I am God's Son. Nothing outside me exists. God will never judge against me or He would be judging against Himself. God does not and will not EVER change His Mind about me. He knows me as His Son. God's Law is Love. Anything other than Love is not Real. I violate God's laws only in my imagination. "Time" and Eternity are both in my mind and will conflict until I realize that the only proper use of "time" is as a means to regain Eternity. What can upset me, if only Love exists? If anything upsets me it can only be because I imagined a world other than God's and it can only be a dream.
At Home in God. I am at Home in God, dreaming of exile but perfectly capable of Awakening to Reality. I know from experience that while I sleep, my dreams seems real. Yet the minute I wake up, I realize I was dreaming. I do not think this is strange, even though all laws of the world were violated in my dreams (I was able to breath underwater, I fell off a cliff and did not die, my house turned into a car, etc). So......is it not possible that in "waking" from "dreams," I merely shifted from one dream to another, without really waking at all?
I have forgotten my Reality with God, but when I hear His Voice, I will remember. When I remember, I will know being Awake in God is my Reality. I will remember Everything the instant I desire It Wholly and Completely. Illusions will disappear. Right now I am distracted by dreams; dreams of responsibilities, love, finances, war, disasters, and weather. But when I Remember, dreams will be disappear because I will want only Truth. And finally accepting Truth, It will be mine.
The Decision to Forget. The word "dissociate" means, "to regard as separate or unconnected." ACIM teaches me that I have dissociated from God and His Kingdom. This is all taking place in my mind. The only Reality is Spirit or Thought, so physical dissociation is not truly possible.
In order to dissociate, I first have had to Associate, or know. Knowledge must come first. I knew God and His Kingdom, and now I have seemingly separated from It. Since this is all happening in my mind, dissociation is nothing more than a decision to forget. I have replaced Knowledge of God and His Kingdom with dreams.
ACIM teaches me to choose God and His Kingdom. ACIM is the shortcut Home.
In my decision to remember God, lies the Joy, Peace and Glory of the Kingdom. God just needs my small willingness, for He retains the Knowledge of Heaven (and myself as Son) and He is waiting for me to accept It. I gladly give up everything that stands in the way of my remembering......for God is in my memory. To remember, is merely to restore to my mind What Is Already There.
The people, situations, natural disasters, problems, and concerns that weigh heavy on my mind are just distracting me from Reality. I created an alternate "reality" that distracts me from Reality. When I attack (all attack is in the mind) I am literally attacking myself. Nothing exists outside of me. I am like a man dreaming of a bear attack, arms and body thrashing in his sleep, only to awaken and realize there is no bear at all! All those "people out there" are One with me. When I look into a brother's face, I will choose to see myself and the face of Christ. Christ is the Son, the sum of all brothers and sisters reunited in God.
The world I created is all about attack in some form or another. Behind every small sigh, is a world of rage. When I attack, I teach and reinforce it in myself. If I only realized the complete havoc this makes of my Peace of mind, I would never make such an insane decision. By choosing the dream-world, I am choosing against God and His Kingdom.
The god of Sickness. I am not apart from God and I do love Him. The crazy thoughts I think in this world are not even my True Thoughts. I have distracted myself with a world that exists only in my dreams. I will not be afraid. It is impossible to change my Reality as God's Son. I am with God in Heaven right now, distracted by dreams that are projected like a movie onto a screen. Any anger, hate, disgust.....even a small sigh, are reminders that I am dreaming. I am the Son of God lost in sickness.
I think I am in this changing, chaotic world; I think I can be hateful, annoyed or saddened; but I am dreaming. I believe I can attack and others can attack me; but I am dreaming. I believe that death is inevitable; but I am dreaming. I believe I am a body and there are other bodies; but I am dreaming.
Wake up to Life. There are no bodies, there is no world, no one is sick and there is no death. Only Love, Happiness, and Life exist.
To believe that a Son of God can be sick is to believe that part of God can suffer. Love cannot suffer. Love never attacks. I am Invulnerable in the Love of God. I am not subject to attack, sickness, and death. I will accept God in myself and my "brother," for while I see "others" I have many opportunities to offer forgiveness and Love, until I Awaken, no longer need forgiveness, and only Love remains.
To believe a Son of God is sick is to believe in dreams. All dreams are caricatures of Creation, taught by a insane mind too divided to know Creation. When I do not know myself as God's Son, I become sick; sick with hatred, sick with disease, sick with old age, sick with fluctuating emotions, sick in thought. I always see error in my brother before I see it in myself, but seeing it in my brothers is proof that it is first in me. I will avoid correcting my brother for my own errors. I will work only on myself, for One Mind is All There Is.
Sickness is an illusion. The only good use of denial is to deny illusions. My task is to deny illusions completely.
God is not a jealous god, He knows nothing can replace Him. But I have created my own gods of death, sickness, money, success, fame, power, disease....and these I guard and covet in my dreams, which falsely reassure me that the dream is real. When I dream about a world without God, I block Him from my mind, then I desperately search for other "gods" to fill the emptiness. Yet my dreams will disappear in a cloud of dust when I remember who I really am: The Son of God. I hear the god I choose to listen to. Will it be the ego-god of the dream-world or will it be my Father?
I do not realize how much effort I put into my gods and how vigilant I am on their behalf. Yet they exist only because I honor them. I honor death with mourning and monuments. I honor every disaster my world brings with my attention and emotions. I honor wealth with purchasing as many possessions as I can, or if I do not seem to have what I want, I allow my thoughts to covet it in "another." Illusions are not worthy of honor. To honor them is to honor nothing. If I see the god of sickness anywhere, I is because I have accepted him. If I accept him, I will bow down and worship him because I made him to be God's replacement.
Only at the Altar of God will I find Peace. This Altar is in me because God Himself put it there. His Voice calls me to return. He will be heard when I place no other gods before Him.
The End of Sickness. All "magic" (medicine, surgery, therapy, etc) is an attempt to fix the un-fixable. All religion is the recognition that the fixable cannot be fixed. Sickness and Perfection cannot coexist. God created me Perfect, therefore I am Perfect. If I believe I can be sick, I have placed other gods before my Father. God does not war with the god of sickness, but I do. The god of sickness is proof that I am seeing a world other than God's, and my world cannot coexist with God's.
If I refuse to "worship" the god of sickness is whatever form he appears to me, he will disappear into the nothingness out of which he was made.
Reality dawns only on the unclouded mind and It is always there to be accepted. I must be willing to accept It. Knowledge cannot dawn on a mind full of illusions. Illusion and Truth cannot coexist in my mind. Truth is Whole and cannot be known partially, or by part of the mind. To overlook sickness or illusion (nothingness), is merely to evaluate it correctly. To perceive other gods, is to have a split mind.
God's Laws will keep my mind at Peace because Peace is God's Will and all of His Laws are created to uphold His Will. The Laws of God work only for my good. God's Laws are the Laws of Freedom. Mine are the laws of bondage. Freedom and bondage cannot coexist, so my laws and God's cannot be understood together. Either I am embracing my laws or God's, it is impossible to do both. There are no other laws other than God's Laws, except in fantasy and dreams. Everything else is lawless and chaotic. Anything not under the Laws of God, does not exist. My gods do not actually bring chaos, I am endowing them with chaos and accept it of them. I am doing this to myself.
I have given my peace of mind to the gods I made. In Reality, I can never lose what God has given me, I can only deny It. But be Joyful. All of this has never been. Nothing except God and His Kingdom are Real. I am dreaming a dream of chaos and unlawfulness. What I have created in my dream is so unworthy of me that I could never want it if I were willing to see Truly. And when I see it Truly, I will see nothing at all. My Vision will automatically look beyond, to the Kingdom within me and all around me. Reality cannot break through my denial and illusions, but It will envelope me Completely when I let go of dreams.
The Denial of God. The rituals of the god of sickness are strange and demanding. Joy is never permitted. Depression is the sign of allegiance to the god of sickness. To deny God is to deny my own Identity which is true blasphemy, and in this sense, the wage of sin is death. To deny my Identity will keep me firmly entrenched in a world of change, destruction, and death. Denying Life is to believe in the opposite of Life which is death. All forms of denial replace What Is, with what is not.
God created me as His Son and gave me Everything Good, yet I tell Him, "I am not worthy. I flagellate myself and do penance and live in this world of chaos, destruction and death.....because I am not "worthy," I tell God that I do not want His Glory. Is this not arrogance? Is this not blasphemy? Yet I cannot blaspheme, I only think I can. Blasphemy is self-destructive, not God-destructive.
To deny God inevitably results in projection and in my projection I have created a world "outside" me that seems to be devoid of God. My dream-world "proves" to my sick mind that God could not possibly exist or if He did exist then He is cruel. I have projected onto the "world" and "others" all the thoughts and ideas that accompany my denial of God. I then believe that "others," not myself, are doing evil and bad things. The denial I project "out there," comes back to me in the images I see and hear in the world. I may believe that I judge "others" by the messages they give me, but I have judged them what I have projected onto them: the denial of God and His Kingdom.
The god of sickness demands the denial of health. To exist in the dream-world, I must perceive and worship sickness with my time, attention, thoughts and ideas. Sickness and death seem to enter my mind against my will, but it was me who created them. I created the god of depression, the god of hate, the god of war, the god of injustice. In my denial of God, I created a world completely the opposite of God in every way.
".....(of yourself) you can do nothing...." John 15:5. But I am not of myself. If I were, what I made would be true and escape would be impossible. It is because God Created me and I am His Son, I do not need to worry. My gods are nothing, because my Father did not create them, and I cannot create anything unlike the Father. Only what is like the Father can be Real.
I have not sinned, I have only been mistaken. Remember.....what I deny, I must have once known. If I have accepted denial, I can also accept its undoing.
God has not denied me. He does not retaliate, He only calls me to return. He calls me from every part of the Sonship. He answers every call, but I have not answered His. The Love of God is in everything He Created. His Son is everywhere. Look with Peace upon my "brothers" and God will come rushing into my heart in gratitude. Healing is the acknowledgment of God.
What is of God is Eternal and I am of God. Would God allow Himself to suffer? "Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead?" Luke 11:11. Would God offer His Son anything that is not Whole, Eternal, Joyful, and Loving? I will accept myself as God Created me and I will be incapable of suffering. If I deny God, I bring sin, pain and suffering to my own mind, because of the Power God gave me to Create. Because of my Free Will, I am able to deny God and His Kingdom. But because my creation of the dream-world does not share the characteristics of God, it does not exist. That I believe it does, is beyond question.
I do not realize how much I have denied myself. God, in His Love, would not have it so. Yet He would not interfere with me, because He Created His Son Free. To interfere with my thoughts and ideas would be to attack Himself, and God is not insane. When I deny God, I am insane. God merely gives me the solution and waits patiently for me to choose it.
Heaven waits for my return. I am not at home anywhere else or in any other condition. That is why I perceive misery and restlessness. Yet God has given me the means for undoing what I have made. Listen to Him and I will learn how to remember what I Am.
God knows me as Wholly Sinless and it is blasphemy to perceive myself or any "other" as guilty. God knows me as Wholly without pain, it is blasphemous to perceive suffering anywhere. God knows me as Wholly Joyous, it is blasphemous to feel depressed. All of these illusions (whatever form blasphemy make take) are refusals to acknowledge God and His Kingdom. To deny God and His Kingdom is to deny my Self.
Arrogance is the denial of Love. Love shares, arrogance withholds. While "time" seems to be my reality, my mind will experiences "choices." "Time" itself is a choice. Choice is not of God. Choice is a concept, not Reality. To remember Eternity, I will look only on the Eternal. Ask myself: is this Eternal? If not, it does not exist. When I am preoccupied with the world and its problems and the things of "time," I will continue to live in "time." As always, my choice is determined by what I value.
Time and Eternity cannot both be Real because they contradict each other. Accept only what is Timeless as Real, and I will begin to understand Eternity and make It mine.
