in which all things are alive forever. It is not Earth.

2. Hell - the attempt to oppose heaven, reality, God, yourself and others, by believing in a state which really does not exist, as if it does. A state opposite to the nature of God, which lacks everything and is therefore devoid of meaning. Onto this empty shell you can project ideas of hell or or heaven, which are seen as a reflection. A belief that hell is real turns the nothingness into hallucinations of something evil. Earth is part of the empty shell, the veil of illusions.

3. Being cast out of heaven - if you are not in heaven, you are dreaming of being exiled. God didn't cast you out, you left. Or at least, you believe you are no longer where God is. This produces an illusion of a world outside of heaven, which includes the Earth. God didn't abandon or reject you, you wanted to not have him be your father and to receive nothing from him. You became the prodigal son who thought he could be better off on his own.

4. The devil - anyone who denies God is against God. They are also against Christ, making them the anti-christ. Being against God you are attempting to turn yourself into a devil. The devil is your belief in an impossible opposite to God. It is your ego. Every separated individual is the anti-christ. But these states are not real. They are make-believe fiction and fantasy in which someone who is confused believes they are something they can never be. Thus there is no real devil or anti-christ, only people with mental illness.

5. Sin - the idea that separation is possible and real and has real consequences. That you can cause reality, therefore you can cause God. Therefore you have committed the "original sin" of trying to attack God. Except nothing real (immortal) can be attacked, so sin is really just a mistaken belief that sin is possible. When correctly recognized as a mistaken belief, it is regarded as error, and errors can be corrected without punishment. If sin were real, punishment by death is inevitable. But if sin is a false idea, then there is no death.

6. Salvation - to the ego-oriented person, salvation is anything opposite to God which takes you further away from God. In this light death is seen as salvation from life. In truth salvation is the return to God through willingness and acceptance that only his truth is true. To be saved is to be free from sin, ie error. Which means simply to be sane and to recognize correctly what is really true. Salvation is the same thing as atonement, true perception and true forgiveness.

7. Atonement - to the ego-oriented person, this is punishment for sin, demanding death. To pay for what you did. Ego says you attacked life so your life will now be attacked. Real atonement is the recognition that attack is impossible, there is no sin, and only what God created really exists. Atonement is the final miracle in which you recognize reality for what it is and reject anything not of God. Where you realize that only God's Kingdom exists and there is no world. That you are still as God created you, causing you to wake up from your dream and return to reality.

8. Evil - the notion that some power other than God exists and can cause changes in the immortal. Evil is nothing but mental illness, insanity, confusion, and just a belief in an opposite to God. It's an attempt to overthrow the kingdom and rebel against reality, making a person seem insane. Believing truth is false and false is true, all properties of nothingness and evil are assigned to God, while all properties of God are assigned to nothing. This produces hallucinations of enemies and attack and hell. There is no evil because it is nothing but a false belief in something impossible.

9. Repentance - you must repent of sins, or choose to stop being a sinner. In truth you cannot really be a sinner because sin is not possible. You can believe you are a sinner, however. And it is this belief that must be undone. To "choose again" is to repent by aligning yourself closer to God and rejecting the ego/devil.

10. Confession - really means to admit the truth, but only to admit the truth of God is true. To admit to having seemingly done something that is impossible in reality, may seem like honesty, but it's really admitting to something unreal. A true confession admits that you are christ and are purely innocent forever.

11. Word of God - the true nature of God expressed and manifested in creation. God's authenticity and honesty and trustworthiness. The expression of God's love, his voice, and his creations. It is the whole kingdom and its truth. 12. Faith - similar to trust, in terms of who or what you are placing your faith and allegiance in. Faith in the ego/devil means trusting a lie and moving towards death. Faith in God means trusting the turth and moving towards life. It's also tied into what you give "credit" to, and therefore what you value or want. If you value God you want God and credit him with being true. Therefore you trust him and side with him, and therefore have faith (know) that his laws are the only laws.

13. Resurrection - A return to life, meaning a return to immortality and eternity. This is possible only in the context that currently those who reject God are to some degree "playing dead" and are trying not to live. Resurrection is the assertion of pure life and is the opposite of choosing to die. It surmounts death and abolishes it and has power over it. It might be expressed or demonstrated as in Jesus's resurrection in which he showed through physical form that death has no power over him. It also includes the power to abolish sickness and death in all its forms, including physically in self and others.

14. Savior - Jesus is an example of a savior in that he united his will with God's, therefore uniting the will of the whole sonship with God's for us. Part of us therefore became united with God again in Jesus's resurrection. In this sense he has now in a position of being able to save ie help us - to become saviors.

15. Prayer - Ultimately communion with God in which everything is given and received. Love is received and love is expressed. It is a request for and an acceptance of everything. In its lower forms it devolves into specifics and requests which include a wish for some kind of attack or control or special favor.

16. Revelation - a true revelation is a state in which fear is totally abolished. It is a one-way communication from God to a child of God, and is like being imprinted with God. In the experience it is deeply personal and there's only you and God there. It does not include others. But its content can later be shared with others. It is not a mere insight or download or slight upgrade, it's a powerful world-blotting-out intense expression directly from God.

17. Soul - God created many souls which are individual beings who comprise the sonship and are the Kingdom. They are simultaneously all one as the Christ, also known as the one son of God. They are not children of Christ, they are children of God. They share everything with each other and therefore are each other. Souls are permanently perfect co-creators with God and create their own kingdoms of living beings together. You have a soul which is your real self/identity in christ, and you have your own kingdom of creations in heaven, which are your children.

18. Christ - Christ is also referred to as the one son, a part of the holy trinity, but christ is also EVERY son of God. Each soul is christ and you are christ just as Jesus is. Which means you are also part of Jesus and vice versa. We are all joined together in christ. Christ is the perfect holy state of being of all souls and the christ-mind is shared by all minds.

19. Trinity - Before the separation from God there was a duality, ie God and his Sonship. But in the separation God also added the Holy Spirit, producing a trinity. The Holy Spirit is the call to awaken, God's Voice speaking to His Son, which guarantees his healing and his return to reality. All three aspects of the trinity are now permanent and only the trinity is real.

20. Holy Spirit - God's creation which was added in the separation to keep a link between God and his children so that they could never be lost. It is God's guarantee of their union with him and the permanent potential for their return home to share everything with him. He bridges the gap between parts of mind that seem united in christ and parts which seem separate. He is the appointed friend and help and corrector and therapist and comforter and healer God has designated to lead us out of hell.

21. Forgiveness - really the recognition that there is nothing to forgive. In this recognition is the clear sane recognition of what is true and what is false. And only God's truth is regarded as true. In that truth sin is utterly impossible and nothing real can be changed. Therefore it's the acknowledgement that everyone is as God created them and nothing has ever happened to change God's will. It disregards all notions of an opposite to immortality and shines a beacon of light in the darkness for all those who think they are unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflection of your immortal nature, and therefore entails invulnerability in which no-one can ever be accused of doing anything to you.

22. Angel - beings created by God as part of the Kingdom. They are created below the sons of God (or from?) and act in roles of protection and guidance and healing. You can communicate and work with them even while on earth.

23. The fall of man - the separation from God, which was an attempted belief that separation is possible, a tiny mad idea, took place in the minds of souls. But also some angels became involved and believed in the separation. This produced what is termed "the fall" in which we exiled/projected ourselves from heaven, into a fictional realm of exile outside of heaven, which is not really anywhere. Lucifer, an actual angel, was included in the fall. He symbolizes the devil perhaps but all separated souls are just as much the anti-christ. This was an actual rebellion in heaven against God and a desire to be God, producing the authority problem and the rejection of God's fatherhood/authorship. A desire for their own kingdom they could rule without him. This produced spacetime, the world, and earth, which was the idea of hell as heaven's opposite.

24. Blasphemy - technically real blasphemy is impossible because God cannot be opposed or offended. But you can believe things which are seemingly against God's nature. Any form of fear, suffering, sickness, death, an annoyance, even a slight lack of joy, unhappiness, lack of peace, are all blasphemous in that they claim something that is not true in God's reality. Therefore they are trying to work against God's truth and oppose his laws. This is of course all a fantasy and there is no sin.

25. The last judgement - God's evaluation of you is the same as it was when he created you perfect, which is that you remain exactly as you were intended to be and nothing can change you. Therefore you are worthy of God and are perfectly innocent forever. Nothing has ever been done to affect your entitlement to his love and you have never sinned or attacked anything real. You merely dreamed of it in a nightmare of your own making, where you deceived yourself. The last judgement upon the world we made (earth etc) is that it is nothing and does not exist.

26. Church - perhaps a term best used as a synonym for the sonship or the kingdom, which are the same thing. The body of God, if you will, is the outer expression of God - his creation. All members of the sonship are part of the church of christ, and this membership is permanent.

27. Communion - while "holy communion" may be a symbolic act, real communion takes place in heaven as the perfect symbiotic union of God and his children. It is the total immersion and openness to God, receiving from Him and expressing in return. To commune is to know, to be, to share. On Earth this devolves into "communication" which can have varying degrees. The separation from God was really a communication breakdown, ie an unwillingness to receive or to see eye-to-eye. Miracles raise the level of communication until communion becomes possible again.

28. Creation - a term only applicable to what takes place in heaven and not on earth. It requires the perfect total whole extension or giving of what the creator has, to what the creation is. The creation inherits everything of its creator and has nothing else. It shares everything with him, having not left him, and therefore can only exist to share it. All creations are co-creators therefore because they inherit the ability to create. Creations are living beings of light, and can only create living beings of light. They cannot create physical objects or forms of matter or energy or other elements of spacetime. Earth is not a creation because it cannot create more earths. Everything in spacetime is a "dead end".

29. Crucifixion - while Jesus's activity on the cross is mostly referred to as "the crucifixion", crucifixion itself really means the attempt to crucify christ, which is everyone, through allegiance to the ego and to death. It's the attempt to prove that God's immortal son can be killed. Every form of fear and suffering and unhappiness and death is a form of crucifixion. This includes the making of an entire seeming universe of spacetime which is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son ie kingdom. It depicts all possible forms of death and is run by laws of death. Being hell, everything in it is crucified and crucifying. Ressurrection marks the ascension back to heaven.

30. Disciple - someone who freely wills to follow someone who may be more advanced, above, or wiser than themselves. Jesus does state in ACIM that if you were not to follow someone of greater wisdom you would be unwise. This indirectly suggests you should follow Jesus as his discipline and learn from him, but is not a mandate. We're also told that Jesus told the disciples to be physicians of the lord, that is to go out and heal the sick and raise the dead, and to heal themselves, with the power of the holy spirit. It is again implied that we are asked to do the same.

31. Garden of Eden - originally really the state of heaven, in which there was no need or lack of anything. Everyone had everything. It wasn't literally a garden with apple trees in it. Adam and Eve were just a couple of God's children. The tree of knowledge of life and death is symbolically the ego thought system, which if believed in (partaken of, eaten, consumed, believed) seems to "poison" the mind, make a person self-conscious of their shameful existence, and attempt to hide in the bushes of the darkness of the mind, to hide from God. They seem then to be expelled from heaven but really have believed in their own expulsion because they want to be exiled, having bought into temptation by believing the tiny mad idea of "the serpent" (ego).

32. God - of course, the prime first creator, the absolute reality, the only true law, the infinite immortal being who shares everything of himself in order to express and apply himself through creation. The father of all eternally living beings and the source of all existence. The all in all. The guarantee of eternal peace and perfection. God relates to every child fully and personally while relating to all children the same way, making him both personal and impersonal. Everyone knows God.

33. Holiness - related to wholeness and purity, innocence and the lack of belief in sin. A state of alignment with God's reality and with truth. Sanity, harmlessness, gentleness, light, healing, power, certainty and openness. Just one of many synonyms for the state of being in heaven.

34. Miracle - in the big picture everything real is permanently miraculous. Miraculousness is the nature of reality in which one thing is all things and all thing are one. This breaks all rules relating to limitation and separate boxes and isolation and exclusion. All expressions of love (God) are miraculous. God creates miracles. You are a miracle of God. God extends through you, God works miracles. You are a miracle capable of creating miracles. Miracles are expressions of life. Even in the world of dreams, on earth, miracles mirror creation in heaven, and are thought-creations which give life, provide love, fill a lack, resurrect, and correct the mind from its mistaken beliefs, producing healing. Since their nature is extension, they are received from God and given to your brothers. There are without number or limit and there is nothing they cannot do. They are truly supernatural - above the nature of the world, based solely on the laws of another world (heaven).

35. Temptation - really just the way that illusions of nothingness seem to symbolically assert and represent things which are opposite to God, as if to try to persuade you to buy into and believe in them. Illusions present themselves as things happening which cannot happen in reality, sins occurring, attacks having effects, real suffering, to "tempt you" to believe further that such things are possible. If you give them your belief, you buy into it and are deceived. If you see through the illusion and frame it in the truth, you deny it and reject its lies and do not believe in it. You can be tempted but not coerced against your will. Being tempted to believe sons of God are bodies is a major hurdle to be overcome because it is not true, but difficulty to recognize as false. The ego/devil is said to tempt souls deeper into hell, which is our own mind/beliefs making faulty decisions.

36. Commandment - not talked about much in ACIM except to say that God's will cannot be opposed, his laws are unbreakable, his nature has permanently established reality, and you cannot do anything to interfere with it. What God has created, no man can put asunder. This does not include the rather social-religious commandments or "guidelines for behavior" on earth. God does not coerce. Thou shalt be free. Thou shalt love your brother as yourself. Thou shalt live forever. Thou shalt come to no harm. Thou shalt be always happy. Thou shalt give and receive as one. Thou shalt share everything with everyone.

37. Worship - Appreciation and awe of God is appropriate, as is loving God and thanking Him, but he does not have an ego with which to receive any kind of praise. You cannot tell him how great he is as if to give him something he does not have. He cannot receive offerings of sacrifice or exalting words. He has no need of anything. But you can celebrate what has been given and rejoice and be glad that only his truth is true. You can thank him for what you are and for what you have been given, and for what your brothers have as well. But you're not supposed to idolize him or your brothers or jesus or turn anyone into a figure "above" you. Only God is above you and that's why you have awe of him.

38. Healing - in ACIM this usually refers to the transformative process of change whereby something begins in a less healed state and moves towards a more healed state. Miracles can induce healing but a "miracle of healing" is a level confusion. Miracles are a remedy, like a drop of detergent upon dirt, which causes the dirt to be removed. Healing is the result, but the miracle itself is not the healing. This is also why miracles can cause shifts in perception but are not the shifts, because the shifts are part of the healing effect, not the miracle that caused them. To heal you give healing and learn to receive healing as you give it. All those who become healed become instruments of healing. Your function on earth is the healing of the sonship as a miracle-worker.

39. Christian - apparently someone who follows christ, but you should recognize that you are christ as well. You are supposed to return to the state of owning up to being christ, recognizing that everyone is christ. Acting as christ and being christ-like is to be christian.

40. Second coming - really has nothing to do with a singular person coming down from heaven for a second time for a second go-around. It's really what happens when all those on earth are choosing to return to heaven and, of themselves, become the christ. The first coming was Jesus showing the way to return to heaven, and the second coming is us actually implementing and following that and doing the same.

41. Eternal life - really granted by God the instant he created you and everyone. It means permanence and the impossibility of anything ever happening that could interrupt, damage or change that permanence. This means it is a state of total immortality and invulnerability. Everything real lives forever.

42. Eternity - a state of heaven and reality in which everything real always exists, is always the same, never changes, and exists here and now and forever. There is no "time" involved, only presence.

43. Golden rule - Not an optional rule, but really the unbreakable law of God that you are everyone. Therefore how you treat them you are immediately and directly and personally treating youreslf. The part of you that is in them is the receiver of what you give, because giving and receiving are one. This produces an incentive for only shared interests and for giving only love, otherwise you will hurt yourself by trying to hurt another. What you do unto others you do unto yourself. By treating them how you would want to be treated, you directly do treat yourself that way and directly receive that treatment, regardless of whether other opt to reciprocate or not.

Some ACIM quotes...

"I told you that I could reach up and bring the Holy Spirit down to you. But I can bring Him to you only at your own invitation. The Holy Spirit is nothing more than your own right mind. He was also mine. The Bible says, "May the mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus," and uses this as a BLESSING. It is the blessing of miracle-mindedness. It asks that you may think as I thought, joining with me in Christ-thinking."

"The Holy Spirit is the only part of the Holy Trinity which is symbolic. He is referred to in the Bible as the Healer, the Comforter, and the Guide. He is also described as something separate, apart from the Father and from the Son. I myself said, "and if I go I will send you ANOTHER comforter, and he will abide with you."

"The Bible enjoins you to be perfect, to heal ALL errors, to take no thought of the body AS SEPARATE, and to accomplish all things IN MY NAME."

"The Bible instructs you to "KNOW thyself," or BE CERTAIN. Certainty is always of God. When you love someone, you have PERCEIVED him as he is, and this makes it possible for you to KNOW him."

"The Garden of Eden, which is described as a literal garden in the Bible, was not originally an actual garden at all. It was merely a mental state of complete need-lack. Even in the literal account, it is noteworthy that the pre-Separation state was essentially one in which man needed nothing. The Tree of Knowledge, again an overly-literal concept, (as is clearly shown by the subsequent reference to "eating of the fruit of the tree") is a symbolic reference to some of the misuses of knowledge referred to in the section immediately preceding this one."

"The Bible repeatedly states that you should praise God. This hardly means that you should tell Him how wonderful He is. He has no ego with which to accept thanks, and no perceptions with which to judge your offerings. But unless you take your part in the creation, His joy is not complete because YOURS is incomplete. And THIS He does know. He knows it in his own Being and its experience of His Sons' experience. The constant GOING OUT of His love is blocked when His Channels are closed, and He IS lonely when the minds He created do not communicate fully with Him."

"That is why the Bible says "There is no death," and that is why I demonstrated that death does not exist."

""No man cometh to the Father but by me" is among the most misunderstood statements in the Bible. It DOES NOT mean that I am in any way separate (or different) from you, EXCEPT IN TIME. Now, we know that time does not exist. Actually, the statement is much more meaningful if it is considered on a vertical rather than a horizontal axis. Regarded along the vertical, man stands below me, and I stand below God. In the process of "rising up", I AM higher. This is because without me the distance between God and man is too great for man to encompass. I bridge the distance as an Elder Brother to man, on the one hand, and a Son of God on the other. My devotion to my brothers has placed me in charge of the Sonship, which I can render complete only to the extent I can SHARE it."

"When the Bible says "Judge not that ye be not judged" it merely means that if you judge the reality of others at all, you will be unable to avoid judging your own."

"I have been correctly referred to in the Bible as "The Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world."

God's nature is not alluded to by the nature of things in this world. We are incredibly used to this world, conditioned in believing that everything does and must change all the time. Even time and space possess properties of change. Every atom is always moving, every object always transforming, everything always being born and growing and dying. God is not like that.

God doesn't change or transform over time. He doesn't create in order to experience 'new' or previously non-existent parts of Himself. He doesn't have moods. He doesn't change His mind. He doesn't get upset or angry or judgemental. He doesn't experience harm or damage or resentment.

If ever there was an 'identity' which you could truly say is so rock-solid and clear and absolutely free from any deviation or adjustment or change whatsoever, it's the identity of God. What God is. It's permanent.

So God is always there. No matter how many 'times' you go to Him, he is always there, always the same. Like.. the most reliable 'thing' in existence. He's always in the same place, having the same expression of divine love, constantly consistent and extremely joyous. He is absolutely unaffected by anything, anywhere.

This is what immortality is like.

And God created us as Immortal Spirit, so this is really what our own true identity is like, as well. Unchanging, unaffected, unmodified, already perfectly whole and innocent, completely unharmed and having never left God in any way whatsoever.

Really, the difference between God and this world is the difference between the absolute and the relative. God works the same all the time. He is always absolute. Always complete. Everything he does is complete. There are no loose ends, no guesses, no 'maybes', no confusions, no delusions or illusions, no mistakes, no options. Just always the same. Totality.

God's nature is your true nature. You are not this strange formation of ideas and concepts and thoughts and memories and experiences and differences and reactions and mortal specialness. There is nothing exclusively special to God because everything is equally special to God, including you, including your enemies.

God loves your enemies. Yup.

Just the same as God loves you.

With A Course in Miracles, for most of us the journey starts in darkness. The lessons are designed to gradually lift us up out of the darkness into the light. As we read the text and learn of its instructions, we gradually piece together a clearer picture of what is true and real. Our learning begins to generalize. Things which made no sense before become internally supported and consistent.

Over time you move from the state of an intense focus on the form of the words, the surface layer, to the much deeper messages. You start to see the correlations between passages spread across different chapters. Gradually you get in behind the words and the clear-cut metaphysical basis for the course's expression comes into focus.

At that point you'll start finding yourself becoming more of a authority and more able to base things you express on the truth. As your intimacy with the truth increases you begin to come from it, built upon it, and start to act from the top down. That means you're beginning to shine your light and remember who you are, expressing from the inner awareness of love and from the higher plane of sanity.

Particularly if you look into the metaphysics of God's Kingdom you'll find there not only clarification about the end goal, but also clarification about where it all started. And as you understand better the mechanics of heaven you can really start to grasp the underlying basis for the entire systems of thought - both that of God and that of the ego. Seeing where it all originated and how it progressed and how it is then reversed gives you great perspective.

You're then able to let go of the "bottom up" approach and begin to fulfill your function more from the top down, acting on a basis of guidance and trust, remaining in the light, holding true to what's real, overlooking the lower rungs of the ladder through forgiveness. The mind and perception are stabilized and the root of your being begins to reveal itself.

You can now utilize this intimate knowledge of the underlying immortal Kingdom as a foundation on which ti build. On which to extrapolate. On which to base your expressions. And then once it has all become so much simpler and refined you are able to express in countless ways and words all of this stuff that emanates out from a forgiven mind, from a state of simpler love and wholeness and clarity.

What that essentially means is you have become the truth, aligned yourself with it, are expressing from it. Both through a metaphysical logical basis and through the extension of love and miracles. A mind that has aligned itself with its Creator now possesses the power of authorship, and that means you now speak for God just as the Holy Spirit does. This is where you have become a teacher of God, able now to be a representative of His Word and the light of the world. Heaven's emissary. An ambassador for eternal life. A messenger of peace. And a holy influence.

If your ultimate, completely long-term goal was to awaken to truth and return to God, and you knew that ultimately nothing could hurt you because you are Immortal Spirit, you would be COMPLETELY okay with WHATEVER is necessary in order to accomplish that goal.

And that does mean literally anything. If you knew that the most important thing in your entire existence is to return to being with God, then you would 'okay' a lifetime in which you suffer terribly, have horrible diseases, are attacked endlessly, treated unfairly, and end up dying. You would sign on the dotted line - yes please, I'll go through this.

And the only reason you'll allow and agree to this, is because you can see ahead of time, what the experience is going to be like but, most importantly, WHAT IT WILL LEAD TO. And because you want what it will lead to - an increase in spiritual growth, an increase in awakening, learning to be more loving, growing your heart or the hearts of others, IF you could be shown that ahead of time, you would be like... yes, that's going to be a painful lesson but the end result is WORTH IT.

This is how we initially set out to become victims in this world. We go through this process before we are born. We evaluate with help, what we want to LEARN, and what is going to be required in order to learn it. And sometimes the requirements or 'stimuli' that will provoke learning may not be necessarily pleasant. And that's a very light way of putting the fact, that we literally choose to suffer in terrible ways, IF it will lead ultimately to awakening.

Then we come into the world and really bad shit happens. Really really bad shit. And it seems terrible. And initially we don't understand because we have this amnesia, on purpose, shutting out awareness of WHY this is happening. But the whole point of that amnesia is so that we can learn and become aware of WHY... so that we can become empowered, so that we can grow stronger, and so that we can ultimately WAKE UP.

In that light, victims are not victims. There are no victims. There are only choices, agreed-to scripts, and purposeful events. Everyone who is to meet will meet. Every thing that is meant to happen will happen. And everyone will ultimately wake up. And everyone will know that it was all worth it, especially given that NONE of this stuff was even real anyway.

Jesus says in the miracle principles, that miracles should be happening ALL THE TIME, and that when they are not happening, something has gone wrong.

What this MUST mean, is that miracles are not simply shifts in perception TOWARDS truth, but they are expressions OF truth. The expression OF truth may well shift perception if perception needs shifting, but the miraculousness of the miracle is an expression from a higher place of LOVE.

When there is love, there is miraculousness. When there is love, supernatural "abilities" are absolutely unlimited. When love is not blocked, there are NO LIMITS to what the mind can do. There is nothing that your miraculous holiness cannot do. Being miraculous is a PERMANENT CONDITION.

Being miraculous is not something that just happens in the dream while we are waking up and then STOPS. Bullshit. Miracles are supposed to be happening ALL THE TIME, and when they are not happening, something has gone wrong. Therefore, the only time where miracles are NOT happening is when something has gone wrong, meaning we are in the ego. When we are NOT in the ego, MIRACLES WILL BE CONSTANT.

YOU are also a miracle of God. God's CREATION is a miracle. Miraculousness is NATURAL. It is the natural way that an immortal spirit is able to create using the UNLIMITED power of the mind, at any time, in any way. It is an expression of LOVE. Love is always expressing "supernaturally", in comparison to this world's unnatural nature.

You will not put miracles aside when you wake up. When Jesus woke up to God he did not STOP being able to perform miracles! In fact he is now utterly UNLIMITED in what He can do. There is nothing your holiness cannot do. ALL EXPRESSION OF LOVE ARE A MIRACLE. When you return to being loving you will RETURN to being miraculous.

Permanently miraculous. You will become "miracle minded". A miracle worker.

Miracles shift perception towards God and atonement, IF that perception is unhealed and "needs a miracle". When perception is all the way SHIFTED, and is IN the atonement, the mind does not suddenly drop its ability to perform miracles or to heal. It becomes EVEN MORE ABLE. AND then its focus will be more on performing miracles for OTHERS, because miracles are the MAXIMAL SERVICE that you can render to others. Ie, loving others unconditionally and fully is healing and helpful to the absolute maximum degree possible. Meaning, unlimited.

Miracles are an EXPRESSION of the atonement. Miracles are love. Love is natural. Miraculous love should be happening all the time.

""I am forever an Effect of God."

"Father, I was created in Your Mind, a holy Thought that never left its home. I am forever Your Effect, and You forever and forever are my Cause. As You created me I have remained. Where You established me I still abide, and all Your attributes abide in me, because it is Your Will to have a Son so like his Cause that Cause and Its Effect are indistinguishable. Let me know that I am an Effect of God, and so I have the power to create like You."

You are at the effect of absolutely nothing, except that you are forever an effect solely of God. Being an effect of God means God is the cause of everything you are. He decides what you are, He defines you, He creates you, He sustains you, and His will is constant and permanent and good.

Being an effect of God, however, doesn't mean you are ONLY an effect. Because you are so like God that you must inherit every attribute of Him. This includes the ability to CAUSE, and therefore to create. By God creating you, He has created you to BE A CREATOR. To be causal. And so you inherited His Power and can use it to create. You have done this, creating your own creations, co-created with Him and with everyone else.

It can be very powerful to focus on this. Contemplate the various ways in which you are in relationship to God. Ask yourself, if God is the cause of me, what does that mean? What does it imply? If it is true, and if nothing else is true, what does that mean? This can be very useful in clarifying your relationship with God, and the truth about you. Because only what God established as true about you can be truly true.

You are caused by God.

You have no say in what you are.

You cannot change yourself.

You are perfect because God is perfect.

You are holy and loving because God is holy and loving.

You cannot die because God cannot die.

You are sustained by God at all times.

You are permanent because God is permanently willing you.

You are welcomed and wanted by God, as what God wants.

You are exactly what God wanted you to be.

You have all power because you inherit all power from Him.

You can create like and with Him as a co-creator.

You only have what came from God.

You have nothing that God did not give you.

You have everything real because God shared it with you.

You are defined solely by His will and causation.

You can be affected by nothing but God.

You are eternal and immortal because He is.

You are constantly happy because He makes you happy.

You are a reflection of His love and nature.

You are so like Him that you share everything with Him.

You are never alone because God is in you.

You cannot be attacked because God is the only power.

You are forever safe from harm because God is harmless.

You cannot change what you are even if you try to.

Your salvation and safety are guaranteed.

Your inheritance is permanently given you.

You are what God has given and you give thanks for this.

You know God because He created you by knowing you.

You cannot be separate from Him.

You cannot be abandoned or rejected by Him.

You have freedom because He insists you be free.

You are immortal because He eternally broadcasts you.

You are forever maintained by Him in perfect condition.

Your health is guaranteed because He gives it to you.

You can never be sick or suffer because He can't.

You can't make yourself sin or be guilty.

You can never lose the innocence that He created you as.

You don't have to do anything to earn His love.

You can never sin because He makes it impossible.

You cannot transform yourself into and evil monster.

You have never changed yourself from His divine design.

You must be still totally as He created you.

You cannot be affected because of His permanence.

You are in constant joy because He created you with love.

You can never be alone because He created your brothers.

You will always be friended because He created Holy Spirit.

You will always be protected by His angels.

You can never die because He wills you live forever.

You can create worlds because He gave you that ability.

You are permanently miraculous and you are His miracle.

You are unlimited because He placed no limits on you.

You have constant peace because He keeps you safe.

You are loved forever by His Will.

You are strong because your strength is His strength.

You can see because He shines a light for you to see in.

You are beautiful because He creates you beautiful.

You share everything with everyone He creates.

You are harmless because He does not will you harm.

You can never be lost to Him, He knows where you are.

You are forever encompassed by His heavenly being.

You can never be distant from Him because He is in you.

You are all powerful because He shares His power with you.

You are real because He added you to His reality.

Your identity is defined by Him alone.

You are his Son/Daughter/Child because He created you.

You have nothing real that He did not create.

You have no faults or flaws because He created you perfect.

You lack nothing because He gave you everything.

You have no needs because He supplies all your needs.

You cannot be a body because He is not a body.

You are like God in every way because you are part of Him.

You are God's investment and you have His inheritance.

You are blessed because God has blessed you.

You are a priceless part of God's Kingdom.

You can never change or be changed or change yourself.

You are already divinely perfect and complete in every way.

You have nothing wrong with you and everything is right.

You are pure, clean and new because He creates you new.

You are immaculate and impeccable and magnificent.

You are a shining star in the heavenly Mind of God.

You are what comes from Him alone.

You can only be what he wants you to be.

You do not want to be anything other than He wills.

You have free will because divine creation is freely given.

You are free to be what God intended you to be.

You were not created capable of sin or attack.

You have never sinned or attacked or been attacked.

You cannot oppose His Will because you are His will.

You can only accept and be glad that you are as He desires.

You are forever God's effect and share His causality.

You can do what God can do.

You will always be a child of God, and not his sibling.

You are authored by God and you share His authority.

You are in awe of God because He spans your brothers.

You are a made of light because He is made of light.

You will always be loved by God and God loves you now.

"To all who share the love of God the grace is given to be the givers of what they have received. And so they learn that it is theirs forever."

1) God created heaven which is perfect. You are in heaven as an immortal being, along with your brothers.

2) You believe you're not in heaven, and made a second world with the idea of opposing everything.

3) The second world is the physical world. Everything about it is false and opposite to God's nature. Not one single thing in it is true or real.

4) As part of the physical world, you also made a body. It's a separation device made to deceive you. It separates you off from God and your brothers and makes suffering seem possible.

5) The body agrees with the physical world's nature entirely, making it seem real. The body cannot see anything else and it cannot see reality at all. Everything it sees is an illusion.

6) Your mind seems to be in a body. Your mind seems to use the body's senses to sense the world you made. The body reports that it is real and happening. Everything in the world presents proof of sin and death and the body says it's really there.

7) If your mind believes what the body is telling it, it will be deceived. The body lies to it, because the world is a lie. So mind has to learn that everything in the world is unreal and untrue, being not of God. This can seem VERY difficult.

Consider for a moment, a definition of yourself, in which YOU CANNOT CHANGE. You are absolutely changeless. You exist always the same, fixed, absolute, certain, permanent. Something that never alters, adjusts, transforms. Something incapable of becoming anything, losing anything, having anything taken away from it, or added. Just the same, always and forever, always existing, always being, always you. Same old you since you were created.

Then with this is idea it being IMPOSSIBLE to experience change, consider the contrast this produces to all the forms of suffering in the world. Someone doing something to you, being affected, upset, made to feel this way or that, moved by the wind, affected by the environment, threatened by the politicians and the warmongers, altered by sickness, pushed around by health concerns etc. All of it... all forms of CHANGE. All things which say "I can change you and you will change whether you like it or not."

What are you and where do you stand and how are you able to play any of these games if YOU CAN NEVER CHANGE? If you cannot be changed by anything, you are invulnerable, immortal, eternal. Always perfect, always strong, always beyond the reach of every kind of influence, every force, every attack, every threat to your nature. You cannot change, you have never changed. You remain as God created you and always will be the same. So can you believe you have been changed, caused, forced, yet again, to become something you can never be?

"You were NOT born to die. You CANNOT change, because your Function HAS been fixed by God." UrT29G4

"Can YOU see guilt where God KNOWS there is perfect innocence? You can DENY His knowledge, but you CANNOT change it." UrT13C8

"You cannot be ANYWHERE that God did not put you, and God created you as part of HIM. That is both WHERE you are and WHAT you are. This is COMPLETELY unalterable. It is total inclusion. You cannot change this now or ever. It is forever true. It is NOT a belief, but a fact." UrT6C6

"In the longer practice period, we will think about your reality and its wholly unchanged and unchangeable nature." UrW67L2

"Now He can remind the world of sinlessness, the one unchanged, unchangeable condition of all that God created." UrM19A2

"Your Self is radiant in this holy joy, unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable forever and forever." UrW190L6

"As God created you, you must remain unchangeable with transitory states by definition false. And that includes all shifts in feeling, alterations in conditions of the body and the mind, in all awareness and in all response." UrW152L5

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there. But still and white and lovely will it shine through all eternity. There was no time it was not there. No instant when its light grew dimmer or less perfect ever was. Who knows the Father knows this light, for He is the eternal sky which holds it safe, forever lifted up and anchored sure." UrT30D8

"Only what God creates is irreversible and unchangeable. What YOU have made can always be changed, because when you do not think LIKE God, you have not really thought at all. Delusional ideas are NOT thought, but you CAN think that you believe in them." UrT5G11

"I am not weak, but strong.

I am not helpless, but all powerful.

I am not limited, but unlimited.

I am not doubtful, but certain.

I am not an illusion, but a reality.

I cannot see in darkness, but in light."

More...

I am not mortal but immortal.

I am not sick but healthy.

I am not dying but eternal.

I am not afraid but confident.

I am not a victim but empowered.

I am not guilty but innocent.

I am not sinful but holy.

I am not lost but united.

I am not alone but one.

I am not forgotten but remembered.

I am not upset but peaceful.

I am not unhappy but joyful.

I am not attacked but safe.

I am not hopeless but grateful.

I am not deprived but abundant.

I am not lacking but receiving.

I am not hurt but invulnerable.

I am not suffering but relieved.

I am not affected but causal.

I am not stuck but miraculous.

I am not imprisoned but free.

I am not angry but calm.

I am not condemned but forgiven.

I am not dark but light.

I am not separate but whole.

I am not an ego but as God created me.

I am not confused but clear.

I am not diseased but healed.

I am not broken but complete.

I am not isolated but expansive.

I am not asleep but awake.

I am not unconscious but aware.

I am not deadly but harmless.

I am not murderous but welcoming.

I am not a victimizer but truly helpful.

I am not misguided but directed.

I am not ugly but beautiful.

I am not depressed but happy.

I am not unwilling but willing.

I am not resistant but open.

I am not ill but well.

I am not damned but saved.

I am not in exile but in heaven.

I am not a body but spirit.

I am not a dream but God's creation.

I am not fictional but authentic.

I am not divided but undivided.

I am not adrift but purposeful.

I am not threatened but permanent.

I am not rejected but loved.

I am not abandoned but embraced.

I am not in hell but in God.

I am not offended but humored.

I am not suspicious but trusting.

I am not vicious but gentle.

I am not ashamed but appreciative.

I am not envious but fulfilled.

I am not idolizing but within.

I am not heroic but saved.

I am not horrified but passer-by.

I am not judging but forgiving.

I am not hateful but generous.

I am not resentful but thankful.

I am not in danger but protected.

I am not disgusting but acceptable.

I am not beyond help but supported.

I am not embarrassed but understood.

I am not grieving but reunited.

I am not controlled but powerful.

I am not terrified but strong.

I am not worried but filled with faith.

I am not dead but eternal life.

I am not lonely but home with God.

I am not sad but overjoyed.

I am not insane but sane.

I am not delusional but honest.

I am not empty but inspired.

I am not insecure but secure.

I am not anxious but reassured.

I am not cold but warm.

I am not tense but relaxed.

I am not disturbed but quiet.

I am not stressed but at ease.

I am not serious but playful.

I am not harsh but kind.

I am not weak but supernatural.

I am not in time but in eternity.

I am not separate but with God.

I've seen recently a new perspective on the healing of self and others.

I noticed that as I was helping a person to realise that they had been hurting themselves, that they were making themselves guilty, and that they deserved love, I also felt a greater love within myself. I was becoming healed as I conveyed to the other person how much they deserved to be healed.

I hadn't experienced this much before, probably because I hadn't focused on how someone else needed help with their own self-attack. The more it became clear to me that they were hurting themselves, and that they deserved better, I felt better myself.

This kind of turned a key in my mind and is now causing me to see people differently. I recognise now that we are all created equal and perfect in Christ, we have temporarily fallen into self destruction, and now we are attempting to return. This means that it can appear someone is evil, sinful, guilty, wrong etc, but this is only a kind of self-denial, a sickness they have in which they are attacking themselves. And it has nothing to do with anyone else, or the world.

I think that to see this clearly you have to not be confused about who is attacking who. When we're in ego and filled with our own guilt, an unhealed healer, we keep getting lost in the projections of others, taking things personally, and don't perceive that they're doing something to themselves. It takes the removal of enough self destruction within oneself, to be able to then recognise that someone else deserves what you've given to yourself. As the course says, you can only give the miracles you have received.

Once we take responsibility for what we're doing to ourselves, as in the secret of salvation, and cease to project guilt, and cease to make ourselves guilty in the first place, it becomes a lot clearer that other people's attacks are not against you but against themselves. Everyone's trying to destroy themselves, and only attack others in an attempt to shift the guilt and pain away from themselves. People can't stand the agony of their self inflicted wounds, so they try to give them to others as a coping strategy.

When you can see that someone's main problem isn't other people, being a victim, or anything outside of them - just as it isn't for you, it becomes more obvious that their whole problem is their own self-attitude. They are crucifying and condemning themselves, making themselves out to be sinful and guilty, believing they deserve punishment, fearing that punishment, and trying to kill themselves off.

The key though is the fact that they don't deserve this guilt anymore than you do. The fact that they are christ, temporarily at war with themselves, and are actually in need of healing. To recognise that their true nature is the healed son of God, an immortal being, correctly frames their suffering or projections as self inflicted lies. They've done this to themselves, they don't love themselves, they want to die.

As a healer, who might be perhaps more healed than the patient, you are then in a position to help them. This has to entail not regarding the surface appearance of their projected guilt as true, looking past it to finding an innocent person inside, a person who deserves love, a person who is their own worst enemy. If you are more healed, you are able to look past the appearance and illusion of their ego and see them as in need of healing. The course calls it "calling out for love". Certainly they are in need of love because they don't love themselves.

Helping someone to recognise that they are doing this to themselves, that they are making themselves guilty, that they are accusing themselves of things they have not done, and assisting them to learn to recognise their innocence and worth, is an act of healing. It moves your mind closer to the lovable being that is inside of them, a lovable being who temporarily denies its value. And as you help point them toward their lovability, you can't help but find that you are pointing yourself toward your own. As such the healing of your brother becomes the healing of yourself, and both of you are healed at the same time.

I think the main difference or shift for me has been to not see people as their surface appearance, their ego, their body, their sickness, and instead to regard them as immortal christ beings who are not loving themselves enough. Their mind is split because they are denying the truth about themselves. They project because they've put themselves into pain. They need to be resurrected and restored to their natural condition of wholeness.

A person's ego condition is nothing more than self attack, and all attack is self attack. The only remedy needed is to stop them from attacking themselves. Helping them to love themselves helps you to love yourself. Shining a light of love into their minds heals your own.

This enlightens me to realise also that people who might on the surface appear to have ego, be evil, sinful, criminal, hateful, murderous etc, are just as much victims of themselves and in need of love. It doesn't even matter how far gone someone is, how twisted and aggressive, how abusive and dark, everyone is deserving of God's love and is in need of healing. Everyone has the potential to transform into a fully integrated christ being, fully loving and fully loved, fully alive and never again to die.

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver AND the receiver."

"Miracles are a form of healing. They supply a lack, and are performed by those who have more for those who have less."

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

"To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember."

Everyone identifies with a thought system.

Every thought system centers around, defines, reflects, what you are.

If it is the thought system of God, God's truth becomes the definition of what you are.

If it is the thought system of ego, the ego's truth becomes the definition of what you are.

As such your sense of self changes from being a son of God, to being a son of ego. Or rather, from being your real self, to being the ego itself.

To change your mind about yourself requires re-identifying with your true self, and the way to do that requires you to re-identify with God's thought system.

In this way God's truth about you becomes the definition of what you are within that thought system.

You are either anchored in heaven or hell. When anchored in heaven you see yourself as divine. When anchored in hell you see yourself as the devil.

But you cannot ever really be the devil or the ego or the thought system of death because only God's system is actually true, and the ego's is false.

To transition away from the ego's system you have to recognize it as false and accept that God's system holds the only truth. As such the ego's truth about you is false and is recognised as not applying to you, because God's truth is the truth of you.

Whatever truth you align with is whatever thought system you align with, and thus produces whatever sense of yourself you have.

Identify with your divinity as Christ, the son of God, an immortal soul, the entire kingdom of heaven, and you are home and one with yourself and in your true environment and nature.

Identify with separation and death and impossibilities and you are alien to yourself and exiled in hell and at war with yourself.

Ultimately none of this has any affect on who you really are, only on your willingness to accept what you really are. Because accepting God's truth is accepting the only truth there is. And everything else is denial.

Therefore you can either accept that you are Christ or you can try to live in denial, but denial will take on the form of death and not life. So if you want to live, you must accept yourself as Christ.

"This is because everyone identifies himself WITH his thought system, and EVERY thought system centers on WHAT YOU BELIEVE YOU ARE." UrT6G2

The 'lords prayer' is commonly known, and goes something like this...

"Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.

Thine kingdom come, thine will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our tresspasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever.

Amen."

Now, last night this came to mind and it came with a different perspective. Usually when I think of this prayer, it's kind of viewed as a measly peasant, beneath and below God, asking for God to guide and have mercy, make our day go well, etc.

But the perspective I got was, if you view this prayer from 'level 2' i.e. the level of Truth/Holy Spirit, and you're above the battlefield, looking down on the world from above, centered in God and looking out FROM God, then it takes on a much clearer meaning.

It talks then of the Father we are WITH, that we are in Heaven WITH God, and that we are willing to extend God's will to the Earth.

It also then thanks God for providing everything we could ever possibly need for us, including perhaps the immediate instantaneous miraculous manifestation of food? The daily bread may be given by God manifestationally, instead of, like, from the grocery store.

It speaks then of forgiveness, oneness, in that in order for us to be forgiven, we need to be forgivING, so that we can see that both ourselves and others are EQUAL in our innocence. That's not a worldly ego perspective, that's the perspective of Holy Spirit.

Lead us not into temptation, simply suggests that we are not in temptation now and we'd like to keep it that way. Therefore we stay IN God, above the battlefield, in order to be immortal and invulnerable and free from illusions or fear. To be delivered from evil means to stay in Holy Spirit and to be sustained by God all through the day, IN God, rather than like, separate from God.

Then we acknowledge God has absolute power and glory and is eternal, like us.

So I guess the main thing here is, who are you praying this WITH. If you pray it with the ego, it means a much less powerful and reinforcing message than if you pray it from Holy Spirit's vantage point, where you are up there in truth and light with Him.

Thought I'd share that.

This is a central ACIM teaching, that death is not "normal" or "natural", but rather a choice, and that if you do not make the choice, death does not happen. It literally speaks to the real possibility of immortality, and the impossibility of death.

Think about this. Death cannot happen without you in some way being victimized. Something has to "happen to you". And that means, you are at the effect of the world in some way. That there is some kind of cause outside of you which somehow seemed to have power over you, which overpowered you, and did something against your will.

The only way that this kind of scenario can occur, is if there is something seriously mistaken about your mind. Your mind has to be seeing itself as a victim. It has to be believing it is affected by an illusion. It has to be playing the part of victim and of being attacked. It also has to be using the world, or people in the world, as scapegoats. Without the ability to accuse the world of causing the death against your will, the death cannot happen.

A key part of this is that even when it appears that death is happening against your will, even if you do choose it and play along with the victim role and being affected by something external, even then you are still giving full consent. You are still involved. Your mind is actually participating in laying down life and becoming un-willing to live. This is not passive.

The mind cannot ever be passive. The mind is always active and creating. If the mind chooses to have a sickness, the mind is still choosing the sickness and the mind is still putting the sickness there. The sickness isn't just happening on its own. And when the mind chooses not to put the sickness there the sickness disappears.

Even if it may *appear* at the time as though the sickness is happening outside the scope of your choice, or beyond what you can control, or that you were not even the one who chose it, the truth is that you did choose it, you put it in place yourself, it is you who are maintaining it, and it cannot even continue showing up without your consent.

So you have to realize what death is. Death is only "possible" as a state where our mind has something seriously fucked up about how it is seeing itself. It can only come about by the mind deciding to pretend that it is being seriously affected. Jesus describes it as a vain attempt to make no choice at all - really the disownership of choice or the attempt to be completely irresponsible for your existence.

In the activity or implementation of dying and death, the mind is actively choosing to pretend that it has nothing to do with living, nothing to do with what happens, and nothing to do with the circumstances that are arising. It is faking it. It is going under-cover, putting on a tremendous performance as if everyone and everything else is causal other than itself, and that it is purely an effect.

So what death really is, is an attempt to NOT be causal at all, to have no power, to appear to be making no choice, and to paint this picture of stuff happening seemingly against your will. But it's such an extraordinary lie, such a cover-up, that everyone seems to believe it. All the fingers will point in the direction of "cause of death" or "why they died" to explain how this death came about. But this will only explain the manner in which the death seemed to "happen", it will not in any way implicate the person as having been the author of these events, or of being the one who made it happen to themselves.

Death is a state of extreme lying. It is the most dishonest condition possible. It is a state of not only denying God, denying the unchangeable fact of eternal life, and denying that nothing can happen to you against your will (because that is God's Will and God has given you a will which cannot be affected).

If life seems to be degrading, and diminishing, and slipping away, and the external world seems to be mounting a successful attack, and the body seems to have a mind of its own, and circumstances appear to be transpiring against the person, and it starts to look AS IF it is unfair and unchosen and the person is not doing ANYTHING to contribute to this condition, that's because the illusion is INCREASING and the person is moving further away from truth.

Death is a complete reversal of sanity, a total reversal of the proper functioning of the mind, and a complete reversal of cause and effect. It places all power and will and choice and causality as outside of oneself, making oneself entirely an "effect" of something separate from oneself.

Death actually is an attempt to claim that God is external, that God is separate, that God has a will which opposes your own, that God is to blame for destroying you, that you have no power to stop Him, and that this is all happening to you entirely against your will. In other words, it is an attempt to claim that God is the cause of all death, and not the cause of life.

It then will appear that anyone who dies does not want to die. It will appear as if the person had no say in the matter, as if life just threw them a shit sandwich. It will seem as if they are being dragged kicking and screaming against their will into the firey pits of hell as if having absolutely no power to do anything about it. This is the most grandiose, lying, fabricated, fictional, deceptive, denying, dishonest, irresponsible and bullshit state of being possible. It's an attempt to accuse the entire world of destroying oneself.

Another way to put it is that we are inside this dream which WE are dreaming, and then we turn around and attempt to claim that this dream - which is coming from us - suddenly has the ability to cause us, to decide for us what we are, to make us what we are, that we are born from it and according to its nature, that we inherit from it, that is has power over us, that it decides if we live (are born) or if and when we die, and now we are a completely powerless victim of it. That's the entire illusion of death. The suggestion that a dream that WE MADE UP, is willing against us and has taken over possession of the very mind that dreamed it in the first place.

Another word for this also is "level confusion". Every single aspect of the ego thought system is level confusion. It means that cause and effect have been reversed and what was just an effect seems to be causal and what was always causal is seen to be at its effect. This means that the lower level - the effect - now seems to turn around and inflict a deadly blow against the higher level that made it in the first place, thus reversing the levels and creating an 'upward' direction of causality.

This is actually nothing more than the attempt to say "I cause God". It is the authority problem. Death is the result of the authority problem. It's an attempt to say, I have a will which is stronger than God's and I am successfully willing that God be dead, or that God is at the effect of me, or I can change God, and God is my victim. This is the idea of sin made real, that we can "actually" sin against God and cause Him harm. When we attempt to do this, instead of God dying, WE DIE. Instead of God receiving the effects, WE receive them. And so death in form is actually an expression of the attempt to kill God, and to kill His Son.

And Jesus goes into this in the Course quite a bit. The body is used as a kind of "anchor" to associate the Son of God with a form which can APPEAR to die or go through suffering, so that we can play out a fictional sadistic story of being successful at torturing and killing God's Son. When our sense of identity as God's Son is associated or identified with the body, or bound to the body, this makes us cling to the body and then we appear to become vulnerable. Eventually the body suffers and becomes weak, because we are using it for attacking ourselves, and then the body dies. And what does our ego think is happening when the body dies? It thinks that we are *succeeding* in destroying the Son of God!. Symbolically anyway. So all death is a SACRIFICE of God's Son.

This is also why this universe that we dreamed up, is a "picture of the crucifixion of God's Son". It's an attempt to implement death, to associate God's son with the form of a body or bodies, and to then destroy those forms in order to act out this idea that God and His Son have been murdered. This is of course utter bullshit and a total lie, because God and His Son are IMMORTAL, and cannot be changed or destroyed or harmed in any way.

God has granted ETERNAL LIFE to all souls He Created and it is absolutely impossible for any soul to truly die or suffer or be sick or upset or unhappy in any way. At the core of your being you know that you are already as God created you, you have not changed since God created you, and you cannot change what God created. At the core of your being you have no authority problem and you know that death is absolutely impossible for you. And yet here we are, pretending to be bodies, stuck in an illusion, bad stuff seeming to happen from our unconscious mind making it seem like we didn't ask for it, yet we are doing it ALL to ourselves.

The secret to salvation is that you are but doing ALL of this to yourself. All of the suffering, all the sickness and disease, all the upsets and unhappiness, all the tragic sudden car accident and airplane crashes and food poisoning and wars and all the rest of it. It's all a massive fictional illusion to make it seem like you are not doing it to yourself - that you are not trying to sacrifice yourself or crucify yourself. But you ARE. It's YOU that is doing it. It is YOU that is giving your consent. It not only that, not just that you are saying to someone hey, I give you consent to come along and kill me so that it seems I didn't do it myself, it's that you actually DO IT YOURSELF.

ALL death is suicide. All of it. Every single person buried in the ground was a suicide. Even the people who "died of old age" committed suicide. All of the people who suffered from terminal illnesses committed suicide. Every single still birth, every tragedy of war crimes, every murder, every unexpected accident, absolutely all of it is CHOSEN. And not one single person had anything happen to them which they did not choose and did not participate in causing to happen.

This is the truth of the Course. This is what Jesus is teaching us, to be responsible for the POWER that we have to make anything happen, and to stop denying it and stop pretending to be victims. We are NOT at the effect of the world we see, the world is nothing but an effect. It has no power to make you ill or weak or afraid or upset in any way! You are invulnerable. You are immortal spirit!

So fundamentally, death is IMPOSSIBLE because you are immortal. Period. You cannot die. But you can pretend to die, or as the course says, you can try to associate your identity with things that appear to die. Such as the body, which is an illusion, and a wonderful way to make it appear that you are not choosing.

It is utterly impossible, in all cases, for someone to move towards death, without their mind having made the decision to use death to try to sacrifice themselves. In every single case, if sickness is showing up, if suffering is happening, if there is punishment occurring, if there is unfair victimhood, or you seem unfairly treated, or something is happening that *seems* you have no power over, it is because you have GIVEN it power over you and you have given AWAY your power TO it, to make IT have the power to seem to choose FOR you that you will suffer and die, so that you can keep your power a secret even unto yourself, and pretend that this is all happening against your will.

Death cannot even begin to happen without your participation. It cannot even begin to happen without your consent. It cannot even begin to happen without your mind doing something wrong and unnatural. Death is NOT natural. It is completely unnatural. Anything that dies is filled with lies. Death is not an exit from the dream either. It is a guarantee of reincarnation. It doesn't matter how much of a famous guru you are. If you still go through death, you are still denying God, are still at the effect of the world, are still putting in place a state of victimhood, are still rallying things against you, and are still believing that God's Son can be killed.

So do not think that death is some kind of option or some kind of thing which is acceptable or peaceful or loving or kind or a sign of success or a way out of dreaming or inevitable or something which just happens against your will. IT DOES NOT. It cannot happen AT ALL unless you are making significant mistakes and are trying to bring about a will against your own will, meaning your will is divided against itself, meaning you still have a split mind. The symptoms of all sickness and death cannot show up AT ALL unless there is something going wrong with your mind.

"A broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." This is absolutely 100% literal. If there is some kind of sign of damage or breakage or sickness in the body, it is because the mind is attempting to attack ITSELF. What you use the body for it will become to you - use it for attack and it will become weak and sick and die. Use it to bring the word of God (immortality) to those who have it not and it becomes holy and being holy it CANNOT be sick, NOR CAN IT DIE. This is pure ACIM teaching.

Death is failure. Death is denial. Death is a lie. Death is a mistake. Death is victimhood. Death is self hatred. Death is sacrifice. Death is illusion. Death is suffering. Death is reluctance to accept the truth. Death is a defense against the truth. Death is sickness. Death is level confusion. Death is a reversal of cause and effect. Death is the authority problem. Death is a belief in the justified consequences of real sin. Death is absolutely the OPPOSITE of everything the course is teaching, everything true about God and His creation, and is a total reversal of sanity. Do not see it as normal or natural or an graceful exit.

Jesus is teaching us to stop killing ourselves. To accept immortality. To demonstrate immortality. To show the world that death is impossible. Jesus was crucified (by his own will) and came back and manifested another body to demonstrate that the MIND makes the body and can make another, to prove that the mind is completely NOT at the effect of the body or the world, and therefore has escaped death entirely. It is proof of immortality. Jesus overcame death. He wants us to overcome death, not give in to it. Not anticipate it or fear it or give it power or expect it or make it into a religion or worship it or put it on a pedestal like some kind of salvation.

Only the creations of light are real. Nothing real can be threatened. What is real is immortal. Spirit is is a state of grace forever. Heaven and earth are total opposites. Heaven is a state of eternal life. There is no death in God's Son.

There is no death! The Son of God is free! The Son of God can only be free if it is completely experientially true that nothing can happen against His will. And it IS true. There is no will but God's. Eternal life is GUARANTEED.

This is a central ACIM teaching, that death is not "normal" or "natural", but rather a choice, and that if you do not make the choice, death does not happen. It literally speaks to the real possibility of immortality, and the impossibility of death.

Think about this. Death cannot happen without you in some way being victimized. Something has to "happen to you". And that means, you are at the effect of the world in some way. That there is some kind of cause outside of you which somehow seemed to have power over you, which overpowered you, and did something against your will.

The only way that this kind of scenario can occur, is if there is something seriously mistaken about your mind. Your mind has to be seeing itself as a victim. It has to be believing it is affected by an illusion. It has to be playing the part of victim and of being attacked. It also has to be using the world, or people in the world, as scapegoats. Without the ability to accuse the world of causing the death against your will, the death cannot happen.

A key part of this is that even when it appears that death is happening against your will, even if you do choose it and play along with the victim role and being affected by something external, even then you are still giving full consent. You are still involved. Your mind is actually participating in laying down life and becoming un-willing to live. This is not passive.

The mind cannot ever be passive. The mind is always active and creating. If the mind chooses to have a sickness, the mind is still choosing the sickness and the mind is still putting the sickness there. The sickness isn't just happening on its own. And when the mind chooses not to put the sickness there the sickness disappears.

Even if it may *appear* at the time as though the sickness is happening outside the scope of your choice, or beyond what you can control, or that you were not even the one who chose it, the truth is that you did choose it, you put it in place yourself, it is you who are maintaining it, and it cannot even continue showing up without your consent.

So you have to realize what death is. Death is only "possible" as a state where our mind has something seriously fucked up about how it is seeing itself. It can only come about by the mind deciding to pretend that it is being seriously affected. Jesus describes it as a vain attempt to make no choice at all - really the disownership of choice or the attempt to be completely irresponsible for your existence.

In the activity or implementation of dying and death, the mind is actively choosing to pretend that it has nothing to do with living, nothing to do with what happens, and nothing to do with the circumstances that are arising. It is faking it. It is going under-cover, putting on a tremendous performance as if everyone and everything else is causal other than itself, and that it is purely an effect.

So what death really is, is an attempt to NOT be causal at all, to have no power, to appear to be making no choice, and to paint this picture of stuff happening seemingly against your will. But it's such an extraordinary lie, such a cover-up, that everyone seems to believe it. All the fingers will point in the direction of "cause of death" or "why they died" to explain how this death came about. But this will only explain the manner in which the death seemed to "happen", it will not in any way implicate the person as having been the author of these events, or of being the one who made it happen to themselves.

Death is a state of extreme lying. It is the most dishonest condition possible. It is a state of not only denying God, denying the unchangeable fact of eternal life, and denying that nothing can happen to you against your will (because that is God's Will and God has given you a will which cannot be affected).

If life seems to be degrading, and diminishing, and slipping away, and the external world seems to be mounting a successful attack, and the body seems to have a mind of its own, and circumstances appear to be transpiring against the person, and it starts to look AS IF it is unfair and unchosen and the person is not doing ANYTHING to contribute to this condition, that's because the illusion is INCREASING and the person is moving further away from truth.

Death is a complete reversal of sanity, a total reversal of the proper functioning of the mind, and a complete reversal of cause and effect. It places all power and will and choice and causality as outside of oneself, making oneself entirely an "effect" of something separate from oneself.

Death actually is an attempt to claim that God is external, that God is separate, that God has a will which opposes your own, that God is to blame for destroying you, that you have no power to stop Him, and that this is all happening to you entirely against your will. In other words, it is an attempt to claim that God is the cause of all death, and not the cause of life.

It then will appear that anyone who dies does not want to die. It will appear as if the person had no say in the matter, as if life just threw them a shit sandwich. It will seem as if they are being dragged kicking and screaming against their will into the firey pits of hell as if having absolutely no power to do anything about it. This is the most grandiose, lying, fabricated, fictional, deceptive, denying, dishonest, irresponsible and bullshit state of being possible. It's an attempt to accuse the entire world of destroying oneself.

Another way to put it is that we are inside this dream which WE are dreaming, and then we turn around and attempt to claim that this dream - which is coming from us - suddenly has the ability to cause us, to decide for us what we are, to make us what we are, that we are born from it and according to its nature, that we inherit from it, that is has power over us, that it decides if we live (are born) or if and when we die, and now we are a completely powerless victim of it. That's the entire illusion of death. The suggestion that a dream that WE MADE UP, is willing against us and has taken over possession of the very mind that dreamed it in the first place.

Another word for this also is "level confusion". Every single aspect of the ego thought system is level confusion. It means that cause and effect have been reversed and what was just an effect seems to be causal and what was always causal is seen to be at its effect. This means that the lower level - the effect - now seems to turn around and inflict a deadly blow against the higher level that made it in the first place, thus reversing the levels and creating an 'upward' direction of causality.

This is actually nothing more than the attempt to say "I cause God". It is the authority problem. Death is the result of the authority problem. It's an attempt to say, I have a will which is stronger than God's and I am successfully willing that God be dead, or that God is at the effect of me, or I can change God, and God is my victim. This is the idea of sin made real, that we can "actually" sin against God and cause Him harm. When we attempt to do this, instead of God dying, WE DIE. Instead of God receiving the effects, WE receive them. And so death in form is actually an expression of the attempt to kill God, and to kill His Son.

And Jesus goes into this in the Course quite a bit. The body is used as a kind of "anchor" to associate the Son of God with a form which can APPEAR to die or go through suffering, so that we can play out a fictional sadistic story of being successful at torturing and killing God's Son. When our sense of identity as God's Son is associated or identified with the body, or bound to the body, this makes us cling to the body and then we appear to become vulnerable. Eventually the body suffers and becomes weak, because we are using it for attacking ourselves, and then the body dies. And what does our ego think is happening when the body dies? It thinks that we are *succeeding* in destroying the Son of God!. Symbolically anyway. So all death is a SACRIFICE of God's Son.

This is also why this universe that we dreamed up, is a "picture of the crucifixion of God's Son". It's an attempt to implement death, to associate God's son with the form of a body or bodies, and to then destroy those forms in order to act out this idea that God and His Son have been murdered. This is of course utter bullshit and a total lie, because God and His Son are IMMORTAL, and cannot be changed or destroyed or harmed in any way.

God has granted ETERNAL LIFE to all souls He Created and it is absolutely impossible for any soul to truly die or suffer or be sick or upset or unhappy in any way. At the core of your being you know that you are already as God created you, you have not changed since God created you, and you cannot change what God created. At the core of your being you have no authority problem and you know that death is absolutely impossible for you. And yet here we are, pretending to be bodies, stuck in an illusion, bad stuff seeming to happen from our unconscious mind making it seem like we didn't ask for it, yet we are doing it ALL to ourselves.

The secret to salvation is that you are but doing ALL of this to yourself. All of the suffering, all the sickness and disease, all the upsets and unhappiness, all the tragic sudden car accident and airplane crashes and food poisoning and wars and all the rest of it. It's all a massive fictional illusion to make it seem like you are not doing it to yourself - that you are not trying to sacrifice yourself or crucify yourself. But you ARE. It's YOU that is doing it. It is YOU that is giving your consent. It not only that, not just that you are saying to someone hey, I give you consent to come along and kill me so that it seems I didn't do it myself, it's that you actually DO IT YOURSELF.

ALL death is suicide. All of it. Every single person buried in the ground was a suicide. Even the people who "died of old age" committed suicide. All of the people who suffered from terminal illnesses committed suicide. Every single still birth, every tragedy of war crimes, every murder, every unexpected accident, absolutely all of it is CHOSEN. And not one single person had anything happen to them which they did not choose and did not participate in causing to happen.

This is the truth of the Course. This is what Jesus is teaching us, to be responsible for the POWER that we have to make anything happen, and to stop denying it and stop pretending to be victims. We are NOT at the effect of the world we see, the world is nothing but an effect. It has no power to make you ill or weak or afraid or upset in any way! You are invulnerable. You are immortal spirit!

So fundamentally, death is IMPOSSIBLE because you are immortal. Period. You cannot die. But you can pretend to die, or as the course says, you can try to associate your identity with things that appear to die. Such as the body, which is an illusion, and a wonderful way to make it appear that you are not choosing.

It is utterly impossible, in all cases, for someone to move towards death, without their mind having made the decision to use death to try to sacrifice themselves. In every single case, if sickness is showing up, if suffering is happening, if there is punishment occurring, if there is unfair victimhood, or you seem unfairly treated, or something is happening that *seems* you have no power over, it is because you have GIVEN it power over you and you have given AWAY your power TO it, to make IT have the power to seem to choose FOR you that you will suffer and die, so that you can keep your power a secret even unto yourself, and pretend that this is all happening against your will.

Death cannot even begin to happen without your participation. It cannot even begin to happen without your consent. It cannot even begin to happen without your mind doing something wrong and unnatural. Death is NOT natural. It is completely unnatural. Anything that dies is filled with lies. Death is not an exit from the dream either. It is a guarantee of reincarnation. It doesn't matter how much of a famous guru you are. If you still go through death, you are still denying God, are still at the effect of the world, are still putting in place a state of victimhood, are still rallying things against you, and are still believing that God's Son can be killed.

So do not think that death is some kind of option or some kind of thing which is acceptable or peaceful or loving or kind or a sign of success or a way out of dreaming or inevitable or something which just happens against your will. IT DOES NOT. It cannot happen AT ALL unless you are making significant mistakes and are trying to bring about a will against your own will, meaning your will is divided against itself, meaning you still have a split mind. The symptoms of all sickness and death cannot show up AT ALL unless there is something going wrong with your mind.

"A broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." This is absolutely 100% literal. If there is some kind of sign of damage or breakage or sickness in the body, it is because the mind is attempting to attack ITSELF. What you use the body for it will become to you - use it for attack and it will become weak and sick and die. Use it to bring the word of God (immortality) to those who have it not and it becomes holy and being holy it CANNOT be sick, NOR CAN IT DIE. This is pure ACIM teaching.

Death is failure. Death is denial. Death is a lie. Death is a mistake. Death is victimhood. Death is self hatred. Death is sacrifice. Death is illusion. Death is suffering. Death is reluctance to accept the truth. Death is a defense against the truth. Death is sickness. Death is level confusion. Death is a reversal of cause and effect. Death is the authority problem. Death is a belief in the justified consequences of real sin. Death is absolutely the OPPOSITE of everything the course is teaching, everything true about God and His creation, and is a total reversal of sanity. Do not see it as normal or natural or an graceful exit.

Jesus is teaching us to stop killing ourselves. To accept immortality. To demonstrate immortality. To show the world that death is impossible. Jesus was crucified (by his own will) and came back and manifested another body to demonstrate that the MIND makes the body and can make another, to prove that the mind is completely NOT at the effect of the body or the world, and therefore has escaped death entirely. It is proof of immortality. Jesus overcame death. He wants us to overcome death, not give in to it. Not anticipate it or fear it or give it power or expect it or make it into a religion or worship it or put it on a pedestal like some kind of salvation.

Only the creations of light are real. Nothing real can be threatened. What is real is immortal. Spirit is is a state of grace forever. Heaven and earth are total opposites. Heaven is a state of eternal life. There is no death in God's Son.

There is no death! The Son of God is free! The Son of God can only be free if it is completely experientially true that nothing can happen against His will. And it IS true. There is no will but God's. Eternal life is GUARANTEED.

There are two approaches to spiritual progress.

1) You start out with nothing and have to attain, build, accumulate, get, learn, grow, become, seek, do something, believe in, empower, achieve, turn into, so that you will be more than you are now. So that your ego and self image will expand, and so that you will become a superhero and the God of the world. Or...

2) You start out perfect and have everything, but then you deny it and hide it, and pretend you have nothing. What you then need to do is backtrack, return, reverse, undo, cancel, deny the denial, dis-believe, withdraw power from the illusion of emptiness, remove the blocks, so that you can recognize and re-awaken to what is already permanently true. That you are with God in heaven and always have been. You "need do nothing" but accept this is already true.

We are very accustomed to thinking in terms of the first approach, because the entire ego thought system has denied God even exists, has hidden your inheritance, has thrown away any notion of you being permanently perfect, and sets you out on a path of "seek and do not find" beginning in emptiness and nothingness. We think this is normal. And we then think that salvation, love, awareness, God, our self, is somewhere else, yet to be attained or earned. Achieved through punishment and suffering and at a cost.

This is the illusion of a spiritual path. Where our whole focus is on "I don't have it now", and therefore "I need to get it". It drives the ego's focus with a complete disconnect between giving and receiving, suggesting you have nothing so have nothing to give, so need to "get" before you can give. It suggests you are devoid of love and perfection, as an attack on your true nature, hiding you from yourself, and then encourages you to seek to become more spiritual. To hide from yourself by finding yourself in another, or in the body.

But there can really be no progress at all if all we do is maintain the belief that we are not ALREADY perfect, and keep trying to become something as if we don't have it already. The ego is plenty happy to encourage you to overdo on the course, commit to paths and books and ceremonies and teachers and groups and seminars and so on, to exalt salvation outside yourself and worship it like an idol. But all this does is it turns everything you have denied within yourself, into an externalized illusion, which you now worship as though it can save you from your emptiness.

The problem is that in this approach, we're not really addressing what has ACTUALLY happened to us. We didn't pop into existence out of nothingness, with no inheritance, with no real source, and starting out with nothing. We didn't just materialize in a state of total lack and need, from which we have to spend our whole lives trying to accumulate food and objects and toys and money and fake identities and shit, just to try to build up a sense of having something, to fill the emptiness with emptiness.

"The purpose of the Atonement is to restore everything TO you. (That is, to restore the awareness. Later clarification.) You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

"The Garden of Eden, which is described as a literal garden in the Bible, was not originally an actual garden at all. It was merely a mental state of complete need-lack. Even in the literal account, it is noteworthy that the pre-Separation state was essentially one in which man needed nothing."

We have to recognize instead that we HAD everything when we were created. We were created perfect and without needs or wants of any kind. We were created permanently, and cannot be changed in our perfection. We cannot lose what we are, we cannot stop being ourselves, and we cannot destroy what God has created.

The truth is that we in fact first denied and hid from our natural permanent immortal perfection, to PRETEND that we had nothing, so that we would seek outside ourselves to find ourselves where we don't exist. The whole story reveals that not only did we try to throw away heaven and God and our real family and identity, we actually did not even accomplish this in reality. We just fooled ourselves into believing that it was possible, and that we had done it. That sin was real. And in that we are mistaken.

So then the only way to REALLY make progress isn't so much in the forward acquisition of the world, the price of which is the loss of your soul. But to realize that our perfect pre-existing immortal safe self is ALREADY THERE, simply disguised and hidden BEHIND various "blocks to the awareness of love's presence". There's simply a pile of garbage in the way, full of fake lies and un-truths, which make it seem like it's not there, or that innocence has been lost and converted into guilt.

Our real task then isn't the ego's path of gathering stuff from outside of us to plug the holes, but to reverse our steps, backtrack, undo, let go, surrender the world, deny the denial of truth, accept the reality of God's truth, simply melt into and settle into what you already ARE, and RE-discover your real nature within. To go inside and find yourself, RIGHT NOW, in a state of immaculate perfection, undisturbed and unattacked, immortal and invulnerable, incapable of suffering or sickness or death, and utterly beyond the reach of this entire world.

It's so easy to become lost in this whole drive to go do be find add get, that we can forget we're supposed to really be RECOGNIZING that we are STILL as God created us, we haven't changed at all, nothing has happened to us, we REMAIN in heaven safely with God, we haven't really journeyed anywhere but into a detour of fear, and we are utterly beyond the reach of all dreams of death. We are constant and we are permanent and we can NEVER be hurt, threatened, endangered or destroyed. Nothing has EVER happened to us. We are utterly indestructible.

That's what waking up is about. A recognition of what has ALWAYS been true, and is still true, and will forever be true. You simply can't go anywhere, or do anything, or be anything other than God established you to be. And you have nothing that he did not give you, or which you did not create with Him. And there is nothing else. You are real and you cannot be threatened, and nothing unreal exists.

You are perfect NOW. And you need merely to relax into accepting that you are ALREADY holy, innocent and perfect. You have been all along, and everything else is a lie. We simply need to acknowledge and admit that we've been perfect all along, have never deviated or changed, and we are STILL exactly as perfect as God created us to be. Which means you have no need to seek for anything.

"Who could have done this but you? Recognize this gladly, for in this recognition lies the realization that your banishment is not of God, and therefore does not exist. You are at home in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of awakening to Reality. Is it your will to do so? You know, from your own experience, that what you see in dreams you think is real, as long as you are asleep. But the instant you waken, you KNOW that everything that SEEMED to happen DID NOT HAPPEN AT ALL. You do not think this mysterious, even though ALL the laws of what you awake to WERE violated while you slept."

"The ego is trying to teach you how to gain the whole world, and lose your own Soul. The Holy Spirit teaches that you CANNOT lose your Soul and there IS no gain in the world, for OF ITSELF, it profits nothing."

"Whom God has joined CANNOT be separated, and God has joined all His Sons WITH HIMSELF. Can you be separated from your life and your being? The journey to God is merely the reawakening of the knowledge of where you are always, and what you are forever. It is a journey without distance, to a goal that has never changed."

"Why wait for Heaven? Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. The light is in them now. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all. Light is not of the world, yet you who bear the light in you are alien here as well. The light came with you from your native home, and stayed with you because it is your own. It is the only thing you bring with you from Him Who is your Source. It shines in you because it lights your home, and leads you back to where it came from and you are at home."

"Thanks be to you, the holy Son of God, for as you were created you contain all things within your Self. And you are still as God created you. Nor can you dim the light of your perfection. In your heart the Heart of God is laid. He holds you dear because you are Himself. All gratitude belongs to you because of what you are."

"We begin the journey back by setting out TOGETHER, and gather in our brothers as we CONTINUE together."

"Ours is simply the journey back to God Who is our home."

"We have forgiven one another now, and so we come at last to You again. Father, Your Son, who never left, returns to Heaven and his home. How glad are we to have our sanity restored to us, and to remember that we all are one."

"Today we will anticipate the time when dreams of sin and guilt are gone, and we have reached again the holy place we never left. Merely a tiny instant has elapsed between eternity and timelessness. So brief the interval there was no lapse in continuity, nor break in thoughts which are forever unified as one. Nothing has ever happened to disturb the peace of God the Father and the Son. This we accept as wholly true today."

"Father, I was created in Your Mind, a holy Thought that never left its home. I am forever Your Effect, and You forever and forever are my Cause. As You created me I have remained. Where You established me I still abide, and all Your attributes abide in me because it is Your Will to have a Son so like his Cause that Cause and Its Effect are indistinguishable."

"In prayer you have united with your Source, and understood that you have never left."

"You are he your Father loves, who never left his home, nor wandered in a savage world with feet that bleed, and with a heavy heart made hard against the Love that is the truth in you. Give all your dreams to Christ and let Him be your Guide to healing, leading you in prayer beyond the sorry reaches of the world."

"In quiet listen to your Self today, and let Him tell you God has never left His Son, and you have never left your Self."

"Now try to reach the Son of God in you. This is the Self Which never sinned, nor made an image to replace reality. This is the Self Which never left Its home in God, to walk the world uncertainly. This is the Self Which knows no fear, nor could conceive of loss or suffering or death."

"Now into Your Hands we give again the spirit of Your Son who seemed to lose his way a little while but never left the safety of Your Love."

"And turn you to the stately calm within, where, in holy stillness, dwells the living God you never left, and Who never left you."

"There is no need for help to enter Heaven for you never left. But there is need for help beyond yourself as you are circumscribed by false beliefs about your Identity, Which God alone established in reality."

"Then will we wait in silence, giving up all self-deceptions as we humbly ask our Self that He reveal Himself to us. And He Who never left will come again to our awareness, grateful to restore His home to God as it was meant to be."

"Beyond all idols is the Thought God holds of you. Completely unaffected by the turmoil and the terror of the world, the dreams of birth and death that here are dreamed, the myriad of forms that fear can take, quite undisturbed, the Thought God holds of you remains EXACTLY as It always was. Surrounded by a stillness so complete no sound of battle comes remotely near, It rests in certainty and perfect peace. Here is your ONE reality kept safe, completely unaware of all the world that worships idols, and that knows not God. In perfect sureness of Its changelessness and of Its rest in Its eternal home, the Thought God holds of you has never left the Mind of Its Creator, Whom It knows as Its Creator knows that It is there."

"Forgiveness, once complete, brings timelessness so close the song of Heaven can be heard, not with the ears, but with the holiness that never left the altar which abides forever deep within the Son of God. And when he hears this song again, he knows he NEVER heard it not."

There is a fairly simple question that can be asked to determine if planet Earth is real, exists, or is God's creation.

There are machine guns in this world. Machine guns full of bullets. The bullets are projectiles which shoot out of this gun and may penetrate other objects. Upon doing so it is capable of ripping holes in things, and if those things are biological organisms it is capable of mowing them down and destroying them and killing them.

Now, that's simply physical fact. That's what the gun does. That's how it functions. That's what it's capable of.

It does not matter if you forgive the gun, it will still function this way. It does not matter if you see it with false perception and hate it, or see it with true perception and love it. It will still function as a bullet-launching death machine, capable of seriously damaging and destroying anything it touches.

Your healed perceptions of the machine gun do not stop it from launching bullets. Nor does your perception change the shape of the gun from being still in the form of a gun. It still has a barrel and a set of machinery and metal bullets. It doesn't matter how many years you've been doing ACIM spiritual practices, it in no way changes a single fact about how that object functions.

Now you have to ask yourself, whether God in his infinite mercy and wisdom and gentleness and love, would EVER conceive of such an object? Because if that machine gun exists, and has reality, then it MUST be of God. It must be part of God's will. It must be what he wants. And God himself must endorse it. In fact God must have designed it himself and co-created it.

How does that sit with you? Even if you forgive the machine gun and send it love and do not blame it and do not project sin or guilt onto it, does it still have a design and capacity for mowing down citizens? Yes it does. Even if you are high on a cloud of spiritual consciousness, does the machine gun still operate according to physical laws? Yes it does. Is it still capable of murder regardless of how spiritual you become? Yes it is.

So you have to ask yourself, would God create such a device? Would God's world, which should be heaven, contain such a device? Could God have willed that such a device be possible? That there can be scenarios in which some of God's other heavenly-created objects are capable of being utterly ripped apart and destroyed in a matter of seconds? Is such a thing allowed and possible and sanctioned in heaven? Is it even a POSSIBILITY, that in God's perfect absolutely infinite immortal reality, that there can be things mowed down with metal bullets?

You have to come to terms with this because the answer is quite important. The ONLY WAY that planet Earth, the physical planet, the solid matter, all of space and time, can have come from God or be in any way God's will, is if God is a maker of weapons. And even if we lift away labels such as weapons and say "that's a lovely beautiful piece of machinery isn't it" in some kind of blissful state of rose-tinted-glasses, we STILL are going to have to accept that IF IT IS PART OF THE KINGDOM, GOD WANTS OBJECTS TO BE BLASTED APART.

So we're really asking now, what is God's nature and will? Can you sleep at night knowing that God is a God who facilitates and supports and contributes to the making of weapons of mass destruction? Is that within God's laws? Does God allow AND support such a thing? Because if he does, what kind of a God is that? And how would a loving, beautiful, gentle, kind, happy God, come up with a design for a very effective "killing machine" as part of HEAVEN?

I think MOST sane or semi-sane people in the world would have to agree, that if God is loving it is HIGHLY unlikely that God could ever be conceived of as personally willing the creation of a machine gun. Not even if the gun is radically forgiven, which has no real effect on the fact that it is still capable of being used to mow bodies down. And regardless of how beautiful and shiny the paint is, regardless of how lovely the sights and sounds of bullets flying are, the fact remains the machinery still functions to attack and destroy. Is is okay with you that God's kingdom, immortal and unattackable, indestructible, has items in it which can in fact still destroy things? God would be contradictory would he not? And heaven would be full of holes.

The only sane conclusion we can come to is that either God is murderous and is responsible for personally willing the making of machine guns and bullets and death and destruction, OR God is not that kind of a God. And if God is not like that, NOTHING like that can exist. Because anything that does exist, HAS to be a part of God's mind and will. Part of his heart. God has to love it and create it otherwise it is nothing and nowhere.

Either, machine guns exist and are real and God created planet Earth and physical bodies and space and time and all the galaxies, which means God must be murderous and cruel, OR, God would never sanely allow, make possible, condone, or contribute to, the making of such objects. And therefore, if God did not create machine guns, planet earth is absolutely unreal, bodies do not exist, destructible objects are absolutely nothing, human bodies don't exist, and there is no world.

Personally for me I can only accept that God's most-beloved Kingdom of heaven CANNOT EVER CONTAIN such objects. Not in any way. Not with any kind of perception or repurposing. Not merely that they don't exist, or haven't been created yet, but that even the POTENTIAL for them to be created does not exist. It must be IMPOSSIBLE for weapons to exist in God. I absolutely cannot bring myself to ever accept or conceive of being able to be at peace and loving with God with the loophole that he is a maker of murderous articles. They simply CANNOT EXIST in heaven's reality.

To me, this is so clear and black and white, there is absolutely no way that there is ANY OTHER way for the machine gun to exist and for it to simultaneously imply that God is benevolent. Either God is loving and exists and is real, OR, machine guns exist and God is murderous and self destructive. That's the choice you have to make. Either earth and bodies exist along with machine guns, OR THEY DO NOT. And quite frankly, we should ALL be recognizing by now that THEY DO NOT.

There will be no machine guns in heaven. Not today. Not ever. And similarly, there are no bodies, and no planet Earth. That is A Course in Miracle's teaching. There IS no other interpretation.

Take a look at this one statement.

"Nothing the body's eyes seem to see can be anything but a form of temptation, since this was the purpose of the body itself."

"You made the body in attempting to deceive yourself". You designed the body to BUY INTO TEMPTATION, so that you would BE deceived by the world and believe it to be real! And everything it sees and senses testifies to the reality of the world. "Only the body makes the world seem real."

This is very extensive. It means EVERYTHING your physical eyes can see, is a form of temptation. Not just small things, or one or two things. EVERYTHING. The whole planet, the stars, all bodies, all objects, every material, all states of matter and energy, all of it. The ENTIRE cosmos of time and space, was made as a form of temptation.

If you also recall, "the world was made as an attack on God." And "the world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son.". So this "picture" of impossibilities, sins and lies, is sitting there in front of your face, 24/7, TEMPTING you to believe that God is attacked and death is possible. All day, every day, every second of the day, in every object, every body. All of it, constantly trying to tempt you to believe in hell.

Death is not possible in God's reality because God is immortal and permanent. Death is an illusion and cannot be true. Every dead leaf, every roadkill, every decaying flower, every rusted car, every dust-bunny, all discarded trash, every exhaust fume, all poops, every broken object, all sick bodies, every graveyard, it is all trying to say "death is possible and happening". To TEMPT you to believe in hell.

If you start to label everything that "happens", everything you "see", as "temptation", you'll start to get a sense of this. Spend a little while in the day responding to everything by recognizing, "that's a temptation".

"It's trying to tempt me". It applies to everything you see. Cars, houses, people, trees, streets, trash, furniture, food, animals, the sky, whatever. "Only the body makes the world seem real." and "The body's eyes are not the means by which the real world can be seen." So the body's eyes were deliberately designed to MAKE the world seem real, by BUYING into temptation. Everything they see screams, "believe this", or "hell is happening", or "God is overthrown" or "you are not immortal" or "real threat is possible." It's all over the place.

Your challenge then is not to buy into it. Not to fall for the trap. Not to believe what you're seeing and sensing. Not to go along with it. Not to accept it as real. Not to give it credit. Not to assign power to it. Not to use it for attacking yourself. And to not listen to its insane shrieks of sin. Everything the world suggests and believes IS FALSE.

"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 only reason you would start to question what you are, is because you're starting to let the world TEMPT you to believe something that ISN'T true. And the whole world is doing this. Your drinking cups are doing this. Your socks are doing this. Your cat is doing this. Your wallpaper is doing this. The grass out the front is doing this. The clouds in the sky are doing this. They all present pictures of IMPOSSIBILITIES, and tempt you to make them real, and to believe in them.

If you put any belief any of it, you are moving into a hellish state of mind, and away from yourself and God. The world, in its entirety, is trying to act like a magnet to draw you into insanity, darkness, despair and suffering. As soon as you take ANY of it seriously, you're going to start having psychological reactions of fear and thoughts of vulnerability. We must remember also the whole purpose of temptation is to make you identified with a BODY. And you actually use the world, through the body's eyes, to testify to you BEING physical.

"Temptation has ONE lesson it would teach, in ALL its forms, WHEREVER it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty, and bound by what it orders him to feel. It sets the limits on what he can do; its power is the only strength he has; his grasp cannot exceed its tiny reach."

Whenever you take any of the physical world to be true or real, you are lowering your vision, blinded by form, isolating yourself into space and time, associating yourself with the physical, believing you are a physical form such as a body, are shutting out your mind, and are are falling for temptation. To become bound to the body is really the same as becoming bound to hell. You become bound to the WORLD. Bound to the battlefield.

Jesus even suggests that the world is going to CONTINUE trying to tempt you right up till the end. That even advanced teaches of God - not just regular teachers of God but ADVANCED ones, will STILL fall for temptation at times. The world will just continue to present its lies to you so long as it seems to exist.

"Even the most advanced of God's teachers will give way to temptation in this world."

This is why we have to be VIGILANT. Vigilance for the Kingdom of God really means doing the opposite of falling for temptation. Let yourself be tempted by REALITY. Let yourself be absorbed into God's truth and to "believe in" his evidence. Deny the world and accept heaven.

"The world you see must be denied, for it is costing you a different kind of vision."

To have vision, which is to see, which is to NOT be tempted by what the body sees, and to use the spiritual eyes which does NOT depend on physical sight, is to rise above the battlefield of hell and look out through Christ's eyes toward the light of heaven BEYOND the physical.

This is why forgiveness, atonement, true perception, being the light of the world, being as God created you, places you OUTSIDE of the reach of temptation. It places you back into the hands of God. And one who fully embraces God's reality can no longer be tempted by the world.

"We have repeatedly stated that one who has perfectly accepted the Atonement for himself can heal the world. Indeed, he has already done so. Temptation may recur to others, but never to this One. He has become the risen Son of God. He has overcome death because he has accepted Life. He has recognized himself as God created him, and in so doing he has recognized all living things as part of him. There is now no limit on his power, because it is the Power of God. So has his name become the Name of God, for he no longer sees himself as separate from Him."

All thoughts create form at some level. This is because thoughts (ego thoughts) are ideas about separation. Regardless of their specific content they are always separation ideas.

Separation ideas always therefore lead to "form" in some way.

What this means is, the idea of separation from God, having that tiny mad idea, AUTOMATICALLY means that form MUST come from it. Form must be the end result of an idea of separation. The thought ITSELF shows up as form - separate images appearing real, and eventually being so "firm" that they seem like solid matter.

Form results from thoughts of separation because separation requires us to make an illusion of how two things are different and disconnected, not sharing space or properties. These illusory appearances make it seem like separation is real and result in the illusion of "separate objects".

Any ego thought therefore emphasizes separation between illusions. As the division between thoughts intensifies, or becomes more "dense", it HAS to eventually lead to the illusory manifestation of what we would call "physical solid matter" - a physical universe - which is essentially just a very heavy/serious thought.

Or to put it simply, the mad idea of being separate from God HAD to create a physical universe. It is a completely logical progression and consequence of having such an idea. Form derives from separation.

If separation is perceived or believed to be real, some kind of universe of forms, to some degree, must seem to manifest.

Before the physical universe there were also prior "stages" if you will, subtler levels of this, which have produced additional levels in the dream. Other dimensions. These are all part of the same ego holographic dream and many of these levels feature form to varying degrees.

As Jesus says for example, nighttime and waking dreams differ only in their forms/content. Being in the physical world is nothing more than being inside the tiny mad idea of separation. It is just an idea, and is not really happening. This is why the physical universe is an illusion. It's an illusory thought of separation - a thought of impossibility.

When you can recognize the illusion correctly, you have completed forgiveness. This means being able to transcend and overlook the thought which has made the physical world. Seeing the truth of this, is seeing the "real world", ie the true nature of the worlds of form (which may pertain to physical level as well as higher levels/dimensions of form).

Overlooking illusions makes them disappear. Overlooking the thought of separation makes it, and everything which has come from it (is inside it), disappear. This is why the physical and other higher dimensional universes MUST eventually disappear, or rather be recognized as having been nothing more than a dream/illusion to begin with. Illusions recognized must disappear. The tiny mad idea, recognized as purely false, must end.

Only Heaven is reality, the home of Immortal Spirit. Only Heaven will be left when all of these illusory universes disappear. Only Heaven is the Home of God and the Son of God. Only Heaven, God's Creation, is the real truth - the real universe of oneness.

Boiling ACIM down to pure logic, we end up with this.

"Only the truth is true and nothing else is true."

) God's realm and creation are TRUE.

2) The world we made in dreaming is FALSE.

3) Forgiveness means becoming TRUE while inside of the FALSE in preparation for moving into the realm of the TRUE.

4) Eventually returning to the actual TRUE realm.

So forgiveness really just means aligning yourself with the true nature that you have IN heaven, while you're temporarily seeming to be outside of it. Becoming as heaven-like and aligned with reality as possible. As identified with Christ Spirit as possible. As under ONLY God's laws as much as possible. As expressive of God's loving nature as possible. All the while being still in this dream world which seems like imagined hell and death, SEEING from and with Truth, a perspective which opposes and invalidates the FALSE world.

And we take the Holy Spirit's hand who SYMBOLIZES the truth and we attempt to become in alignment with that symbolism, even at the body level symbolizing eternal life, so that we are as close to heaven as possible and ready for God to take us home.

You can also describe it this way.

1) The PREMISE of the Kingdom is God, immortal truth. The logical outcome of that premise is the creation/extension of eternal life as the Sonship etc.

2) The ego's idea of separation is a FALSE PREMISE, resulting in an entire seeming world which is entirely FALSE. It is opposite the Kingdom in every way.

3) Having made the false world and having CONFUSED IT with the truth, it is given all of truth's properties such as "reality" and "existence". It now seems to be real and exists. And now we experience the nightmare of hell.

4) Forgiveness ONLY means, bringing the PREMISE OF THE WORLD into question, and switching from the ego premise to God's premise. That is all. Nothing else.

5) To question the world's reality, to strip it of truth, to disbelieve it, to side "against" it, to deny it, to recognize it is FALSE and not true, to sort out how and why it is unlike God, and to realize it is NOTHING because an opposite to God cannot exist, IS FORGIVENESS.

We simply need to shift from the entire spectrum of ego reactions of "its a real world and bad things are really happening", to "the world is NOT REAL, it's a dream, and it is NOT happening." That is changing the premise of the separation. That is the only logical thing you can do and it's all that's needed.

When what seemed like real war, real attack, real suffering, real death, are put into a context of ITS A DREAM, not a reality, it completely reframes everything in a different context, and the ENTIRE THING is uprooted and stripped of its threats and dangers and sins. It has no further power to affect you because you recognize it is FALSE and unreal, NOT a real world, and NOT really happening. And be glad it is so.

"There is no death, the Son of God is free."

"There is no world."

There is part of you which is already in heaven with God. It never left.

That means your spirit-self is already awake and one with God.

Jesus says that like you, He has everything that God gave Him. The only difference between Him and us, is that He has nothing else.

So there is a part of who we think we are, which is "foreign" and not *actually* who we are.

Our only job is to clear away the illusion of that "extra self", a second self, which pretends to be the only self, to reveal the True Self that you are already.

There is already a "second self" - your higher self, which exists already, in "addition" to your ego self. It seems like it does not exist at all, or that it is separate from "you". But you are it, and the "rest of you" that is ego is not.

You cannot make yourself become spirit, or therefore cannot "become" spiritual. You also can’t turn your ego into spirit. You can only stop trying to be something you are not. What is left after the fight against God is surrendered as not necessary, is who you always have been.

You are already immortal spirit. Your confused identity which thinks it is either partly or entirely something else, could in fact communicate with your spirit-self (or higher self) right now, here in the dream. I have even seen an apparition of someone’s "spirit" a couple of times.

Your awakened self already is awake and already exists. Holy Spirit loves to look upon the face of Christ. You as Christ can already communicate with "you as ego", in terms you might accept.

I’ve spoken with my own ‘higher self’ on occasion. I’ve also spoken with the higher self of other people on occasion. It’s interesting that they respond when I am thinking about or talking to some person who is ‘in a body’ and their already-awakened self steps in and says something.

Strange dynamic isn’t it, that the awakened self we are trying to "become" already exists. We are just waking up TO it, not building it from scratch for the first time.

This is also why God/Holy Spirit can communicate with you even while you are in the dream. You don’t have to "make" a Holy Spirit in order to do this.

You are already as God created you, and you are still as God created you. This real self is simply a bit covered up with some illusions which pretend that you are something else. You cannot remove or change what God created, you can only deny it.

This is also why you cannot make yourself die, in the biggest picture. What God has created, no man can put asunder. You cannot change God’s will, thank God.

Become who you already are.

There is part of you which is already in heaven with God. It never left.

That means your spirit-self is already awake and one with God.

Jesus says that like you, He has everything that God gave Him. The only difference between Him and us, is that He has nothing else.

So there is a part of who we think we are, which is "foreign" and not *actually* who we are.

Our only job is to clear away the illusion of that "extra self", a second self, which pretends to be the only self, to reveal the True Self that you are already.

There is already a "second self" - your higher self, which exists already, in "addition" to your ego self. It seems like it does not exist at all, or that it is separate from "you". But you are it, and the "rest of you" that is ego is not.

You cannot make yourself become spirit, or therefore cannot "become" spiritual. You also can’t turn your ego into spirit. You can only stop trying to be something you are not. What is left after the fight against God is surrendered as not necessary, is who you always have been.

You are already immortal spirit. Your confused identity which thinks it is either partly or entirely something else, could in fact communicate with your spirit-self (or higher self) right now, here in the dream. I have even seen an apparition of someone’s "spirit" a couple of times.

Your awakened self already is awake and already exists. Holy Spirit loves to look upon the face of Christ. You as Christ can already communicate with "you as ego", in terms you might accept.

I’ve spoken with my own ‘higher self’ on occasion. I’ve also spoken with the higher self of other people on occasion. It’s interesting that they respond when I am thinking about or talking to some person who is ‘in a body’ and their already-awakened self steps in and says something.

Strange dynamic isn’t it, that the awakened self we are trying to "become" already exists. We are just waking up TO it, not building it from scratch for the first time.

This is also why God/Holy Spirit can communicate with you even while you are in the dream. You don’t have to "make" a Holy Spirit in order to do this.

You are already as God created you, and you are still as God created you. This real self is simply a bit covered up with some illusions which pretend that you are something else. You cannot remove or change what God created, you can only deny it.

This is also why you cannot make yourself die, in the biggest picture. What God has created, no man can put asunder. You cannot change God’s will, thank God.

Become who you already are.

The happy truth behind every seeming disasterous illusion in this world, is that nothing has gone wrong at all and we are still with God.

The happy truth is also that it is actually possible to be immortal, as spirit, and to even manifest a seemingly incorruptible body if you so choose. Doing so is nothing compared to your real power.

All things that could ever go wrong to hurt you, come from you, and are a choice, and therefore not choosing them renders you invulnerable. If you do not see this clearly it's because you believe the *illusion* that people don't do things to themselves.

Nothing happens to anyone without not only their consent but without them actually literally orchestrating and doing it to themselves. So this myth of vulnerability, that you can be affected, or that death can come along and attack you without having the power to stop it, is a complete lie that has been perpetuated for millennia.

The happy truth is that all the things that you're concerned about, are not true. And nothing is really wrong. And nobody is really getting hurt. Of course that flies in the face of what *appears* to be happening, because that's us falling for the illusion that people aren't choosing.

If we could recognize and see the choices everyone is making and expose the entire back-story of how everyone has deliberately chosen every single thing they have ever experienced, we would not be able to believe for a second that something can happen to us against our will. And our belief in death would be totally blown out of the water.

It's only because the truth seems to be hidden, i.e. your are unaware of it, that it seems plausible that things are happening to you that you did not ask for. And this also means that once you are aware, you will no longer make yourself suffer and die, and lo-and-behold will find that nothing beyond you has the power to make you die either.

As such you are completely protected, perfectly safe, only love is real, and really this is all just a big joke. The Son of God is playing with illusions and toying with death as part of His little fantasy story-telling adventure, and one day we will wake up to experience this truth and know that nothing ever really happened to anyone.

And then we'll remember to laugh

Just because you believe that you are not yet perfect, and are still trying to perfect yourself and attain some kind of 'better you', does not actually mean that you are not already perfect.

In fact, from God's vantage point, He has already finished creating you perfect. Your immortal spirit self, your true self, already exists and is already completely perfect and divine.

And in fact, God has already built into you an appropriate place for you to exist, an appropriate way for you to exist, and an appropriate way for you to express eternal life.

And that means, that you are literally already fully equipped with all of the tools that you need in order to perform miracles, in order to extend and express love, and in order to have perfect divine health.

God is not the one who is lacking and how has forgotten to give you what you need or who has denied you abilities as a miracle worker. You are the one who believes you are lacking and that you haven't been given what you have been given.

Your lack of awareness of the gift God has given you is what stands between you and your ... insight.. that you are perfectly capable and READY to express that gift to others.

You are already capable of miracles. You are already a divine physician. You just haven't realized it yet or uncovered it in yourself or developed trust in it.

God has shown up already for you. God already has your back. God already knows you. God already sees you as perfectly capable. And God has already given you an appointed 'role' as extender of the Kingdom.

You do not need to even be going back to God asking, what is my role, or please give me miracle abilities, or whatever. It's already built-in. You just aren't in touch with it and using it.

And you don't need to be going to God and saying, how do I deal with this stupid situation. God already has given His One Answer as Holy Spirit, you are already poised and pointed in the direction of being the savior of the world, you are already the light of the world, and you already share His power to command miracles of healing and correction. You just are out of touch with knowing that you are already fully prepared or how to wield the power that God has given you.

Step into the shoes that were designed for you to fill. God has already taken care of everything else.

Denial denies that the truth is true.

Denial attempts to make something else be true, which is false.

Denial is a lie.

Denial is essentially the only ego device. It is another word for separation - the attempt to make the truth go away, to get rid of God, to kill of God's Son, to go unconscious.

You have to own up to and admit to everything, and that is an act of surrender. To stop denying the truth is to surrender or give up the ego position of fighting against it.

In the example of someone who has committed a crime but who is denying that they did it, until they are willing to surrender and stop hiding from the truth, they will maintain denial as a defense. To give up that denial is to admit the truth, which means surrendering to Authority. In the world this usually means the authority of others over them, to decide their fate, but psychologically is means surrendering to the Authority of God, which is a blessing.

Denial then is an authority problem, where you are attempting to have authority over the truth by redefining what it is and making it be something it is not. It's your ego's attempt to assert itself and make itself valid. To surrender to the truth, to God, is the undoing of the authority problem, the relinquishment of the ego, and is a rejoining of mind in wholeness.

To put down denial is to open up to God, to receive love, to accept reality, and to return to sanity. It means admitting that there is nothing you can do to make the truth be something it isn't, and to gladly accept it and welcome it as it is. That doesn't mean accepting that the world is real or that things in the world really are happening. That's not the truth. It means accepting that this world doesn't exist because God did not create it, and being untrue means there is no reason to be upset about it.

You cannot change the fact you live forever. You cannot undo eternal life, because it is immortality. Spirit is in a state of grace forever and has never changed. But you can deny it. You can pretend it is not true. You can try to avoid it, you can make-believe it isn't real, and you can weave illusions to try to make it seems like it isn't true. You can try to invent death and make death seem to happen. But you cannot kill what God created. Death isn't real and it never will be.

To die is to deny Real Life, and death is just a state of heavily denying what the truth is. Death therefore cannot be the truth, and must be reversible if you are willing to surrender the illusion of lies. Death, being denial, cannot be considered a true state, a final state, a whole state. It requires considerable effort to maintain, and cannot last. Like all things made without God, it has a limit to what it can seem to do. That is why the Spirit escapes it, and why we then have more lifetimes.

You can deny the truth up and down and left and right and pretend to be something you are not and try to die in every way imaginable, pretending you deserve it and make-believing it is justified, but it is always a state of lies. You simply are not being honest. The honest truth is that God has created you eternal and you cannot die and this world does not exist. So, what is there to be concerned about? Why pretend you are vulnerable? Why attempt to make out that you can be attacked? You are immortal spirit.

Forgiveness is nothing more than seeing correctly.

It means recognizing that illusions ARE illusions, and not falling for them.

It means overlooking illusions and seeing past them, rather that taking them at their appearance and thinking they are real.

This extends all the way to the illusion of death, which is where the Son of God in all HIs divine freedom and power creates the ILLUSION that He has absolutely no freedom or choice left, or that things can happen to Him against His will.

This is of course impossible, so it is an illusion, bit it APPEARS on the surface to be an unwanted death, happening to someone who didn't seem to ask for it. But the Son of God is faking it.

If and when you can recognize and see that this is in fact an illusion of death, not a real death, then you are now over-looking and not falling for the trick. Believing it's real is a complete mistake.

You will only believe illusions are real when you forget to forgive, which puts you into so-called "judgement", which is really to do with attacking appearances and making them out to be the truth.

Illusions are not the truth. Death is not truth. But as soon as you are convinced that it's real you've become blinded, you've been tempted and you've succumbed to the deception. You didn't notice that it was the Son of God, infinite and immoral, who was pretending He can die.

And so because you didn't look past the ILLUSION of death, to see its Author, which would reveal to you plain as day - this is absolutely pretend - so you enter into the illusion yourself and go unconscious.

All you need realize then is that all you need to do to 'wake up' is to see correctly, ie have your perception corrected, so that you are not falling into the lie, are not believing the trap, and didn't go along with the story. It means fixing your vision on the truth, on what is really going on here, not buying into any form of victimhood or suffering or accidental events, and staying very certain that the immortal Son of God cannot be harmed. Death cannot be real. And nothing is really happening.

To overcome an illusion, ie "forgive", you must learn to see past the deception that you've fallen for, remember the truth, and stop taking it seriously. It's like some old trick that someone keeps playing on you and finally you figure out that someone is behind it and it's not just some random bizarre thing going on, his cover is blown and the illusion is broken, and now you can no longer fall for it. That's all it is, just learning to recognize and see the truth and stop being deceived by appearances.

All false appearances are your interpretation of the 'illusion of separation' as though it is not an illusion. Behind this misinterpretation there is still an illusion being created by the Son of God, but it has no power to convince you it's real unless you choose to play along with it. Then it's just something you can't believe anymore and you know is false. As such you escape death, because death is just part of believing that illusions are the truth.

The ego only attacks itself. When it targets a person, and it refers to some kind of identity that is the recipient of its attack, that identity is always comprised of egoic properties.

When it says "you are....", it's referring to some guilty person. When it tries to attack "you", it's attacking a sinful you.

It is actually addressing itself within its own thought system. It never actually addresses God or innocence.

It never says, "you perfectly innocent so and so". Innocence is never really its target. It cannot even conceive of innocence.

That means, the ego attacking itself can only affect YOU if you have changed your identity into an ego identity. If you believe you are made of sin and guilt and fear, then when the ego directs something at you, it will be directing it at that false, sinful self. It's really screaming at itself.

If you are not identified with the ego when the ego attacks itself, you will not experience any effects. You will recognize it is not about YOU, because you are not the guilty target that it is addressing. It's talking about someone else. If you are innocent and sinless, then it literally never even mentions your name. Your "name" is the identity you have and what you are made of. If you are not made from ego, then the ego cannot even address you.

So when you are out of the ego, and someone tries to attack, the only way you will take it personally is if you perceive they are actually addressing YOU, and the only way that's possible is for you to identify with IT. So again, the ego attacks only itself.

This is also why the ego's attacks have absolutely no effect on the innocent and immortal Spirit of God, or His Son, or His Creation. This is why nothing real can be threatened.

When you buy into the ego (believe in it) and think it is yourself, you are giving the ego "permission" to attack "you". It now has access to you, and when it attacks, it will seem to hurt you. Just by your being in the ego thought system gives it access. It can only attack itself so the only way to attack you is for you to be identified with it.

In other words, if you believe in "real sin", that you are really sinful, then you have identified that you are a part of the ego thought system. And now because of your "sin", it warrants punishment, and now the ego can seem to attack you. This is exactly the same as the Christian belief that if you sin, this gives the "devil" permission to attack you and possess you. If you align with the ego, you are "opening the door" and authorizing punishment by the ego/devil.

This is how the belief in real sin automatically grants the ego access to punish you. The way out is to not believe that your identity contains real sin. You are innocent. And you are free. And therefore you have nothing to worry about because the innocent are invulnerable to the ego.

The funny thing with fear is, that while you are feeling it, it actually changes how reality looks to you .... so the world goes from appearing to be a place of safety and beauty, to a place of darkness and danger. And that's only because there is fear happening in your mind. You think you MUST be afraid if xyz is happening. That's not true.

So it's not as though you're actually having an objective, detached viewpoint. Every perspective of the ego always claims that it is being completely objective and capable of discerning what is true and false, when in fact it is always CONTRIBUTING to what it sees and experiences. As such ego thoughts are never neutral. "There are no neutral thoughts" - ACIM

You think that the amount of fear that you experience correlates exactly to how much of an 'actual' danger is out there. But fear distorts reality, and causes you to be incapable of seeing reality. So how do you know that there really is as much danger as you perceive?

And what if I were to tell you that "projection makes perception"? i.e. you are projecting fear onto the situation, which MAKES it look like there is a danger, so now you believe you are unsafe even if you are safe. You think there is such a thing as reliable fear, or discerning fear, or very carefully considered fear. There is no such thing. As in quantum physics, if you look with the ego you will change what you are looking at. You cannot be anything but subjective.

Outside of your fear, it is possible that there is a world that is not a threat to you, and is not a cause of fear. It is possible that the PRESENCE OF FEAR in you is actually the ONLY problem that needs to be dealt with. It's the mustard seed in your own eye the blocks you from perceiving truthfully, and as such you see blockages in the eyes of others, i.e. intentions to attack you. Your attack on them shows you this. Your fearing about them shows you a reason to be afraid.

This is the secret then to fear. Fear is its own problem. It tries to justify itself, and it changes how reality looks to you, and then shows you that altered reality as though claiming it is real. Therefore, the only things you are ever are afraid of are how reality looks when you are IN the fear, which paints a picture that's horrifying and threatening. You are not SEEING reality. You're seeing the mirror-reflection of fear itself. But when you are IN the fear, you really really believe that the threat is real. If you USE fear, which is a choice, you will find reasons to justify why you are afraid. And none of them are true. Fear is always false - a lie.

Outside of fear there is no reason or need to be afraid. Everything is safe. There is no danger or threat. Nothing can harm you. You are invulnerable. You are immortal spirit.

If you believe bodies and sickness are real, you will look upon bodies suffering and want to fix them. The nightmare of things going wrong compels you to do something in guilt and desperation. So you try to heal, but you are simultaneously reinforcing the sickness with a belief in it. You attack the sickness to try to destroy it, and fight against it wishing it would leave.

Some small measure of healing can be possible this way, beacuse there is at least a partial desire to heal and help, and this can have some effect. But it is thwarted by the conviction that it won't work, based on an ongoing attack upon the victim.

By seeing them as a body, and as sick, as if true, you pull them down from being an immortal perfect Christ being in heaven and frame them as weak and suffering, which is an attempt to weaken and destroy them.

True healing completely ignores the sickness, recognizing that sickness and bodies are lies. They are not true or real, and what they present is a decoy designed to tempt you away from the truth. The bodies screams with its fits of proclamation as to what is wrong with a person and all the ways the are guilty.

To heal is to look past this with forgiveness, to not be deceived and to not listen to what the body says is true. The forms of sickness do not matter, the type of sickness does not matter, the alleged severety or length does not matter, and how it seemed to arrive deos not matter.

Instead the healer looks to the truth and focuses only on what is actually real, not deceived by false illusions. You look for the fact that the person in God's creation is already perfect, already immortal, already unharmed and already whole. This IS the truth about them, which their body and sickness are designed to hide.

So you must recognize that the sickness is a deceptive lie, a form of denial, covering up the truth that the person is NOT sick at all. The mind is playing games and covering over perfection with imperfection. Our focus should be only on the perfection of the person.

In fact, in truth, this means the person does not really need to be healed, because their spiritual self is still as it always was - perfect and unchanging, incapable of sickness, unable to die, and always the same. It is only their mind which seems distorted and lost, trying to form pictures of suffering that don't apply.

By focusing on the true light of the person you become glad and thankful to God that he has blessed you with this divine holy gift that is your brother. And so your brother is seen as YOUR savior and healer. And by thus recognizing his changeless perfection, he shares that perfection from God with you and you reflect it back to him.

As you become aware in your mind of the Holy Spirit in him, the changeless perfection in him, and given that your light IS your brother's light, and your mind IS part of his mind, you lift up his mind FOR him and help him to remember his own light. He thus is healed because you saw him AS healed, which is a fact and a truth and a reality, and not a wish or a desire. Something to recognize.

By recognizing that your brother is healed, this strengthens his view of himself in what seems to be his own mind, because your minds are shared. And so he is resurrected in your sight and the shining of this light INTO his mind AS his own shared light and identity, prevents him from having such strong belief in his own separation.

True healing is thus the extending and sharing of light and power and life from your mind into your brother's mind to enlighten and brighten his mind so that he can see his own perfection.

"Healing ONLY STRENGTHENS. Magic always tries to weaken. Healing perceives NOTHING in the healer that everyone else does not share WITH him. Magic ALWAYS sees something special in the healer, which he believes he can offer as a gift to someone who does NOT have it."

"You might well ask why SOME healing CAN result from this kind of thinking, and there is a real reason for this. However misguided the "magical healer" may be, and however much he may be trying to strengthen his ego, HE IS ALSO TRYING TO HELP. He IS conflicted and unstable, but AT TIMES he is offering SOMETHING to the Sonship, and the ONLY thing the Sonship can ACCEPT IS healing."

"Learning is constant and so vital in its power for change that a Son of God can recognize his power in an instant, and change the world in the next. That is because by changing HIS mind he has changed the most powerful device that was ever created FOR change."

"When you heal, that is exactly what you ARE learning (doing). You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by perceiving (knowing) that he could NOT have changed his mind. That is how you perceive the Holy Spirit in him. It is ONLY the Holy Spirit in him that never changes His mind. He himself must think he CAN, or he would not perceive himself as sick. He therefore does not know what his self IS. If YOU see only the changeless in him, you have not really changed him at all. But by changing your mind about HIS FOR him, you help him undo the change his ego thinks it has made in him."

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

"The mind WE share IS shared by all our brothers, and as we see them truly, they WILL be healed. Let YOUR minds shine with mine upon their minds, and by our gratitude to them make THEM aware of the light in THEM. This light will shine back upon YOU and on the whole Sonship because this IS your proper gift to God."

"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."

"But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals."

"When I am healed, I am not healed alone."

"Healing is an act of thought by which two minds perceive their oneness, and become glad. This gladness calls to every part of the Sonship to rejoice with them, and let God Himself go out into them and through them."

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

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

Time is change, and change is death.

Space is separation, and separation is death.

Space and time are systems of death.

There is no escaping this. There are no exceptions.

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

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

ALL THINGS HERE DIE.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven."

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

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

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

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

This means all things in space and time will end.

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

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

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

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

Time DEVOURS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"For you are asked but to forgive all things that no-one ever did; to overlook what is not there; and not to look upon the unreal as reality."

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

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

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD."

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

When someone says or does something that you judge and perceive as wrong, you become upset.

In your upset, you claim that you are upset because they said or did something that was wrong - i.e. something incorrect, something that is a mistake, or something untrue.

But, even though YOU are claiming to believe that this thing is untrue and wrong, you are still upset.

Why are you upset, if what the person said is not true? Why do you become upset when someone says something untrue about you, something that seems to attack you, to slander you, to accuse you, to portray you as unfairly guilty, or to label you with something derogatory? Why are you upset if its not true?

The truth is, even though you are to some degree aware that it is not true, you're upset because some part of YOU does believe it is true.

If you didn't believe it, you'd just laugh. You wouldn't take it seriously. You'd KNOW with so much certainty that it's just ridiculous and completely false, that it wouldn't even seem to touch you or engage with you at all.... like it's got nothing to do with you.

But you DO think it's got something to do with you. On some level, deeper down, there is some part of you that actually thinks there is truth to what someone has said about you, even if you are simultaneously horrified and upset and are claiming that it's completely false in a very intense way.

You could be experience a very intense sense of it being unfair, of the slander being vicious, of the person being totally nuts in their accusations, and all of this other framing of the situation that makes it looks like they are wrong and you are not... and yet, you're still upset, despite your claims about how mistaken they are.

You don't really, really, really believe that they are mistaken, you actually believe that they are REAL, and what is real is true. So if you are 'really' being attacked, then you are being attacked with truth, and you believe in this truth so you will be upset. What you receive as real will strike you as the truth and you will accept it. i.e., you took it seriously and didn't overlook/forgive it.

And so this boils down to this simple fact: you are upset because YOU believe these things about YOURSELF.

So then it's really not so much anything to do with what anyone else has said or done. It's not really that they have accused you of something so incredibly - potentially - hurtful. It's not that there is even some kind of inherent attack-power embedded into their slander, or some kind of force in their words that can actually come into you and MAKE true whatever they are judging you for.

Instead, it all boils down to your own beliefs about yourself - your own sense of identity. Has this *attempted* attack got anything to do with what I AM? If it hasn't, because I'm clear about what I am, and I am immortal spirit, and I am eternally innocent, then in that clear identity I have absolutely no grounds for even thinking that it's got something to do with me.

But if I do not believe in my own innocence, if I myself am actually in some way AGAINST MYSELF, or have undermined myself, or think of myself as unworthy or not good enough, or think that I don't deserve love, or I don't like something about myself, you can bet that when someone comes along to appear to provoke you, you WILL think that it has something to do with who and what you are - you will think that they're talking about YOU and you will 'take it' as an attack on that identity.

So you can see this in people who are very against themselves, who have a lot of self-hate or self-loathing or low worth etc. When someone seems to attack them or judge them, they become very upset very quickly. This is because they themselves very strongly believe in and AGREE WITH what the other person is claiming is true of them.

The person is so upset by the stimuli because they themselves are very upset about their own self, they are upset about how they see themselves, they are already walking around with a huge baggage of pain and suffering within themselves that they feel very badly about, and this is now tapped into by the other person.

The pimple then seems to pop and the cover of denial laid over the top of this mountain of self-attack is taken off, and out pours the gush of a "reaction"... which typically is then blamed on and projected on and targeted at the other person, as though they created all of it.

But all the other person is doing.... is nothing. Absolutely nothing. They're just showing up and mirroring back to you a reflection of what YOU think of yourself. People will come into your life "as if by magic", attracted to the vibrational frequency or mental focus of content in your mind, that reflect to you what you currently think of yourself. And you will hate them for doing this, because you hate yourself. And each time they come along and seemingly do TO you what YOU are already doing to YOURSELF, you don't like it. And the only reason you don't like it is because they are doing to you exactly what you're already doing to you.

And so even if you are upset, deep down you in some way must agree with that person, even if they seem to be a horrible enemy, otherwise, why would you be upset? Why would you be having a reaction, if their judgements were completely false and you knew it? Why would you lose your peace and blow up in a rage or whatever if you're calmly certain that that person is very mistaken about who you are, and you are very clear about who you are? And I don't mean, clear about your ego self, but clear about your REAL self as God created you - innocent immortal spirit. Your real identity.

So every time you get upset, and it seems like someone caused it, it just means that YOU HIRED SOMEONE to come along (attracted them mentally) to come and point out, within you, what it is that you believe is true, about yourself and God, so that you will become aware of what is in you, and get an opportunity to question it. Is it really true? Do I really want to hold onto this belief? And if all you're doing at that point is falling for the appearance that someone else is causing everything you're feeling, then you've totally missed the point. And you're being dishonest.

It's more honest to step back and look at why you are upset. You are upset because you believe that your worst enemy's attack is actually true of you and deserved by you. You actually want it. You chose it. You asked for it. Yes you did. And that means that they're not actually doing it 'to' you, as much as YOU have done it to you. And since you're the one who actually believes this bullshit about yourself, YOU are the one who needs some correction. The other person is only there to "trigger" you, to draw your attention to areas of yourself where you thought you were pure but are not, or areas where you believe bullshit that needs to be purified. They're helping you. They're actually on your side, in the bigger scheme of things. And you hired them to do so. All those enemies of yours? They're your servants.

So at some point you have to get past this fireworks of blame and denial and projection, and take some responsibility. It's you that believes you suck and are not worth shit. When someone does something to highlight this, you should be thanking them. AND then you should work on undoing YOUR belief that this is true. If you are upset, you DO believe it is true, and you DO agree with them, no matter what you are experiencing and no matter how much you think this is not the case. If you are upset, you are believing something untrue about yourself, and the only way to be not upset is to undo that.

So yes, it's not anyone else's fault that you're upset. Look at yourself. What have you decided about yourself? What is it you believe about yourself?

Because if what the other person has 'done to you' is not the truth, then why are you still upset? It MUST be because you actually don't FULLY believe that it's not true. Some part of you agrees and some part of you has attacked your own self.

And what this will lead to is the simple insight, that ALL of your upset is really the result of your own belief about yourself, and NONE of it is really because of other people. And therefore, if you can change your own attitude about yourself, and learn to love yourself, you will be learning your LESSONS and will wake up to the truth about who you are. And then you will have peace, and you will stop putting 'helpers' in your life to provoke you "painfully". Instead your way will be made straight and Holy Spirit will go before you to smooth the way, such that nothing is about your little ego self anymore and you are fully convinced of your own innocence.

Not until you are fully convinced of your own innocence will you cease to be upset when other people accuse you of guilt. But when you get there, you will experience invulnerability, confidence, empowerment, peace and immortality.

A Course in Miracles would say no. You always get what you ask for. You only get what you ask for. You never get anything you do not ask for.

There are no victims. There are no accidents. Nothing happens unless it is deliberate. There is no randomness or chaos. Someone somewhere is making decisions all the time.

A leaf does not blow in the wind without someone choosing to make the leaf blow in the wind. The leaf doesn't even appear to exist without someone's mind making it appear to exist.

Where is there any room in this for "might not work" or "not sure if" or "got lost in translation" or "God doesn't always answer" ?

The "Song of Prayer" will tell you that you are always praying and you are always getting precisely what you actually did ask for.

If stuff is happening that you believe was not supposed to happen, or you got results that you seemed to not ask for, or stuff happens that you didn't seem to want.... you need to think again. You DID ask for it, you just didn't realize how you asked for it. You MUST have asked for it otherwise it could not have appeared.

This is the level of certainty that Jesus enjoys. This is how it possible to be completely certain that you are not at the effect of anything. This is the end of victim consciousness.

There is absolutely no room for an idea of being victimized if it is true that you always get what you ask for. The entire fiction of being unfairly treated is absolutely 100% a lie.

You are treating yourself exactly how you wish be treated. You are, right now, experiencing exactly, and ONLY, what you actually did ask to experience. There is nothing happening outside of the script you have written or continue to write.

Nothing happens without your say so. This is how it is true that nobody dies without their own consent. This is how is it true that ALL death is suicide. This is how it is POSSIBLE that if you do not choose death, you will not die, and therefore it is POSSIBLE to be immortal.

Nothing is happening to you that you did not want. So if you do not like it, you need to change your decision. i.e. change your mind and heart.

If you got something you did not want, then you did not realize that you asked for it. It's not a matter of you having not asked for it, it's a matter of you being not AWARE that you asked for it.

Learning to discern HOW the asking happens, is the key to salvation. Recognizing that you ONLY do things to yourself, and nobody else EVER does anything against your will, gives you the key to salvation. Salvation - being saved from all suffering - is possible, because of this.

Every single story about how something happened to someone, some disaster struck out of nowhere, something suddenly went wrong, something occurred that nobody liked, the world went down the toilet, war broke out, there were "acts of nature", "it must be God's will", or any other bullshit, is absolutely a total fictional lie by the ego mind.

Absolutely everything in front of your face right now, you put there. And you wanted it. And not a single thing in your day or your month or your life has ever happened against your will. You have never been victimized.

Nobody has ever died against their will. They were choosing it, wanted it, made it happen, and put every single event in place to cause it to occur, even if those events or causes *appeared* to be coming from something over which they had absolutely no control. They DID choose it. It's just not obvious that they chose it, because of the ILLUSION that they did not, which was part of their cover-up story and part of their way of making it happen.

There has not ever been a victim. There has never been anything happening by accident or out of order or against anyone's will. Nobody has ever suffered a single bit without asking to suffer. No-one has ever been afflicted with sickness without having first put that sickness in place themselves.

Nothing has ever even happened in this world AT ALL, without someone choosing it and making it happen, pulling all the strings and animating all the objects and orchestrating all events. If it were not for minds making such decisions, this world would not even appear to exist at all. It is only here doing its thing because someone somewhere is MAKING IT.

Not one single feeling that you have is caused by anyone other than yourself. They are not caused by events or people or situations or stimuli or any other causes that seem to be separate from your own mind. Any feeling you ever have, you CHOOSE to have. You put it in place.

Not one single physical symptom in your body has ever been caused by any person or object or environmental condition or events seeming to happen against your say-so. Not one single "effect" showing up in your body or your emotional reactions has ever really been put there by anyone or anything other than YOU. You even put in place all of the illusory effects which external causes *allegedly* put in place against your will.

When someone kicks you in the leg, which is you kicking yourself in the leg, YOU put the bruise in the leg. The bruise in the leg is not put there by the person who kicked you, or their physical foot, or anything that happened. You instead conveniently orchestrated and used the situation to attack yourself and make it SEEM as though you have a bruise showing up because of someone else, so that you can project blame for your sin onto them, finding them guilty.

No-one outside of you is guilty of ever doing anything to you ever. Not one single person in this world has ever attacked you or created symptoms or effects in you. There has never been side-effects, symptoms, damage, hurt, pain or suffering occurring in your experience that your own mind didn't put there itself.

When events transpire, by your secret design, to seem to cause something to happen to you, you not only orchestrated the events but you also manifested the causes and the effects all at once, putting them into place in the illusion using your thought.

Nobody ever gets sick. People choose to be sick. Nobody is ever hurt by someone else. They hurt themselves. Nobody ever falls victim to abuse. People abuse themselves. Nobody ever dies of some cause they could not prevent.

People create the illusion that they have no say in the cause, in order to paint this very convincing picture that they are not the one making any choice whatsoever. The denial and displacement of your own mind's decision making, making it look like it has nothing to do with it at all, is an act of irresponsibility and disownership of power.

Nobody is ever weak or suffering or lacking or diminished or limited or disabled or afraid or sick or in poverty or at a loss without having chosen to be so, on purpose, so that it can appear as though they are victims, so that they have a tremendous basis for a huge story about how they do not have any power whatsoever, so that they can fake their own death and blame it on everyone other than themselves.

Death is a choice and death is someone choosing to die. Death is the ultimate cover-up story, all death is fake, there is no real death, every death is a massive illusion orchestrated by the mind to make it look like all power, responsibility, ability to choose and all will to Live have been taken away by someone other than yourself. Not even in death has this been made true.

There is nothing happening in this world, as in, stuff that is just occurring on its own. There are not just events that tick over automatically. There are no forces of nature which just do their own thing like they have their own will. There is no wind that blows on its own or life that grows on its own or cycles of weather that just "happen". Someone somewhere is making it happen.

There is no realm of things which are within control and another realm of things which are outside control. There is only deliberate creation. Either you are making up shit or you are not. Either you are inventing lies or you are being the truth. There is no middle ground where things just occur because of external causes, or alien wills, or fate, or bad luck, or good luck, or any kind of unchosen reason.

You have the power to choose again. You are NOT a victim of the world you see. NOTHING is happening on its own. And nothing CAN happen without you making it happen, wanting it to happen, using it for a purpose, having a fictional need for it, and making it occur in illusions. This whole world is your dream, coming from your mind, coming from your decision making. It is not dreaming itself!

Be free to choose again. Make a better decision. No-one can stop you. You are the immortal unlimited Extension of God, in whom nothing happens without His Will. This is the realm of miracles, where whatever you will, is so.

Whatever you will, will be so. It must. This is your power.

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects."

The idea of separation is madness, because what it implies is impossible. It is not possible to be separate from God. But the mad idea was the idea that you CAN be separate from God, even though it is impossible.

To insist it is possible, must be madness, because to believe it you have to deny reality and truth and blind yourself to sanity and sense. This belief makes the mind insane, because it now believes impossible things are possible. This is why the separation from God was an entry into a state of mental illness, ie insanity.

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth."

"The instant that the mad idea of making your relationship with God unholy seemed to be possible, ALL relationships were made meaningless. In that unholy instant time was born, and bodies made to house the mad idea, and give it the ILLUSION of reality."

The mad idea gave rise to a mad world, based on insane notions and crazy laws, devoid of meaning and empty of truth. And into this insane world we projected our insane beliefs, producing a mad and false world to reflect our inner madness. And all who participate in it are mentally ill.

"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."

What we've ended up with then is a fictional world which insane people believe exists. And it is populated with people who have insane beliefs about who and what they are. They do not know themselves, are out of touch with their own reality, and think they are something they're not. This especially is entwined with the belief that they are physical bodies, which their immortal souls could never be. And they see themselves as limited and lacking.

"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 should be, and where it really is. Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

Realize then that the world as we know it is populated by beings who originally were, and in truth still are, wholly immortal, perfect, innocent, loving, healthy, happy and completely invulnerable. Beings who God created to live forever in divine perfection, who lacked nothing and were capable of anything.

In the separation, these beings gave belief to impossible nonsense and thus moved their minds into insane states. This produced the anti-christ or otherwise known as the ego, which is an idea of what you THINK you are, as a kind of wishful thinking or denial of your true nature. Thus each person developed a SECOND self for themselves, which they identified with and as, and thought to be the whole of who they are.

"This is the anti-Christ; ... Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

"The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE."

So now you have a world seemingly populated by individual beings who strongly believe they are NOT as God created them. They've added an entire layer of lies on top of themselves, to cover themselves up. They've invented a second self to suit their preferences.

They have profound denial which means they actively resist admitting to the truth about themselves and each other, and instead participate in lies and fantasies about what they are. They want to be a body and they want to suffer and they want to die, and they think this is normal because they think the hell they created is heaven.

"He has come to save me from the evil self I made."

"They DO believe that Heaven is hell, and ARE afraid of love. "