As you work to forgive yourself and recognize your own innocence, you become more loving. But you're going to find that this cannot happen in isolation.

As you increase your light, and no longer believe sinfulness or guilt within yourself, you're going to encounter the fact that other people still regard themselves as sinful and guilty.

This puts you in a position where you "have more" than they do, and are in a lighter place than they are.

"Miracles supply a lack." "Miracles are given by those who temporarily have more to those who temporarily have less."

If you were to simply "drop down" to where they are at, through false empathy, you will lose your light. You also can't maintain a forgiving perspective on yourself if you still run into the obstacles to peace that other people put in place.

So that means that sooner or later, as you continue to ascend into the light, you're going to have to start moving past other people's guilt. Whatever their belief or darkness is, if you don't forgive it in them, you can't maintain your state of mind.

"When I am healed I am not healed alone."

That means you begin to no longer support other people's self attack. You start to question whether they are guilty. And you start to support the light in them as well. You begin to steer them towards the light, so that you can remain in light.

As this progresses, it's going to become very natural that as you become more loving, you will automatically uplift others as well. You will have to not believe that they are guilty, in order for you to not be guilty. You can't have different rules for them and you - that's ego.

So that means that you becoming healed, you begin to turn into an instrument for healing.

"Those who are healed become instruments of healing."

This isn't even really optional, unless you want to go back into darkness. By stepping into light and recognizing the Golden Rule, and developing what is now a shared interest, you literally HAVE to have a healing and forgiving attitude towards others in order to maintain your own. This isn't a passive state of just sitting there observing, it's an active DOING and a going out and an expressing towards others in relationship.

This positions you as a healer and a forgiver of others. And I don't mean in the sense that you do forgivenesses about the stuff you think other people do to you. If you have BECOME healed, you are now in a position to undo the confusion of others and shine past their blockages.

Your mind becomes constructive, rather than destructive, as it realizes that only by supporting light can it move towards heaven, and only by moving towards creation can it move away from its own self destruction. This puts you in a position to constructively assist others who are trying to destroy themselves.

"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. By affirming this, the miracle worker releases the mind from over-evaluating its own learning device (the body), and restores the mind to its true position as the learner."

It is not only your duty and role, but also your right and privilege, to assist others in this way, healing them and enlightening them and steering them towards their innocence.

"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."

"It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive."

The correct and effective forgiveness of yourself does lead to an automatic function of healing on earth, in relation to others, which you share with the Holy Spirit. This function positions you as the light of the world.

"Forgiveness is my function as the light of the world."

"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."

In this function, this natural role, you profess Christ. And this professing or expressing of Christ is a healing function which is given to others. To those who have less light than you, in order to raise them up and resurrect them.

"The Disciples were officially and specifically told to heal others, as Physicians of the Lord. They were also told to heal themselves, and were promised that I would never leave them or forsake them. Atonement is the natural profession of the Children of God, because they have professed Me."

This is the point at which you become a miracle worker who is in service to others.

"Miracles are the maximal service you can render another."

Serving, therefore, is what you automatically do, or move into doing, as your own awakening progresses. If you have received miracles then it is automatic that you will give them. To receive them you have to recognize your innocence, which you have to believe is true of everyone, otherwise it cannot be fully believed. And this recognizing that the same truth (golden rule) applies to everyone makes you ready and willing and able to reinforce it in others."You can only give the miracles you have received."

Thus you join the great crusade, you become the atonement, you are now part of the plan and a mechanism which God is using to bring about the healing and awakening of your brothers. As a Teacher of God you now function as part of God's way of bringing everyone home, because atonement is more than just about your own personal salvation, it's about the salvation of the entire sonship.

"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." .... ie the mind IS separate from bodily conditions. And since "if I defend myself I am attacked", if you try to DIRECTLY defend the body you will attack it and keep it sick.

However...

"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."

Therefore, by recognizing that the mind is distinct from the body and NOT at the effect of the body, the mind assumes a position of healing, which HEALS the body. By focusing first on the healing of the mind, the healed mind HEALS the body.

"The mind, being sane, heals the body."

These statements are not saying that you can just focus on mind and ignore the body's condition. Or that by recognizing mind is SEPARATE from the body - thus not affected BY it - that the mind would still maintain or allow the body's sickened state.

Instead, Jesus is saying that once you DO see that your mind IS NOT your body, THIS state of mind will CAUSE the body to heal.

"Now is the body healed by miracles."

Then the body will become "a healthy serviceable instrument."

It is made healthy due to the removal of the level confusion that's inherent to the belief that the mind IS the body, or that the identity is the body/ego. Once you become clearer about WHAT YOU ARE, and what mind is, the mind adopts its natural HEALING function and cures all sickness.

This teaching has nothing to do with just escaping the body and being only identified with spirit - which IS a goal - but the EFFECT of this goal is that mind regains its POWER, and can now CAUSE healing and life to be restored.

In other words, you heal the body INDIRECTLY by DIRECTLY healing the mind so that IT IN TURN heals the body. But if you swap this around and try to heal the body first without healing the mind, you won't get a lasting healing.

"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."

While it's true that if you FOCUS ON the body first and foremost, you are really reinforcing it as real and really sick and separate. And this attacks it and keeps it sick. In that state of mind you are NOT really in a position to "heal it".

So it seems like a PARADOX... or counter intuitive. .. but you in fact are being instructed that if you DO want the body to heal, you GO ABOUT IT BY healing the mind/identity, SO THAT this leads to the mind mind indirectly healing the body.

By focusing on the body first you are trying to really bring about death in the NAME of healing. But if you focus on healing the mind first you are attempting to bring about LIFE, and this RAISES THE BODY FROM DEATH.

"A pure mind knows the truth, and this IS its strength. It cannot attack the body, because it knows EXACTLY what the body IS. This is what "a sane mind in a sane body" really means."

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind MUST BE STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

The body does not really do a whole lot. It is an instrument. It cannot really live without you as a host. It doesn't really have a mind of its own, or a will, or power, or causality. It cannot really create anything or make anything happen. It's a medium, a tool, a device, which is to be used. You can pick it up and put it down. Without you it would do nothing.

"A body cannot stay without illusions"

"The body cannot heal, because it cannot MAKE ITSELF SICK."

"the body CANNOT be used for purposes of union"

"The body cannot KNOW. And while you limit your awareness to its tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur that surrounds you."

"Yet a body CANNOT be guilty, for it can do nothing of itself. You who think you hate your bodies, deceive yourselves."

"The body cannot create, and the belief that it CAN, a fundamental error responsible for most of the fallacies already referred to, produces all physical symptoms." "the body cannot be healed by itself."

The eyes are neutral. As you look around the room the body just reports what's there. It is like you have a video feed coming into you through your face. The eyes just pick up the light signals and pass them on. The eyes themselves are not aware of what they are looking at. They don't judge or decide anything about what they detect, and they don't even "see" what they are picking up because they have no awareness - making them blind. They just faithfully report on what's outside. They are sensors, like a detector, or a scanner.

As you look at different things, or rather, use the body's sensors to detect what is supposedly out there, there is no judgement, there is no meaning, there is no partitioning, there is no accusation, there is only a completely neutral feed of images being transferred. Your eyes are like a camera. They just bring in the data, they don't have any opinion about it at all. It isn't until the mind looks at the data that we start to enter into deciding what something means, our attitude about it and our relationship to it.

It's the mind that "looks at" what the body "looks at". There are therefore two steps in seeing the world. The body sees it first and passes on what it sees. Then the mind looks at the "printout" of what the body has seen. The mind isn't actually looking directly at the world out there. It's looking at the recorded images which have come in through the video stream, through the pipeline of the optic nerves, and which have travelled to the place in the brain where the mind is "attached". And as though on a kind of internal screen, the mind is now looking at the screen on which these images are reconstructed.

This all happens quite effortlessly so it is very easy to be deceived. The body is so non-interfering with sight, unless perhaps the eyeballs or vision apparatus is damaged, that you easily forget that the eyes are even there. This sets up a kind of deception, in which it's very easy to just think that you are looking directly and personally at the physical world. But you in fact are not. You are looking at images which are sent in to you via external sensors on the body's surface, and you are sitting there in the mind, beyond the brain, reading the transmitted images. But you think hey, I am looking at the actual world. No, you're looking at images once removed.

The same happens with sound. The ears do not discriminate as to what they hear. They just hear everything they can. They are like microphones. They pick up and sense the sound vibrations and translate it into a signal, which is sent to the brain, and then it is reconstructed into "sound". And then, the mind listens to the reconstruction, and thinks that it now hears the world. It's almost like the body is a long distance telephone, and it's picking up audio from a world far away, sending the sound along a wire, and now you're at the other end listening in. You're not really out there, in the environment where the sound is picked up, you are removed from it.

All the other body senses have the same properties. They just detect changes and differences and report them to you. You then get to interpret or give meaning to them. Upon receiving the signals your mind could have decided that all the things experienced are absolutely real. That they really exist. As though, because your body sees a car, that there really is a car there. Or because your hands touch the car, that there really is a car there. Or that because you hear the car, the car really must exist. But it's not the body that decides this, nor the brain. It's your mind, on the receiving end of transmissions. It is the mind that decided what it is FOR, or how it USES it.

It is optional, whether you believe in what the body is telling you. It is just a sensory device. In fact, Jesus says in ACIM that the body is not really there to know anything, it is only there to sense. "To sense is not to know." Which means that sensing the world or using physical perception to look at it, is not an act of knowing. It doesn't mean that you know the thing is really out there. It means that your sensors are detecting something and telling you something. And they might be lying.

The problem is, is that the body can lie. Because here you have a physical instrument for detecting things, which can report back that something exists, within the same realm that the body itself inhabits. Which means that the body can also sense itself, can look at and hear and smell and touch itself, and can report back that the body "is really there". But this cannot in any way be reliable. The body is now justifying its own existence and trying to prove itself.

The body can easily lie to you. To rely on an instrument to tell you what really exists, given that the very same instrument is reporting upon its own existence, completely invalidates everything it tells you. It is no longer impartial or neutral, if it is telling you that its own existence has been detected by its own sensors. It is completely biased, then, because it is ALWAYS telling you that physicality is true and real, even if it is not. It is ALWAYS reporting that things exist even if they don't. And if it is going to tell you to trust it when it tells you that its own existence is real, based on its own senses, this is heavily tainted information.

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"Yet a body cannot evaluate. By seeking after such things the mind associates itself with the body, obscuring its identity and losing sight of what it really is."

What it comes down to is that your mind is sensing a world using an instrument, whereby the signals you receive and are aware of are once removed from the thing you are sensing. But if you buy into them and forget you are using an instrument, you will act as if it is YOU who is doing the sensing, and thus confuse yourself with the body. This is body identification. It's the failure to recognize that the body is a device for sensing, and is not your self. Since the senses themselves seem "transparent" and have no opinion, and since they report what's there all the time, it's easy to forget that you are even using sensory equipment, and instead believe that you ARE the senses. That the body is YOU who is picking up on the world, and YOU who sees it and hears it. It seems so effortless that you forget you even are using senses, which is extremely deceptive.

The mind is not required to believe anything that the body tells it. When it receives neutral images of a world, it can decide what to do with that image. It can dissect it, it can give meaning to it, it can believe in it, it can choose to react to it, it can remain detached from it, it can judge and condemn and attack it, it can love it, it can ignore it, whatever. But we have to realize that since the senses themselves are effectively neutral, it is US who is giving everything we sense all the meaning that it has. It is US who decides whether you believe what we see, whether it is real, and what truth it holds.

"You have given everything all the meaning it has for you." "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. Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place, for differences cannot exist within it, so too are illusions without distinctions."

So the mind is receiving signals from the outside world, through the body sensors, and gets to decide what to make of them. What meaning they have. All such images are illusions because the world itself is an illusion, and all sensory inputs are actually false, because the world they are reporting on isn't real. The eyes are in fact unable to really see actual reality. They are strapped into a virtual reality headset and are blinded to see only the inside of a tiny box. The body is in fact an interpreter, a translator, and it is fixated on an illusory world which isn't reality in order NOT to see reality. And so everything that it faithfully and neutrally reports, is a lie. What it sees is not really there to see, what it hears makes no real sound. And the sensations it sends to your mind for evaluation are all false.

"These eyes made not to see will never see."

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

It is up to your mind to decide what to make of the signals it is receiving through the body. It is up to your mind to recognize the body cannot really see or hear reality. It is up to your mind to discern that everything the body tells you is happening, is not really happening. It is up to your mind to withdraw all of its dark and twisted and confused meanings, which it projects onto the body's signals, and to instead categorize all body signals as FALSE. It is up to your mind to overlook and not see what the body is telling you is there. And it is up to your mind to recognize the world is nothing but an unreal dream, something to overlook through forgiveness and NOT see, and that BEYOND it is heaven.

"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely. Now mistakes become quite possible, for certainty has gone."

"Let not your eyes behold a dream; your ears bear witness to illusion. They were made to look upon a world that is not there; to hear the voices that can make no sounds. Yet are there other sounds and other sights which can be seen and heard and UNDERSTOOD. For eyes and ears are senses without sense, and what they see and hear they but report. It is not THEY that hear and see, but YOU, who PUT TOGETHER every jagged piece, each senseless scrap and shred of evidence, and MAKE a witness to the world you want."

"Let not our sight be blasphemous today, nor let our ears attend to lying tongues."

"Anger but screeches, "Guilt is real!" Reality is blotted out as this insane belief is taken as replacement for God's Word. The body's eyes now "see"; its ears alone are thought to hear. Its little space and tiny breath become the measure of reality. And truth becomes diminutive and meaningless."

"Rejoice you HAVE no eyes with which to see; no ears to listen, and no hands to hold nor feet to guide. Be glad that ONLY Christ can lend you His, while you have need of them."

"How can you judge? Your judgment rests upon the witness that your senses offer you. Yet witness never falser was than this. But how else do you judge the world you see? You place pathetic faith in what your eyes and ears report. You think your fingers touch reality and close upon the truth."

"The body cannot see this, for the body AROSE from this for its protection, which must ALWAYS depend on keeping it NOT seen. The body's eyes will NEVER look on it. Yet they will SEE what it dictates. The body will remain guilt's messenger, and will act as it directs, as long as YOU believe that guilt is real. For the REALITY of guilt is the illusion which seems to make it heavy and opaque, impenetrable, and a REAL foundation for the ego's thought system. Its thinness and transparency are not apparent, until you see the light BEHIND it. And then you see it as a fragile veil, before the light."

"He will not tell you that your brother should be judged by what your eyes behold in him, nor what his body's mouth says to your ears, nor what your fingers' touch reports of him. He passes by such idle witnesses, which merely bear false witness to God's Son."

"You do not seem to doubt the world you see. You do not really question what is shown you through the body's eyes. Nor do you ask why you believe it, even though you learned a long while since your senses do deceive. That you believe them to the last detail which they report is even stranger when you pause to recollect how frequently they have been faulty witnesses indeed! Why would you trust them so implicitly? Why but because of underlying doubt which you would hide with show of certainty?"

"These testimonies which the senses bring have but one purpose; to justify attack and thus keep unforgiveness unrecognized for what it is."

"Everything these messages relay to you is quite external. There are NO messages that speak of what lies underneath, for it is NOT the body that could speak of this. Its eyes perceive it not, its senses remain quite UNAWARE of it, its tongue can not relay ITS messages."

"You strain your ears to hear ITS soundless voice, and yet the Call of God Himself is soundless to you."

"This body, purposeless within itself, holds all your memories and all your hopes. You use its eyes to see, its ears to hear, and let it TELL you what it is it feels. IT DOES NOT KNOW. It tells you but the NAMES you gave it to use, when YOU call forth the witnesses to its reality."

"You who would make a sacrifice of life, and make your eyes and ears bear witness to the death of God and of His holy Son, think not that you have power to make of them what God willed not they be."

"Here is an image that you WANT to be yourself. It is the means to make your wish come true. It GIVES the eyes with which you look on it, the hands that feel it, and the ears with which you listened to the sounds it makes. IT PROVES ITS OWN REALITY TO YOU. Thus is the body made a THEORY of yourself, with NO provisions made for evidence BEYOND itself, and NO escape within its sight. Its course is sure, when seen through its own eyes. It grows and withers, flourishes and dies. And you cannot conceive of you APART from it."

"The mind without the body cannot make mistakes. It cannot think that it will die, nor be the prey of merciless attack. Anger becomes impossible, and where is terror then? What fears could still assail those who have lost the source of all attack; the core of anguish and the seat of fear? Only forgiveness can relieve the mind of thinking that the body is its home. Only forgiveness can restore the peace that God intended for His holy Son. Only forgiveness can persuade the Son to look again upon his holiness."

"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."

Get used to this idea. Stop trying to make the world out to be a wonderful great thing that you want to keep forever. It's okay to forgive it and love toward it but in and of itself it is absolutely NOTHING. It is not worth a single thing! All this special-love baloney about how Earth is so special and save the planet and all this bullshit, you're not even supposed to be here.

The body and the world are absolutely worthless. They are not your home, they are not where you belong. God did not create them, and so they are meaningless, valueless, worthless. Putting the body or the world on a pedestal and worshipping it is worshiping false idols. They are not Gods. When you are done with the body and the world you will throw it in the trash and walk away.

The world holds NOTHING that you want. It IS nothing. How can you value nothing? To do so is to completely fail to recognise the world is an illusion. It's not really there to have! You can't keep it, you can't save it, you can't make it mean something it will never mean. You are supposed to forget it entirely and return to heaven. It is VITAL that you recognize the world is nothing. Recognizing this will set you free from suffering.

While we're busy getting excited about all the magical things in the world, all the places you can go, things you can do, stuff you can gawk at, it's all ultimately purposeless until you repurpose it toward awakening FROM it. The world has absolutely nothing to give you, it adds absolutely zilch to God's Kingdom, it doesn't give you any abilities or benefits whatsoever that you didn't already have in spirit, and all it does is limit and take away. Stop making the world into a special relationship. The world is absolutely nothing. There is no world!

"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?"

The things that happen in the world don't really matter. All the efforts to build things, reach goals, assemble cities, improve governments, it's not really the point. It's not why we're here. We're here because we're stubborning refusing to live with God. We have lessons to learn and the purpose is to get to a point where we leave the world permanently. It's not about building a wonderful human civilization on the planet. There is no real benefit to doing that. We're not really supposed to be here. We belong in heaven. This world is just a temporary outpost, a corner in which we're hiding, while we delay being with God. Don't get too comfortable, because it was never meant to last.

"Salvation is no more than a reminder this world is NOT your home; its laws are NOT imposed on you, its values are NOT yours. And nothing that you THINK you see in it is REALLY there at all."

"Yet who can build his home upon a straw, and count on it as shelter from the wind? The body can be made a home like this BECAUSE it lacks foundation in the truth. And yet, BECAUSE it does, it can be seen as NOT your home, but merely as an aid to help you reach the home where God abides."

"The world I see has nothing that I want."

"God's teachers can have no regret on giving up the pleasures of the world. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Does an adult resent the giving up of children's toys? Does one whose vision has already glimpsed the Face of Christ look back with longing on a slaughter house? No-one who has escaped the world and all its ills looks back on it with condemnation. Yet he must rejoice that he is free of all the sacrifice which its values would demand of him."

"It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give."

"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."

"The body is hardly worth the least defense."

"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?"

We talk a lot about forgiveness and undoing grievances and not projecting guilt etc, but a HUGE elephant in the room is how everyone believes they are their body!

We are quite literally NOT a physical body. We are spirit beings, made of God-stuff. The body is NOT a part of our self.

"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."

"The body is OUTSIDE you, and SEEMS to surround you, shutting you off from others, and keeping you APART from them, and them from you."

But take a look at the world, look at how everyone is always focused on bodies, regards bodies as people, refers to bodies by name, and how we all seem to be very IDENTIFIED WITH the body.

Even from birth and through childhood, we're told that we are a boy or a girl, or a human being, and that our body is our self. It's drummed into us by a society that HEAVILY believes that we are bodies.

This isn't made any easier by the fact that the body ITSELF makes the world seem very real, and thus makes ITSELF seem very real. It reports on itself using its OWN senses, and reports that the body it senses as existing really exist. Pain and sensations confirm it.

Everyone's looking in mirrors at "how they look". Everyone's talking about what other "people" look like. Everyone's talking about what their body did today. Everyone's taking their body appearance personally, either to their benefit or detriment.

We have a BIG PROBLEM of believing that we are flesh and bones objects walking around on a fake planet.

We are not even 1% body. We are 0% body. Purely spirit. Purely life. Purely made of God-stuff. And yet the world is at like a 99% belief that bodies are true, bodies are life, bodies are our reality.

It is this identification WITH and AS the body that produces EGO, and is a problem of identification. That we literally start experiencing the body as if it is US, and anything it experiences is happening to our SELF. This is mental illness and it is widespread and extremely common.

In fact it is so common that it's taken to be absolutely normal, absolutely natural, the stuff families are made of, the stuff countries are made of. Human since birth, born to be flesh and bones, born to have a brain and a heart, born to bleed and die.

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

"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. Would you BE this, if Christ appeared to you in all His glory, asking you but this, "Choose once again if you would take your place among the Saviors of the world, or would remain in hell, and hold your brothers there." For He HAS come, and He IS asking this."

"In Heaven God's Son is NOT imprisoned in a body, nor is sacrificed in solitude to sin."

"To be without a body is to be in our natural state. To recognize the light of truth in us is to recognize ourselves as we are. To see our Self as separate from the body is to end the attack on God's plan for salvation, and to accept it instead. And wherever it is accepted it is accomplished already."

"The ultimate purpose of the body is to render itself unnecessary."

"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?"

"All these things are your replacements for the Love of God. 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."

"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." "The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it, MAKING it sick because of its identification WITH it."

"The body is the ego's home by its own election. It is the only identification with which it feels safe, because the body's vulnerability is its own best argument that you CANNOT be of God."

How do you know that you have a body?

Do you see it with your body's eyes?

Do you hear it with your body's ears?

Do you taste it with the body's tongue, touch it with the body's flesh, and smell it with the body's nose?

Is this not a completely circular logic within a closed system?

You are using the very device that you are trying to detect, to detect that same device.

It cannot see outside of its own self. It cannot objectively report whether its own form exists or not.

Its own eyes show you a picture of a body, but the picture is seen with the body that the body is looking at. And so using the thing itself to detect itself, is completely invalid.

You would need proof outside of your own body, that your body exists. And you have none. A scientist could come along and tell you that, per their study, your body does in fact exist. But this would also be a lie. Because they used bodies to look at bodies. They uses eyes to look at eyes. It's entirely invalid within a closed loop.

The body therefore cannot be relied upon to tell you of its own existence. And therefore, there is no proof whatsoever that the body really exists.

You think you see your body in a mirror. But your body is using itself to look at itself. It is completely biased. It cannot tell you if it exists or not, it is designed ONLY to report a false positive that it "has been sensed". It's not capable of telling you of its own non-existence, and is totally one-sided.

The body does not really exist. All it can do is sense what it was designed to sense and NOT see reality.

"To sense is not to know." - ACIM

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen." - ACIM

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself." - ACIM

"At no time does the body really exist." - ACIM

"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." - ACIM

"Here is a world established that is sick, and this the world the body's eyes perceive. Here are the sounds it hears; the voices which its ears were made to hear. Yet sights and sounds the body can perceive are meaningless. It cannot see nor hear. It does not know what seeing IS; what listening is FOR. It is as little able to perceive as it can judge, or understand, or know. Its eyes are blind, its ears are deaf. It can NOT think, and so it cannot HAVE effects." - ACIM

"The body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist." - ACIM

"The ultimate purpose of the body is to render itself unnecessary. Learning to do this is the only real reason for its creation." - ACIM

"Minds need not bodies to communicate." - ACIM

"To be without a body is to be in your natural state." - ACIM

The Holy Spirit proves the ANSWER. Your function is to listen and accept his answer.

The Holy Spirit provides the HEALING. Your function is to RECEIVE AND EXTEND it. To let yourself be an instrument of healing which he can use to heal others.

The Holy Spirit provides the DECISIONS. Your function is to let him decide for you. He decides on God’s behalf, on your behalf.

The Holy Spirit provides the GUIDANCE and instruction. Your function is to listen, learn and carry out the instructions.

The Holy Spirit provides the THERAPY. Your function is to let yourself be comforted and transformed and corrected.

The Holy Spirit provides the SOLUTION to all your problems. Your function is to offer up your problems to him and allow him to correct the problems for you. He can undo all the consequences of your wrong decisions if you will let him, including physical symptoms.

The Holy Spirit provides the JUDGEMENT. He knows what everything is and how to judge it correctly and without condemnation. Your function is to judge LIKE him and accept HIS judgement as your own.

The Holy Spirit provides the EDUCATION. Your function is to listen and learn and be taught. That means being willing to admit to be mistaken and to change your beliefs.

The Holy Spirit provides TOTAL KNOWLEDGE. Your function is to trust that he knows everything and have faith in his word. You do not need to know.

The Holy Spirit provides the HELP from God. Your function is to ask for help and let yourself BE helped. You do not need to understand how you will be helped.

The Holy Spirit provides the COMFORT AND SAFETY. Your function is to allow yourself to be comforted and to open to trusting him so that he can help you to feel safe. He will smooth your way and clear obstacles from your path.

The Holy Spirit provides a HAPPY DREAM. Your function is to open to this dream and share it with him and others. This includes the perfect functioning of the body.

The Holy Spirit provides a HEALED BODY. Your function is to let him use your body for healing so that it can depict healing. He can undo all forms of suffering, sickness and death.

The Holy Spirit provides the POWER OF GOD. Your function is to allow him to express God’s power through you, for you and for others. There is nothing his power cannot do.

The Holy Spirit provides the MIRACLES. Your function is to share his function and trust him to perform those miracles through you and for you. You do not need to understand what miracles are or how they work.

The Holy Spirit exercises the WILL OF GOD. Your function is to have a little willingness to carry out God’s will and allow God’s will to be done through you by the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit brings the LIGHT of God. Your function is to receive and give the light of God which has been given to you through sharing. You do not need to have your own light, you just extend it.

The Holy Spirit FORGIVES YOU. Your function is to let yourself be forgiven and share in his forgiveness, forgiving LIKE him. He knows how to forgive, you do not.

The Holy Spirit is like the perfect teacher. Your function here is to be the perfect student. He is here to help, to fill your needs, to guide you, teach you, heal you, and bring you home.

Your function is to FOLLOW his lead and DO as you are told, and willingly. He will direct you, he will organize people for you to meet, he will speak through you, he will heal through you. You will be told very specifically what to do so that HE can fulfill his function. And he will never leave you.

The body you have, no matter what its issues are, they are not who you are. Thankfully, you are immortal spirit. You're just using this body temporarily as a vehicle to interact with the world.

You've had other bodies of various kinds. Memory of that fact would immediately help you to look at your current body as not a fixed part of your identity, but just a 'house' that you temporarily live in.

You have attributed various properties to your sense of self based on the body you have, how it looks, what color it is, how it moves, what its problems are, but none of those things really are to do with who you really are.

Just because you, or your loved ones, are showing up IN a body, doesn't mean you or they ARE a body.

If you could keep in mind that you are not a body and "no-body" else is either, then you'd see that it's kind of funny how we all keep going around acting as though what applies to our body applies to us.

We groom our body, decorate our body, look at our body in the mirror, do weird things with our body, look at other bodies, notice what other bodies are decorated as, and generally speak to other bodies as though they are people. But it's what's inside the body that gives it life - spirit - which without it the body would be just an empty, lifeless host.

This is part of learning to see yourself and others as Christ. Christ is not a body. Overlooking the body and not being distracted by it is part of forgiveness. Not regarding people as bodies is part of forgiveness. Not identifying yourself as a body is part of forgiveness.

At some point you're going to stop using this body, probably, unless you somehow convert it into a higher form, and then when you stop using it and carry on your way, you'll recognize how it is not who you are.

It's like putting on some clothes and then starting to believe that you are the clothes. It's easy to do, given how intimate you are with the body and how closely it seems to match your every intention. You are creating it, after all. But it's not your self.

Almost everyone in the world remarks about how 'you' look, what 'you' did, where 'you' went etc... really all referring to the "hero of the dream" - the exalted body which everyone is worshipping. The body is a false idol, and just an instrument to use temporarily.

It is by overlooking form and recognizing/knowing the true nature of your identity and the identity of others, not confused with bodies, that miracles are possible.

Miracle principle 20: "Miracles reawaken the awareness that the spirit, not the body, is the altar of truth"

Miracle principle 42: "A major contribution of miracles is their strength in releasing you from your false sense of isolation"

Miracle principle 44: "The miracle is an expression of an inner awareness of Christ and the acceptance of His Atonement"

Miracle principle 50: "The miracle compares what you have made with creation, accepting what is in accord with it as true"

"I am not a body, I am free" - ACIM

Quote: "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. If this were the truth, the mind were vulnerable indeed! "

"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."

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.

After a while you realize that many things are really the same thing. And there are really only two categories of things. There's what's real, and what isn't. Love/life and its opposite - a seeming lack of love/life.

For example, fear is a lack of love. Sin is a lack of love. Guilt is obviously unloving. Sickness is an absence of love/life. Death is a lack of love/life. All forms of attack or grievance are lacks of love. All weakness or corruption or deficiency or blockage or denial are just more signs of a lack or resistance against love/life.

So there's just really the presence of love/life and then there's the seeming absence of it. The absence of it shows up as the opposite of love/life in all its many forms, including all forms of sickness, all symptoms, all forms of fear, all less than perfect states.

Healing then is purely about a supplying of this lack, a restoration and a resurrection, in which the seemingly "lacking" love/life is given to fill what's missing. Like how a battery can be empty or charged.

As a miracle worker it becomes much simpler to realize that all states of suffering, all sickness, all problems, all fear and guilt, all seeming sin, is all just one thing - a lack of something. Some kind of distance from God, from love and life, from happiness and wholeness.

One category is true, one category is false. It doesn't matter what form it's taking. It doesn't matter if it's fear or a sickness or a deadly disease or death. It's all just different disguises for one single problem - God appears to be lacking in some way.

Healing can be nothing more than simply the supplying of what is lacking. This is why God created the Holy Spirit as "the idea of healing", or in other words, the idea of supplying the love that was lacking in the separated children of God. By offering the love and life, the Holy Spirit restores the mind to a healed state by making it whole again. He is the resurrector of life.

"If you consider what the process really means, it is nothing more than a series of pragmatic steps in the larger process of accepting the Atonement as THE remedy. From this viewpoint, the steps can be reworded as follows:

1.) Know first this is fear.

2.) Fear arises from lack of love.

3.) The ONLY remedy for lack of love is perfect love.

4.) Perfect love IS the Atonement."

"Miracles are a form of healing. They supply a lack, and are performed by those who have more for those who have less."

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

"The power of God IS limitless. And, being always maximal, it offers EVERYTHING to EVERY call from ANYONE. There is no order here. A call for help is GIVEN help. The only judgment involved at all is in the Holy Spirit's one division into two categories; one of love, and the other, the call for love."

"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. Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place, for differences cannot exist within it, so too are illusions without distinctions. The one answer to sickness of any kind is healing. The one answer to all illusions is truth."

"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. Among the creations of man, it can also separate the true from the false by its ability to perceive totally rather than selectively. It thus becomes the proper instrument for reality testing, which always involves the necessary distinction between the true and the false."

"My Atonement was for the canceling out of all sins (i.e., lack of love) which human beings could not otherwise correct."

The following passage from "if I defend myself I am attacked", speaks of "confusing" or merging mind and body, a level confusion, or a mis-identification of what you are. Seeing what’s in the mind as if it’s in the body, projected onto the body makes the body sick. ("Sickness is anger taken out upon the body." "All sickness comes from confusing the levels.")

Merging mind and body as if one thing results in sickness because it depicts mind as at the effect of the body/world. Believing that you, as mind, are the body, results in sickness. The body is an illusion, mind is real. Mind is cause, body is effect.

Confusing mind with body puts you at the effect of the body, believing the body is now causal. This is the belief in magic, that the effect is causing you, because of your confusion about which is which. Not believing you are the body heals the body. Not projecting mind stuff onto the body heals the body. The body is nothing and causes nothing. Believing otherwise is mental illness.

"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. And nothing that the body says or does but makes HIM manifest."

Basically, the mind is distinct from the body. If the mind is having an ego spaz, the mind is sick, and it will spaz all over the body, affecting the body negatively. It will project its spaz onto the body and see the spaz as if its in the body, confusing itself with the body due to level confusion/perception reversal.

The mind’s power/force will then distort the body to try to make it take on the shape/form of the mental illness. This skews the body, warps it, disfigures it, producing symptoms of distress. The body is practically an ‘innocent victim’ in this because it HAS NO WILL of its own and is completely passive to the raging mind’s self harm. Mind is just shitting all over it, destroying it senselessly. It is clearly therefore the mind that needs to be healed.

When the mind is healed and healthy it does not project shit onto the body or distort it or mangle it. It doesn’t try to make the body act out the "plans" derived from insane perceptions, and does not impose its tyrrany onto the body form. The body automatically is freed from these mental distortions and is instead healed by the mind. "The mind, being sane, HEALS THE BODY."!

"The "self " that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defence, 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."

"These are the thoughts in need of healing, and **the body will respond with health** when they have been corrected and replaced with truth. This is the body's only real defence. Yet is this where you look for its defence? You offer it protection of a kind from which it gains no benefit at all, but merely adds to your distress of mind. You do not heal, but merely take away the hope of healing, for you fail to see where hope must lie if it be meaningful."

"Enslavement of the body to the plans the unhealed mind sets up to save itself must make the body sick. It is not free to be a means of helping in a plan which far exceeds its own protection, and which needs its service for a little while. In this capacity **is health assured**. For everything the mind employs for this will function flawlessly, and with the strength that has been given it and **cannot fail*

If ACIM is to be believed, and interpreted correctly, it is literally saying that this world is the OPPOSITE of what's real. And therefore it is completely unlike the nature of God's Kingdom. Indeed, unlike your real self.

"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."

"earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

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

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

This presents a major challenge, because if the world is completely opposite to reality, truth, nature and eternal life, then every single thing in it is going to be doing things which are completely against who and what you are, against God's nature and will.

The Holy Spirit is now a spokesperson for the true nature of God's reality, and our own, and is here with us to help us to become heaven-like instead of earth-like. All of his motivation points towards eternal life rather than towards the world of mortality.

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death" "Nothing the world believes is true."

But if you'll think on this it's pretty crazy the contrast. Here we are in a world which seems very tangible and immense, and yet Jesus is saying that every single thing in it is opposite, upside-down, and backwards, from what is true. And that the body was made to deceive us into believing it is real. "The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

It would be much seemingly easier to just live a life in this world acting the way bodies act, interacting with objects, not questioning anything. Just taking everything to be verbatim as-it-is and not deceptive at all. Believing everything you see and hear.

Jesus's message is far more radical though, because if what he says is true, then fundamentally the entirety of space and time and all their contents, including all planets and galaxies, are completely false, unreal and untrue. "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."

So now on a daily basis, you have this task of literally questioning everything in the world, trying to recognize the world is an illusion, trying not to be deceived by everything the body shows you, trying not to identify with the body as your self, and basically denying and rejecting everything in spacetime.

That can seem very unnatural perhaps, to suggest you have to deny that the world is of God, and then deny everything about it, but Jesus does appear to be telling us to do this. That the only way out of suffering, sickness, misery and death, is to cancel out the entire seeming universe and believe none of it. That's a pretty tall order.

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."

Nevertheless, it's clear that this is what Jesus is instructing us to do. To exchange the belief that this world is founded on reality, for a recognition that it is nothing but a dream. A fiction of a world which is hallucinated and not really there at all. Nor does it comprise anything real or permanent or of God.

"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 is nothing. Not something, but nothing at all. It's not there. It's a pretend world, hiding the Kingdom of God. And there is nothing in the world worth keeping as a substitute for the real thing.

"Yet its nothingness IS your salvation"

"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."

"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."

ACIM's simple teaching: "This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel that a course which, in the end, teaches nothing more than that only reality is true is necessary. BUT DO YOU BELIEVE IT?"

Do you believe this fully and deeply, that only God's truth is true? Maybe in theory, to an extent. But that's not what matters. What matters is if you REALLY believe it deep down.

We're simply being asked to ONLY believe God's truth, the truth of heaven and reality, and to disregard all lies and falsehoods. That's all. But we have to be CONVINCED and deeply fully believing that God' truth is true, AND that we want it.

The entire "process" of waking up entails just sorting out the true from the false. Reason being that we've mixed them together and are confused and lost. We have to clearly identify what the truth IS, and we have to in contrast recognize what things are false. And then we have to be willing to believe ONLY the true things.

This is likely to be met with ALL your resistance, because the fact is that EVERY single belief you have that is false has to be brought into question, and had to be recognised as NOT true, and you do NOT WANT to do that. You think the opposite is false and want nothing to do with it, unwilling to even entertain its possibility. You literally will have to give up everything you think you know and be very open to being extremely mistaken.

There really is nothing more to it than that. We identify what is REALLY true in God's terms, we contrast it against what is OPPOSITE, we recognize that they can't BOTH be true, we reject the FALSE in favour of what is TRUE, and accept the truth - which is atonement. The Holy Spirit helps us in this sorting out:

"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. Among the creations of man, it can also separate the true from the false by its ability to perceive totally rather than selectively. It thus becomes the proper instrument for reality testing, which always involves the necessary distinction between the true and the false."

"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."

"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."

"The contrast between what is true, and what is not, is PERFECTLY apparent, yet you do NOT see it. The simple and the obvious are NOT apparent to those who would make palaces and royal robes of nothing, believing they are kings with golden crowns BECAUSE of them. All this the Holy Spirit sees, and teaches, simply, that ALL THIS IS NOT 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. The ego sees SOME good, but never ONLY good. That is WHY its perceptions are so variable. It does not reject goodness entirely, for this you could not accept, but it always ADDS something that is NOT real TO the real, thus CONFUSING ILLUSION AND REALITY. For perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth AND illusion you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

"Truth must be all-inclusive if it be the truth at all. Accept no opposite and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely. Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true and nothing else is true. This you have heard before, but may not yet accept both parts of it. Without the first the second has no meaning, but without the second is the first no longer true. Truth cannot have an opposite. This can not be too often said and thought about. For if what is not true is true as well as what is true, then part of truth is false, and truth has lost its meaning. Nothing but the truth is true, and what is false is false."

"Let all these errors go by recognizing them for what they are. They are attempts to keep you unaware you are One Self, united with your Creator, at one with every aspect of creation, and limitless in power and in peace. This is the truth, and nothing else is true."

"The distinction has also been made here between "miracle-mindedness" as a STATE, and "miracle-doing" as its expression."

Note that there are TWO aspects to miracles. Most people seem to refer to miracles as getting into a certain state of mind, having shifted perception and ending up closer to the Holy Spirit. The mind becomes "miracle minded", aka right-minded.

But that is only the STATE of mind. That isn't what MIRACLES are.

Miracles are EXPRESSIONS FROM that state, which produces a DOING or PERFORMING of miracles. A WORKING of miracles.

You get into a state of miracle MINDEDNESS, so that you can be a miracle WORKER, who DOES/PERFORMS miracles.

"The former needs YOUR careful protection, because it is a state of miracle-READINESS. This is what the Bible means in the many references to "Hold yourself ready" and other similar injunctions."

"Readiness here means keep your perception right side up, (or valid), so you will ALWAYS be ready, willing, and able. These are the essentials for "listen, learn, and do." You must be

READY to listen

WILLING to learn

and ABLE to do"

When you are READY TO DO, you are then ABLE To do, and WILLING to do. And now you actually DO.

"Do his works."

This is where you EXPRESS a miracle, which is GIVEN to someone, which can energize them and give them LIFE, and raise them from death. This is where a miracle CAUSES a healing.

"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."

"Miracles are NOT incompetition, and the number you can do is LIMITLESS."

"You can do ANYTHING I ask. I have asked you to perform miracles, and have made it VERY clear that these are NATURAL, CORRECTIVE, HEALING, and UNIVERSAL. There is nothing good they cannot do."

"Miracles are expressions of love." "Miracles supply a lack."

"The miracle is an expression of an inner awareness of Christ and acceptance of his Atonement."

Just so we're clear then, your have a mental state which can be either miracle-mindedness, or anti-miraculous (egoic etc). Blocks to love, and fear, prevent you being in a miracle-minded state. Once you are IN a miracle minded state, and given that mind must project and GIVE what it has, MIRACLES (plural) now EXPRESS FROM that state, and are gifts of life which you GIVE TO OTHERS.

"Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers." "Miracles are GIVEN by those who temporarily have more to those who temporarily have less."

When people talk of shifts in perception they are mainly talking about PURIFICATION, and not miracles. And if they are talking about miracles, they are talking mainly about receiving healing or possibly receiving a miracle. But a miracle expresses FROM a loving state of mind, and you have to be IN that state of mind FIRST in order to PERFORM them.

"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 need the use of miracles for yourself to get YOUR mind into a state of miracle mindedness. You MIGHT call that perceptual shifts. But then once your mind is the right-way up (right minded), you are now able to GIVE what you have. "I can only give the miracles I have received." And now you can use miracle WORKING to PERFORM miracles for others, energizing them and resurrecting them.

So a miracle is not a shift in perception. That's just the RESULT of healing, when a miracle is APPLIED. Healing is an EFFECT of a miracle. When you have become healed, you can now be an instrument for healing and give healing to others, APPLYING what you have. This can in turn "shift their perception" as an EFFECT of their mind being healed.

"Those who are healed (miracle minded) become instruments of healing (can perform miracles for others)."

"It is the privilege of the forgiven (miracle minded) to forgive (undo the unforgiveness in 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 levelconfusion of others."

"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."

Here is a very important statement by Jesus:

"Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help."

Notice how this says ****NEVER****. That means, without exception. The Holy Spirit is supposed to be involved in ALL healing and ALL forgiveness.

Now, if you also look at what we're told about the Holy Spirit, he is the HELP that God appointed to us. He is the only therapist. He is the healer. We are NOT asked to do everything on our own, and in fact that would be arrogant, because we haven't got a clue what to do. We NEED HIS HELP because we are tangled and caught up in so many illusions, misbeliefs, misinterpretations and are somewhat clueless about how to get out of it.

The Holy Spirit does have a FUNCTION, a place, a role. The holy instant itself is supposed to remove fear and hatred from your mind. The Holy Spirit himself is supposed to heal you. Which means you need only provide a little willingness, and invite him in, and welcome him, and make room for Him to operate through you. You are supposed to let Him express through you, talk through you, heal through you. You have to allow Him to operate on you, allowing Him to do His job. The course is not a self-study, it's a cooperative partnership.

"I do NOT feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM."

By all consequences he means every symptom, side effect, condition, sickness, upset, and any form of suffering, which you induced through your poor choosing. "I made the decision myself." He can and will heal all of it on all levels, if you will trust and allow him to do so. But this act of trust, is more than just surrender. Surrender is like going up to the front door and opening it, to see Him outside waiting to enter. You have to go even further, to step aside and let Him walk in through the door. He wants to live in you. And by healing you, He makes you an instrument of healing.

"I will be healed as I let him teach me to heal."

This entails receiving Help. Receiving love. Not just conceptually, but through will and openness and trust and connection. Love does not enter where it's not welcome. You have to not only invite it in, you have to welcome it. And welcome means willingness to move past and let go of anything that He wants to access. You have to let him into your house, take up residence in you and operate your appliances. You have to make room in you for this to happen. You have to share yourself with Him. And by doing so, you share His function.

He has Gifts of God to give to you, if you will allow and receive them. But you have to honestly want them, thus welcome them, and therefore be open to receiving what has been given. Just as God has a symbiotic relationship with His souls, so too the Holy Spirit is part you, part God. Let Him into you, into your body, into your feelings, let Him operate on you, let Him work through you, and let Him heal you FOR you.

---

"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."

---

"Prepare you NOW for the undoing of what never was. If you already UNDERSTOOD the difference between truth and illusion, Atonement would HAVE no meaning. The holy instant, your holy relationship, the Holy Spirit's teaching, and all the means by which salvation is accomplished, would have no purpose. For they are all but ASPECTS of the plan to change your dreams of fear to happy dreams, from which you waken easily to knowledge. Put yourself NOT in charge of this, for you can NOT distinguish between advance and retreat. Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success.

Never approach the holy instant AFTER you have tried to remove all fear and hatred from your mind. That is ITS function. Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function. Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven. On your little faith, joined with HIS understanding, HE will build your part in the Atonement, and MAKE SURE that you fulfill it easily. And, WITH Him, YOU will build a ladder planted in the solid rock of faith, and rising even to Heaven. Nor will you use it to ascend to Heaven alone."

False perception is exclusive vision. It sees only a small part of what there is to see, excluding the rest. It is blinded by form and appearance and cannot see past the surface of an illusory world. It has covered the world in labels and categories and fragmented boxes.

True perception is an inclusive vision. It can see the small parts of the illusory world but only as a thin transparency overlaid upon a unifying light. It sees through and beyond the physical realm. The compartmentalizing of the world is removed and all things are placed in a single box.

As such, by being inclusive, vision sees wholly and sees the whole. It has one singular response of love to everything. It is unmoved by form and unchanged by conditions. It doesn't adjust or waver or fluctuate based on circumstances or upon what it seen. It is constant.

It brings a steady light to everything that is seen, such that everything is seen in the same way and with the same judgement of innocence. The steady innocence anchored within is projected outward, seen reflected in everything regardless of its form.

We are therefore transitioning from an exclusive, separating, partial way of seeing, to an inclusive whole-oriented way of seeing. To see everything in the same way. To judge everything as a single whole. To have no favoritism or special interests. To not pick out some parts as ugly and some parts as beautiful. But to bring a higher beauty, detached from form, which is seen in all parts at once.

A forgiven world is then a world of form, which might to unforgiving eyes appear to be separated out by that form. But seen anew with unifying eyes, which ignores the form, forgiving eyes regard everything in the same light and with a singular meaning.

Nothing is rejected or attacked or split off or segregated. Everything, all forms and appearances, are recognized as equally unreal. Simultaneously, the properties of unity, which includes innocence and holiness and love, are seen across all such forms, because these are what are being used for seeing. Thus Earth comes to reflect heaven and is forgiven of its attempt to be a symbol of separation.

Now that the mind is open to seeing wholly, it is open to the whole, and therefore now sees the whole beyond the partial world. It recognizes the world is not even a whole world, and sees the unity beyond the dream. Now is it ready for heaven, to enter into that which is truly one.

"The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness."

"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. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs."

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. Among the creations of man, it can also separate the true from the false by its ability to perceive totally rather than selectively. It thus becomes the proper instrument for reality testing, which always involves the necessary distinction between the true and the false.

"You are NOT limited by the body, and thought CANNOT be made flesh. But mind can be manifested through the body if it goes beyond it and DOES NOT INTERPRET IT AS LIMITATION. Whenever you see another as limited TO or BY the body, you are imposing this limit ON YOURSELF. Are you willing to ACCEPT this, when your whole purpose for learning should be to escape FROM limitations?" UrT8G16

Bodies don't really matter in a relationship. The soul is androgynous and perfect. It isn't male or female. It has no limits and loves unconditionally.

It uses a body temporarily and then moves on. It might've had lifetimes as men and women, children and the elderly, as parents or alone. It could've had a gay body or a straight body, an overweight body or a skinny body. Whatever. Across its experience of so many different types of bodies, it cannot help but generalise the learning and detach from the specifics of each of them. It learns again to love regardless of form.

There could be a lifetime where two souls meet and they have certain types of bodies. They may or may not even be attracted to each other's bodies, or be compatible physically. Perhaps they are man and woman but one of them is gay. Perhaps they are from different cultures or races. It doesn't matter.

The body really is just a kind of tool that the soul uses. The body has its severe limitations and its limited scope of expression, which means that as the soul uses it, it has to work with what it's got. If it wants to talk, the words are likely to come out sounding the way that the body instrument allows to happen. If it wants to have intercourse, it has to work with whatever appendages or holes are available. If it wants to hug it has to deal with its length of arms and its roundness of belly.

If the soul is not heavily body identified, its view of the body is very detached and transcendental. The body doesn't really matter to it, nor does the bodies of others. When the soul is more identified with and lost in its current body, taking it to define itself and to be itself, this narrow perspective will inhibit relationship and make it more conditional. The bodies of others then matter more, relationships have more criteria, and everything has to be acceptable within limits. There is also more hell to pay when the rules are broken.

Ultimately we're meant to learn to love ourselves and everyone equally and fully, regardless of their bodies. We are to use the body as best we can to relate though and beyond, without placing so much emphasis on the body itself of what appear to be very limited categorisations of types.

Jesus suggests in the course for example that everyone should love everyone regardless of specific bodily appendages. A soul-to-soul communication is more important than cutting off a brother because their body is a certain type or style. This even applies to people having disabilities and sicknesses, learning to love them regardless of what their bodies are doing, and looking past the body to the immortal spirit within.

In my marriage for example, I was a male-gendered body person married to a female-gendered body person. She was 18 years older than me, which didn't matter. I had some attractions towards men as well, which didn't matter to her. She was from a different country thousands of miles away, which didn't matter. She grew up in a different culture, which didn't matter either.

Regardless of the sense of specialness and exclusivity in the relationship, there was also a more transcendental and unconditional element. I had some attractions to men for example, which she knew about, and she found it interesting and a curiosity instead of judging against it. She was willing even to encourage me toward it even if it meant her and I possibly not being together. Just as she at times wanted to be with other men.

We still had intimate relations which entailed a biological compatibility, even if in some way we might not have been entirely on the same page. We used what we had and made it work, because it was really more important that we were together and loving each other. A love that transcended the physical. A love between souls that spanned many lifetimes and many bodies. We could've been even more extremely different on the physical level and I think we would still have had a deep soul connection.

Ultimately what this has taught me is that the physicality of the body is not really that important. It is much more important to love a person and be open and honest and trusting. To share deeply and intimately, emotionally and psychologically. This can happen even if the bodies appear to be what the world would consider thoroughly incompatible. We turned heads with our weirdness and our age gap, for example. This can happen for gay or straight people, for people with any kind of body and any kind of persuasion. Every relationship has the potential to be holy.

What I realise now is that for any future relationship, it doesn't really matter if the person is male or female, or looks a certain way. It doesn't have to be a 'mr right' or a 'mrs right', or some kind of ideal model of perfection. The person is more important, the mind-to-mind is more important. If it comes with a certain type of body, and even if that body has certain limitations, it doesn't really matter.

Having a full whole relationship is more important than just some physical sexual hookup that's empty and cold and full of ego. If the person has certain genetalia, or types thereof, what does it matter, really, if the love transcends it? The two souls potentially relating on a higher and more whole level is what's important. This can even take place without any physical interaction or proximity or anything that the world might think of as a relationship. It can happen with strangers. It can happen anywhere, and beyond any type of body.

Looking past the body to the soul/mind is what's really important. The holy spirit's home is in our relationship to the christ in ourselves and others, which overlooks bodies and regards them as nothing but tools. If you still use them to interact then so be it, within the limits and specifics that the body allows. Sex is a limitation just as gender is but you can still use it while the mind is in a higher state. We're supposed to learn to love people as beings, as children of God, regardless of what their bodies are doing. Because ultimately no-one is really a body anyway.

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

I seem to be operating through a male body in this lifetime. It has a certain appearance. A certain shape. It functions in a given way and has certain seeming abilities and inabilities. There are appendages and shapes and features which other bodies don't seem to have. It seems to have a physical gender. It seems to have needs. When it looks upon itself in the mirror using its own eyes it sees an image of what it seems to be.

But this body is not who I am. I am not a male, or a humanoid. I do not really have arms and legs or a head. This strange creature I inhabit is not my self. It is but one of many possible iterations of bodies, all of which are distinctly different, and none of which are an accurate representation of my soul. None of them, not even this one, depicts who I really am.

"What you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

Your face is not how you look, any more than the face of another person's body is how they look. The face is a disguise designed to present a picture of what appears to be a "person", or someone looking, or someone speaking. But this face is just an instrument, a device, a facade, like the outside of a building. It actually hides the invisible self which cannot be seen with the body's eyes. This face is merely an arrangement of bones and flesh and muscles and sensory organs operating in a certain, very specific way.

What you are as a permanent, perfect creation of God, cannot possibly bend to become the shape of a particular body. In one lifetime you might show up as a woman, in another as a man, and in another as a woman again. Shapes and features of different sizes and proportions and colors and behaviors. None of these conform precisely to the true nature of what you are, and not one of them is wholly a perfect depiction of yourself.

In fact, because the core of you is so perfect and formless, every single body that you could ever utilize cannot come close to or even touch upon your true nature. Every one of them is distanced from your identity and set apart from or is external to your soul's true nature. They are all strange pictures of persons, who are not really persons, portraying physicalized images of artificial identity, as temporary substitutes for who and what you are.

When you identify with or as this body, believing it is completely yourself, there must be quite a jump of the gap between your true nature and the nature of this strange image. You must distort yourself, confine yourself, mangle yourself, in order to consider yourself to BE IT. You must be not yourself, in the most extreme way, in order to regard it as who and what you are. Are you at toe? Are you a buttock? Are you teeth? Do you chop off parts of yourself when you get a haircut? Do you shed yourself? Are you constantly changing? You are not these things. And trying to identify as these things, alone, must induce mental illness simply because these things are so unlike you.

There was a gospel of Judas which was discovered, I think it was part of the dead sea scrolls. I watched this on tv some years ago... in which, for one thing, Judas was properly recognized as being the one who was closest to Jesus and most believing him, which is why the authorities later depicted him as the worst traitor, to slander him. And in this gospel there were accounts that Jesus had already accomplished such spirit identification that he was able to transfigure in and out of different bodies. Sometimes appearing as a woman, sometimes as a child, or an old man, depending on what form was suitable to meet with particular people.

I don't find this to be improbable or impossible. Some of the great masters of the East have acquired similar abilities, dissolving the body and turning into a ball of light which then flies over the land and then rematerializes as a body later. Clearly when one has total clarity about what one is, and has power over the body and all forms, this kind of thing becomes easy and possible.

We are not bodies. We are spirit beings. And we do not need bodies in order to exist. "To be without a body is to be in your natural state." You do not need a body to be with God, or to be yourself. "God did not create the body." and so it is not a natural part of you or your inheritance. We must learn to correctly recognize that even the body we have right now, is not our identity. I am not a 6-foot caucasian male in his 40's. This is just the particular picture that my mind is projecting or that I chose to show up as or "incarnate into". In my last life, I was probably a woman.

In order to love yourself and to love everyone equally you cannot be offended by, putt of by, judging of, preferring, or being biased in any way about particular types of bodies. Fat or thin, large or small, tall or short, gay or straight, masculine or feminine, hairy or bald, ugly or beautiful, it should not matter, because these are all just clothing. Just flesh suits which our real selves are temporarily using. And no matter how a particular body appears, it is not the person.

Holding the body against them is like accusing them of sin. You must learn to look beyond your body and theirs, to recognize that deep within, there is a shining light, a perfect soul, just the same as yours, and all the children of God are perfectly identical and equal in Christ.

"The Holy Spirit is the IDEA of healing. Being thought, the idea GAINS AS IT IS SHARED."

As we allow ourselves to be healed, we become healed, and in turn become healers. We are able to give the miracles we have received, and we can give healing to others.

"I will be healed as I let him teach me to heal."

"No one can give what he has not received. To give a thing requires first you have it in your own possession."

"Those who are healed become instruments of healing." (note that an instrument is used by something HIGHER than the instrument - in this case the Holy Spirit).

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another."

We're asked in ACIM to perform healing WITH the Holy Spirit. That means he is included in the healing process, and is actually the way by which the healing occurs. This is because HE is the only healer and therapist. Only HE understands miracles. He is the answer to the separation and KNOWS HOW to heal everything. You DO NOT know how to heal!

"the healer ALWAYS heals BY Him"

"The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION."

"help is His function"

"its presence becomes manifest THROUGH you. Do His work, for you SHARE in His function."

"he (you) LETS HEALING BE"

"the nature of miracles you do not understand" "Nor do you DO them."

"HE (you) can point to darkness, but he (you) CANNOT bring light OF HIMSELF"

"What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world"

"what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them"

In effect, we act like a kind of portal or window THROUGH which the Holy Spirit's radiance of healing power extends. The light of God comes from God through him, through us, to others. We are not able to GENERATE this light ourselves.

We of ourselves really have NO power at all. But when we OPEN ourselves to him, and allow him to work WITH AND THROUGH us, we GAIN the power of God. And this power works ON ITS OWN, because love automatically extends and shines.

It's kind of like, the radiant shining light of God, which has healing power in it, shines from God THROUGH you, to others. Which is why "Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me (Jesus, as an example of a brother), to my all brothers". The light of God is God's light, which shines through you, and extends to others, healing them.

"The Holy Spirit is the mechanism of miracles" or the way by which this miraculous power is bridged to you from God, so that it can be GIVEN TO OTHERS through you.

This is because in your creation, you are given the gift of giving, which means that God gives himself to create you, and creates you to BE a giver, so that HE can be given THROUGH you along WITH you, to co-create. He has given you something which you are meant to GIVE to others, to share with them, in order to have it.

"You CAN LEARN to bless, and CANNOT give WHAT YOU HAVE NOT. If, then, you OFFER blessing, it MUST have come FIRST TO YOURSELF. And you must also have ACCEPTED IT AS YOURS, for how else could you GIVE IT AWAY? This is WHY your miracles offer YOU the testimony that YOU are blessed."

"Your hands will heal, and give the gifts that you accept of me."

Healing miracles are a mirror of this creative dynamic, on Earth, whereby you give what you receive. And WHAT you receive (God's blessing/miracle) has within it the power to heal others, WITHOUT you having to know how it does it.

It's kind of like you are passing along or allowing to extend THROUGH you a power which you did not generate on your own, you did not author, but which you allow to TRANSFER as a form of communication. God shines through you, FOR you, and therefore FOR your "patient".

"The power of one mind CAN shine into another, because all the lamps of God were lit by the same spark."

Your function is, in effect, to participate in the Holy Spirits's healing work, by sharing his function, allowing HIM to PASS ON his healing (of you) through you to others. In this, you don't really get to claim any credit for being a healer, or special, or the source of the healing.

HE heals YOU, FOR you. And you in turn allow him to heal others, FOR you, FOR them. Because he is the help that God has appointed and given. He is supposed to be the one who DOES the miracles.

"The Holy Spirit does NOT work by chance, and the healing that is of HIM ALWAYS works. And unless the healer ALWAYS heals BY Him, the results WILL vary."

"And that is why the Holy Spirit IS the only therapist."

"The Holy Spirit is the radiance that you must let to banish the idea of darkness."

"The Holy Spirit is the way in which God's will can be done on earth as it is in Heaven."

"The text explains that the Holy Spirit is the Answer to all problems you have made."

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

This means that in truth the Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist, because ONLY he knows everything to be able to be certain how to heal everything. He is the GUARANTEE that the separation WILL be undone, because he has the power TO undo it entirely, given him by God. The Holy Spirit DOES NOT FAIL, and when He heals, IT ALWAYS WORKS. Your role then is really to LET HIM DO THE HEALING.

"The Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist. He makes healing PERFECTLY clear in ANY situation in which He is the guide. ***The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION. He needs no help for this.*** He WILL tell you EXACTLY what to do, to help ANYONE He sends to you FOR help, and will speak to him through you, IF YOU DO NOT INTERFERE. Remember that you ARE choosing a guide for helping, and the wrong choice will NOT help. But remember also that THE RIGHT ONE WILL. Trust Him, for help is His function, and He is of God."

"We once said that the Holy Spirit is the Answer. He is the answer to EVERYTHING, because He knows what the answer to everything IS."

When I heal with the Holy Spirit, I am not really doing anything. I am specifically instructed what to do, to fulfill my part of the function I am sharing with him. I may be told to place my hand on a specific part of the body. I may be told when the healing is done. I may be asked to move to a different position.

But more often I will be asked to "rest" or "relax". In effect I am really being told to just take a chill pill and sit on the sidelines while I let HIM USE ME and work through me. He works through my body and through my hands. The more that I don't try to do anything at all, the less obstructing I am. I pretty much just relax and rest and just let him get on with it.

I have NO CLUE how he does what he does. I do not know what he is doing, only that he is doing it. My body shakes and my hands tremble and there is an intensity and various back-and-forth motions and so on. But these happen on their own, caused BY him, or as side effects of what HE is doing.

This means that I have to be willing to trust and to sort of "get out of the way", and to "not interfere". And you can be sure that at times my ego does try to BECOME the healer. The ego in me starts trying to say things to make healing happen, which really has little to no effect anyway. Or I start thinking that I need to force or push, or to hold my hand differently, or to think forgiveness thoughts, or to start doing affirmations, or say lofty things, and none of this is necessary. I am told to relax or even to stop.

In particular Jesus instructs me by saying "let me". Which I've come now to learn to mean, allow him to use the Holy Spirit through me to perform a healing on a person FOR me and FOR them, without me doing anything other than being used as a kind of vessel. It may still entail me "laying on hands" and spending some time involved in the process, but my participation is minimal.

It does take the willingness to allow something OTHER than yourself to DO stuff through you and through your body. This may be unsettling at first, learning to trust to allow some unseen force to make stuff happen IN your body and THROUGH it. To see that, even if you are standing there doing nothing of your own volition, your body is moving, even BEING moved by some unseen power.

Trusting that it WILL move on its own, without your intention to move it. And then seeing it consistently do so, without interference or motivation or control on your part. I am now at a point where I can let the Holy Spirit literally move my body parts ON HIS OWN. He can actually make my arms and hands move around with no motor intentions of my own.

"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."

"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."

"Concern yourselves not with the EXTENSION of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do NOT understand. Nor do you DO them. It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that demonstrates you did NOT do them. Why should you worry how the miracle extends to all the Sonship, when you do not understand the miracle itself?"

So here Jesus is clear, you don't even really DO miracles yourself. That is to say, you do not originate or source the power or the light that produces healing. You do not "use your own power". You are not the "battery" that charges someone. Instead, the Holy Spirit temporarily USES your system to infuse your battery with HIS power so that it extends beyond yourself to someone else. HE brings the power from God, and you allow it to extend.

This is also reflected here, where Jesus tells us that the miracle extends through you WITHOUT your help, because it's really something that's being given BY GOD. "Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life." "Miracles are a universal blessing from God." Their RADIANCE or GIVING to another is essentially AUTOMATIC, because you give it freely through sharing and letting it go. Ie not inhibiting it or stopping it from FLOWING THROUGH you.

"The ONLY way to heal is to be healed. The miracle extends WITHOUT your help. But you ARE needed that it can BEGIN. ACCEPT the miracle of healing, and it WILL go forth, because of what it IS. It is its NATURE to extend itself the instant it is born. And it is born the instant it is offered and RECEIVED. No-one can ask ANOTHER to be healed. But he can let HIMSELF be healed, and thus offer the other what he has received. Who can bestow upon another what he does not HAVE? And who can SHARE what he denies HIMSELF? The Holy Spirit speaks to YOU. He does not speak to someone ELSE. Yet BY your listening, His Voice extends, BECAUSE you have accepted what He says."

Essentially then you are to receive help and healing from the Holy Spirit to get your own mind into a state where it is more trusting of HIS help. Where you are willing to RECEIVE miracles for yourself, which you are willing to SHARE with others. You become infused with healing and love and power. And HIS light now shines out from you ON ITS OWN. This light "performs" the healing in another. The light comes from God and you just allow it to pass through you. You become a kind of CHANNEL or MEDIUM THROUGH which love, light, life, healing etc is communicated to your brother.

"We have said that the Holy Spirit is the MOTIVATION for miracles. This is because He ALWAYS tells you that ONLY the mind is real, because only the mind CAN BE SHARED."

"You CANNOT choose to escape His care, because that is not His will. But you CAN choose to accept His care, and use the infinite power OF His care for all those He created BY it."

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you CAN see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His RESULTS, you will understand where He MUST be, and finally KNOW what He is."

What I have learned now is to let Jesus and/or the Holy Spirit perform the healing. As in "You will see healing through your hands through me." This means acknowledging that the healing power or force or love which CAUSES the healing, the remedy, is something given by God and passes TO me and THROUGH me. I can let it pass through me when I have been willing to receive it for myself, because that means I am unblocking myself and getting MY blocks out of HIS way, so that HE can shine THROUGH me.

This means also recognizing I am NOT SPECIAL as "a healer". I have NO CLUE how to heal anyone to be honest. I don't know how bodies work, what makes emotions work, or the intricacies of the actual mind or how to make it sane. I cannot claim selfish credit for the healing that takes place, beacuse I am not the one doing it. Yes i am involved, yes I am facilitating, yes I am using my hands, yes I am maintaing a relaxed and non-interfering state of mind, but I am not the CAUSE of the healing. All "glory" for that goes to God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

At least, for now anyway. We are told that eventually we will become far more directly in-touch with all power in heaven and earth, that "I am not afraid but all powerful", and that by acknowledging that "all power is of God is to gain all power." But right now my experience is that I a pretty much powerless to do anything OF MYSELF, I don't HAVE any special powers, and I don't know HOW to heal. But I do know how to trust the Holy Spirit and Jesus to do healing through me.

"A better and FAR more helpful way to think of miracles is this: You do NOT understand them, either in part OR whole. Yet you have DONE them. Therefore, YOUR understanding CANNOT be necessary. Yet it is still impossible to accomplish what you do not understand. And so there must be Something IN you that DOES understand."

"As God communicates to the Holy Spirit in you, so does the Holy Spirit TRANSLATE His communications THROUGH you, so YOU can understand them."

"The Holy Spirit will teach me this, if I will let Him."

"I do NOT feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM. I WILL to let Him by allowing Him to decide for God for me."

"You understand that you are healed when you give healing. You accept forgiveness as accomplished in yourself when you forgive. You recognize your brother as yourself, and thus do you perceive that you are whole. There is no miracle you cannot give, for all are given you. Receive them now by opening the storehouse of your mind where they are laid, and giving them away."

"But YOU must see the works I do through you, or you will not perceive that I have done them unto YOU. Do not set limits on what you believe I can do THROUGH YOU, or you will not accept what I can do FOR you. For it is done ALREADY, and unless you give ALL that you have received, you will not know that your Redeemer liveth and that YOU have awakened WITH Him. Redemption is recognized ONLY by sharing it."

"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."

In ACIM, Jesus teaches in many ways that the body, the ego and the world are nothing. Even that they don't really exist at all in reality. But another major part of the teaching is that we've invested these things with meanings, laws, rules, values, powers, which they do not have.

"It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body. What is alien to the mind does not exist, because it has no source."

As a further step, Jesus goes on to say that if you give the body power or meanings or roles that it is not supposed to have, being nothing at all, this is what makes it sick. The body becomes sick because your mind is trying to distort it from being nothing into being something else. It is putting pressure onto the body, trying to manipulate it into serving made-up causes.

"You might ask how the voice of something which does not exist can be so insistent. Have you ever seriously considered the distorting power of something you WANT, even if it is not true?"

As Jesus says, if you believe that the body has an ability to create, meaning an ability to cause something, your mind will be sick and it will manifest this sickness upon/as/in the body. Since the body is nothing, it does not have an ability to cause anything. If you believe the body can or is causing something, your mind is sick, and this will make the body sick.

"The body cannot create, and the belief that it CAN, a fundamental error responsible for most of the fallacies already referred to, produces all physical symptoms."

The same applies to the world. It's easy to say we're not at the effect of the world, but we need to also realize we've invested the world will all kinds of powers, casual abilities, creative powers, trying to make it be something, with false values and credit where it's not due etc. And these things distort the world and effectively results in a sick mind, a sick body, and a sick projected world. The world has to be recognized as absolutely nothing, rather than believed to be something of importance.

"As "something", is the body asked to be God's enemy, replacing what He is with littleness and limit and despair. It is HIS loss you celebrate when you behold the body as a thing you love, or look upon it as a thing you hate. For if He be the sum of everything, then what is NOT in Him does not exist. And His completion IS its nothingness."

It may seem odd at first, but Jesus wants us to recognize that all bodies are nothing. They are not something. They are much closer to being emptiness and lack, being the idea of sin. We need to stop giving power to them, stop giving value to them, stop making them out to be something they're not, and stop trying to give them worth.

"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?"

Jesus even says that they are so worthless as to be not even worth defending, and that if you defend the body you will make it sick. By this worthlessness he does not mean that the body is judged as evil or that we project guilt onto it or make it out to be a victim or a perpetrator. It doesn't mean we value it as low and hated and so on. He simply means that because it is neutral it is nothing, and its neutrality means that you cannot give it any attributes at all, either positive or negative.

"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."

The body is essentially not there. It is not real. It does not exist. It's an hallucination, empty, void, pretending to show up as something but isn't even a real creation.

"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."

Jesus goes on to suggest that if you can recognize the body as nothing at all, withdrawing all artificial beliefs, uses, roles, laws, meanings and so on from it, the body will actually become a picture of health. The reason is that the mind is becoming "clear" and empty of illusions, and therefore the picture of the body begins to fade and disappear, at first infused with light and healing and love, but eventually eradicated by it.

From the state of a healthy mind and body, the body will go on to disappear entirely into the light, consumed by it and erased by it. Recognizing your brother's body as nothing is the way for your body to be free from sickness and death. Regarding a person as a body is a form of separation-belief, and so is an attempt to be split off from life. Your brother's body, your spouse's body, your children's bodies, your neighbor's bodies, they are all absolutely nothing and worth nothing all. Mistaking these people for their bodies is an attack upon who they really are.

"His body's nothingness releases yours from sickness and from death. For what is yours cannot be more NOR less than what is his."

"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."

Finally, Jesus suggests that if you take this all the way, if you deprogram your mind from belief that the body and the world and the ego are ANYTHING, and recognize them as nothing at all, they will disappear. What is recognized as nothing cannot really be there, and this causes it to not be there. In truth, there is no body, there is no ego, and there is no world.

"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."

We are tasked with nothing short of erasing the world, ending space and time, and returning to the complete recognition that they are not there, they never were there, and only God's Kingdom really exists.

"What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

A Course in Miracles teaches:

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom."

"Love did not create the body."

"The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate parts of his Self from other parts."

"The body will not stay."

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love."

"God cannot come into a body, nor can you join Him there."

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea."

"Love's answer is inevitable. It will come, because you came WITHOUT the body, and interposed no barriers which would INTERFERE with its glad coming."

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that YOU will last forever"

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

"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."

"To be of one mind is meaningful, but to be of one body is meaningless. By the laws of mind, then, the body IS meaningless. "

"The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it, MAKING it sick because of its identification WITH it. "

"Grace is not given to a BODY, but to a MIND."

"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but NEVER experienced just now."

"The ego is idolatry; the sign of limited and separated self, born in a body, doomed to suffer and to end its life in death."

"You can escape the body if you choose."

"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."

"The body needs NO healing. But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed!"

"A mind and body cannot both exist."

"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."

"You CANNOT make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will NEVER be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love's condemnation."

"The special relationship is a device for limiting Your self to a body, and for limiting your perception of others to THEIRS."

"Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster illness."

"The body does not really exist, except as a learning device for the mind"

"It offers nothing, and does not exist."

"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."

"The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive SOMETHING, and WITH something."

"I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body AND the power of the mind, by uniting MY will with that of my Creator, which naturally remembered the Soul and its own real purpose."

"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."

The main thing we keep doing over and over, is confusing the mind and the body. Similarly, confusing the mind and the physical world.

If we assign to the body/world MENTAL attributes, we are doing what the course calls "level confusion." We're confused about what level something applies to.

An example is believing that you are a physical body. The belief requires you to try to MERGE the mind and the body. And now the physical body is believed to "have a mind" (the brain).

This belief brings with it what Jesus calls "magic", which is part of level-confusion.. .. the belief that physical things now have MENTAL attributes, such as power, will, mind, causation. And therefore the BODY is now CAUSING things to happen.

This confusion of levels is an attempt to narrow the mind down to a physical object. Another word for this is IDENTIFICATION. The mind is expansive and unlimited and whole. The body is separate and small and limited. They are opposites.

If you try to smush the mind into the body you sort of place the mind "under arrest", to use Jesus's term. This arresting of the mind's nature, trying to make the mind function "like a body", makes the mind sick. And this sickness is then taken out on the body, and now the body becomes sick and dies.

The ego is especially keen to merge the mental and physical levels. It wants to eradicate and ignore the mind level, so it tries to turn it into a physical thing. It wants to ignore that you have a real self, so it tries to imprison it in a body. It wants your sense of "self" to be "I am a physical object". Then it can kill the physical object and believe that the son of God has been killed.

The sole problem is the attempt to merge the mind level with the physical level. To merge self, identity, truth, God's properties, with the physical. To give the physical reality, power, causation, eternal life, value, meaning etc. Doing this makes you mentally ill and makes you lost sight of who and what you are. It's how you lose awareness. This is the attempt to be ONE WITH THE PHYSICAL.

The solution then is that we have to positively "separate out", what is mind and what is physical. We look at the various ways that we refer to physical things with MENTAL labels. Such as thinking that a body is guilty. Guilt is mind-content, not physical. Or that "the weather decided to rain". The weather does not make mental decisions. Or that "that person just sinned" - sin is a mental judgment and bodies are not people.

In particular, our sense of identity, our self, who and what we are, needs to be peeled away from the physical. To put it another way, THE EGO needs to be identified as DISTINCT from the physical. We need to recognize the physical as its own sort of layer of images and illusions - a dream. And this dream covers over a prior dream that is purely mental content. The ego thought system, which is hidden below the surface.

When we stop confusing ego stuff with physical stuff, we can see more clearly that the ego stuff is the problem we need to correct. The insanity in the mind is where the problem is. The insanity influences how we see and what we see. The insanity judges the physical and hates it.

To see the physical world and body as forgiven, we have to correct the content of the mind so that a healed mind can look out from its holiness and see the reflection of heaven. To do this the physical has to be NOT confused with mental constructs. It can't be labelled as being inherently mind-stuff, like sinful, guilty, fearful, evil, etc.

All mental qualities such as reality, truth, eternal life, power, etc have to be TAKEN AWAY from the world and the body. They do not have these things. The body/world has to be recognised as being a neutral image, quite apart from your mind, nothing to do with you, nothing to do with anyone.

Physical bodies have to be seen as having absolutely 0% to do with anyone or anything real. Recognised as just material suits which are temporarily utilised then discarded, with no value of their own. When they are confused with minds, souls, people, wills, powers, etc then we are mentally ill and confused and our identification has shifted from spirit to form.

Even physical death has to be seen as not meaning anything. It has to be seen as not causing anything, harming anything, doing anything real, having any effect. The whole world in fact has to be recognised as not CAUSING anything to anyone or anything real. Causation has to be associated with the mind ONLY. Then the world can be recognised as an EFFECT only.

Long story short, all mind-oriented stuff has to be recognised as NOT PHYSICAL and nothing to do with the physical. So then things like blame, hate, attack, guilt, fear, judgement, murderousness, unworthiness, etc... all is lifted away FROM the world and the body and properly identified as a MIND problem. And since the problem is in the mind, it can now be healed IN the mind.

"The INTENTION is in the mind, which tries to USE the body to carry out the means for sin, in which the MIND believes. Thus is the JOINING of mind and body an INESCAPABLE belief of those who value sin." UrT21D10

"..he does NOT accept the ego's confusion of mind and body." UrT7F3

"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." UrW96L4

"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

"The attempt to unite non-physical content with physical attributes is illustrated by statements like "the thirst for knowledge." UrT1C20

"Mind CANNOT be made physical" UrT8G11

"All physical illness represents a belief in magic. The whole distortion which created magic rested on the belief that there is a creative ability in matter, which can control the mind. This fallacy can work either way; i.e., it can be misbelieved either that the mind can miscreate IN the body, or that the body can miscreate in the mind. If it can be made clear that the mind, which is the only level of creation, cannot create beyond itself, then neither confusion need occur." UrT2C6

"Think a while about what the world calls sacrifice. Power, fame, money, physical pleasure; who is the hero to whom all these things belong? Could they mean anything except to a body? Yet a body cannot evaluate. By seeking after such things the mind associates itself with the body, obscuring its identity and losing sight of what it really is." UrM14A2

"To the ego, THE MIND IS PRIVATE, and only the body CAN be shared." UrT15H8

There's a perspective on the world and upon our minds and beliefs, which is very beautiful. In fact it's quite divine. It's the perspective that God and the Angels would have of what we seem to think is happening here.

From their viewpoint of love and joy and compassion, they know that the entire ego thought system is nothing but a simply mistake. Every belief in sin is just someone being confused. Every seeming attack is nonsense that's not really happening.

And they know that those who believe in the nightmare, are akin to those who have lost their minds. That we're simply somewhat insane and are having wild hallucinations, being very confused about what is true and false, very uncertain about what is real or unreal.

They know that nothing about the separation or the entire world is true or real at all. They know that we're just literally having a nightmare, a bad dream where we're imagining all kinds of horrible stuff. And in this dream we seem to think that we're sinners and evil monsters who deserve to suffer and be sick and die.

And they know that this isn't true. They know that we don't deserve any of that. They know our real selves, and they know that in awakening we'd realize it to. That we are the beautiful angelic shining eternal beings of love and light that could never sin or suffer in any way. They hold that view of us because it is the truth about our real selves.

So as they come to our aid as our mighty companions and helpers, including the Holy Spirit and Jesus, they have this perspective that we're simply mistaken. We're just confused and lost and afraid and are scaring ourselves with imaginary monsters and strange dark threats which aren't even real. That we're just having a strange crazy dream and making up all kinds of things which aren't true.

They see us as just temporarily mentally ill. As having temporary insanity. They have the utmost total compassion for us because they completely recognize that all of our nightmares and screams are simply calls for help, asking for love and to be saved.

No matter how much it seems we might be wanting death and destruction they still discern clearly that in the midst of that belief is a sense of horror and fear and of not wanting what is happening. They recognize everyone's calling as a call for love and a cry in the wilderness. And God has answered.

The whole world is just one big psych ward. One big psychiatric hospital. Where all the patients and even the people caring for the patients and even the people who seem to have nothing to do with patients at all, are all patients. It's a crazy world filled with crazy insane people, and very little sanity.

God knows that. The angels know it. They love us and wait for us until we're willing to accept the truth. They keep guiding us, healing us, steering us to the truth, back to awareness of being home. And we will all return to that eventually. It's guaranteed. Because God is love and He loves His children, and has guaranteed their safe return.

"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? What need have they of sights or sounds or touch? What would they hear or reach to grasp? What would they sense at all? To sense is not to know. And truth can be but filled with knowledge, and with nothing else. ... The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself. "

"Sin is the home of all illusions, which but stand for things imagined, issuing from thoughts which are untrue. They are the "proof " that what has no reality is real. Sin "proves" God's Son is evil; timelessness must have an end; Eternal life must die. And God Himself has lost the Son He loves, with but corruption to complete Himself, His Will forever overcome by death, love slain by hate, and peace to be no more."

"A madman's dreams are frightening, and sin appears indeed to terrify. And yet what sin perceives is but a childish game. The Son of God may play he has become a body, prey to evil and to guilt, with but a little life that ends in death. But all the while his Father shines on him, and loves him with an everlasting Love which his pretenses cannot change at all."

"How long, oh Son of God, will you maintain the game of sin? Shall we not pull away these sharp-edged children's toys? How soon will you be ready to come home? Perhaps today? There is no sin. Creation is unchanged. Would you still hold return to Heaven back? How long, oh holy Son of God, how long?"

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.

You are outside of the world, looking in upon it from the outside in. From this perspective, the body is given no value at all. The world is recognized as completely fictional. The body is used temporarily only as a tool for sensing the vibrations of the illusory world, so as to detect its current configuration and seemingly interact with its inhabitants.

At no point is the body mistaken for your self, nor awarded attributes it does not have. It is not regarded as spiritual or scared or special or worshipped. All sense of personal use of the body has gone. It is rendered nothing more than a functionless instrument through which light may flow into the dream as the light of the world.

In this view, the body is not mistaken even slightly for your sense of self. It's appearance says nothing about who or what you are. Its particular configuration or attributes make no statement whatsoever as to your true nature or creative abilities. It is merely a picture, a portal, into a fake world, through which you briefly peer in order to look at the surface of objects and see bodies moving around.

You recognize that everything the body senses is not real or true. It picks up on vibratory signals of a world that seems to be there but which is not. It shows you pictures of this pretend world, registers sound vibrations, and even seems to be able to touch the surface of imaginary objects. But there is no delusion that any of these things really exist or that these signals are conveying the truth. All they do is relay messages about what seems to be there, but which is not believed in. And so the mind does not use the body to "sense reality", it uses it only to sense unreality.

The dream world continues to depict scenes of fighting, abuse, conflict, physical and mental sickness, trees, buildings, storms, war and chaos, and all manner of activities. Flowers growing and dying, birds eating, fish swimming, and every imaginable form of forms changing form.

The mind observes this through the body senses which register perceptions of such things occurring, but the mind is not deceived by any of them. It knows it is witnessing a lie, a false world, a temporary fiction, which has no inherent truth and absolutely no reality. And it uses the body thus only to temporarily interact with those who see themselves as bodies, that there might be communication, teaching and healing, to guide them similarly to the recognition of a sane perspective on this world and on the bodies they utilize.

For now the mind is standing on the outskirts of the world, not immersed and not lost within its illusions. It is no longer tempted by appearances. It knows with certainty that nothing is happening here, and even when the ego demonstrates its prowess in manufacturing scenes of horror and destruction, these happenings have no influence over the mind. It reacts not and is unmoved and undisturbed by such illusory occurrences. And it continues to look past all of them to the real truth, which these appearances once hid, to the real light and the real show, which is occurring beyond the world entirely.

The mind then has lost interest in the world. It has come to recognize the world has nothing to give. It has surrendered all investment in the world and all attempts to believe it can do or achieve or give anything of value. It is recognized as nothing but a distractor device, made of denial, pretending to be something but is ultimately nothingness. There is no further worshipping of idols, there is no emotional investment, there is nothing that it wants in the world, because it knows the world has nothing to offer. It is nothing but a prison for insane minds who come to suffer and die in dreams of pain. And it is clear there is no such thing as sin.

Such a mind is the light of the world and has come to bless, only because it recognizes the truth and does not fall for the traps and illusions of a world of errors. It does not believe anything the body witnesses or suggests is happening, and realizes the limitations of the senses. It uses them only to serve to the extent they are able and is under no delusions that they represent reality or its experience. The body is known to be only what it is and nothing more, and it is nothing but an illusion. It has no life nor death.

From this view, the world is recognized as nothing. A sphere of un-happenings and illusory events. All events are nowhere. All changes wrought are substance-less. Not one thing occuring has any truth to it. Not even the dying bodies are really dying, nor the sick bodies really sick, nor the living bodies really alive. It is all the same, one illusion, one picture of strange objects and interactions, none of which are real or true.

The hierarchy of illusions has been flattened, and along with it the illusion of orders of difficulty. Nothing is regarded as more or less important or valuable than another, nor more difficult to reverse or change or heal. Nothing is given to the world but the love that would dispel it. And no meaning is attributed it beyond the meaning of forgiveness. Every occurrence has no effects. Every cause seen as an effect of dreaming. And nowhere is there a real consequence believed.

Only for a time does the teacher of God occupy a body thus, using it as a scalpel to dissect the illusions of the world and see beyond them to the truth. The mind no longer loses sight of what is true and real beyond the world, fixated on the reality of light outside the dream. There is no longer deception or temptation capable of inflicting suffering. And not one single aspect of the world has the power to do anything.

The world has been forgiven, overlooked, and not believed. The body is nothing and unnecessary. All the pleasures and pains of the world have been surrendered as useless futilities designed to waste time and avoid the truth. Death has no further appeal, for it is realized it accomplishes nothing real at all and is a worthless pursuit. No one in their right mind chooses to make such demonstrations occur, and what use is a dead body as a tool for communication and healing?

As a teacher of God, you have one foot in the world, but your spiritual eye perceives the light beyond it. Your mind is aligned with the truth but your body is doing body things. You don't fall for the ego's tricks, nor do you react to its worst attacks. You know that nothing can affect you because you have remembered what you are. You are as God created you, and you live outside of the world in another world of light, a world untouched by sin and danger, out of reach of war and pain.

Nothing can disturb you because you are safe in God. The dream of exile is nothing but a strange dream where strange things don't really happen. Where nothing can be believed. And where there is no truth. It is but a desert, arid and empty, a lifeless container of nothingness. And not once has it changed anything real or true. You come a while to offer a message from beyond, to remind your brothers what they believe is not true. You set them free by example and demonstration of your freedom from the world's evidence of irreversible sin. And they see in you a light shining from beyond your body.

This world isn't real. It is not your home. It is false. Nothing in it is true. It holds no value. It is not what you want. And eventually you will learn to recognize it as nothing, realizing that to gain all of heaven you are giving up nothing at all. And not one memory of the dream world will linger as you awaken beyond the world into the reality of the Kingdom. For everything you ever thought happened was nothing and nowhere. Only love is real and only the living world of light is true. And in this light you will know what you are and have always been.

"W-pII.14.1. I am God’s Son, complete and healed and whole, shining in the reflection of His Love. 2 In me is His creation sanctified and guaranteed eternal life. 3 In me is love perfected, fear impossible, and joy established without opposite. 4 I am the holy home of God Himself. 5 I am the Heaven where His Love resides. 6 I am His holy Sinlessness Itself, for in my purity abides His Own."

This is the VERY SIMPLE essence of our work with ACIM to return to sanity. We simply need to identity and recognize, correctly, WHAT IS TRUE, AND WHAT IS FALSE.

This recognition comes about through the DISTINCTION between the two. Some things are simply inherently true - such as the creations of light. Some things are simple inherently false - such as the illusions of the dream world.

It is only because we have CONFUSED AND SWAPPED what is true and what is false, that we do not clearly recognize which is which. We have lost touch with reality and sanity. We simply need to learn to distinguish clearly between them, and recognize that ONLY that which is really true is true.

If your mind has confused or mixed or swapped truth and lies, it perceives accordingly. False perception is INVERTED perception, meaning what is true appears false and what is false appears true. This "total confusion" is the logical outcome of the ego thought system. It produces false perception in which NOTHING is recognized correctly.

To access true or accurate perception, that which actually is true must be "separated out" from that which is false. The false must be clearly and accurately recognized AS inherently false, and the true must be clearly accepted AS the only real truth. All real truth is of God. All real truth is THE KINGDOM and its contents. All real truth about YOU and your brothers is defined in the creation of souls.

When you have COMPLETELY distinguished correctly what really is true and what is not, BOTH the true and the false are recognized for what they are. The true - as in heaven or the real world, is seen as the only truth (vigilance for the Kingdom), while the false - the world of illusions - is regarded AS false and give no reality.

Jesus in fact tells us that if we give reality or truth TO that which is false, we will SEE IT, because we invest it with belief. This produces false perception and sees the world of bodies. When that which is true is the ONLY place where you allow there to be reality and truth, you will SEE ONLY the face of Christ.

This means that learning to SEE THE TRUTH (the Kingdom), allows you to OVERLOOK the false world (which is now the forgiven world, the veil, which disappears from sight). He wants us therefore to SEE ONLY REALITY.

Jesus makes reference to this many times over...

"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."

"Recognize this, for it is true, and truth MUST be recognized, if it is to be distinguished from illusion"

"You do not have them now, because your mind is totally undisciplined, and you cannot distinguish between joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, love and fear."

"Therefore, if you learn the tests by which you can distinguish everything from nothing, you will make the better choice."

"Only by learning what fear is can you finally learn to distinguish the possible from the impossible and the false from the true."

"Its sole concern is to distinguish between truth on the one hand, and error on the other."

"His Voice will teach you how to distinguish between pain and joy, and will lead you out of the confusion you have made."

"Thoughts are not big or little; powerful or weak. They are merely true or false."

"Thought-systems are but true or false, and all their ATTRIBUTES come simply from what they ARE. Only the Thoughts of God ARE true. And all that follows FROM them, COMES FROM what they are, and is as true as is the holy Source from which they come."

"But a hypothesis is tested as either true or false, to be accepted or rejected accordingly. If it is shown to be true it becomes a fact, after which no one attempts to evaluate it unless its status AS fact is questioned. ... EVERY idea which the ego has accorded the status of fact is questionable, because facts are in the realm of knowledge."

"For perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth AND illusion, you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

"The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception."

"My role is to separate the true from the false in your own unconscious, so it can break through the barriers the ego has set up and shine into your minds."

"Jesus remains a Savior because he saw the false without accepting it as true."

"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. He led the way for you to follow him. He leads you back to God because he saw the road before him, and he followed it. He made a clear distinction, still obscure to you, between the false and true."

"For reason sees the SOURCE of an idea as what will make it true or false."

"Innocent (or true) perception means that you NEVER misperceive, and ALWAYS see truly. More simply, this means that you never see what does not exist in reality."

"If nothing but the truth exists (and this is really redundant in statement, because what is not true CANNOT exist) Right-Minded seeing cannot see ANYTHING BUT perfection."

"The way to correct all such delusions is to withdraw your faith from them, and invest it ONLY in what is true. To whatever extent you side with false perception in yourself or others, you are validating a basic misperception. You CANNOT validate the invalid.""If you are willing to validate what is true in everything you perceive, you will make it true for you."

"The Spiritual eye perceives both the Creations of God AND the creations of man. Among the creations of man, it can also separate the true from the false by its ability to perceive totally rather than selectively. It thus becomes the proper instrument for reality testing, which always involves the necessary distinction between the true and the false."

"Christ's Second Coming gives the Son of God the gift to hear the Voice for God proclaim that what is false is false, and what is true has never changed. And this the judgement is in which perception ends."

"In sorting out the false from the true, the miracle proceeds much along the lines suggested very correctly by Bill, e.:

If perfect love casts out fear,

And if fear exists,

Then there is NOT perfect love.

But only perfect love really exists.

Therefore, if there is fear, it creates a state which does not existBelieve THIS and you WILL be free."

AND WHY THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES...

In this world, forms of objects and bodies and planets are all made to establish how one thing is DIFFERENT to another.

So when we look at the spectrum of types of sickness for example, we have DIFFERENCES in appearances. A headache, a cold, some back pain, a broken leg, a disease, and death, all SEEM different in their FORMS.

However, difference IS NOT reality or truth or sanity. Differences are fundamentally an ego thing.

So what do you think happens to your body when all of its "differences" are undone? Clearly it cannot even exist at all. If it is not being used to make differences real, then it is not being used to differentiate degrees of sickness.

It is DIFFERENCE between things that produces all forms of sickness and death. Or in other words, forms of SEPARATION. Total death requires total intense separation from Life, identifying the body as being so UNLIKE LIFE that it must be dead.

So on this spectrum, death is literally just an attempt to reinforce or EMPHASIZE how "unlike life" the body is. And that's a result of the MIND that is projecting and using the body, and ITS degree of belief in how unlike life it is. Death is ISOLATION from life, which confines you to and identifies you closely with being a body, because a body is a symbol of something STANDING APART from the whole.

When you believe you are NOT LIKE GOD, or you are not the way God created you which is in His likeness, you WILL produce some kind of "difference" in your mind and that WILL produce an APPEARANCE (illusion) of difference in the body. The body will start to look like it is not LIKE LIFE, and so will start to show up as falling apart and malfunctioning and dying.

The body ITSELF, in terms of its FORM, was made as an attempt to assert that what you are is DIFFERENT from all others. That's because "your body" is literally physically cut off from other bodies, does not look like them, has different qualities and seems not to be operated by any other minds, if you ARE this body then you are SEPARATE from others, and therefore you are UNLIKE WHOLENESS, and therefore you are not like LIFE, and therefore you are DEAD.

So the body itself is actually a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son, or the idea that the Son is DEAD because it has been separated out into illusions of distinct different parts which are unlike and disconnected from each other. This fragmentation of identity as FORMS OF DIFFERENCE is, however, an ILLUSION.

The mind does not HAVE to elect to SEE this way. It does not have to regard itself as confined to or IDENTIFIED BY the body or the way that this particular body is showing up versus those of others. The mind can elect to OVERLOOK the body, recognizing that it actually was made to SEPARATE, by its fundamental nature of appearing different and isolated, and it was designed as an instrument for ISOLATING YOU to one very small limited location.

The mind can elect to NOT BELIEVE that this isolated body form is actually representative of its identity. It can believe and perceive that this one body is not ITSELF, and does not limit it, and that the mind is not "identified as" the body. To do that however requires the undoing of mental beliefs in DIFFERENCES BEING REAL. And that means learning to OVERLOOK ALL DIFFERENCES and to not believe in them.

That means you have to learn to not be convinced that one APPEARANCE is actually TRULY different to another, that one sickness is more severe than another, or that even death itself is any more "true" than a paper-cut. When we believe in separation we believe in difference and therefore automatically start believing in the "hierarchy of illusions", which is TOTAL FICTION.

When you can learn to NOT pay attention to the ILLUSION OF DIFFERENCES, of forms, and LOOK PAST them, which DOES mean to FORGIVE them, you get into the kind of mind that recognizes that ALL forms are illusions and are all THE SAME, NOT DIFFERENT, and therefore any miracle that you would apply to one is THE SAME as would be applied to another.

This is what results in awareness that THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES. If death is not REALLY any different to a broken nose, then it should not in any way present any greater difficulty in healing than to stop the nose bleeding. Jesus in fact mentions in the Course that the idea of raising the dead should really be no harder than anything seemingly less severe. This does however require total faith and quite an advanced degree of NOT BELIEVING illusions of separation, or appearances.

ALL appearances of difference were made to DECEIVE and BLIND YOU. "Nothing so blinding as sight of form". The Holy Spirit CAN utilize the body as a holy temple through which it is only used for COMMUNICATION. Communication means extension, ie total SHARING, oneness, unity, IDENTICALITY, seeing that you and your brother are ALIKE in every way, overlooking all DIFFERENCES, and recognizing that the same Love that God put in YOU is also in your brother. This results in HEALTH and HEALING, because the belief in *separation* is the root cause of ALL sickness and death.

Without BELIEVING YOUR EYES, or rather, without believing that "differences are true", you can no longer believe that a certain form is any more true or difficult to heal than another. It also therefore means, that when you can demonstrate that THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE, and that the appearance of a difference - regardless of its extremeness - can be easily "ironed out" by a mind that does not BELIEVE in the difference (because it's an illusion), this can literally IRON OUT the difference IN FORM, producing a collapsing of the extremes of "different forms", the reversal of sickness, and even restoring LIFE to the DEAD.

The "erasing of death" should thus be natural to a miracle worker, and as easy as showing that there IS NO SEPARATION in any sickness. That sickness itself is merely an idea of fictional difference and a mind that does not believe in it can produce changes in APPEARANCE that represent NO DIFFERENCE, which causes sickness to literally disappear from the form because the mind is stronger than the body and stronger than all forms.

This also ultimately means, that once communication is whole and there is no belief in the LIE OF MATTER, and not being convinced by ANY illusory APPEARANCE of difference in form, this ENTIRE UNIVERSE must simply be cancelled out. If there cannot be any differences, and if all differences are illusions, and the entire fabric of MATTER is based on belief in one thing being separate or different from another, there literally CANNOT BE ANY MATTER, because there ARE no differences between things, and thus does this universe COMPLETELY DISAPPEAR once it is RECOGNIZED as an illusion. "Illusions recognized must disappear".

This is why there is no world and why God could not have created something that exhibits conflict and separation and death.

"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."

Here is the main problem we all face day after day. The body makes an ILLUSORY WORLD seem real. The world is an illusion of a world, a picture of crucifixion, a vision of hell, a depiction of total lies, holding not one single shred of truth and is designed to tempt you believe that illusions of death are reality.

The BODY, was INTENTIONALLY MADE, in order to sense this world and to try to make the world SEEM real - to seem to really EXIST. It does this through what we call senses, sensory inputs, detection, perception, ways of discerning that not only is something REALLY THERE, but it's DOING STUFF, it's changing, it's shifting, there are sensations being produced, you can touch it and smell it and see it, and all this turns into EVIDENCE trying to testify that THE WORLD EXISTS.

EVERYTHING THE BODY SENSES IS A LIE!

The body is designed to DECEIVE you. Its senses are designed NOT to be aware of reality. It's eyes are designed to be BLOCKED by forms of sin/error/matter so that you do NOT see. It's ears pick up on fake sound vibrations. You touch the surface of nothing with your fingers and believe it's a real object. It's a massive deception.

This is a pretty major issue for us because we're strapped into these bodies. We're being presented with this holographic virtual world all around us, showing us pictures of death, suffering, sickness and hell, a world where everything is fundamentally imperfect and impermanent. And then we're forced through the body's sensory inputs to PICK UP ON "what's there" and to relay that as messages to our mind. Our mind sees these messages and now has a choice, either you BELIEVE THEM, or to recognize them as UNREAL.

When your mind believes what the body senses, which includes ANYTHING YOU CAN SEE, any notion that "something is happening", any sound or smell or taste, any appearance of any body doing anything anywhere in any way, you are FALLING FOR TEMPTATION. You are being deceived by illusions and have entered into the ego. And that means your spiritual eye is not open, you're not having christ vision, and are unconscious.

The problem is, you're going to remain strapped into the body UNTIL you can COMPLETELY 100% transcend the world, and transcend and NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING the body detects. And yet the body is going to keep bombarding your mind with all of its sensory inputs. Pictures of crucifixion, bodies writhing in pain, wars waging, fights breaking out, people crying etc.

The body is going to just keep picking up and sensing this stuff and broadcasting it to your mind. So what is your mind going to do about this? How do you get out of hell? How do you transition from being DECEIVED by everything the body picks up on, to being NOT deceived?

This is where changing our beliefs comes in. And this is where forgiveness comes in. Because "to forgive is to OVERLOOK". Which means to forgive the entire world you must overlook it, not see it, must learn to RECOGNIZE that it IS AN ILLUSION, and NOT BELIEVE IT. Believing the body's sensory impressions of the world are real is FALSE perception. Believing illusions are reality is FALSE perception. To reach true perception you must come to RECOGNIZE and believe, that everything the body picks up on as "out there" or "happening" IS NOT TRUE AND NOT REAL. IT IS NOT HAPPENING AND DOES NOT EXIST!

"Forgiveness recognizes that what you think you brother did HAS NOT OCCURRED." It has not even happened. The events were ILLUSIONS! What your body showed you WAS A LIE! This is profound because it means literally we have to learn to open the spiritual eye which looks with TRUTH (holy spirit) and clearly recognizes what this world IS (a lie), rather than believing in it. A forgiven world is a NOT BELIEVED world. A forgiven world is a FALSE world. And this means weakening investment in physical senses.

"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."

So this is our issue. We are using a body which is picking up on a world of sin and hell which is not real, and which tries to tell us "ITS REALLY THERE". "It exists". Add this is what the body was DESIGNED TO DO. And it was designed to never do anything else. Which means it CAN ONLY LIE to you. So you have to learn how to STOP BELIEVING IT. You must learn to recognize ALL body signals are UNREAL and UNTRUE. Add that means the entire world you're in, everything you see, is NOT REAL.

It's by learning to recognize illusions as illusions, sensory inputs as FALSE, and trusting only the spiritual eye of truth and light, that you escape from the dream of hell and wake up to reality.

"Nothing you see means anything."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world, God did not create it."

"These eyes made not to see will never see."

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"To sense is not to know."

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality."

"Theirs (body's eyes) 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."

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"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."

"But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely."

"God's teachers choose to look **on dreams** a while (the world). It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. **The dream says otherwise**, but who would put his faith in dreams once ****they are recognized for what they are****?

Awareness of dreaming (recognition that it IS a dream not a reality) is the real function of God's teachers. ****They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. (body visions) Yet they are not deceived by what they see.**** 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 (reality, truth) alone is not a thing of dreams (not of or in this world). And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as ***behind the dream*** (behind the illusory world), beyond all **seeming** (appearances, illusions) and yet surely theirs."

"The ***body’s eyes will continue to see differences.*** (for a teacher of God who is still in a body using it temporarily alongside christ vision) 2 But the mind that has let itself be healed ****will no longer acknowledge them.**** 3 There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, ****and the body’s eyes will report their changed appearances as before.**** 4 ******But the *healed mind* will put them all in one category; they are unreal.******

5 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*** (all body sensors inputs including everything you see - you SORT OUT these messages in your mind). 6 And of these two, but one is real. 7 Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place—for differences cannot exist within it—so too are illusions without distinctions. 8 The one answer to sickness of any kind is healing. 9 The one answer to all illusions is truth. (mind recognizes the world is an illusion, because it sees WITH truth, which reveals what is true and what is not - the world is not)"

A lie is when something false is presented as if it's true. The false thing is still false, but it is disguised as truth. This false thing is deceptive because it isn't what it seems to be. It seems true on the surface, but it isn't.

If someone presents something false as if it's true, that person is being deceptive. They are hiding what the truth really is, behind a pretend truth, which substitutes for it.

What then seems to be true is actually false, but while you don't recognize it AS false, you are fixated on it. The way that a false thing seems to be true, is what we call an illusion. It appears like truth but isn't. Perhaps its shape, its form, its color, its movement, all are a facade covering up the lie.

To fall for this presentation of something false "as if its true" is to be deceived. The presentation of this illusion is a temptation. It tempts you to believe that something false is true when it isn't. It is lying to you. If you fall for the trick you will buy into it and be convinced. But you can only fall for it by not knowing or recognizing what the truth really is.

The real truth, God's truth, is like a light which frames everything in its proper perspective. In light of what you are aware of as true, it is impossible to be convinced that something false is true. The real truth is obvious, and provided you remain aware of it, you cannot but laugh at the ridiculous efforts of illusions to pretend to be the truth. They are obviously false when you are sane.

As you lose sight of the truth, blocked in your awareness, confused about whether the truth really is true or not, you will enter into a doubting of the truth, and doubt is fear. Being uncertain what the truth is is automatically a state of fear. And so fear (and death) are the nature of all illusions.

To question the truth is the authority problem, an attempt to assert that the truth (God) isn't what it is, and is something else. It's an accusation that the truth is an illusion, that it is deceptive, that it can't be trusted, and is false.

In other words, the deceptive nature of illusions - false things pretending to be truth - is projected onto the truth to try to make out that the truth is deceptive and is "not really true." While claiming that God's truth is lying to you, the ego simultaneously lies to you with untruths masquerading as truth.

Simultaneously, that which is false begins to seem plausible, believable, realistic, convincing, possible, tempting, and seemingly true. You couldn't possibly experience it this way if you were recognizing what the truth really is. "You aren't seriously buying into that lie, are you?"

But because you don't, or have lost sight of it, or it's unclear, false things seem to "make sense", take on an air of reality, and are assumed to be unchallengeable.

The world is a lie. It is false. It was made to oppose the nature of the Kingdom of God. Since the Kingdom is the real truth, the artificial world must take on all the characteristics of something false.

That means the world must be an illusion, it must be deceptive, it must be a lie, it must be made to tempt you to believe it's real, it must seem like reality, it must seem believable based on surface appearances (forms), it seems to true, and it must also seem to block reality.

Lies also have a lot to do with honesty. Someone who is honest does not lie, is not deceived or deceptive, does not tempt sin and does not believe in illusions. An honest person recognizes what is really true AND what is really false. They go hand in hand. Only the truth is true, and everything false is false.

Someone who is honest does not deceive, just as someone who is dishonest does seek to deceive. The ego, as we call it, is a label for an attempt to deceive or be deceived. It is a symbol for "a liar", someone who is putting forth a state of something false, made of illusions, pretending they are the truth. It claims that false things are true and true things are false. It lies to you.

The ego's lies have taken on the form of a physical planet, human bodies, birds in the sky, forests and mountains, lakes and rivers and fish, weather, solar systems, galaxies and the like. These are all false. They are all illusions. They are lies. They are not what they appear to be. They are not the Kingdom of God and they are not real, but they tempt you to believe they are.

Death is a lie. Sickness is a lie. Suffering is a lie. Unhappiness is a lie. Guilt is a lie. Sin is a lie. Fear is a lie. Bodies are lies. Planets are lies. The sun is a lie. Physics is a lie. Cancer and heart disease and strokes and trauma and abuse and pain are lies. Aging is a lie. Time is a lie. Facebook is a lie. Your clothes are lies. This whole universe is a lie. Separation from God is a lie.

It's a lie because it is literally a vast illusory realm of utter nonsense, manufacturer by a "lying" dishonest mind, projected based on the lie of separation, taking on myriad forms of lies, all trying to tempt you to believe the lie. The whole world was made to tempt you to think you are a body, that others are bodies, and that the world is real. It's a big stinking lie.

"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."

The only way not to be tempted by the world, is to not believe in it. And the only way not to believe is to not attribute truth to it. Which means recognizing that it is purely false. To see the falseness that it is made of, recognizing it AS false, and not for an instant giving it the slightest credit as anything true or real.

You might seem to be surrounded and bombarded by a lying world day in and day out but you must not be deceived by it if you want to be aware of the truth. The truth is of God and it is completely opposite to everything this world presents to your senses.

This world is as if someone told the biggest lie that could ever possibly be told, so big, so vast, so far reaching, that it produced an entire universe-sized lie. The world holds nothing that you want. It's not your home. It's not even really existing. The whole idea of "there is no world" is telling you that the world is fiction, a dream, imagined, made up.

All lies are made up. They are like stories. We invent them. We make them out of nowhere, weave them into what seem like feasible meaningful sequences, but they are total nonsense. Like fairtytales. They're not even based on the truth. Just outright total lies. Lies of things happening and people doing things that are impossible. Things that in reality could NEVER be true.

It could NEVER be true that God's son suffers, is sick, dies, reincarnates as a horse, shits on his former grave, and is then blown up by a rocket. It could NEVER be true that anything real be threatenable or damaged or that you could ever sin against it. It could NEVER be true that you can die or really suffer in any way. And it could NEVER be true that THE LIE ITSELF can ever take the place of or have power over the real truth.

It's a world of lies, based on a lie, made of lies, telling lies all the time. The body lies all the time. There is nothing to see or hear or touch or taste or smell. There isn't even a world here. Nothing has even happened.

(Mind).. "it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere."

To be aware of the real truth is to be clear about what really is true, and what is false. It merely is a recognition of the truth. To accept atonement is to accept that ONLY God's truth is true, and there are no lies mixed in with it. It is not mistaken for something it is not.

It is fully embraced as ONLY God intended it, unchanged and unaltered, free of all deceit and denial. It's a state where the truth is recognized as true and false things are recognized as false. To be clear about this is enlightenment.

"Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all."

You not only have to be extremely honest you have to be ABSOLUTELY perfectly honest. Perfect honesty means fully willing to admit (allow access to) that the truth is true. It means completely accepting and supporting that truth without taking a side against it.

"The peace of mind which the advanced teachers of God experience is largely due to their perfect honesty. It is only the wish to deceive that makes for war. No one at one with himself can even conceive of conflict. Conflict is the inevitable result of self-deception, and self-deception is dishonesty."

"Honesty does not apply only to what you say. The term actually means consistency. There is nothing you say that contradicts what you think or do; no thought opposes any other thought; no act belies your word; and no word lacks agreement with another. Such are the truly honest. At no level are they in conflict with themselves. Therefore it is impossible for them to be in conflict with anyone or anything."

It means honestly presenting and representing that truth without a shred of deception, denial, avoidance, pretense, manipulation, change or distortion. God's teachers are completely honest with themselves and with everything.

Any degree of denial, any block or unwillingness to be aware of the truth, any lack of recognition of what the truth really is (via the real world then heaven), any avoidance of God, any fear, any belief in the world, any movement away from what is, is going into the lie. The state of not truth. Either you want the truth or you want the lie. Either you speak the truth or you speak the lies.

The world simply is false. It is nothing. It is not reality. It is not God's creation. It has nothing to offer. It isn't doing anything. It has no power or meaning. It produces no real consequences. Everything it depicts is false. It has no life. It has no sharing. It has no truth. The truth is not out there in the world. There is no world for the truth to be out there in.

"Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

"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 Son of God CAN be mistaken; he CAN deceive himself"

"The mind can not attack, but it CAN deceive itself."

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"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.

The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt.

Knowledge is not the remedy for false perception since, being another level, they can never meet. The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception. It will not endure. But for the time it lasts it comes to heal. For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one. They are the one beginning, with the end to lead to oneness far beyond themselves. True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist. And it is this that true perception sees.

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.

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. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not. And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."

Some related quotes about what the body cannot do and how it limits you. You can become free of the limitations, but ultimately not WITHOUT the body disappearing entirely. God cannot enter a body, nor can you join him there.

"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."

"The body cannot KNOW. And while you limit your awareness to its tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur that surrounds 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. "

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that, within it, is YOUR Kingdom, where God can enter not. Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe."

"To see a body as anything EXCEPT a means of pure extension is to limit your mind and hurt yourself. "

"As the ego would LIMIT your perception of your brothers to the body, so would the Holy spirit RELEASE your vision, and let you see the Great Rays shining from them, so unlimited that they reach to God. It is this shift in vision that is accomplished in the holy instant."

"For the body IS little and limited, and only those whom you would see WITHOUT the limits that the ego would impose on them, can offer YOU the gift of freedom."

"No-one can BE beyond the limitless, because what has NO limits, must be everywhere. There are no beginnings and no endings in God, Whose Universe is Himself. "

"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."

"For what you think is sin is LIMITATION; and whom you try to limit to the body you hate because you fear. In your refusal to forgive him, you would condemn him"

"Who transcends the body has transcended limitation."

"The special relationship is totally without meaning WITHOUT A BODY."

"The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate parts of his Self from other parts. It is within this fence he thinks he lives, to die as it decays and crumbles. For within this fence he thinks that he is safe from love. Identifying with his safety, he regards himself as what his safety is. How else could he be certain he remains within the body, keeping love outside? The body will not stay."

"The body is a dream."

"The body is the ego's home by its own election. It is the only identification with which it feels safe, because the body's vulnerability is its own best argument that you CANNOT be of God. "

"Only bodies can be attacked."

"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. For communication MUST be UNlimited in order to HAVE meaning, and DEPRIVED of meaning, it will NOT satisfy YOU completely. Yet it remains the ONLY means by which you CAN establish real relationships."

"As something is the body asked to be God's enemy, replacing what He is with littleness and limit and despair. It is HIS loss you celebrate when you behold the body as a thing you love, or look upon it as a thing you hate."

"Each miracle He brings is witness that the body is NOT real."

"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"

"The body is the symbol of what you THINK you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist."

"The body can bring you neither peace nor turmoil; not pain nor joy. It is a means, and NOT an end."

"For holiness is positive, and the body is merely neutral. It is not sinful, but neither is it sinless."

"You see the flesh or recognize the Spirit. There is no compromise between the two. If one is real the other must be unreal."

"The ego's fundamental wish is to replace God. In fact, the ego is the physical embodiment of this wish. For it is this wish which seems to surround the mind with a body, keeping it separate and alone; and unable to reach other minds except through the body which was made to imprison it. The limit on communication cannot be the best means to expand communication. Yet the ego would have you believe that it is."

"We have seen ourselves in a body and the truth outside us, locked away from your awareness by the body's limitations."

"Forgiveness lets the body be perceived as what it is; a simple teaching aid to be laid by when learning is complete, but hardly changing him who learns at all. The mind without the body cannot make mistakes. It cannot think that it will die, nor be the prey of merciless attack. Anger becomes impossible, and where is terror then? What fears could still assail those who have lost the source of all attack; the core of anguish and the seat of fear?"

"You CANNOT make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will NEVER be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love's condemnation. For here is love made fearful, and hope abandoned. Even the idols that are worshipped here are shrouded deep in mystery, and kept apart from those who worship them. This is the temple dedicated to no relationships, and no return. Here is the "mystery" of separation perceived in awe and held in reverence. What God would have NOT be, is here kept "safe" from Him. "

"Yet would I offer you my BODY, you whom I love, KNOWING its littleness? "

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself. Its purpose is to strive."

"A miracle reawakens the awareness that the spirit, and not the body, is the altar of Truth."

"The body DOES appear to be the symbol of sin, while you believe that it can get you what you want. While you believe that it can give you pleasure, you will ALSO believe that it can bring you pain. To think you could be satisfied and happy with so little, IS to hurt yourself. And to LIMIT the happiness that you would have, CALLS upon pain to fill your meager store, and make your lives complete. This IS completion, as the ego sees it."

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be STRONGER. "

"The Holy Spirit's purpose lies safe in your relationship, and not your bodies. You have ESCAPED the body. Where you are now, the body cannot enter, for the Holy Spirit has set HIS temple there. "

"As nothing, which it is, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego."

"The body cannot create, and the belief that it CAN, a fundamental error responsible for most of the fallacies already referred to, produces all physical symptoms."

"The body cannot see this, for the body AROSE from this for its protection, which must ALWAYS depend on keeping it NOT seen. The body's eyes will NEVER SEE."

"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."

"The Holy Spirit is not concerned with form at all, being aware only of meaning. The ego cannot ask the Holy Spirit for anything, because there is COMPLETE COMMUNICATION FAILURE between them. But you can ask everything of the Holy Spirit, because your requests are real, being of your will."

"It is extremely simple, being based on what this little kingdom really IS. The barren sands, the darkness, and the lifelessness are seen only through the body's eyes. ITS vision IS distorted, and the messages IT transmits to you, who MADE it to limit your awareness, ARE little and limited, so fragmented that they are meaningless. From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it. And these messages bear witness to this world, pronouncing it as true. For YOU sent forth these messengers, to bring this BACK to you.

Everything these messages relay to you is quite external. There are NO messages that speak of what lies underneath, for it is NOT the body that could speak of this. Its eyes perceive it not, its senses remain quite UNAWARE of it, its tongue can not relay ITS messages."

"The body's eyes were made not to see." "They cannot see" "They will never see."

The great lie of the world is that we are all separate. Each of our bodies testifies to this. I have my own body, my own feelings, my own mind, my own thoughts, my own beliefs. It seems that you have your own as well, and mine is separate from yours. We don't seem to really share anything. And any changes I make seem not to affect you.

This is what bodies were designed to do. They were meant to be "separation devices", to separate me off from you, to isolate each of us in our own little prisons, keeping us apart. They were made to imply that nothing is shared, what is mine is not yours, I am not like you, we are not the same in any way, I am unique and so are you. We're cut off and different. What I have you lack. What you have I lack. And thus we have no oneness.

But this is utterly completely opposite to the nature of spirit and mind as God created it. It's utterly opposite to your true nature, and mine as well. We're not meant to think of ourselves as separate from each other, sharing nothing, not overlapping, or kept at arm's length. We have to transcend the limits of the body entirely.

The truth is that there is a part of you which is shared by me. And there is a part of me that is shared by you. Kind of like one thing which has two people controlling it simultaneously. Kind of like siamese twins, with two heads and one torso. There is actually some of you in me and vice versa. There are actually aspects of your self which is what I am, and aspects of my own self which is you.

In truth we are joined together as one. In truth we share everything. And this is not in any way the same thing as sharing between two separate people, where they remain separate but there is some kind of transfer between them to bridge the gap. It's a real sharing where I literally am overlapping with where you are located, and vice versa. Where we are literally fused together as one thing, but from two vantage points. One mind, with two focal points.

Because of this, we are actually part of a collective consciousness. And the really big thing is this. Everything that I do or think or feel or choose or believe, affects the entire universe. And everything you do or think or feel or choose or believe, affects the entire universe. If I lift myself up, it must lift you up in some way as well because I am a part of your self. If you lift yourself up, I must be lifted up in some way because part of me is you.

We are NOT isolated, alone, separate, cut-off, imprisoned, separated, orphaned, divorced, abandoned, relegated, split apart or confined. Everything that we each do, affects us both. And even affects the whole sonship beyond us. What that means is that there are no private thoughts. Not simply from the vantage point of there being two separate people who send thought transmissions across the gap between them which they pick up on, but where my mind and your mind are literally welded together such that when I think something YOU think it with me. Part of your thought process is taking place in my mind and vice versa.

Jesus teaches similarly that if I am healed, I am never healed alone. If some kind of healing takes place for me, it is also on behalf of the whole universe, which is the sonship (not spacetime). Jesus also tells us that we are not alone in experiencing the effects of our thoughts. That if I have a thought, both me and you are affected by it. And your thoughts affect me. Not in terms of you sending them over to me across a brick wall but in terms of part of me BEING you and vice versa, SHARING those effects as one, transcendentally of space of time.

Jesus is even telling us that vision transcends all spatial limitations, depends not on any thing physical, can see and experience without regard for distance or seeming remoteness. Simply because you can BE everywhere, in everyone. This is the true nature of mind, that it is not really naturally limited to any one location at a time. Or to any one person at a time.

What this also leads to is a matter of responsibility. Anything that I think affects the whole world. Anything you think affects the whole world. In that sense, and given that these thoughts are never private or isolated from anyone, everyone experiences the effects of our thoughts, and therefore I have to consider that I need to "think responsibly", and without guilt, because my thoughts are actually affecting everyone.

I think on behalf of everyone, just as you do, and just as everyone does. And all our minds are joined. Which means that we're sort of like this one tapestry where each of us seems anchored to the fabric of it in different places, but if I pull upwards I'm pulling you all with me. And if you pull down you're going to drag a lot of others down with you. Unless of course they are pulling up at the same time. This means that we really are all a TEAM. Because we have to now consider that EACH PART of the sonship INFLUENCES THE WHOLE.

You ARE part of a holographic system and since you are the whole of the sonship at the same time as being part of it, your relationship INCLUDES everyone. It affects everyone. Every thought is offered to everyone. Every healing brings peace to everyone. Maybe in ways they might not entirely be aware of but in some way on some level, everyone affects everyone.

This also brings me to the proper understanding of why joined minds produce the healing of sickness in others. A part of your mind is actually my mind. And my mind is part of your mind. We are NOT separated off with entirely isolated minds. Our minds overlap and are shared. I actually manipulate part of your mind, so to speak, and you manipulate part of mine. Our minds are actually one and shared. Mutual minds. Like two people driving the same bus.

So let's say you believe in your part of the mind that you are sick, which is really an attempt to believe the whole sonship is sick. And then let's say that normally this belief would attempt to weaken me and others. But then let's say that I'm in a particularly loving space in my mind which is more powerful than your assertion of weakness.

If I choose to believe that there is nothing wrong with you, while you are believing there is something wrong with you, I override your belief. The part of your mind which is shared with me, which is my mind, changes your belief FOR you. Part of your mind is in me. If I change my mind, I am literally changing a part of your mind. And that actually influences what you might think of as the rest of your own mind.

As Jesus says, when you do not believe the falsehoods that your brother believes about himself, you weaken his own belief in being faulty. And so you weaken his sickness. If your mind, which is part of his, and his as part of yours, asserts strongly that your brother and you are not sick, then you are actually taking a part of HIS mind (as yours) and are causing it to not believe in sickness. And so he cannot get "his" mind to project sickness onto his body because YOU, as part of his mind, are not allowing it.

This is why Jesus says that you are your brother's keeper. This is why he says you should not allow your brother to be sick. This is why you are in a sense responsible for everyone, because your contribution to their experience is part of the fact that your minds are shared.

It's not simply that you are joining minds, because God actually joined all minds together in the creation. But moving away from the belief in being separate/isolated and returning to an awareness that your minds ARE joined, naturally, lets you tap into the ability to influence the minds of others more consciously. And naturally this openness to sharing is rooted in love, so can only be used for good.

So instead of seeing ourselves as separate people, living separate lives in separate bodies, as if everything we think and do is utterly isolated and affects no-one else, we need to really think of ourselves as part of a combined mind-mesh, part of a team, part of a collective hive mind, and there isn't anything we can think without it being shared by everyone in that collective. And any effects which those thoughts might produce are going to be shared by everyone.

This is also of course the foundation for shared interests. Because if mind is really yours AND your brother's, then what you use it for is being used on his behalf as well as your own. As per the golden rule, whatever applies to him applies to you equally. This is also why Jesus says that forgiveness is not real unless it brings a healing to both your brother and yourself. Your healing IS HIS healing. When you heal, HE ALSO is healed along with you in a very direct way - because he is part of your self.

And further, this also tells us that forgiveness is not just a gift of healing you give to yourself, it is also something that extends and is given to everyone. If you are healed you become an instrument of healing. If you are the light you shed light into other's minds and enlighten them. If you are filled with the Holy Spirit you can fill others with the Holy Spirit. If you are whole you can make others whole. And atonement is a lesson in sharing, not a lesson in isolated enlightenment.

When you forgive, you actually do heal both yourself and the mind of your brother. When you forgive and undo your belief in someone being sick, you do actually in fact undo some of their belief in being sick. This is sort of tied into the idea of "holding them in the light", not through some wishful thinking that the light might rub off on them but much moreso the fact that since you ARE them, you being the light "forces" them to be the light also.

Your mind influences other people! Your mind is not JUST your mind. It is yours AND it belongs to others. You are thinking on behalf of everyone. Your whole resurrection is for the benefit of the entire sonship. This is why Jesus's resurrection reconnected the ENTIRE sonship to God, and why in his awakening YOU woke up in some way to some degree as well. How could the whole world not be affected by such an event? Jesus did in fact "save you" from the belief in sin, through his own atonement.

I am you and you are me and we are one and everyone is us and we are all the collective sonship family of God. If I choose the light, you're coming with me.

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

"Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. "

"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? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself."

"Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him Judge what the response should be. So is he healed, and in his healing is his pupil healed with him. The sole responsibility of God's teacher is to accept the Atonement for himself. Atonement means correction, or the undoing of errors. When this has been accomplished, the teacher of God becomes a miracle worker by definition."

"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."

"Two minds with one intent become so strong that what they will becomes the Will of God. For minds can only join in truth."

"When two minds join as one, and share one idea equally, the first link in the awareness of the Sonship as one has been made."

"Whoever says, "There IS no gap between my mind and yours," has kept GOD's promise, NOT his tiny oath to be forever faithful unto death. And by his healing IS his brother healed. Let THIS be your agreement with each one; that you be one with him and NOT apart."

"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. For you share the real world as you share Heaven, and his healing IS yours. To love yourself is to HEAL yourself, and you cannot perceive part of you as sick and achieve your OWN goal. Brother, we heal together as we live together, and love together."

"Do not allow your brother not to remember, 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."

"You will forsake yourselves and your God if you forsake any of YOUR brothers. You are more than your brother's keeper." "Concern yourselves not with the EXTENSION of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do NOT understand. Nor do you DO them. It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that demonstrates you did NOT do them. Why should you worry how the miracle extends to all the Sonship, when you do not understand the miracle itself?"

Lesson 54: ""I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts." ... I am alone in nothing. Everything I think or say or do touches all the universe. A Son of God cannot think or speak or act in vain. He cannot be alone in anything. It is therefore in my power to change every mind along with mine, for mine is the power of God."

THE BODY'S EYES ***CANNOT SEE REALITY*** EVER!

THIS IS A VITAL A COURSE IN MIRACLES TEACHING!!!

THE BODY CANNOT AND NEVER WILL BE ABLE TO LOOK AT REALITY. YOU HAVE TO DEVELOP AN ENTIRELY NEW WAY OF SEEING - VISION - WHICH DOES NOT LOOK AT BODIES OR THE WORLD **AT ALL**.

THIS ALSO WHY THERE ARE NO BODIES IN HEAVEN! THEY ARE ***USELESS***. "To sense is NOT to know."

Many people are trying to "see" Heaven in the world and to look at this world WITH the body, keeping the body, and supposedly SEE reality. YOU CANNOT. The body's eyes are permanently fixated on hell. You have to use an entirely different kind of vision to SEE reality BEYOND the world.

Too many are getting lost in believing this world - Earth - is to be "looked at" in a loving way. It is supposed to be LOOKED PAST. If you look AT IT and SEE IT you are blinded by sight of form. The world WILL NEVER be Heaven. The body will never show you God's Kingdom. Spiritual vision requires mind-to-mind awareness which completely bypasses ALL forms, bodies and planets.

Check out these vital statements from Jesus about how the body is completely limited and CANNOT SEE. You cannot USE IT to see Heaven or reality. You cannot see your brother if you see a body. "To see a sinless body is impossible."

You must choose your method of sight, and what you will look upon. If you choose the body, you will see ONLY hell (Earth). If you choose the spiritual eyes/Christ Vision, you will see ONLY Heaven. You cannot see two worlds. Sight of one denies the other.

The entire PURPOSE of the Workbook is to train you to develop A NEW WAY OF SEEING that doesn't rely on the body!!!! IT says so in the workbook introduction! "The workbook is divided into two main sections, the first dealing with the undoing of the way you see now, and the second with the acquisition of true perception" "The very nature of true perception is that it has no limits. 6 It is the opposite of the way you see now." True perception is not just an alternative perception, it's based on the holy spirit's thought system which is spirit-based and it transcends the laws of the world!

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within you, there is a force which no illusions can resist."

"You look still with the body's eyes. And they CAN see but thorns. But you have asked for AND RECEIVED another sight. Those who accept the Holy Spirit's purpose as their own, share also His vision."

"Your chosen home is on the other side, beyond the veil. It has been carefully prepared for you, and it is ready to receive you now. You will not see it with the body's eyes."

"Here is a world established that is sick, and this the world the body's eyes perceive. Here are the sounds it hears; the voices which its ears were made to hear. Yet sights and sounds the body can perceive are meaningless. It cannot see nor hear. It does not know what seeing IS; what listening is FOR. It is as little able to perceive as it can judge, or understand, or know. Its eyes are blind, its ears are deaf. It can NOT think, and so it cannot HAVE effects. "

"Let not the body's ears and eyes perceive these countless fragments seen within the gap that YOU imagined, and let THEM persuade their maker his imaginings were real."

"The barren sands, the darkness, and the lifelessness are seen only through the body's eyes. ITS vision IS distorted, and the messages IT transmits to you, who MADE it to limit your awareness, ARE little and limited, so fragmented that they are meaningless. From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it. And these messages bear witness to this world, pronouncing it as true. For YOU sent forth these messengers, to bring this BACK to you."

"The body cannot see this, for the body AROSE from this for its protection, which must ALWAYS depend on keeping it NOT seen. The body's eyes will NEVER look on it."

"What witness to the wholeness of God's Son is seen within a world of separate bodies, however much he witnesses to truth? He is INVISIBLE in such a world. Nor can his song of union and of joy be heard at all. Yet is it given him to make the world recede before his song, and sight of him REPLACE the body's eyes. "

"What can the body's eyes perceive, with power to CORRECT? Its eyes ADJUST to sin, unable to overlook it in any form, and seeing it everywhere, in everything. Look through its eyes, and everything will stand condemned before you. All that could save you, you will never see. "

"It is your world salvation will undo, and LET you see another world your eyes could never find."

"Is it not evident that what the body's eyes perceive FILLS YOU WITH FEAR? Perhaps you think you find a hope of satisfaction there. Perhaps you fancy to attain some peace and satisfaction in the world as YOU perceive it. Yet it MUST be evident the outcome DOES NOT CHANGE. Despite your hopes and fancies, ALWAYS does despair result. And there is NO exception, nor will there ever be."

"And what is this decision, but the choice whether to see him through the body's eyes, or let him be revealed to you through vision?"

"And you can want to see a sinless world, and let an "enemy" tempt you to use the body's eyes, and change what you desire. "

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"Faith sees him only NOW, because it looks not to the past to judge him, but would see in him ONLY what it would see in YOU. It sees NOT through the body's eyes, nor looks to bodies for its justification. It is the messenger of the NEW perception, sent forth to gather witnesses unto its coming, and to return their messages to YOU. "

"The body's eyes are closed, and as you think of him who grieved you, let your mind be shown the light in him beyond your grievances. "

"But what is there to see by searching for your Savior, seeing Him through sightless eyes? "

"And this will be your concept of YOURSELF, when you have reached the world beyond the sight your eyes alone can offer you to see."

"Let not the dream take hold to close your eyes. It is not strange that dreams can make a world that is unreal. The WISH to make it IS incredible."

"That is because your idea of what seeing means is tied up with the body, and its eyes and brain."

"These are among the many magical beliefs that come from the conviction you are a body, and the body's eyes can see. You also believe the body's brain can think. If you but understood the nature of thought, you could but laugh at this insane idea. "

"It is your weakness that sees through the body's eyes, peering about in darkness to behold the likeness of itself; the small, the weak, the sickly and the dying, those in need, the helpless and afraid, the sad, the poor, the starving and the joyless. These are seen through eyes which cannot see and cannot bless."

"The strength in you will offer you the light and guide your seeing, so you do not dwell on idle shadows that the body's eyes provide for self-deception."

"Leave, then, the dark a little while today, and we will practice seeing in the light, closing the body's eyes and asking truth to show us how to find the meeting place of self and Self, where light and strength are one."

"You do not seem to doubt the world you see. You do not really question what is shown you through the body's eyes."

"How can you judge? Your judgement rests upon the witness that your senses offer you. Yet witness never falser was than this. But how else do you judge the world you see? You place pathetic faith in what your eyes and ears report. You think your fingers touch reality and close upon the truth. This is awareness which you understand, and think more real than what is witnessed to by the eternal Voice of God Himself."

"He will not tell you that your brother should be judged by what your eyes behold in him, nor what his body's mouth says to your ears, nor what your fingers touch reports of him. He passes by such idle witnesses, which merely bear false witness to God's Son."

"Properly speaking, this is the release from hell. Perceived through the ego's eyes, it is loss of identity and a descent into hell."

"Let me not look to my own eyes to see today. Let me be willing to exchange my pitiful illusion of seeing for the vision that is given by God. Christ's vision is His gift, and He has given it to me. Let me call upon this gift today, so that this day may help me to understand eternity."

"Beyond His Will lie only illusions. It is these I choose when I think I can see apart from Him. It is these I choose when I try to see through the body's eyes. Yet the vision of Christ has been given me to replace them. It is through this vision that I choose to see."

"You closed your eyes to shut him out."

"How can you become increasingly aware of the Holy Spirit in you, EXCEPT by His EFFECTS? You cannot see Him with your eyes, nor hear Him with your ears."

"You dream of isolation, BECAUSE your eyes are closed. You do not SEE your brothers, and, in the darkness, you cannot look upon the light you GAVE to them. "

"Anger but screeches, "Guilt is real!" Reality is blotted out as this insane belief is taken as replacement for God's Word.The body's eyes now "see"; its ears alone can "hear." Its little space and tiny breath become the measure of reality. And truth becomes diminutive and meaningless."

"And you look up and on toward Heaven, with the body's eyes but serving for an instant longer now. "

"You do not doubt that the body's eyes can see. You do not doubt the images they show you are reality. Your faith lies in the darkness, not the light."

"Miracles are seen in light. The bodys eyes do not perceive the light. But I am not a body. What am I?"

"The dream of crucifixion still lies heavy on your eyes, but what you see in dreams is not reality. "

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold? What need have they of sights or sounds or touch? What would they hear or reach to grasp? What would they sense at all? To sense is not to know. And truth can be but filled with knowledge, and with nothing else.The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing. You think you think them, and so you think you see them. This is how your "seeing"was made. This is the function you have given your body's eyes. It is not seeing. It is image-making. It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions."

"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."

"What you see of His Son through the eyes of the ego is a demonstration that His Son does not exist, yet where the Son is, the Father MUST be. "

"There has been some controversy (in human terms) as to whether seeing is an attribute of the eyes, or an expression of the integrative powers of the brain. Correctly understood, the issue revolves around the question of whether the body or the mind can see (or understand). This is not really open to question at all. The body is not capable of understanding. Only the mind KNOWS anything. "

"But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely."

"Here are the sounds it hears; the voices which its ears were made to hear. Yet sights and sounds the body can perceive are meaningless. It cannot see nor hear."

"This is because you actually cannot see anything, and it is easier to recognize that no matter how vividly you may picture a thought, you are not seeing anything."

"It is indeed a senseless point of view to hold responsible for sight a thing that cannot see, and blame it for the sounds you do not like, although it cannot hear."

"His vision cannot SEE the body, because it cannot look on sin."

"You cannot see the invisible. But if you see its effects, you KNOW it must be there."

"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. "

"We said before that the spiritual eye cannot see error, and is capable only of looking beyond it to the defense of Atonement."

"Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. 3 No one who looks on it without the help of reason would try to pass it. 4 The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. 5 Yet reason sees through it easily, because it is an error. 6 The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from reason's eyes."

"Everything the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole without the meaning that the whole would give."

"The body's eyes see only form. 4 They cannot see beyond what they were made to see. 5 And they were made to look on error and not see past it. 6 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. 7 To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. 8 Yet how can sight that stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? 9 It is held back by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived."

"These eyes, made not to see, will never see. 2 For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. 3 What was its maker's goal but not to see? 4 For this the body's eyes are perfect means, but not for seeing. 5 See how the body's eyes rest on externals and cannot go beyond. 6 Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning. 7 Nothing so blinding as perception of form. 8 For sight of form means understanding has been obscured."

"Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body's eyes can see. 3 Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins and of his body. 4 What is there in him that you would attack except what you associate with his body, which you believe can sin? 5 Beyond his errors is his holiness and your salvation."

First of all, let's touch on what the "authority problem" is. You as a Child of God, were authored by God. God caused you. His authority, or His power to Author you, designed you to be the way God wanted you to be.

You are the result of His Will, your nature is as He chooses, everything you have is inherited from Him, you only have what He has given you, you are only capable of what He created you to be capable of, your identity was given to you by sharing His with you, and you cannot change anything about yourself.

In fact, you are an extension of God Himself, you "host" God within yourself. It's not just that God is sitting there in a chair and then created you sitting in another chair some distance away. He extended out from Himself and put Himself into you, as you.

"I, who am host to God, AM worthy of Him. He Who ESTABLISHED His dwelling- place in me created it as He would have it be."

"When God GAVE Himself to you in your creation, He ESTABLISHED you as host to Him forever. He has NOT left you, and YOU have not left HIM."

You host Him, which is what your "inner altar" is. So you are not only a self, you are a self that also contains all of God. You are joined to God within you. You overlap with Him. You are a part of God which is also host to the whole of God. His own being is embedded into what you are. It's like, His light is shining in your heart. He is radiating through you. He is so intimately close with you that He is inside of you, and together you co-create as one.

In the separation idea, you questioned authority. Which means you questioned who was the Author of you. You questioned God. You protested against being Authored by God, and became unhappy with the fact that you were ONLY as God created you. You wanted to be not only the author of yourself, you wanted to be the author of God also, the definer of reality, and the chooser of what is true.

You wanted to become something other than you are. You wanted to change your idea of what God is. You wanted God to stop Authoring you, so that you could "be God", ie so that you could take Authority away from Him, and have this authority for yourself. Even to the extent that you wanted to have authority OVER His Authority, which is the idea of sin - the ability to affect, change, and cause God.

In concert with Him, you shared His Authority. His Power, His Authority, is in you. And it operates through you. But you wanted to be able to exercise a power that did not come from Him. You wanted a power of your own, or to regard yourself as authoritative without His Authority being the source of it.

"The issue of authority is really a question of authorship. When an individual has an "authority problem," it is ALWAYS because he believes he is the author of himself"

In fact you wanted God not to be your Father, to not be the source of you, and to not be the Author of your identity, inheritance, or nature. And by denying that God was the Author of you, you denied that you had been Fathered (created) by Him. This was necessary in order to reject or oppose His Authority.

But by doing so, you made yourself fatherless, like an orphan. And so instead of being the Self that God created, you become "anonymous", attempting not to share His identity, rejecting your inheritance, and claiming to have not been Authored at all. This was an attempt to separate cause and effect, Father and Son, and to block awareness of your identity.

"and men preferred to remain anonymous when they chose to separate themselves FROM their Author. The word "authority" has been one of their most fearful symbols ever since."

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all. "

Now that an individual has developed an artificial "problem with Authority", they move into the ego thought system. Here they believe God is not their Father, who and what they are is not defined by God, they do not want to be defined by God, they are the author of themselves, and they even proceed to invent a new Father to explain their own origins.

"being uncertain of their true Authorship, men believe that their creation was anonymous. This has left them in a position where it SOUNDS meaningful to consider the possibility that they must have created themselves."

"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."

"The "attack on God" made His Son think he was fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god of depression."

"he would not accept the fact that, although he was a creator, he had been created."

While rejecting God's Authorship of you places you into turmoil, accepting it restores you to peace. God HAS established the only facts of your existence, the only truth that is true of you, and is the sole source of your nature. You cannot change this fact because it is absolute. It is impossible to alter God's will, but you can deny it. You can reject the fact that "you inherit God", but this just makes you unaware of your inheritance, which God saves for you.

"Peace is a natural heritage of the Soul. Everyone is free to refuse to accept his inheritance, but he is NOT free to establish what his inheritance IS. The problem which everyone MUST decide is the fundamental question of his own authorship."

"He has thrown away the reason for his own peace, and sees himself only in pieces. This strange perception IS an authority problem."

The question then is how to return to an acceptance of what your true Authorship is, how do you return to being a host to God, how do you become aware of your inheritance, and how do you resume your real function in heaven. Obviously this will involve the undoing or ceasing-to-do of the various ways that you play God, the attempt to author/define yourself, and the unwillingness to accept your function as extender of God's being.

It entails acknowledging that whatever you are, you are what God says you are. And you need to become okay with that. It needs to become acceptable to you, even welcomed, that you are ONLY as God created you. That ONLY the truth is true of you, and nothing else is true.

It means you have to recognize that the way Creation is set up, you ARE an effect of God, He DOES define you, you CANNOT define what you are AT ALL, and you have no desire to do so. Accepting Atonement simply means accepting the truth is true, accepting your position in the machinery of heaven.

You were created to create with God. You were created to HOST God. God is in you, at your sacred inner altar. You and God are one, and everywhere you go He is in you. You do everything together. And you are still as He created you. Nothing has changed, you have not changed His Will or His Mind, and you Will only to Will like Him, in accord with His Will.

"Instead of "seek you first the Kingdom of Heaven" say "Will ye first the Kingdom of Heaven," and you have said "I know what I am, and I will to accept my own inheritance.""

This means putting aside your need to be the gatekeeper or decider of what is real or true. It means making room for God to operate THROUGH you. It means accepting that you have nothing of your own, and everything you DO have, which is everything, is OF or FROM God. Even AS God.

"Recognizing that all Power is of God is to gain all Power."

"If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. But to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father IS the acknowledgment of yourself as you ARE. 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."

It means giving up trying to do everything alone, or by yourself, or dependent on your own strength, which is at best highly lacking. You HAVE nothing that God has not given. Not even strength, ability, will, power, mind, or anything. You are in a symbiotic relationship with God. You cannot live without Him.

"Symbiosis is misunderstood by the mentally ill, who use it that way. But I also told you that you must recognize your total dependence on God, a statement which you did not like. ... God and the Souls He created ARE symbiotically related. They are COMPLETELY dependent on each other. The creation of the Soul itself has already been perfectly accomplished, but the creation BY Souls has not. God created Souls so He could depend on them BECAUSE He created them perfectly. He gave them His peace so they would not be shaken, and would be unable to be deceived."

You and God function like a Team. It's kind of like He is the hardware, His mind and power is His software, He creates you as a new piece of Hardware, and downloads His software into you. Without Him you have nothing. With Him you have everything, but you only have what He has given, and what you create together.

So it's really a matter of humbleness and honesty and a willingness to make room for you to host God again. You have to receive Him. You have to allow Spirit to guide you again. You have to plug your mind back into your Soul. You have to become an instrument through which healing can occur. And you have to be willing to let your mind be loving so that it can not interfere with the automatic extension and expression of love, which is miraculous.

In your purified state, you resume the proper function as the Light of the world, because HIS Light is in you and extends through you. You resume your place as powerful miracle worker, because HIS power operates through you. You act as a relay station for His miraculous love.

"The miracle extends WITHOUT your help, but you ARE needed that it can BEGIN. ACCEPT the miracle of healing, and it WILL go forth because of what it IS. It is its NATURE to extend itself the instant it is born. And it is born the instant it is offered and RECEIVED."

Your proper function is to express God and Christ. To be in such a state of cooperation and alignment and agreement that their functioning empowers your functioning. You thus become a miracle worker, able to give what you are receiving, to others. This is simply because having been Authored by God, He has given YOU the ability to Author, and thus you become able to create and to work miracles. To extend and express what is in you, which is God Himself.

The final acceptance of being host to God, and thus that God operates through you to others, is what establishes you as an UNLIMITED miracle worker, and is the acceptance of the atonement. It requires you acknowledge God is your True Father, the ONLY cause of what you are, that you are not caused BY anything else, and therefore resume your place as a Son of God, co-creator of miracles and life.

"Souls were given their own true authorship"

When you act as/with Christ, operate through the Holy Spirit, and activate the Power of God, there is nothing your holiness cannot do.

"24. A miracle is a Universal Blessing from God through Me to all My Brothers. EXPLANATION: You once said that souls cannot rest until everyone has found salvation. This happens to be true. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. The Disciples were officially and specifically told to heal others, as Physicians of the Lord. They were also told to heal themselves, and were promised that I would never leave them or forsake them. Atonement is the natural profession of the Children of God, because they have professed Me."

"A miracle is a Universal Blessing from God through Me to all My Brothers. " simply reflects on this arrangement of beings. You host God, God is in you, God is the source of miracles, Holy Spirit is the mechanism, it extends THROUGH you, TO ALL OUR BROTHERS, or perhaps to an individual brother. You operate as a "physician of the lord" to go out and profess Christ, healing the sick and raising the dead as a miracle worker. This is atonement - being part of the great crusade to give to those what they seem to lack.

"The power to work Miracles BELONGS to you. I will create the right opportunities for you to do them. But you must be ready and willing to do them, since you are already able to. Doing them will bring conviction in the ability. I repeat that you will see Miracles through your hands through MINE. Conviction really comes through accomplishment.

Remember that ability is the potential, Achievement is its expression, and Atonement is the Purpose."

"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."

The physical universe is not what it appears to be. It is a wall, constructed of a mad idea of sin, formed from lies, to tempt you to believe a great many horrible things are happening. It has been inserted as a gap of hell, in between you and yourself, between you and God. It depicts every form of suffering imaginable, is designed to tempt you to believe all of it is real, and deceives at every turn.

"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."

"The world was made as a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

So hanging in between you and God's Son, there is a three dimensional image, physical matter, "the world of bodies is the world of sin", depicting God's son as crucified, attacked, murdered, fragmented, suffering, vulnerable and sick. This is what planet Earth was designed to be. A giant holographic presentation of the idea of an attack on God and His Holy Son.

"The world was made as an attack on God."

All of its forms, all events, all occurrences, every interaction and movement, is all part of a shifting picture of change, in which every possible unreality except permanent perfection is depicted. Every car crash, every disease, every murderous war, every pain, every destructive habit, every unhappiness, all the tears, short and long term death, it's all designed on purpose to show you a picture of crucifixion.

Crucifixion is another word for death and this is a dream of death. And being an illusion of death, with stories of death running through it, it does not depict life and is not capable of doing so.

"What you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

"Nothing so blinding as perception of form."

So here you are, in your human dream body, looking out upon what seems to be a world, which you are blinded by. The body was deliberately designed to use its own senses to attempt to self-prove its own existence and the existence of other bodies. Its eyesight is blocked by the surface of sin (flesh, matter) so that by seeing it you do not see past it to the light of truth.

"You cannot behold the world and know God."

"Theirs (body's eyes) 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."

And so, every day, you wake up, and you see this world - the hell you made. And in it, things go wrong, all the time. You see someone you love in pain or suffering sickness and fear. You see animals being abused. You see wars waging on foreign continents. You try not to drive your dream car over the road kill. You see the dead deer on the side of the street. And the whole thing is one big pile of torture and terror.

The thing is, just the mere fact of "feasting your eyes" upon any of this worlds contents, immediately instills fear. Just the mere act of seeing it at all, means christ vision has become blocked and you are now losing sight of the truth. Illusions of a world rise before your sight, claimed as true and real by the body's senses. And now the world seems real to you. People seem to be suffering.

Things seems to be going wrong. There is murder and death on the news. And if that is true, if you see it, if it has become real to you, if you are experiencing it at all, it is because you now believe it is reality. And by virtue of equating this world with reality, you MUST now be horrified and afraid, because if suffering is reality, there is no way to exist anywhere in reality without suffering.

And if pain and misery are true, there is no way to exist in truth without pain and misery. And in this there is no hope and no light and no salvation, because if reality is now hell, there is no heaven. And all this occurs in a split second just merely by "sensing" this world. Just merely by seeing someone walking as a cripple. Just merely receiving signals that someone is crying in pain. Just merely witnessing bodies moving around. This is enough to produce an ego reaction of terror.

The instant you believe, are deceived by, witness as true, and fail to overlook this ENTIRE world, this picture of crucifixion and lies, your mind MUST now equate that reality is harmful. And this will instill a sense of being at the effect of harm. And this will incite fear. And now your mind will spring into action with "why is this happening" "how can I fix this" "how can I avoid this" "what's gone wrong" "what caused it". All based on the belief that IT IS HAPPENING AT ALL.

At this point we have already fallen for the ego's trap. The instant we are deceived by the world, tempted to believe "it's happening" or "there is a world", we've already slipped on the slope and are now descending into ego responses. And our entire struggle now becomes one of trying to escape, while falling ever deeper into a pit. With the walls of the world closing in. And no matter what we do, WITHIN that kind of mindset, it does not bring peace. Because now we're in the desert where there is no life or love, and we need to leave.

It's like, we're being bombarded night and day with visions of hell. A world of lies. Where not one single thing is true. Where the whole world is a temptation to buy into an illusion of a world, as if it's really here. As if events are happening. As if things are being threatened. It's a nightmare to believe this world is happening. It's a dream of death, and all dreams are of death. A dream of life is still a dream of death, because life isn't a dream.

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."

So if there is someone in pain, if someone is suffering, and you see it or hear it or sense it, and you take this to mean "its happening", and you believe that, that alone means you are now tempted by the ego and are not forgiving. Because "to forgive is to OVERLOOK". And "falling for the world" or "gaining the whole world" causes you to lose your soul.

Failing to recognize this is JUST an illusion, NOT something "really happening", NOT something to react to, is a failure to be in christ vision. It's a failure to SEE reality. The screeching sounds of the ego have blotted out the real world. Not only is form blinding, it's *extremely* blinding, and every single thing that this picture of crucifixion DOES or SHOWS, is an illusion. A lie. A not truth. A false witness. A testimony of death. An attempt to prove that sin is real and death is truth.

If you watch yourself you'll see this happen. The moment you "experience" anything in this world, where you see something seem to go wrong, watch how your mind instantly reacts with ego. Watch how the fear increases rapidly. Notice how you immediately slip into the context of "I accept it is happening, but what is causing it"? rather than realizing, or questioning, is this even happening? If I believe what my senses are telling me at all, I am deceived.

"Whatever you accept INTO your mind has reality for you."

If I just fall into "its happening" mode, I will automatically start having thoughts like "why is this happening", "what's making this happen", "how can I stop this happening". Which is all ego. We then turn into fixers, managers, controllers, resisters, trying to change what we believe is happening. Trying to change an illusion based on believing that the illusion is real. And this is not forgiveness at all.

Forgiveness is profound. It literally means that this world IS NOT HERE. It requires the recognition and acceptance that THERE IS NO WORLD. It entails seeing PAST this world entirely, not falling for ANYTHING YOU SEE. Not being deceived by the powerful tempting illusions of suffering. To literally completely IGNORE extremely loud shrieks of suffering and war presented as physical proof. To look past the world as if it's not there. To not believe for an instant that someone's appearance of sickness is REAL or TRUE or HAPPENING. To realize your brother literally did not do anything that he appeared to do, and there are no real events here.

"All events are nowhere."

"Forgiveness recognizes that what you think your brother did HAS NOT OCCURRED."

Not just you thinking, well, yes he did something, he moved, he writhed, he suffered, he spoke, whatever... but that this wasn't real. It means being willing to pay NO ATTENTION to any of that, to ignore those signals, to not even TRUST your body senses, and to instead fixate on the light of truth beyond the body. Beyond matter. Beyond all physical objects and planets. Beyond the universe. A vision in the light so bright that it completely looks PAST (overlooks) and practically ignores everything in the world.

"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. It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

Anything the body does is not true. It's an extraordinary picture of lies.

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

We have to learn, this is a really profound lesson. This whole world was designed to deceive us. We have to learn to NOT believe its lies and NOT take its appearances as literal reality.

"The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely."

"Temptation has one lesson it would teach, **in all its forms** (all objects), 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."

"The temptation to regard problems as many is the temptation to keep the problem of separation unsolved. The world seems to present you with a vast number of problems, each requiring a different answer. This perception places you in a position in which your problem solving must be inadequate, and failure must be inevitable.

No-one could solve all the problems the world appears to hold. They seem to be on so many levels, in such varying forms and with such varied content, that they confront you with an impossible situation. Dismay and depression are inevitable as you regard them. Some spring up unexpectedly, just as you think you have resolved the previous ones. Others remain unsolved under a cloud of denial, and rise to haunt you from time to time, only to be hidden again but still unsolved.

All this complexity is but a desperate attempt not to recognize the problem, and therefore not to let it be resolved. If you could recognize that your only problem is separation, no matter what form it takes, you could accept the answer because you would see its relevance. Perceiving the underlying constancy in all the problems which confront you, you would understand that you have the means to solve them all. And you would use the means because you recognize the problem."

There is a world beyond this world. It's reality. This world, Earth, is a giant advertisement for everything OTHER THAN reality. "Earth, heaven's opposite in every way." Every aspect of this universe is a dream about "what is it like to be dead". "The world has disappointed you since time began." It will never satisfy us. "This world holds nothing that I want."

"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."

The escape from hell is the escape from this world, into the light of reality. Leaving behind every temptation, deception, denial, resistance, darkness, horror and hellish vision. To awaken from this dream of suffering and return to awareness of immortal reality.

"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.The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are?Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. ***They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die.Yet they are not deceived by what they see.*** 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. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

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

Since my wife "died" in January, my perspective on this world and the body, sickness and death has changed drastically.

My wife (her body) was afflicted with various disabilities and medical conditions for over 12 years. For the past 4 years she lived in a bed, and unable to walk. We're talking amputations and strokes/paralysis and heart conditions and sleep disorders and cancer and diabetes and kidney failure, brain damage and dementia, eye problems, breathing problems, digestive problems, multiple trips to the ICU, declared brain-dead one time and barely making it through a triple-heart-bypass another.

The horror show compelled me to want to perform miracles, to heal her body and undo her limitations. Like any person would, driven to alleviate suffering and to make things easier. Avoiding death became the whole focus. And obviously this revolved around my mistaken belief that she was at least in part a physical body. A body with seemingly "real" sicknesses and serious problems.

For years we had this dynamic of me trying to get her (body) back to health, to keep her (body) going, to keep her (body) alive, to resurrect her (body) and fix her (body) and undo everything that happened to her (body). But it all took a toll and over time her body's condition deteriorated. It just couldn't function enough anymore to keep her going. While I helped in some ways, I failed.

Just before she passed, I reached a point where I finally found a willingness to consider, maybe I should just stop trying to keep her (body) alive. Maybe I should just let her go and let her die. All the years of fighting against it, resisting it, avoiding both sicknesses and interventions, trying to prop her up and keep her ticking, it all just kind of came to a point of surrender. It was long and cruel and stressful and fear-inducing. She'd had enough long before, and so had I. Eventually it becomes so ridiculous you just can't keep going.

It was then within a week or two that her body was really giving out, and quickly led to a brush with death, and then a very rapid but mostly peaceful passing. All the time spent resisting death, trying to stop the body being sick, and trying to keep it going indefinitely, culminated in what seemed to be a total failure. A failure to raise the dead, a failure to be miraculous, a failure to stop death itself. But despite appearances, it turns out that wasn't a bad thing.

Actually death turned out to be liberating for both of us. It wasn't what I thought it would be like, and nothing like I feared. In fact, as she continued to live in spirit and communicate me on many occasions in many ways, it proved to me that she was far better off now. She was thrilled and excited and happy, peaceful and calm, liberated and empowered. After she went through a kind of rehabilitation period, she showed up even more, refined and purified and centered in her soul.

Meanwhile her body was on ice shoved in a cardboard box, awaiting cremation. As I looked upon it I could shift perceptions back and forth between believing it was her and that it was nothing to do with her. Clearly something had left it, regardless of how convincing it looked and seemed to have all her features intact. But it wasn't her.

I deliberately viewed the corpse a few times to make the most use of the opportunity to forgive and see it correctly. To distinguish that the body was not her, and to separate out her spirit from the form. So now I was presented with this intense contrast between - the body says she's dead, and the reality and experience of spirit/mind says she's totally alive. And they can't both be true.

It became apparent while communicating to her and thinking about the soul's journey, spanning lifetimes and many bodies, that it never really was 'the plan' in this life for her body to reach an resurrected state. We had this dream that we would ascend to heaven together, and that was a total flop - but partly because in the big picture plan of atonement she is due to wake up in another lifetime, and I'm due for some radical change.

And that was ok, because there was a bigger picture. The really big picture has souls using bodies across many lifetimes, and they are just as easily discarded when no longer functioning well as they are picked up in the first place. They are just tools, devices, vehicles, that we temporarily use for a purpose and then throw away as worthless.

The destruction of the idea of saving her body from death, the complete failure to cause her to avoid death, the surprising discovery that death was liberating and "not all bad", the experience of her continuing to live and interact, the expansive perspective of the soul and its use of bodies, and the way her passing into the light lifted me into the light also, has altered how I look at all this.

What has become super clear is that as soon as we identify with bodies, we immediately go into fear, and start feeling compelled to defend the body against its own nature - its ultimate purpose of dying. As a body we want the body to carry on forever. I wanted to be with my wife's body forever. Then the body snuffs it. Good luck with that, cus you're all gunna die, unless you stop being a body.

By believing a person is a body we develop an entire culture of body preservation, keeping people in their bodies as long as possible, freaking out when the body is attacked or sick, not allowing anyone to leave their bodies voluntarily, trying to stop the body being sick, and generally just resisting the body's death at all costs. It all adds up to a mindset of the fear of death and an attempt to protect and defend the body at all costs. Until that entire mindset goes crashing against the rocks and is smashed to smithereens.

That's what's happened for me. The whole mindset of "lets keep the body going forever" has been destroyed. All the cultural and social ways that we have concern for it, fear of dying happening, avoiding things, trying to create security and safety, freaking out when "someone dies", valuing the body, wanting it to live, even the idea of using miracles to rescue the body endlessly, all has been destroyed for me. And that's a good thing because it was all rooted in believing bodies are people, valuable objects, and something to keep.

I've shifted from a horizontal to a vertical perspective. I would even go so far now as to say "let it all die". Not just the bodies, but all the things of the world. It's dying anyway, and it's going to. All the resistance I had and the fear of it happening was pointless and worthless and ended in a total inability to stop it. It was actually good that I ended up at the end of this lesson surrendering and "letting death happen". Because funnily enough, that was a key to stopping preserving it through the wish to defend the body at all costs. I'm guided now to simply "let her be dead". Because in truth, she isn't.

Trying to prevent death induces it. And I also realized that trying to stop sickness is just making it real and fueling it. So you can imagine that being exposed to someone with many severe sicknesses for a long time has drilled this home for me. I had to get past her body, get past believing she was sick, get past trying to resist the sickness, and get past believing she could even die. And she's proven to me many times over now that she absolutely has not died.

That then becomes a strange irreconcilable contrast. On the one hand the body is sprinkled in the wind as ashes and is no more, seeming to suggest the person is totally destroyed, and yet there she is even more alive than ever, happier than ever, having a great time. When I told her it would be great to be able to see her walking again, and she showed me herself running through fields, she even said "I can fly!". So she's having a great time, and what appeared to be "death" on a physical level did nothing but leave her better off.

So now my whole perspective on bodies and the world and sickness and death is different. I've used her death against death. I see people believing they are bodies, when it's been shown to me that people are not bodies. I see people fearing the body's vulnerabilities, when it's been shown to me that this is because they think they are bodies. The whole culture of body preservation and trying to stop people being sick is a joke. And even in this world the idea of voluntarily going to heaven is illegal and taboo, forcing people to suffer horrible conditions until they "naturally" snuff it.

I know this sounds a bit potentially anti-miraculous but, the hard lesson has actually been to let someone die and to stop fighting it. It was actually less spiritual and much more psychologically unhealthy to believe someone was a body and to be constantly worried for their safety and fearing for their life. What dies is not even a real thing, its not the person, and they cannot die. What dies is a lie, and death is a lie, and the whole basis for avoiding it is a lie.

So now I am much more flippant. Not to say like, okay, go ahead and die on purpose just so you can realize that being in heaven is totally amazing. Because we are still using bodies to learn shit. But in the big picture souls don't give a shit about the body really, they just use them temporarily as learning devices. Then they throw them in the trash. In and of themselves they are worthless junk. They are nothing. They are not people and they are not life.

My view now is much more aligned with my wife's view, seeing from her perspective and from the vantage point of the bigger picture. Souls coming and going, taking on bodies and then discarding them. Not identifying with them. Not falling into the trap of believing they are people, or the nightmare of fear that comes from that. My fear of death has melted because a) dying and going to heaven is wonderful and b) I can't die. Just as my wife can't die.

I've lifted up out of the body-identified body-worshipping death-avoiding culture of the world. Avoidance of death is definitely the same thing as promoting it. Nothing real can be threatened. The whole problem of the world is people believing they are a body and not knowing they are spirit, which results in a nightmare of danger and threat and attack and vulnerability. Then everyone starts barricading themselves in trying to avoid the bad stuff happening, and the sicknesses set in and the people want it to all go away so they can stay in their bodies forever and never go home to God.

I couldn't care less about stuff dying now. It's everywhere and relentless. It's the way of the world, driven by laws of death. Stuff is dead before it's even born. Everything here is guaranteed to end, to rot and decay and turn to dust. So I say, let it. Fuck it all. Who gives a shit about it anyway. It has no effect whatsoever on our reality as spiritual beings. And trying to stop it happening is madness. But what does it matter when an illusion dies? It really means nothing at all. The death of an illusion means nothing.

No-one who believes that bodies dying means something can work miracles. No-one who believes that a person is really sick can work miracles. No-one who believes that death can actually change the sons of God can work miracles. And no-one who fights against it happening can have any power over it. I had to go through the lesson of associating my beliefs in sickness and death with my wife's body, so that as her body died so too did my beliefs in these things.

I failed to raise the dead or to stop sickness happening, and it was the best thing I could've learned. The lesson is that death doesn't matter. But the key is to let death be what it is, because in truth it is not anything. Surrender the fear of death and let it all go, let it all die, and you'll be free from it. And then maybe you'll be ready to be a miracle worker. To surmount death is to transcend it, and you can't do that while you're resisting it. But letting it be also lets it go, and then you can rise above it and have power over it.

"But time, with its illusions of change and death, wears out the world and all things in it."

"But this you do not see; that you made death, and it is but illusion of an end."

"Behold the body, and you will believe that you are there. ⁴And every body that you look upon reminds you of yourself; your sinfulness, your evil and, above all, your death."

"There is a risk of thinking death is peace, because the world equates the body with the Self which God created."

"And fear, denying love and using pain to prove that God is dead, has shown that death is victor over life. ⁷The body is the Son of God, corruptible in death, as mortal as the Father he has slain."

"The “reality” of death is firmly rooted in the belief that God’s Son is a body."

"This is what death should be; a quiet choice, made joyfully and with a sense of peace, because the body has been kindly used to help the Son of God along the way he goes to God. ²We thank the body, then, for all the service it has given us. ³But we are thankful, too, the need is done to walk the world of limits, and to reach the Christ in hidden forms and clearly seen at most in lovely flashes. ⁴Now we can behold Him without blinders, in the light that we have learned to look upon again."

"False healing rests upon the body’s cure, leaving the cause of illness still unchanged, ready to strike again until it brings a cruel death in seeming victory. ²It can be held at bay a little while, and there can be brief respite as it waits to take its vengeance on the Son of God. ³Yet it cannot be overcome until all faith in it has been laid by, and placed upon God’s substitute for evil dreams; a world in which there is no veil of sin to keep it dark and comfortless. ⁴At last the gate of Heaven opens and God’s Son is free to enter in the home that stands ready to welcome him, and was prepared before time was and still but waits for him."

"The “self” that needs protection is not real. ²The 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. ³Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?"

"From here the body can be seen as what it is, and neither less nor more in worth than the extent to which it can be used to liberate God's Son unto is home."