If you're open-minded to the idea that heaven is a place you can go, which is not the Earth, the retelling of a profound near death experiences will be clarifying and validating for you.

After leaving the body, we travel to a kind of summer land, a beautiful "other side" dimension (which is not Earth), complete with beautiful landscapes and people etc ... likely what we might call the astral plane or "lower heaven". Then we move on to a direct encounter with God in his higher dimension of heaven.

For me this is roughly the "structure" that I believe "exists", ie Earth and spacetime are a much denser lower-order realm, above is the astral "spirit world" dimension where people typically hang out between lifetimes etc, and then beyond that is heaven proper where we are one with God.

A Course in Miracles does lend itself to these ideas because as it states in Song of Prayer:

"If there has been true healing, this can be the form in which death comes when it is time to rest a while from labor gladly done and gladly ended. Now we go in peace to freer air and gentler climate" This "gentler climate" is the astral spirit world - still a dream perhaps but a higher dream and more beautiful than this lower denser world we call Earth. I do SOMETIMES wonder if "the real world" spoken of in ACIM might be perhaps in some way a reference to that "summer land", another dimension beyond this one yet short of heaven.

One possible clue is when Jesus speaks of rivers which never waste away - which have been spoken of in various near-death experiences.

"when you have looked on scenes of violence and death, and WATCHED them change to quiet views of gardens under open skies, with clear life-giving water running happily beside them in dancing brooks that never waste away; who need PERSUADE you to accept the gift of vision? And AFTER vision, who is there who COULD refuse what MUST come after?"

I guess we'll find out. For sure I am firm in the belief that this physical level of human bodies and bullshit is not and never could be God's Kingdom. Beyond this world there is at least another entire dimension, if not many. When you hear people speaking of actually experiencing it, we can no longer remain closed-minded or regard the spacetime of the "physical universe" to be real, or our true home in God. Ultimately, it is nothing.

"Salvation is no more than a reminder this world (Earth/Spacetime) is NOT your home"

"The (physical) 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 (when you leave it behind) where God abides (in heaven)."

When I am reminded of things like this, which sometimes are thought to be outside of "acim teachings", but nevertheless hinted at by them, I feel more in touch with my own inner truth. I recall that there are indeed other dimensions, life beyond the physical, and a heaven that is not of this world.

"Your Kingdom is not of this world (Earth/Spacetime) because it was given you from BEYOND this world (Heaven)."

"Others find it in experience that is not of this world, which shows them that the world (Earth/Spacetime) does not exist because what they behold (Heaven) must be the truth, and yet it clearly contradicts the world."

In this world, nothing gets done unless you put in some effort. And that's a chore, meaning that making stuff requires work. This isn't really natural to us - we are creators. We should be able to cause things to happen just by will alone, by mind power.

But we made the world as a result of being unwilling, which means it's not a world of will, it's a world that seems unwilling to do anything. So you have to then force it.

When bits of trash fall on the ground, they will stay there forever, unless someone does something to pick them up. If you want to "create" something here, which really means making something, there is now a craft to it, which requires skill and effort because all the objects are different.

At first, the thing you want to make doesn't exist at all, you have a blank slate, an empty canvas, a nothingness. You have no idea what it will be like, but you have to start somewhere. This is daunting, to take nothingness and make it into something.

The process of making is a process of translating higher-level abstract mind-stuff into form, which is an act of materialising, or at least sculpting and forming and reshaping and assembling and building from parts and pieces and materials.

To make anything, you have to take it from an idea to an implementation. But at first, you will have no idea how to do that. You will have to push, and force, and try to wrangle stuff to get it to become a bit more finite, more concrete, to nail things down, commit to decision, to move things forward and see it "take shape" as it turns into form.

That can be difficult because it means trying to take an empty nothingness and somehow "make" something out of it, which means having to put limits in place, define things, make lots of decisions, design and plan, and gradually refine it.

You start with a basic template perhaps, a vague idea, and you start somewhere and put some pieces roughly in place, but it's not finished and you have a lot to figure out. You don't even as yet know how it's going to end up, because you don't as yet understand how to even move forward with it.

So in order to push it forward you have to do some work on it, because if you don't it will just sit there, lifeless and doing nothing, because you're really make it out of death. And even if you do a bit of the work, it's not finished, it will just stop whenever you stop, because it has no real life of its own. It can't become anything until you force it to.

So then making becomes an act of forcing and applying effort and energy and attacking the thing to overpower it and coerce it into taking on a certain form, as an accumulation of actions. And gradually as you apply this effort you reshape the thing and refine it and it starts to turn into something.

Eventually with enough time and effort you can get through the seeming brick wall of nothingness, through all the uncertainty and difficult lack of definition, and pin things down. It's a process of taking something in the mind and trying to make it physical. You have to physically go through the motions, apply the tools, click the buttons, do all the little annoying steps, in order to get to the end result. Sometimes this can be painstaking.

This is a translation process, and it takes time. And unless you keep hammering away at it, it won't happen. Again and again you have to keep gong back to it to do more to it, to keep building, to keep growing it, to keep moving it forward toward the goal, otherwise it just sits there lifeless and incomplete. And no-one's going to do it for you or come along and rescue you, unless maybe you pay them.

And then once you complete the thing you're making, when you think it's good enough, and done, maybe you're happy with it, and maybe you recognize it's ended up a bit shit anyway. Because the things we make in form and from materials in spacetime are all very limited and strange and not really like the level of mind where anything is possible. Have you seen people's DIY disasters?

You have to make do and tolerate limits and put up with imperfections, to accept choices for one color and not another, to go with some option that partially works and know that the other options had something you're missing. What you end up with is a strange collection of stuff that is very limited and unwhole and imperfect, but it'll have to do, because that's as good as physicality gets. You're forced to have to "conform" to form, which means accepting limits and separations and exclusions.

This is all unnatural for the mind and soul, because it means trying to work within the confines of a very awkward system of limits, in which every little part of the thing you're trying to make has to be undertaken personally and with effort and force, to sculpt it and mold it and make it be something. That takes a lot of time and patience and commitment.

You can easily be put off when the next step is unclear, when you don't have the experience, when you don't know how it's going to look or what's going to work. When you have to figure things out as you go along, and the whole thing seems like you're just winging it, making it up as you go.

And then when you get to the end you don't even know if what you made is really the most ideal or best it could be, because you didn't have the foresight to be able to produce perfection. And what you then made is quirky and odd and maybe partly does the job. They you'll probably have to go back over it and fix stuff and polish it up, to do more work on it based on hindsight.

Making is certainly a strange process. But without making, nothing in this world gets done. The world just stays much the same way as it is. Your "life" stays stagnant, your home remains undecorated, your projects remain unfinished and you end up stuck in a rut. If you want things to be different in form, you have to take action. Physical action and effort. You have to try.

Compare that to heaven where to create you simply will what you want to exist and there it is, perfect and whole and complete, instantly effortless, with no time or space involved, no forcing or constant refinements, just simply direct perfect results every time, and joyfully so. How very different that is to getting anything to happen in spacetime through labor.

This is why life is a bit of a chore, and why sometimes people just can't be bothered to do the work. It's tiresome, unless you can find some way to enjoy the process itself, enjoy the craft, or feel some sense of accomplishment or purpose to why you're doing all that work. Maybe if it's of service to others you can feel better about it. Life here is hard work, in general, because the world is difficult in general. But maybe it can be repurposed and seen in a better way.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."

"You still could not will against Him, and that is why you have no control over the world you made. It is NOT a world of will, because it is governed by the desire to be unlike Him. And this desire IS NOT WILL. The world you made is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless "laws," and without meaning of ANY kind. For it was made out of what you do NOT want, projected FROM your mind, because you were AFRAID of it."

"God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death and see the life beyond."

You can say that death is bad, and everything should be moved towards life. That includes healing the body and mind. There should be resurrection happening, a reversal of aging, an undoing of the effects of space and time. A return to life from death.

But this can also be mixed in with an active avoidance of death, a fear of it happening, and a wish to stop a suffering that seems real. If a person's body is real, and it is sick, you'll be motivated to "perform miracles" to heal and rescue them from death. You just want it to all go away.

This attitude of death avoidance can seem like it is in support of miracles, and even can compel and entail attempts at healing. But it's still the behaviour of an unhealed healer - a mixture of trying to resurrect the dead while still believing death is real. If bodies are real, then fixing them becomes a priority.

I went through this whole phase over the course of many years, presented with an endless supply of pictures of my wife being sick and disabled. It was practically an embarrassment to a budding ACIM miracle-worker, the amount of assistive devices we had to use - lifts and wheelchairs and special beds and medicines.

Here I was, trying to stave off death at all costs, keep the body going, undo the sickness, reverse the symptoms, resurrect the dying and make it all better. But this too was driven by a belief that my wife was a body, constantly mixing her spirit and mind with the physical form, where references to "her" always included the body.

I resisted the sickness and the death. I didn't want it to happen. I wanted to keep the body-person around for as long as possible, and couldn't even conceive of any other way of living. Keeping her ticking over was a constant struggle and a daily effort, thwarting wrong diagnoses and fending off stupid medical staff. Trying to keep the death-mongers at bay.

But eventually it got to a point where it was all exhausted, and it occurred to me that I really should just let her die. And that seemed totally against everything I believed. Not that it was up to me anyway, but I had to stop fighting it. I realised I should stop trying to keep her here, and stop trying to prevent all hell breaking loose. She didn't want to really be here any more and we were both quite done with the daily drudgery of bodily upkeep.

It was within a week of that surrendering that she died. Well, I should say, she went to heaven. Her body for sure died, and she for sure did not. Which presented its own confusing challenges to get my head around. But a few things became super clear to me.

My entire attitude about death being "a really bad thing" was totally bullshit. It was fuelled by a belief that the body was the person and must be kept alive. My fear of it and avoidance of it just attracted it. My belief in the sickness just fuelled it. But all of a sudden she was in a state of extreme freedom and happiness, relieved and grateful, totally stunned yet overjoyed.

All the suffering simply switched off. All the daily grind came to an end. All the resistance to it happening was blown out of the water. And it seemed nothing but wonderful for her. I was really thrilled for her to be free at last, which she exclaimed to me "I'm free!" and "I'm happy".

So death really wasn't that bad, after all. In fact, it appeared like a kind of liberation and mercy, given how much she'd suffered for years. I wouldn't wish her for a second to return to that body, and her joy just made me realise more how cruel the world was in not allowing her to leave sooner. The whole idea of keeping someone in a body for as long as possible was shown to be utter bullshit. A multi-lifetime soul doesn't give a shit about it.

It taught me many things all at once. The bullshit of my anti-death pro-miracle deception. My demonising of death and making it out to be a terrible thing. My resistance to the fact that everything in the world dies. It all just popped the bubble. I stopped fighting against it, and that was liberating in its own right. If you try to stop it happening, you make it happen more. But if you stop resisting it, life can take over.

It's another one of those kind of paradoxes. If you make death out to be a bad thing you will choose it. If you don't make it out to be a bad thing, people will think you're anti-miraculous and a death worshipper. But giving it any reality, importance, meaning or value, even if its negative meanings, is just more ego. Death is supposed to be nothing, nothing whatsoever. Meaningless. It's not supposed to be the opposite end of some spiritual warfare between good and evil.

I still recognize and fully believe that death in any form is not supposed to happen. It is not God's nature. Nothing real ever dies. And pretty much everything in the world does. But we also can use the mind to reverse the world's laws and perform miracles, which does still include raising the dead and healing the sick, even to the extent of bodies recovering. In fact Jesus would like for us to demonstrate bodies so healthy and lovely and filled with life that they become symbols of immortality in the dream.

Still, you're not going to get there by opposing death. And when you decide to stop opposing death, that doesn't mean you condone it. It just means you stop fueling it and stop believing in it. Avoiding it just keeps it around. And believing in it while trying not to resist it just condones it. You have to stop believing in it entirely if you want to raise the dead, and believe only in life.

I have perhaps become more truly miracle-minded now that I am no longer fighting against sickness and death. I've stopped making them my enemies. I've stopped resisting them. Well, at least to some extent. My attitude is kind of, "let it all just die", but that too could sound like some murderous idea. The world is hell-bent on dying anyway, so fighting that is bullshit. But at the same time, in that same attitude of letting it go, we can also step into a power that's able to reverse those laws and undo death.

In effect, you bring an end to death by not making it out to be an ending. You withdraw your belief in it being some terrible tragic thing that everyone must avoid at all costs. So shit dies, so what. Fuck it. Who cares. Souls don't care. They just move on and have more lifetimes with fresh healthy new bodies. And being out of the body is fantastic in comparison to coming into one.

This is not in any way to glorify death or sickness, or to suggest to let people keep suffering and not be helpful. But make it real and you die alone with it. Only the living can raise the dead. We are still called to be miracle workers, to raise the dead and heal the sick where possible. To be truly helpful to everyone, to choose not to die ourselves, and to be an example of resurrection. Even to the extent of having our bodies become incapable of death.

But we don't get there by first believing in death and then trying to forgive or undo it. We're the ones that make death have power over us by believing in it. And having made it out to be a power that we can't prevent, which is a projection and disowning of our own power, all we do is end up fighting with ourselves in turmoil. I'm not interested in trying to come off as having some kind of saviour complex, wanting to heal and save everyone from dying.

Most people are going to snuff it in this lifetime because they'r not ready to go all the way. I spent decades trying to heal my wife and reverse her amputations and paralysis and heart disease and brain damage, but bullshit to that because, as it turns out, that was not the plan anyway. The plan was to use the opportunity to learn that making sickness and death real and then resisting it is not the way to be miraculous. To use the sickness as a way to learn to stop believing in it. The plan was never to radically zap her body into a state of perfection. Not in this life.

I totally failed to raise the dead, and it was a great lesson. It almost couldn't have gone any better. In the big picture, this is what I was ready to learn, not that I was some hero that could just zap away death with miracles all over the place. That heroic rescuer bullshit had to die as well. You're far better off letting shit go sometimes. Just as Jesus kept saying to me, "let her."

So some people are not meant to be resurrected in this life. The bigger plan might not call for it and they might not be willing. The Holy Spirit knows what's best and what's possible or appropriate. Some people don't want healing. Some are not ready for an "undiluted miracle." Some want to die too much and aren't ready to forgive themselves. Some are there to play a role for a while and then leave, perhaps to rejoin at a later encounter and carry on. It doesn't all have to happen in one lifetime, and most of the time doesn't.

So I have a much looser attitude now. I recognise the world is just full of disappointment and death so I get much less attached to the bullshit of temptation. I am no longer so mistaken to get all wound up if someone is sick. I'm not feeling like trying to fix and save and stop it happening out of some inability to let it be. Jesus was forever telling me "it's fine" even as my wife's leg was getting chopped off, even as she had a stroke, even as she was in the ICU twice and on her death bed. "It's fine" he said, because ultimately it doesn't matter whatsoever. Nothing real can be threatened. No-one ever dies. Just the body.

This has shown me that from the soul's perspective this world is just here for us to use temporarily. To repurpose. We go through bodies like water. We take on roles and challenges, lessons to learn and people to meet, and we move on. Probably across countless lifetimes. None of the physical shit really matters. It's not important at all. If people are to come and go and die off and leave, so what, you'll see them again. They were never a body in the first place, and the body is worthless anyway. This whole world will be thrown down the toilet and flushed away eventually "as the world spins into the nothingness from which it came."

So yeah. Be miraculous and overcome death by not believing in death and not resisting it. Gotta not resist it if you want there to be any freedom there. If you want to replace it with life you can't be dimming your light with death-believing thoughts of resistances rooted in a fear of loss. This is why we let the dead (in mind/heart) bury the dead (in body). It doesn't matter. Graveyards aren't even real. All of us are spiritual immortal beings who will live forever, and we will never ever be separate or alone.

When we're ready to surmount death and stop dying entirely, we'll resurrect the body and make it disappear. The body then becomes incapable of being sick or dying, so it can only leave by vanishing. The mind overlooks the illusion of death and recognises it as nothing, and away it goes. Then the body is no more, and never was, and you will never again go through death, or birth for that matter. I'm no longer an anti-death spokesperson. Death doesn't exist.

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

"We call it death, but it is liberty. It does not come in forms that seem to be thrust down in pain upon unwilling flesh, but as a gentle welcome to release. If there has been true healing, this can be the form in which death comes when it is time to rest a while from labor gladly done and gladly ended. Now we go in peace to freer air and gentler climate, where it is not hard to see the gifts we gave were saved for us. For Christ is clearer now; His vision more sustained in us; His Voice, the Word of God, more certainly our own."