Teachings Based on ACIM

Death and Immortality

The following quotes have been taken from ACIM and will help to clarify its position on the subjects Death and Immortality.

• Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death yourself, and can therefore abolish both. You are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your creator. Everything else is your own nightmare and does not exist. Only the creations of light are real.
  
  
• The emptiness engendered by fear must be replaced by forgiveness. That is what the bible means by 'There is no death', and why I could demonstrate that death does not exist.
  
  
• The mind perceiving without love, perceives an empty shell and is unaware of the spirit within.
  
  
• Death (emptiness, nothing) is replaced by forgiveness therefore demonstrating that nothing does not exist.
  
  
• Where fear of God was - there was in fact only forgiveness, where the mind perceives sin, there was in fact only forgiveness..
  
  
• The term 'Last Judgment' is frightening not only because it has been projected onto God, but also because of the association of 'last' with death. This is an outstanding example of upside down perception. Last Judgement = forgiveness.
  
  
• There is no death, but there is a belief in death. Life and death are irreconcilable. The world is not left by death but by truth, and truth can be known by all those for whom the kingdom was created, and for whom it waits.
  
  
• The futile attempts of the ego at reparation, and finally the crucifixion of the body, or death. Such repetitions are endless until they are voluntarily given up. You are free to crucify yourself as often as you choose.
  
  
• When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone you will know you will last forever. Perhaps you think this is accomplished through death, but nothing is accomplished through death, because death is nothing. Everything is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the mind. The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who are life. If we share the same mind, you can overcome death because I did. Death is an attempt to resolve conflict by not deciding at all, like any other impossible solution the ego attempts, it will not work.
  
  
• All forms of sickness, even death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. They are attempts to reinforce sleeping, out of fear of waking. Sleep is no more a form of death, than death is a form of unconsciousness. Healing is release from the fear of waking and the substitution of the decision to wake.
  
  
• Sleep is not death. What He created can sleep, but cannot die. Immortality is His will for His Son, and His Son's will for himself. God's Son cannot will death for himself because his Father is life, and His Son is like Him.
  
  
• Behold the Guide your Father gave you, that you might learn you have eternal life. The Holy Spirit guides you into life eternal but you must relinquish your investment in death, or you will not see life though it is all around you.
  
  
• 'The Attraction of Death' - see p. 416 and also lessons 131 and 132.
  
  
• Death is the thought that you are separate from God.
  
  
• Birth is not the beginning, and death is not the end.
  
  
• What is Death? See page 66 of Manual for Teachers.

Eternal Life / Immortality

• My word, which is the resurrection and the life, shall not pass away because life is eternal.
  
  
• Whatever is true is eternal, and cannot change or be changed. Sprit is therefore unalterable because it is already perfect.
  
  
• God is incapable of creating the perishable, as the ego is of making the eternal.
  
  
• I raised the dead by knowing that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God created.
  
  
• Eternity is yours, because He created you eternal.
  
  
• God extends outward beyond limits and beyond time, and you who are co-creator with Him extend His Kingdom forever and beyond limit. Eternity is the indelible stamp of creation. The eternal are in peace and joy forever.
  
  
• You are altogether irreplaceable in the Mind of God. No one else can fill your part in it, and while you leave your part of it empty your place merely waits for your return.
  
  
• What can upset you except the ephemeral, and how can the ephemeral be real if you are God's only creation and He created you eternal?
  
  
• 'At Home in God' - see page 182.
  
  
• Every loving thought that the Son of God ever had is eternal. The loving thoughts his mind perceives in this world are the world's only reality. They are still perceptions, because he still believes he is separate. Yet they are eternal because they are loving. And being loving they are like the Father, and therefore cannot die. The real world can actually be perceived. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing else.
  
  
• 'The Condition of Reality' - see page 210.
  
  
• Immortality is the opposite of time, for time passes away, while immortality is constant.
  
  
• Immortality - not subject to death. The body no more dies than it can live. Life is of the mind and in the mind.
  
  
• See 'Forgiveness' and 'The End of Time' - Chapter 29
  

Special Relationships and Holy Relationships.

The following quotes have been taken from ACIM and will help to clarify its position on the subjects of Special and Holy Relationships.

• A special relationship is a device for limiting your self to a body, and for limiting your perception of others to theirs.
  
  
• Every special relationship you have made has, as its fundamental purpose, the aim of
  occupying your mind so completely that you will not hear the call of truth.
  
  
• The special relationship is an attempt to re-enact the past and change it.
  
  
• The special relationship is the renunciation of the love of God, and the attempt to secure for the self the specialness that He denied.
  
  
• In a sense, the special relationship was the ego's answer to the creation of the Holy Spirit.
  
  
• In looking at the special relationship, it is necessary first to realise that it involves a great amount of pain.
  
  
• The conviction of littleness lies in every special relationship, for only the deprived could value specialness.
  
  
• The special relationship is totally meaningless without a body.
  
  
• To believe that special relationship, with special love, can offer salvation is the belief that separation is salvation.
  
  
• In the special relationship where both partners see the special self in each other, the ego sees 'a union made in heaven'.
  
  
• All special relationships have sin as their goal.
  
  
• The closer you look at the special relationship, the more apparent it becomes that it must foster guilt and therefore must imprison.
  
  
• In His function as interpreter of what you made, the Holy Spirit uses special relationships, which you have chosen to support the ego, as learning experiences that point to truth.
  
  
• Everyone on earth has formed special relationships and although this is not so in Heaven, the Holy Spirit knows how to bring a touch of Heaven to them here.
  
  
• I have said repeatedly that the Holy Spirit would not deprive you of your special relationships, but would transform them.
  
  
• The special relationship will remain, not as a source of pain and guilt, but as a source of joy and freedom.
  
  
• Your special relationship will be a means for undoing guilt in everyone blessed through your Holy relationship.
  
  
• When you accept truth as the goal for your relationship, you become a giver of peace as surely as your Father gave peace to you.
  
  
• The Holy relationship is the old, unholy relationship, transformed and seen anew. It represents the reversal of the unholy relationship.
  
  
• The purpose of the Holy relationship is to undo guilt in each other and everyone blessed through your Holy relationship.
  
  
• The Holy relationship's purpose is to bring light to darkness.
  
  
• In a Holy relationship each one has looked within and seen no lack.
  
  
• In each Holy relationship is the ability to communicate instead of separate reborn.
  
  
• The function of a Holy relationship is to receive together and give as you have received.
  
  
• To bless each other is the purpose of the Holy relationship.
  
  
• A Holy relationship is one in which you join with what is part of you in truth.
  
  
• What is born into a Holy relationship can never end.
  
  
• In all its aspects, as it begins, develops and becomes accomplished, the Holy relationship represents the reversal of the unholy relationship.
  
  
• In this world, god's son comes closest to himself in a Holy relationship.
  
  
• The Holy relationship has the power to heal all pain, regardless of its form.
  
  
• The Holy relationship is the expression of the Holy instant in living in this world.
  
  
• Through your Holy relationship, reborn and blessed in every Holy instant you do not arrange, thousands will rise to Heaven with you.
  
  
• Yet reason sees a Holy relationship as what it is, a common state of mind, where both give errors gladly to correction, that both may happily be healed as one.
  

Ego and Holy Spirit

The following quotes from the text of ACIM offer clarification re the course perspective on the subjects of Ego and Holy Spirit.

• The ego is nothing more than a part of your belief about yourself.
  
  
• The ego believes it is completely on its own, which is merely another way of describing how it thinks it originated
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• The ego is nothing more than a delusional system in which you made your own father.
  
  
• The ego always seeks to divide and separate.
  
  
• If the ego is the symbol of separation, it is also the symbol of guilt.
  
  
• From the beginning then, the purpose of the ego is to be separate, sufficient unto itself and independent of any power except its own.
  
  
• The ego is the questioning aspect of the post separation self, which was made rather than created.
  
  
• Do not be afraid of the ego. You must recognise that the last thing the ego wishes you to realise is that you are afraid of it.
  
  
• The ego has never given you a sensible answer to anything.
  
  
• The ego believes in atonement through attack, being fully committed to the insane notion that attack is salvation.
  
  
• The ego depends solely on your willingness to attack it.
  
  
• The ego teaches you to attack yourself because you are guilty, this must increase your guilt, for guilt is the result of attack.
  
  
• Obsessed with the conviction that separation is salvation, the ego attacks everything it perceives by breaking it into small disconnected parts without meaningful relationships and therefore without meaning.
  
  
• The ego regards the body as its home, and tries to satisfy itself through the body.
  
  
• The ego uses the body to conspire against your mind, and because the ego realises that its 'enemy' can end them both merely by recognizing they are not a part of you, they join in the attack together.
  
  
• The ego uses the body for attack, for pleasure and for pride.
  
  
• The ego literally lives by comparisons.
  
  
• Complexity is of the ego, and is nothing more than the ego's attempt to obscure the obvious.
  
  
• The ego is expert only in confusion. You may have carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is total confusion about everything.
  
  
• The introduction of reason into the ego's thought system is the beginning of its undoing, for reason and the ego are contradictory.
  
  
• No one who follows the ego's teaching is without fear of death.
  
  
• The ego tries to teach you that you want to oppose God's will.
  
  
• The ego teaches this: Death is the end as far as hope of Heaven goes.
  
  
• The ego teaches you always encounter your past, and because your dreams were not holy, the future cannot be, and the present is without meaning.
  
  
• In the ego's teaching, there is no escape from guilt. For the ego really believes it can get and keep by making guilty.
  
  
• The ego tells you all is black with guilt within you, and bids you not to look.
  
  
• The ego will assure you that it is impossible for you to see no guilt in anyone.
  
  
• Forgetfulness, sleep and even death become the ego's best advice for dealing with the perceived and harsh intrusion of guilt on peace.
  
  
• To the ego, the guiltless are guilty.
  
  
• Wherever you respond to your ego you will experience guilt, and you will fear punishment.
  
  
• If you identify yourself with the ego, you must perceive yourself as guilty.

Holy Spirit:

• Remember the Holy Spirit is the Answer, not the question.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit is the answer to everything, because He knows what the answer to everything is.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit does not speak first but always answers.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit came into being with the separation, as a protection, inspiring the Atonement principle at the same time.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit is God's answer to the separation; the means by which the Atonement heals until the whole mind returns to creating.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit is the Mind of the Atonement.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit atones in all of us by undoing.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit merely teaches you how to remove the blocks that stand between you and what you know.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit teaches you to use your body only to reach your brothers, so He can teach His message through you.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit is the call to awaken and be glad.
  
  
• The choice for the Holy Spirit is the choice for God.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit keeps the vision of Christ for every Son of God who sleeps.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit is the communication link between God the Father and his separated Sons.
  
  
• The concern and care of the Holy Spirit for you are limitless.
  
  
• Be comforted, and feel the Holy Spirit watching over you in love and perfect confidence in what he sees.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit, like the ego, is a decision.
  
  
• You whose mind is darkened by doubt and guilt, remember this: God gave the Holy Spirit to you and gave Him the mission to remove all doubt and every trace of guilt His dear Son has laid upon himself.
  
  
• You judge effects, but the Holy Spirit has judged their cause.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit has the task of undoing what the ego has made He can therefore perform the function of
  reinterpreting what the ego makes, not by destruction but by understanding.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit cannot distinguish between degrees of error, for if He thought that one form of sickness is more serious than another, He would be teaching that one error can be more real than another. The miracle dissolves error because the Holy Spirit identifies error as false or unreal.