"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."
Since change is death, and changelessness is life, notice how the ego has arranged the world so that when there is a lack of change, death seems to occur. For example if you were to stop breathing and have no change in the breath, there would be death. And yet this is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the truth. Because in truth that which never changes is alive forever, and any change indicates that an END has come.
The ego's idea of death is the idea of life. The ego's idea of life is the idea of death. What appears to be life is not alive. And what appears to be only indicated by death is eternity. The entire dream world portrays this inversion of the truth, and has expressed it in PHYSICAL FORM, as a PICTURE of the TOTAL INVERSION of reality.
Death attempts to steer you away from stillness, while "life" disrupts all stillness with its constant modifications and interruptions. Eternity is a constant state of perfectly sustained perfection forever, in which nothing changes because it is constantly perfect. Nothing happens to it, there is no sickness, decay, suffering or death. It goes on forever, because it DOESN'T change, nor does it need to change to be what it is or to last.
All things which change, from the very beginning, have the mark of death upon them. They are inherently forms of death because of the very fact they are born in a moment of the denial of what came before. The fact that "life begins" with non-existence tells you that it cannot have eternal life, nor last forever. And so from its very inception it is doomed to create illusions of life, through growth and progression and morphic alternatives, but inevitably must fail to succeed indefinitely, because it was conceived in the moment of death which we like to call "birth".
This world is back to front, inside out, and upside down. Its pictures represent an attempt to oppose the truth. Every form testifies to the opposite of what it is and thereby acts as a decoy, distraction and temptation to believe anything other than reality. Life is death, and death is believed to be the doorway to life. Cessation of movement is considered lifelessness, and yet total stillness is the fullness of eternal life.
The dream of death, the illusion of life, couldn't be more of a lie in this respect. Its signposts all point away from the truth, using images of guilt, sin, death and fear to warn you off, that if you would pursue anything beyond them, you might discover their lies and instead uncover eternal reality. Be not deceived by what this world shows to you, it was made to tempt you away from your home, not to be your home. Your home is with God, where changelessness and perfection are forever guaranteed. And where everything lives forever.
"Nothing there but shines and shines forever."
Anything this side of the separation from God, comprises the ego's thought system, and the ego THINKS in terms of exclusion. "If this is true, and that is different, that is not true".
Anything the OTHER side of the separation from God - God Himself, creation, sonship, souls, heaven etc, is NOT governed by the ego thought system. It's rules and laws completely defy the ego. God functions in *inclusive logic*. The way that God "reasons" is totally unlike the ego.
When we use the ego's thought system, and the ego's way of thinking, to try to understand the meaning or nature of GOD's system, it is absolutely guaranteed every time to produce false conclusions. The ego looks at God and sees separations where there are none, and sees unity where there are divisions. It CANNOT see the whole of God's nature comprehensively or inclusively without rejecting some parts of it as false.
Any study of heaven or God or creation or anything not of the ego, cannot be accurately done *using* the way the ego thinks. It's not merely a matter of just "thinking about it better" - the ego's use of logical exclusions is fundamentally a FAULT based on separation that instantly pollutes the conclusions you'll come to.
The only way to correctly discern the nature of creation, heaven, sonship, God etc, is to THINK LIKE GOD. And this thinking like God comes to conclusions which are TOTAL NONSENSE to the ego's thinking, seems like they are "false conclusions" when in fact they are true, and produces the total opposite of what the ego would conclude.
This is why huge chunks of A Course in Miracles's metaphysics and statements have been GROSSLY MISUNDERSTOOD and mis-taught since the beginning of the Course's inception. And we are making this same mistake to this day.
In God, it is logical to say, "If this is true, and that is seemingly separate from this, that must be true also." See how that seems to make no sense to the ego? It sounds false, but it's not. Example: "If God has given all of His love to me, and there is another soul here, then God must have also given all of His love to that soul as well." The ego screams, "no" "that can't be" "there's not enough love to go around". And this is because the thought system of God is based on SHARING and INCREASE, which the ego totally opposes and cannot see sense in.
The ego says, "if I give this to you, I will lose it." God says, "if I give this to you, it will increase and we will both have it". They are fundamentally different modes of reasoning. The ego says, "if this statement Jesus just made about heaven is true, this other statement is saying something seemingly different so it must be false". God says, "this statement Jesus just said is true, AND that other statement is true, and there is NOT a contradiction."
The ego is fundamentally incapable of accurately depicting or representing God's nature. It's thought system, it's very WAY OF THINKING about God, is broken. It is limited. It CANNOT think "like God" in order to be able to "map God" or accurately "see" God. Instead it dissects God and splits Him up unnaturally and joins parts together which are not joined.
Any discussion about the nature of God or his creation MUST be made based on how God thinks, thinking about it LIKE the way that God thinks about it, which means "holographic logic", otherwise all manner of false conclusions will arise.
And MAJORLY FALSE CONCLUSIONS HAVE ARISEN pertaining to everything the course says about God's nature, heaven, the sonship, the existence of individual free-willed souls, the performance of miracles, the demonstration of the end of death, and various other things, which has massively watered-down A Course in Miracles and turned it into a sanitized powerless blob-forming heaven-splitting sonship-denying miracle-less lie.
We need to learn to "think like God thinks" if we are to be part of Holy Spirit's thought system. It' snot just a matter of still thinking like the ego but in a happy way. The Holy Spirit's thoughts are TOTALLY UNLIKE the ego's thoughts, and his reasoning and logic are TOTALLY UNLIKE the ego's reasoning and logic. To grasp heaven and to attune ourselves to it, we have to embark on embracing an entirely new way of thinking, one which does not dissect Jesus's statements and does not see contradictions where they don't exist.
"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." - Jesus
"If the mind can heal the body but the body can't heal the mind then the mind must be stronger than the body."
"The mind must be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this."
"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." (or a body).
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If the mind is stronger than the body then the body must be caused by the mind. And as Jesus said about his resurrection, He materialized another body with HIS MIND, in order to demonstrate that the mind that MADE a body ("the body of jesus") can make another, since form is an illusion. That means ALL BODIES are made by the mind, not by the world.
What we can controversially conclude here, is this:
God is your only Creator, not anything in the world.
Your earth parent's bodies did not create your body.
Your body was not the result of sperm and egg.
Your body as a baby did not manifest as a result of biological laws, it manifested as a result of the MIND.
The mother's womb is a symbol not a cause.
Bodies cannot make bodies. They have no causal power at all. How can effect make an effect?
The mind that made the body, also made the world, and therefore the world did not make the body.
Your body was NEVER made by the world or anything in the world, because there are NO CAUSES in the world.
"It (the world) is incapable of change because it is merely an effect."
Effects are not causes. On the level of this world, causes and effect seem horizontal/linear and this is 100% an illusion. The only true cause is vertical, as demonstrated in the vertical perception which brings about miracles, through the proper order of the LEVELS, which means the higher level of MIND causes the lower level of FORM.
"Mind over matter" is ALWAYS the case for any form that shows up. The mind is the ONLY CAUSE of stuff (bodies, world, objects etc) being made.
So even if it SEEMS like your body is a thing ("as no time does the body exist AT ALL"), or has a history, or is ruled by biological laws, or is the effect of the world, or caused by parents, or put there by SOMEONE ELSE, you're basically claiming that you are automatically at the effect of the world you see and are a victim. Being born BY or FROM the dream, as a body that the dream MAKES "for you", is victimhood. It is a lie.
This is because the ego set up the body-making ILLUSION, the illusory causes of bodies coming about, to make it SEEM as though the world creates the body. This is 100% the reversal of true cause which is that body comes from within not without, and the world has NO CAUSAL POWER at all. To suggest part of the world itself can "create life" is the most opposing illusion, opposing the fact that only God/souls create life, and there is NO LIFE OUTSIDE OF HEAVEN. The ego deliberately has made this ILLUSION of "being born to parents" in order to cover up the causality of the mind or the true source of the body, which is the dreaming mind.
YOUR MIND MAKES THE BODY AT ALL TIMES, from "inception" to death.
When you acknowledge that your mind or some kind of mind is making your body, you will also realize that the body is not something you "attach to" or "identify with" or "put on as a costume" or "incarnate into" like it's something that exists ON ITS OWN independently from you. Like it's some kind of thing in its own right, which happened to .. .just show up magically with no-one being the cause of it?
Instead, recognize that when your mind believes YOU are made of ego illusions, ego illusions will SHOW UP, i.e. materialize, as an image seeming like a solid body in the mind. When your mind has no illusions or ego in it, it will cease to materialize a body, because it does not identify itself AS being made of ego stuff. Therefore the body disappears and you become "invisible" to this world. A clear mind produces invisibility i.e. no form.
Unless we are willing to take FULL RESPONSIBILITY for making the body be what it is, for making it show up, for MAKING IT period, we will see it as a separate "thing" and that WILL keep us stuck in this ego illusion. It cannot be let go by disassociating from it or separating from it.
That means you're actually performing an unworthy form of denial, by trying to keep the body and detach yourself from it. That's an act of premature death. The mind that is making the body, if it attempts to then pretend it is not making it, is simply in denial. The only way to leave the dream is by DISAPPEARING IT, by no longer identifying AS ego. And your mind will then make it vanish.
"You are not a body" does not mean, make a body and pretend you didn't make it.