And if God created bodies, death would indeed be real. But God would not be loving."
Let's just be clear about something here. God creates or extends reality. Everything real is within God's being. Everything real comes from His Will. Ok. The entire "realm" of God is within Himself, and all of it is real and deliberately created BY HIM.
SO.....
If we claim, God created planet Earth, God created bodies, THEN... we have to also say this:
Earth, bodies, dog shit, death, war, terror, sickness, suffering, starvation, explosions, supernova, ice ages, being eaten alive, piles of puke and diarrhea, cannibalism, murder, destruction, rape and incest, etc... ALL OF IT.... MUST, be part of God, per God's will. If it is God's CREATION, there is no loopholes, no exceptions, no OTHER makers of this stuff. It is all God's. And it's all real. And you cannot escape any of it.
If whatever God creates is within HIS OWN BEING, and is part of HIS OWN SELF, per HIS OWN WILL, then absolutely EVERYTHING within his being must be in accord with His Will, CREATED BY HIM, without exception. And therefore everything "created" MUST reflect God's nature, intention, attitude.
This should be pretty obvious. The ENTIRE CONTENT of whatever "world" He creates must be 100% HIS DOING and entirely WHAT HE WANTED.
So this now means, every single thing in this world, good or bad, right or wrong, happy or sad, is HIS DOING. And this leaves NO ROOM for other wills to have other doings. There are no other causes. This makes God the AUTHOR of all hatred, pain, torture and decay. All suffering is HIS FAULT. HIS WILL.
God causes floods. God causes famines. God causes stars to explode destroying solar systems. God causes black holes to suck up galaxies and civilizations. God causes murder and attack and death. ALL OF IT MUST be part of God's mind and will, IF GOD CREATED THIS WORLD.
And if you can understand why this is entirely correct, you should also realize that if God WERE to do this, to have DONE this, God WOULD BE EXTREMELY CRUEL.
As the opening statement says, if God created BODIES, which includes all forms of bodies not just human, including planetary bodies, IF GOD created them, DEATH IS REAL. Because these bodies DO DIE. Flowers die. People die. Planets die. Galaxies die. IF God created these things, DEATH IS REALITY. And if death is reality, then you CANNOT UNDO IT, you cannot overcome it, you are guaranteed to die forever. And that means there is NO SUCH THING as eternal life. So you better be counting the days until your "inevitable death."
The idea that God made the world is the idea that GOD IS THE EGO!!!!
And that means, quite simply.... GOD WANTS YOU DEAD. That it is GOD'S WILL THAT YOU DIE.
So now, we're in a bit of a predicament, because unless you want this to be TRUE of God, you CANNOT be claiming that God made the world. It literally CANNOT BE POSSIBLE that God had ANYTHING to do with the making of any of this shit, if God is to be loving. It is absolutely ridiculous to suggest, God WANTED there to be suffering, sickness and death.
Now, some people, who are insane and in denial, and cannot accept this fact, try to find another way to look at this situation, so that they can do two things: 1) KEEP the world and keep believing God created it, 2) Explain it in such a way that it is NOT terrible, bad, ugly and murderous. And so what do they do?
They come up with this bullshit idea that if you will simply change your mind ABOUT it, you'll suddenly realize that MURDER AND DEATH are totally LOVELY. That it is NATURAL for animals to eat each other alive. That there is SUPPOSED to be seasons in which things are born, suffer, and die. That if we will just skew our perception enough, supposedly "truly", then we'll see it as GOD INTENDED, as though to say, the things which SEEM like death and cruelty, ARE NOT ACTUALLY that.
And so what does that mean? It means God is totally nuts. Because now God does CRUEL THINGS, on purpose, under the BELIEF that THEY ARE NOT. It makes God out to be an absolute idiot. It justifies murder. It justifies death. It tries to adjust to the world to MAKE IT OK. It sees true perception as a device for changing the MEANING of a meaningless world, to GIVE it meaning, so that it seems meaningful. It's an attempt to find a way to look at this world such that EVEN THE HELL of it SEEMS LOVELY AND ACCEPTABLE.
That, is totally nuts. But that is what some people are doing with ACIM.
This world cannot be God's will. God HAS TO BE CRUEL to produce ANY of this, regardless of how you perceive it, regardless of how you think it was conceived, regardless of how you think God views it. God could not construct EVEN THE POSSIBILITY for suffering. God could not come up with even a scenario where you MIGHT even die. Yet alone to accuse God of MAKING DEATH. And to then try to explain it away by saying it''s not death, really, it's actually totally natural part of life. BULL SHIT.
I want you to consider this deeply. Think about it. God HAS to be TOTALLY FUCKING CRUEL in order to make a world like this. Which,may I remind you...
"Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"
"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."
And therefore, Because God IS NOT CRUEL AT ALL, He CANNOT have made it.
Nor does it STOP BEING cruel just because you try to LOVE IT. Just because you forgive it, look past it, or truly perceive it, this does not change what it is. A true perception of a world of death doesn't turn it into a world of life. Who can look on death and believe IT IS NOT THAT? No amount of forgiveness has ever stopped animals from eating each other alive, babies from dying at birth, planets colliding, or black holes swallowing whole entire civilizations.
THIS WORLD, is NOT God's creation.
THIS WORLD, is the world WE made when we were delusional and trying to DENY God's world. This is written all over the course. A delusional system of those driven made by guilt. A place where God could enter not. An attack on God. A picture of the crucifixion fo God's son. Make no mistake it is NOTHING LIKE God's creation, and crediting it to him is a MASSIVE disservice. God in his perfection could not come up with the shite that happens in this world. And all of the shit that happens would HAVE TO BE BECAUSE OF HIM if he created it.
God does not create hell, suffering, death, decay, destruction, sickness, meaninglessness, suicide, insanity or hatred. Look around you. This is not reality.
"The world you see is an illusion of a world.God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself."
"Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself, "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are no streets where people walk alone and separately. There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever." This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. 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."
If you want to SEE REALITY, you have to DENY THIS WORLD. There are two worlds. One you made, one God created. In God's world there are no bodies, no day and night, no stores, no stupid stuff you don't need, no sickness, no death, no muder or attack, no suffering, no time, no loss, no dog shit, and especially no bad weather that kills people. If you want to SEE IT, to see the world GOD ACTUALLY created, you have to STOP LOOKING AT THIS PLANET. Sight of it is COSTING YOU the ability to SEE CHRIST where HE IS, in God's Kingdom, BEYOND THIS WORLD.
"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. 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. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world. But the REAL world (heaven) HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT (heaven). And what you call with love WILL come to you. Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made (earth), and do not want. 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."
Heaven is not like this, folks. God can do a lot better.
After some recent insights, I have a theory... that God's Kingdom actually has locality and non-locality, meaning there is a kind of timeless time, and spaceless space. Whereas 'spacetime' is the idea of locality only.
God's whole system runs on a BOTH/AND kind of logic. Something true of me is true of you - golden rule, etc.
God is both personal and impersonal. He's personal because he gives 100% full attention to each individual being, yet he is impersonal because he treats all beings the same.
Similarly there has to be locality in order to have a creation distinct from God - "separate beings", souls that God created. It requires some sense of multitudes and some way to say "I'm here, you're there" sort of thing. But at the same time, non-local as in - we're both overlapping at one everywhere.
I think what happened in the separation is we denied the non-locality shared qualities of reality and tried to emphasise just the local ones, which produced space and time. Space is this idea of being isolated to one location, similarly with time being isolated to one moment.
If true, this suggests that in heaven there is a kind of "space" but it's not the same as the space of spacetime... its simultaneously locations but also the presence of everything everywhere all at once. That God is in everything still. Both local and non-local.
This would go on to allow there to be multiple creations, and for example the course makes reference to things like "you too have a kingdom your soul has created" and "your mind has the power to create worlds" etc. Why have the power to create worlds, if we haven't created worlds somewhere? And he says we basically have created kingdoms somewhere.
It requires a kind of 'space' but it's like... the things in the space are so shared and so one that everything is also everywhere. And it could imply that there is an enormous amount of universes of 'stuff' up there in reality. Not PHYSICAL forms, but forms of some kind that are also formless.
Another important property of reality is that everything is always open and fully accessible to everyone. And nothing real can be threatened. This means there's no hard surfaces, no walls, no impacts, no possibility of destruction or attack, nothing firm or solid, no things that can reject or repel or resist.
There could be for example some kind of 'thought creation' or 'idea' of a thing, perhaps a place, a gathering, a created world/environment or structure perhaps .... but its not made of of things which "keep people out" or "keep people in". You can't attack it because it's made of spirit. You go to touch it and you become one with it, overlap it, pass through it. No-one is denied any access ever.
So I think its possible on this basis that heaven could have "stuff in it", made of spirit/light, but the stuff doesn't have the repelling hard surfaces of spacetime matter, and because everyone IS everything nothing can sort of "block you" or "attack you" or anything like we see with physical objects. There could be spirit forms, ideas, thought-creations ("miracles are thought creations"), which we can merge with, pass through, overlap with, share, be one with.
Our experience there would be quite different than in the physical realm. In physicality, it's all made of walls, blocks, resistance, attack, denial, imprisonment, impacts, rebounds, forces keeping things separate, damage, decay, etc.... all these physics things all require a 'barrier' of some kind that says "keep out". Those barriers don't exist in heaven - you can pass right through it and be one with it. Total freedom to come and go anywhere and everywhere.
This is also why spacetime and the physical are illusions because they're basically formed from the idea of saying "no" to something, not allowing freedom, not allowing access, pushing away, forcing, etc.... a world of walls and blocks and solid lies and prison cells. This is how spacetime is fundamentally different from heaven. And also is why the physical world is a total illusion, formed from ideas of separations between everything rather than shared unity. And without separateness there can be no solid matter.
Also an interesting part of this is the non-locality of time. In 'time' we have localised time but not non-local time. So it's all sort of like one moment of 'now' but the things in it come and go (die), there is no sense of "always and forever". In heaven there could be local time - which is actually necessary in order to allow for example "the kingdom to increase", and for you to "add to the kingdom". And for God to create the holy spirit in response to the separation, and being in our right minds before the separation etc, and there being an "after the atonement".
All that creation requires is essentially a kind of causal chain which requires a kind of linear progression - a sort of time. But at the same time, heaven has total non-locality so it has non-local time everywhere as well, meaning, the now moment ie every moment in which we "live and move" through local/non-local space, also features a sense of this being always and forever, that all times exist at once as one thing, transcending 'local time' as we know it.
Cus there's some things about heaven's reality, creation, God's nature, which really need to have the presence of some kind of progression or time or sequence, as well as some kind of order or sort of places to create kingdoms and such. It has to have a 'kind of spacetime', it's just that it's not purely spacetime - it's spacetime + non-localised space and non-localised time. It's BOTH, eternal and time, unlimited and local.
Space is the local+non-local space of heaven stripped of its non-local shared nature. Time is the local+non-local time of heaven stripped of its non-local eternal nature. Separate spaces, separate times, instead of 'oneness spaces' and 'all times'. This idea at least seems to, for me, clean up some loose ends and open some doors to some possibilities that were overlooked.
Talking out loud to flesh this out... might be right, might not. But it's interesting.
"When you have looked on what seemed terrifying, and SEEN it change to sights of loveliness and peace; 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?" UrT20I12
"You are wholly lovely. A perfect shaft of pure light." UrT1B30W
"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky." UrT30D8
"When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was." UrW167L9 "If you created GOD and He created you, the KINGDOM could not increase through its OWN creative thought. Creation would therefore be limited, and you would NOT be co-creators WITH God. As God's creative Thought proceeds FROM Him TO you, so must YOUR creative thoughts proceed FROM you to YOUR creations. In this way only can ALL creative power EXTEND OUTWARD. God's accomplishments are NOT yours. But yours are LIKE His. HE created the Sonship, and YOU increase it. You HAVE the power to ADD to the Kingdom, but NOT to add to the Creator OF the Kingdom." UrT7A2
"it was forever created TO increase. If you perceive it as NOT increasing, you do not know what it IS." URT7B5
"And His Sons, who create LIKE Him, follow it gladly, knowing that the INCREASE of the Kingdom depends on it, just as THEIR creation did." UrT7C7
"We have spoken often of the INCREASE of the Kingdom by YOUR creations, which can only BE created as YOU were." UrT7F12
"You, too, have a Kingdom which your Soul has created. It has not ceased to create because your ego has set you on the road of perception." URT4D3
"A co-creator with the Father must have a Son. Yet must this Son have been created like Himself. A perfect Being, all-encompassing and all-encompassed, nothing to add and nothing taken FROM; not born of size nor weight nor time, nor held to limits or uncertainties of ANY kind." UrT24H7
"Nothing in either of these statements implies any sort of level involvement, or, in fact, anything except one continuous line of creation, in which all aspects are of the same order." UrT9A2
The more I learn that I am responsible for everything I experience, the clearer it becomes that anything I experience is not "because of" the world.
It used to be that everything I experienced seemed to be a reaction to the world, seemingly caused by it. I could not separate out myself from any of it, and any upsets or problems I was having were always tied into what was happening in life.
By taking responsibility and recognizing the secret of salvation, that I'm doing this all to myself, I let the world off the hook, so to speak, in that it is not really the "cause" of anything.
Yes sometimes things in the world happen which may trigger a certain response in me, but the triggering isn't because of the world, it's because I am triggerable. Which means something in me is unhealed, like a bruise or wound, which seems to be touched upon or poked at by worldly events. Up comes the old hurt, as if the world caused it, but it was already there, buried.
So over time, I see that if I am in any way upset, unhappy, angry, afraid, guilty or sinful etc... it's not really because of the world, the situation, or other people. It's because this is happening inside my mind, and it's really something to do with my own mental attitude or beliefs. There's some pain I'm healing or it's time for some emotional release or some other thing that's caused by me.
The more I "own" this, the less I try to pass it off as being the responsibility of the world. I stop blaming others for it. I stop accusing the world for it. I stop disowning it, through disassociation, and I stop projecting it away from myself onto the world in an attempt to be rid of it.
I am less in denial as I honestly admit that any and all fears and upsets are "my own stuff". If I'm angry and barking I have to admit this has nothing to do with anyone else. If I'm afraid I have to admit I'm using the world wrongly and reading meaning into it from within. Am I looking at the world through my ego or the holy spirit? It must be one or the other.
What this leaves me with, over time as I practice and reinforce this more, is a growing sense that if I am ever upset or unhappy in any way, it's because something in coming in between myself and the world. It's not because of the world. And it's nothing to do with who I really am behind it.
Let's say that behind this stuff there is a real me, which is always loving and light and shining with joy and happiness. All this self does is extend love and respond with love all the time. But overlaid on top of this self there is all this past stuff, ego baggage, lies and illusions, which comes in between me and the world.
If I look "through" this wall of lies, it changes how the world appears and I become lost in it, accusing it of sin. But if I get step back and get out of it, I become aware that this is just "my stuff" TEMPORARILY getting in the way.
If a situation arises and I become triggered and upset, and then I remember this is my own internal problem nothing to do with the situation, and I address this problem within myself through some kind of healing process, and it goes away, I'm then left looking at the situation "without" my reactions to it. And going back and forth like that shows me that, because my baggage was "additional" to the situation, it wasn't INHERENT to the situation. So it really wasn't anything to do with the situation in the first place.
This shows me that, really, the world is a forgiven "real world" of love and light, IF I can experience it without internal baggage. When I become caught up in my ego stuff, it's a state of *temporary* insanity. If I get lost in it, I need to get myself back out of it with honesty and healing and Help. And then I can return to happiness and truth again.
The more clear I become about this, discerning that if I'm not happy it's my own doing, and if I'm upset it's because of my own belief, and this is all what I'm doing to myself, I can become clearer and clearer that it really has nothing to do with the world. So then I stop looking outside myself for causes and reasons and sinners and people to blame or pin it on. I don't go into confusion as often as to "who" is doing what to whom.
If I'm cranky, having a bad day, upset, emotional, frustrated, afraid, whatever it is, I try as best I can to remember, this has NOTHING to do with the world. It has nothing to do with anyone else. This is entirely me doing my own thing to myself temporarily. And in that recognition there is also a kind of sense of security that, because it's mine, it's not really the world ganging up on me, or frightening me, or ACTUALLY attacking me.
So what we're doing here is we're learning that the world IS NOT attacking us. Bad things are not really happening. We're not being thrown around on some kind of emotional rollercoaster as a result of the world being shit. And in fact, events can still transpire with OR without me having an emotional snowball at the same time.
Which is interesting, beacuse now the Holy Spirit suggests in the midst of strife, where I think I "should" be upset "based on" what's happening externally, to "laugh". And so I force myself into a laugh and lighten up and step back. And at first it seems silly but I then I ask myself, why not? Why do I have to be upset in this situation? Do I really have to? Am I locked into that reaction? Maybe I can still go through the SAME situations, but not taking them at all seriously.
Someone's sick? Maybe I can be happy and laugh about it. Job sucks? Maybe I can rise above it. Scary things seeming to happen? Maybe I need to get out of my ego's "experience" of the world and get into a higher view.
And as I do, I find that there IS a higher way to experience what's happening. There is a happier, lighter, "does not believe the world is real" state of mind and perception and feeling, which is joyful and happy and non-serious, which I am cultivating. It's a different approach to the world, through the Holy Spirit, which is turning the course's truth into much more of an experience than a theory.
I don't HAVE to have a given amount of xysz upset as a result of a given scenario. I don't have to be immediately caused by the world to enter into a prescribed reaction. I don't have to just fall into temptation and go down with the ship. And this stepping back is such a globally applicable thing that it applies to the whole world.
So life is transitioning from... stuff happens, I am affected ... to... I'm not affected by anything external, I work on fixing up my inner experience, going within to the truth of me, and the rest is all just a matter of laughing at the world as nothing serious. I don't have to have the reactions the world says I should have. Because the world is not the cause of anything.
I am peeling myself away from its causality lies as I recognize I am the cause and it is the effect. I have power over the world, not the other way around. Isn't it quite amazing to discover that a world which used to "bully you" with its insane attacks, is finally recognized as causing NOTHING at all, is totally harmless and inert, is not a threat, does not upset you, and can bend to your holy will? :-)
As I uncover who I really am behind all of this ego attack/defense/distortion, a light is emerging which calls for greater peace and more frequent happiness. A way out of hell. I need only remove the blocks to the awareness of love's presence in me and the world will be revealed as a place of peace and love. Because without the projection of my self attack upon it, that's all that's real about it.
"THERE IS ***NO LIFE*** OUTSIDE OF HEAVEN. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion. At best ***it seems like life; at worst, like death.*** Yet both are judgments on WHAT IS NOT LIFE, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven (planet Earth, galaxies etc), only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions are but forms. Their content is never true."
A seed is sown. It sprouts. The plant grows tall. A bud appears. The bud opens and the flower blooms. The flower pollinates. The flower dies. The leaves wilt. The plant is dead. It crumbles, and all it becomes is the ground in which other seeds are sown.
THIS, is the fundamental nature of spacetime. Because you'll notice that the plant has to be in a constant state of CHANGE in order to be in ANY state. It cannot remain constantly the same. It has to always be transforming, growing, sprouting, adjusting, dying.
We like to say that new things are born, and old things die. This is a lie. There are not two states here, there is only one state. It is all death. All things here are changing, always, and they can never stop changing. Change is death, because only permanence is life. So even birth is death as well.
This is what stuff in this universe does, fundamentally, because everything here is based on the idea that "nothing ever stays the same." Which is the opposite of "everything lives forever."
We made it to be this way. It's a world based on the laws of death. Death is built into it. Not just the end result of death but even the sprouting and the flowering is a sign of death. It's death because it's not an eternal state. Change means the opposite of immortality, and therefore the opposite of life.
"Without the idea of death there is no world."
"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."
Even if things appear to be born, to grow, to transform, to seem to live and then to die, all of it is death. All of it is what happens when nothing ever lasts and all things are constantly coming and going.
Nothing here is ever still. The idea of something being constantly the same is totally alien. Nothing here ever perpetuates forever. Nothing here can hold onto any sense of stable identity for any amount of time. Nothing is ever quite here and now, it's always transitioning from the past to the future. And therefore nothing here has an identity, because nothing is stable or ongoing or inherently permanent.
There is no self in a world of shifts and changes. There is no reality in such a world either, because reality cannot be shifting and unstable and constantly in flux. That which is real must always be the same, reliable, trustable, constant and changeless. It's like a rock that you can rely on. But nothing in this world provides this stability, because it's an unreal world.
Human bodies in any stage of development, ranging from fetus to birth to children to teens to adults to those older of age, it doesn't matter. Every stage is just one more version of a state of death in a dream of death under laws of death. Death is change. Life is eternal changelessness. Even as a newborn arrives, the body is already not really there and not really anything.
If something can change from one thing into another, it cannot really be what it seems to be. If it were a seed, and now its a plant, and then its a flower, and then it is garbage, it is not any of these things. There is no permanent nature to it. It has no continual identity that is unwavering and consistent. And so every state it transitions through is an illusion of appearances.
This ultimately is why there is no world. Everything that shifts and changes is unreal and does not really have any real here-and-now existence. And the body is never really in a state of complete here-and-now. It seems to be here now, but it is transitioning from what it was to what it will be. It has not stopped to be here and now, it will not stay the same for even a nanosecond.
"The body does not really exist."
"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all."
"None of this existed before, nor does it actually exist now."
Fully in the holy instant, in the total present, there is no body and there is no world. The world and the body are a little bit removed from here and now. In fact, the world is the past. And the body is either a memory or an anticipation. There is a slight delay between here and where the body and world are. Even in terms of the body's functioning, there is a delay in the perceiving of the world's signals.
A flower is not a flower, because it was a stalk, and was a seed, and will be a bush, and will be dirt. It is not fully anything, and so it is fully nothing.
Space, in general, is really the idea that nothing fully exists anywhere. It was made to oppose God. God exists fully everywhere. Space, and its contents, which includes flowers and bodies and the planet, depicts the idea that God is not fully anywhere, nothing exists everywhere, and therefore God is dead and has been replaced by non-existence. This is why it is an attack on God, an opposition to the nature of the Kingdom.
Time is no better. Time suggests that everything must always be different and nothing can ever be permanent. This too is an attack on eternity. It constantly changes what is into what it was not, and back again, and on it goes, never stopping to be anything truly. And so time is the idea that you never fully exist, and have no identity, and there is nothing true about you.
Space-time is just a belief. It's an ego belief in separation. When the belief is gone, space time is gone. And without space time you cannot have flowers and bodies and planets. There is nothing to keep things separate. Nothing to hold the atoms apart. Nothing to keep time ticking. They just vanish and all their dream contents go with them. Because there is not really a world here. It's an illusion. A world of death does not exist because death is an illusion. And the world is already dead.
"Their death is sure and this alone is certain in their world. It is the ego's world because of this."
"But the world has none to offer. All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death."
"In this world, there appears to be a state that is life's opposite. You call it death."
"Yet each must fail and crumble and decay, because a form of death cannot be life, and what is sacrificed cannot be whole."
"Leave the world of death behind, and return quietly to Heaven. There is nothing of value here, and everything of value there."
"It is the world of birth and death, founded on the belief in scarcity, loss, separation and death"
"For this world is the opposite of Heaven, being made to be its opposite, and everything here takes a direction exactly opposite of what is true."
"All the world of pain is not His Will"
"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear (=death). And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God (life) could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him."
"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"
"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world"
"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."
"Freedom and peace and joy stand there, beside the bier on which they sleep, and call them to come forth and waken from their dream of death."
"He has overcome death because he has accepted life."
In ACIM there is a very strong theme, based on the Golden Rule, which describes a dynamic we are all supposed to adopt. It's the idea that giving and receiving are one.
"giving and receiving are the same" UrW225
In fact, that entire phrase appears SIX times in the course.
It is the backbone of the Golden Rule, which is a law of God, that what you do unto another YOU directly DO unto yourself. And this is on the basis that your brother - other people - are a PART OF YOU. And therefore, what you do to them, you literally are doing to the part of you that is SHARED with them.
But think about this for a moment, because it really makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Jesus presents it with what appears to be a nice voodoo-sounding phrase, which is laden with impossibilities:
"Therefore, His teaching begins with the lesson: To HAVE, GIVE all TO ALL." UrT6F13
How on earth, can you give everything, to everyone, and still HAVE everything? This defies normal logic, does it not? It does not make sense. Ask anyone in the world how this is possible, they will probably be stumped. It seems totally false.
If I give you my dinner, I will not have my dinner. If I give you my car, I will not have the car. If I give you my money, I will not have the money. HOW can it MAKE SENSE, to say that if I give you everything, I will HAVE IT ALL? Or even worse, that I'm supposed to give what I have ***TO EVERYONE***? How is that even possible?
If you are savvy and paying attention, you should conclude that these kinds of statements MAKE NO SENSE AT ALL. They seem absolutely nonsense. They are totally out of line with what we experience in the world. How can they be true?
The big thing is... Jesus seems to be telling us that it is not only POSSIBLE, but the true law of God, that things which seem impossible to us are the ONLY possibility. That there is some WEIRD way by which something that makes absolutely no sense, IS in fact the truth.
He is telling us that we're supposed to "love others as ourselves" - as we would love ourselves, and knowing that they ARE a part of ourselves. How can this make any sense though? And be careful not to go into denial here and just PRETEND that "you believe it" because it sounds all magical and spiritual.
It seems ONLY to make sense to say that whatever I GIVE, I WILL LOSE. Yes? Have you ever experienced otherwise? Anything you have ever given you have lost. You have had to compromise. You have never been able to keep what you have given to anyone. Why is Jesus telling you that it is some kind of divine law or dynamic or way of relating to others that you're supposed to adopt? What nonsense!
"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously." UrT1B18A
The thing is.. .. God's truth and laws are nothing like the laws of this world, or the dynamics of ego relationships, or the way by which physical objects interact and relate. What SEEMS to make sense to us here, is in truth absolutely nonsense. And that which SEEMS to be absolutely nonsense, is in fact the truth.
Now... that's a REALLY BIG CLAIM. Because now Jesus is telling us that something that seems to make NO SENSE, is in fact the truth! Nonsense is the truth?! Not only is it the truth, GOD HIMSELF apparently has a nature which makes NO SENSE.
Somehow, we're told, God gives everything to everyone, and yet keeps everything. And, supposedly we're supposed to adopt the same function, of giving everything to everyone, in order to have everything. And he even tells us that if we do NOT give it all away, we will have nothing. WHAT NONSENSE, SURELY?!
"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." UrT3G15
Here for example Jesus is saying not only are there souls created by God (hold that thought), but also that EACH of them knows God COMPLETELY. Which means, that I can have everything, and you can have everything, and we can both have everything simultaneously. WHAT THE F?! .... How can that make any sense at all?
How can you have everything, while I also have everything, without either of us having to compromise or share or take turns? But he's telling us that's how it is. And he describes this dynamic as miraculous - it IS a course in the miraculous, after all.
So here's the big issue. It is CLEARLY evident that all of the things which are true of God, and all of the dynamics of his creation and reality and the workings of his relationships and so on, SEEM TO MAKE ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.
They entail seemingly mind-bending possibilities, such as you handing over your entire inheritance and still having it all. Such that, in fact, when you give everything, the other person you gave it to now HAS IT ALL, AND YET... you ALSO have it all, which means the total amount HAS INCREASED. F me!
"God Himself created the law by creating BY it. And His Sons, who create LIKE Him, follow it gladly, knowing that the INCREASE of the Kingdom depends on it, just as THEIR creation did." UrT7C7
We're told that the entire Kingdom of God INCREASES, because when you GIVE ALL TO ALL, you still HAVE it all, and now everyone else HAS everything you gave, and now it is DOUBLED. So there is constant increase of everything real. This is a real dynamic in reality. How can this make any sense at all, that when you give stuff away IT MULTIPLIES?!!! What?
What it then boils down to, is that the ultimate truth is, God's nature, the nature of reality and oneness, what is possible, what is a fact, will always SEEM TO MAKE NO SENSE TO YOU. It will in fact seem like a collection of paradoxes. And it will seem like nonsense. And anything that is true WILL seem to be nonsense to your ego, and to your earthly way of thinking, and to the way that you REASON all your conclusions. They are all nonsense.
Here's the climax of my post. There is much debate about oneness and non-duality and so on. And people generally will say that whatever MAKES SENSE, must be the truth. Screw that! God has dynamics which DO NOT make sense to ordinary reasoning. Giving everything away in order to keep it, what?! What's given increases when you give it away, what?! It seems like nonsense. BUT IT IS TRUE.
So you should NOT be quite so certain, that God's reality and workings are supposed to fit nicely into what you think "makes sense". In fact, if you think that God's functioning makes sense based on ordinary reasoning, YOU ARE CONFUSED.
To normal reasoning, God's workings are supposed to look like paradoxes. They are SUPPOSED to look like contradictions. They are SUPPOSED to look like they make no sense at all and can't be true!! Because the reasoning being used to LOOK at it is itself BACKWARDS and false.
The people who thus claim ACIM is non-duality are using backwards reasoning to claim that "oneness" and "it's all God" and "you don't exist" makes perfect sense. That's a total fail. God is capable of BREAKING all your rules and TRANSCENDING all your little limitations and requirements.
ACIM clearly is teaching a transcendental thought system which, to the way that most people think, DOES NOT make sense. And this is supposed to reveal to you, at some point, that THE WAY YOU THINK IS WRONG. Not just what you think, but HOW. Not just the line of your thinking and the conclusions you come to that you THINK make sense, but the entire method and logic that you use to draw conclusions IS MISTAKEN. It is OPPOSITE to the nature of God.
This is why ACIM is not non-duality. Non-duality is far too absent paradoxes. It contains none of the mind-bending transcendence of laws and limits present in the Golden Rule. It has no recognition of the fact that God can do things which SEEM impossible, including the creation of multiple sons/souls who themselves are creators in reality, WITHOUT VIOLATING ONENESS. Which... you guessed it, seems like it would be "totally impossible" and "totally nonsense", BUT ISN'T.
So you should really get used to the fact that reality WILL NOT make sense to your typical reasoning. Your conclusions are all back to front and entirely within the separation-based thought system of the ego. Even non-duality and oneness are ego constructs resulting from a way of reasoning that doesn't even acknowledge the rule-breaking nature of God.
If you think this is not correct, think again. Think again about the facts we're being taught. We're being told to do something that seems TOTALLY COUNTER INTUITIVE. Which seems to run TOTALLY OPPOSITE to how your ENTIRE thought system works. To treat others in the knowledge that they are a part of you, such that what you do to them you do to yourself. That is not something that makes any sense to the world's thinking.
Don't be deceived that making sense of something means it is true. An entire system of thought can have internal consistency and seem to make total sense, and yet be entirely wrong. We are not here in the business of just being a sheep that follows the basic little conclusions the ego comes up with.
"It's all one therefore there can't be many"... nonsense.
"God couldn't create anything otherwise there would be separation" .... nonsense.
"If I exist then I must be an ego" ... nonsense.
"If there are many things in reality then reality is dualistic". ... nonsense.
The truth is FAR more mind-bending and waaaaaaaaay outside the box of how you think about things. If you have not encountered all the paradoxes and found a way to live with them, you are still squarely locked into the ego's thought system.
"ACIM is non-dualistic" is a conclusion drawn by egos following all of the ego's rules of separation-based reasoning, without showing the slightest sign of appreciation for God's PARADOXICAL nature, in which two completely opposite-seeming things can be simultaneously true, WITHOUT it being wrong.
If you think everything about God's nature has to sound like it makes nice tidy sense, you haven't even begun to recognize what God is like. God is a creator, and oneness DOES have real parts to it, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that fact at all. If YOU see a gross contradiction, YOU have not escaped the ego's mindset.
Continuing with the "it's bullshit" theme, let's look at how guilt is also bullshit.
Guilt is not atonement. It is not compensation. It does not make up for doing something wrong. It does not help the person who you hurt. It does not undo what happened. It does absolutely nothing to correct sin. It does not give a gift to the person you attacked. Guilt does not heal anyone.
It doesn't pay for or correlate to the amount of sin that you caused. It does not prove that you did not want to sin. It does not demonstrate that you have "repented". It does not equate to atonement or forgiveness. It does not indicate that you really did not want to do what you did. And it does not raise the overall level of happiness in the world.
Guilt is justified self-attack, resulting from a failure to forgive. But guilt has an even deeper motive.
When you sin, or believe in sin, it is very deliberate. Whatever act it is that you "did", you did it by choosing to do it. Make no mistake that in your ego belief, you wanted to attack, intended to attack, wanted to destroy God, desired to be opposed to God, were being murderous and hateful, wanted the consequences of your attack to be real, desired to overthrow God's will and power, wanted to affect God and make Him dead, and wanted to really believe strongly in sin being "reality" - that you really did bring about real "success" in your attempted separation. Sin is a belief that death is real.
Realize also that at every stage of separation from God, denial is used to try to make whatever is present go unconscious. It is an act of trying to get rid of yourself, because the whole purpose for the dream of death is to destroy yourself. You tried to get rid of yourself by getting rid of God, shutting Him out of awareness, making him unconscious to you. Then you are left staring sin in the face.
But this wasn't enough for you. Just "sinning" did not completely destroy you. So you had to keep on denying yourself, keep on making stuff go unconscious, and keep progressing towards a state of TOTAL DEATH. Sin demands death and will stop at nothing until it is enacted, because only when it is completely implemented will the belief in the permanence and non-reversibility of sin be completed.
So what you did next was make sin go unconscious, denied that sin had happened, and covered it over with another layer of illusion. On purpose. The purpose was to KEEP the sin real, not heal or reverse it, and to add another layer of denial to take you closer to death. You implemented this by INVENTING GUILT.
Guilt, then, is this state of mind in which you start to claim, and make illusions which appear to show, that you DID NOT WANT TO SIN. OOoo.... so ok, first you are believing in murder and death and killing God, and then.... you start to pretend that you did not want to do it, even though you did. Guilt therefore is your attempt to FAKE that you really felt remorseful, guilty, ashamed, that you somehow RECOGNIZED that you did something that you should not have done, and that now you somehow want to "take it back" or "wish that it had no consequences" or "yearn for re-uinion" or whatever else bullshit.
Guilt will position you as APPEARING to claim that you didn't want to sin and "wish" that it hadn't happened, BUT a WISH is not a WILL. The guilt will not actually *do anything* whatsoever to undo the sin. The guilt merely establishes that you believe heavily in the sin, because you think it has reality and truth to it, and you have NO intention whatsoever of undoing that or challenging it. The guilt is a total facade to try to make out that you feel sorry about it or didn't mean it, in a completely powerless, non-active, non-consequence-producing way, which has absolutely no effect on the sin itself or its consequences.
Realize also then that guilt or shame is completely self-serving, and also contains a component of feeling sorry for YOURSELF that, because you sinned, you now are going to lose out or be punished. Guilt is a reaction to sin, the opposite of forgiveness. Forgiveness will say you did not really sin and nothing was hurt and there's no reason to be upset. But guilt goes the other way, and says the sin was so real that you don't deserve forgiveness.
This lack of deserving or worthiness of being forgiven, then starts to establish your belief that you are "not good enough" or you don't deserve to be loved or you are unworthy of God or forgiveness. And this will create a belief in you that God couldn't love you, SHOULD NOT love you, and that you REFUSE to accept that He DOES love you, because really you have NO interest at that point in retracing your steps. The positioning of yourself as unworthy and unlovable, which comes across even to yourself as a kind of sorrowful, pityful, unfairly-treated sort of experience, is actually the total opposite in its purpose. IT IS FAKE. It's nothing less than an attempt to KEEP sin and guilt and do *NOTHING* about them to actually change them in any way.
Just as there is no such thing as real sin, there is no such thing as real guilt. All guilt is fake. A "guilty conscience" is a bullshit conscience. Guilt has been put on a pedestal by the ego to celebrate its success at murdering God, and to pretend that it is innocent. It wants someone else to be *responsible* for it, to accuse someone else of sin (even if that means they kill you), but only so that the "evidence" that YOU were the one who chose to make sin real is completely hidden. No-one would suspect you of murder if you APPEAR to be innocent.
No-one would accuse you of being the one who sins if you come across as having a facade of sweetness and niceness, guiltlessness, weakness, powerlessness, hopelessness, unworthiness, fearfulness, vulnerability, littleness, or ignorance. The ego's entire strategy for IMPLEMENTING DEATH is to first of all set up the belief in death by believing in sin, then enacting every step necessary to bring about death. It does this by attempting to strip you of all responsibility, all power, all will, all mind, and to portray you as a weak helpless VICTIM, who can't POSSIBLY have chosen to sin and who is now being completely unfairly accused by external sources. Those external sources will then come to be the pretend jduge and jury who deal a death sentence and inflict the final blow on your now completely helpless, victim-ridden self, to prove that YOU DID NOT SIN.
Who could suspect you of sin if you were just innocently, inevitably, unfairly attacked and mistreated, in such a way that is destroys you and APPEARS to be against your will? It is a fake death. You are faking your own death by pretending to not believe in sin when you still believe in deep down. People who APPEAR innocent are NOT INNOCENT. They are very filled with sin and guilt. The fake innocence facade is a perfect disguise. Guilt is the 2nd step in implementing it, and the belief in deserving punishment which comes from guilt lays the groundwork for implementing the 3rd step - fear of punishment, which is also 100% bullshit.
So you see, guilt is not genuine. It does not help anyone or correct anything or atone for anything to be guilty. It just keeps all of the consequences of what you did and protects them behind layers of denial. If you were really, really interested in "atoning" for sin, you would actually take action steps which would UNDO THE SIN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. You wouldn't be like, oh I guess you have to live with the consequences now, nothing I can do about it. Instead, you'd be choosing MIRACLES to correct and undo all of the side-effects of your wrong decision, with Holy Spirit. And that means lifting all of the signs of attack off of yourself and anyone who was involved.
Going into guilt also is usually SUPPORTED by the person that you attacked, whereby they feel justified in proving you are guilty, leaping at the opportunity to condemn you, and failing to forgive entirely. To hold you condemned in guilt for your sin, the other person thinks they are righteous and justified but they are just as much enacting bullshit. It does not help anyone to be guilty. What the attacked person should be doing is finding you INNOCENT, forgiving you, overlooking the belief in sin, PROVING that they cannot be hurt by you by disallowing any effects in their mind or emotions or body, and therefore teaching you that YOU DID NOT attack them and are innocent.
Only when there is "redemption", ie both parties are lifted UP closer to the light, closer to forgiveness, closer to truth, closer to the undoing of sin and guilt, that is the ONLY real form of atonement. If you're not approaching the atonement then you're going into the ego, no matter who you are or what side the victim/victimizer drama you fall on.
Guilt is a lie. A big fat stinking lie. It's just another ego ILLUSION designed to LOOK LIKE you gave a crap about sinning, while doing nothing about it, using it as JUSTIFICATION to attack yourself even more and put yourself down and destroy yourself as a SACRIFICIAL OFFERING to the person you supposedly did this to. Dying is not atonement. Self destruction is not atonement. Guilt is not atonement.
Another way many people fall into this is by believing that if they hurt a loved one, they should be GUILTY in order to show that they are LOVING. They will go into guilt-ridden justifications and compulsions to try to "make it up" to the person. They will do housework out of guilt. They will buy make-up gifts out of guilt. They will "owe" the person something. They will try to do stuff to compensate and "balance out" the offense, to try to win back favor. This is not love! It is so often believed to be what it means to give a shit or to love someone. IT IS ATTACK. It's like rubbing salt in the wound.
All guilt is bullshit. We need to look at this and admit to it and stop using this EGO WEAPON as a disguise to pretend that we didn't want to sin. We did want to sin. Every death celebrates that fact. If we truly give a shit, we will undo guilt, undo sin, undo death, undo ILLUSIONS of consequences that we think we caused, recognize our PERMANENT INNOCENCE, and return to God. Guilt is arrogant. You ARE worthy of love and forgiveness.
There is a certain leap of faith required in learning to trust and work with Spirit. It's like opening up to trusting that something completely out of sight and out of control is going to be there when you need it. We are completely unaccustomed to seeing situations this way and it requires a lot of TRUST.
Since we have been relying on our own self all this time, on our ego intellect, our own abilities, our knowledge etc.... we are very used to needing to have a sense of personal confidence in a situation in order to proceed with an action.
So we'll have to make sure that we're in the right mood, we have to have all the ducks in a row, we need reassurance that this is the right thing to do, and we feel that we need to kind of talk ourselves into the right frame of mind to 'perform'. We have to ready ourselves, and we won't move ahead to take actions until we have gathered enough ego information and enough reliance on our own capabilities. And to create something of quality simply threatens us to have to perform at the top of our game, which is nerve-wracking.
But the problem with this is that it shuts out Spirit. The problem is, since we are experiencing ourselves as disconnected from Spirit, we keep having to rely on ourselves, depend on ourselves, accumulate our own skills, develop our own prowess, acquire our own knowledge, and build ourselves up to try to handle situations. But this puts all of our sense of TRUST squarely in our own ego abilities. Trusting our own ego produces FEAR which undermines any sense of reliability.
Spirit doesn't work the same way the ego works. Spirit is much more spontaneous. Spirit is also extremely capable and unlimited and doesn't suffer from the inadequacies, limitations, insecurities and difficulties that our ego self has to deal with constantly.
Spirit is actually ready to fly right now, right away, without any preparation. God is immediately on hand and ready to heal, right now. Holy Spirit is immediately on hand and ready to teach the highest of truths, right now. They don't need time to get ready. They don't have to figure out what to do. They don't need to get themselves into the right mood or to be on their best form or to have put aside as many fears as possible in order to take some decisive action.
So what this means is, if you want to work with Spirit, such as to express Holy Spirit's Voice or to teach from a higher place or to perform a healing miracle, there has to be a certain amount of 'blind faith' and a different kind of trust. This trust quite literally means that you really need to actually START taking steps to move forward and express, knowing that Spirit is going to show up immediately and be there to help you.
It actually kind of requires you to be much more spontaneous and UNPREPARED. (Who knew that being unprepared could lead to greater confidence when trusting Spirit?!) And even if you feel unprepared and uncertain and afraid and doubtful about whether YOU can pull off whatever it is that you're about to attempt - teaching, healing, writing, whatever.... even though you do not know what the heck you are going to say, even though do not know how the heck you're going to 'do this', you have to actually start doing it with faith that Holy Spirit is right with you in the MOMENT.... and that as you begin to 'flow', all of Heaven is going to rush in to support and help you.
There are people who receive healing miracles, let's say for example they have a broken arm or something. The person prays for them and healing begins, but the person still believes they don't have a healing, and the arms seems to be a problem. But then the healer tells the person, MOVE YOUR ARM. And the person moves their arm, and AS they move their arm, healing comes to the arm.
There are countless examples of this in Jesus's miracles where he tells someone to actually DO something, to do something that they supposedly currently cannot do, so that WHEN they attempt to do it, with some faith that it will BECOME possible, their willingness and openness is what actually brings the miracle into them and healing occurs, AS they ACT AS IF they are healed. For example Jesus might've commanded 'get up and walk', and a paralyzed person who could not walk, would at least ATTEMPT to get up and walk, with enough trust and faith that perhaps it COULD work, and then as they get up, suddenly they can walk. But not until they started trying to do so.
So you see, Spirit is very immediate and becomes a part of the flow as and when you are willing to actually take some action on faith. You will not be prepared. You will not be ready. You will not know how you're going to do this. You'll get to the very limits of the edges of your own ego abilities and all the information you could possibly have gathered and all the preparedness you could've possible done, and still there is another step needed. To trust Spirit, you have to take the leap. You have to ACT AS IF miraculous things can happen, ACT AS IF healing is going to flow when you say it will, ACT AS IF Spirit is going to back you, even if right now you don't feel even connected to Spirit. And Spirit will rush in and be right there to support you.
For example, I am writing a book and I have procrastinated on this for a long time because I kept feeling that I wasn't quite ready, or in the right mood, or I just wasn't prepared. I felt like I needed to get MYSELF into the best possible frame of mind, the most purified readiness, the most spiritual of mindsets etc, in order to be ABLE to pull off this writing. And I could never really rise up to the occasion. I couldn't get myself into the 'heights' of what I knew needed to be written down, and was just always riddled with insecurities and excuses and fears and worries about how was *I* going to write this and how was *I* going to be able to know what to say or to say it correctly etc. So I avoided it.
But then what broke, was that I came to a place of at least realizing it's not going to be me doing this on my own. It's not going to come FROM me, its going to come from Spirit. And I'm going to write it down, but I'm not going to know WHAT to write. I'm not going to be able to prepare for it or study for it or have everything all organized to try to get a sense of confidence about it. Instead, what its going to call for is for me to actually sit down, hands on the keyboard, and to be in that moment WITH Spirit, inviting Spirit to be the one to write, and to then just start doing it. Just GO. And that means trusting something totally outside of myself, totally beyond my own abilities, beyond my mind, beyond any personal readiness. And in that moment, in the now, in the present 'flow' of it, Spirit is right there and started talking, and I started typing, and out it came.
Surprisingly easy once it got going, but I'd avoided it so much because my mind, my ego mind, my separate mind, couldn't see past itself. It couldn't get outside of its own box or its own reliance on "I must do this all by myself". The mind needs to be handed over to Spirit. Spirit is meant to be in charge of how the mind is used. And this really does mean actually surrendering this constant reliance on independent self, on separately having 'the power' or 'the skills' to do whatever. To be Spirit-backed we have to stop being so independent and so self-reliant and trust something that we don't even seem to have any control over, a source of confidence and teaching and creation that is beyond our own self. And nothing can prepare you for that. You have to just do it and try to trust that you're going to be backed up, and you will be.
This is why development of trust is so important. Learning to trust that Spirit has got your back, that Spirit can heal, that Spirit can do miracles through you, and that Spirit can help you no matter whether you have everything under control or not. It's all about learning to be part of a TEAM, instead of going solo all the time. You don't have to do this all by yourself, and you DO NOT have to find the confidence and prowess to pull off some amazing feat of expression all on your own. It's much easier to let Spirit do the heavy lifting, if you can let go enough to take a shot in the dark. And that's what it's like often, just blindly assuming that Spirit will do its thing when you take action to begin the flow.
I'm glad to say I got a whole chapter written, once I finally stopped fearing (depending on my own strength) and trusted that I just had to 'show up' in the present moment and be ready and willing and that Spirit would do the rest. It can really be daunting to have this kind of trust, to trust in something you can't see and doesn't even seem to be there until the very moment that you're having the faith that it will show up. Something outside your control, outside your mind.
Our minds are supposed to be connected to Spirit in this way. They're not supposed to be separated off and trying to rely on themselves. We're not supposed to be bolstered up, or turned into 'models of success', or superheroes. We're not meant to be thoroughly educated and learned. We're not meant to develop this extraordinary prowess at doing something amazing all by ourselves. This is not how the mind is meant to operate in isolation. It's meant to be connected to and a RECEIVER of a flow of spiritual power from Spirit. It's meant to be in service to Spirit. It's meant to receive God and to extend God, not to come up with its own separate power or its own separate abilities. Transitioning over from self-reliance to God-reliance is a tough challenge and goes entirely against our entire ego-centric way of living, but it's what we're called to do.
It adds a whole new level of meaning to "let go and let God".
I want to tell you about a way in which I used my persona to destroy myself, and how I am learning to overcome it. This was actually a very very painful long-term lesson, so it is hard to write about.
I grew up as a highly sensitive person, who experienced everything in an intense, overwhelming, overpowering way. In order to try to cope with this, I developed the use of my persona. The persona is the side of the ego split-mind that focuses on specialness, goodness, success, social acceptability, favoritism, pleasantness, etc. So I went very strongly into 'people pleasing'.
What I'd do, quite automatically/unconsciously, was I'd put on this facade, literally a 'false face', where I'd smile a lot, become very quiet, try to appear pleasant, try not to upset anyone, look unthreatening and harmless, as though 'showing this' to people would deflect them and therefore protect me. It was my attempt to be invisible. This included a really intense repression of myself. Basically I was using this to hide my Self.
In any public situation I would put on this persona mask and make it appear that nothing was wrong, that everything was good and normal, nothing to see here, being nice to everyone and don't say a single word, and not get hurt. But there were many times this blew up in my face.
Once I was on a bus heading into town and it stopped at the hospital. A man got on the bus and sat nearby. He said that he had just gotten out of the hospital from his 3rd heart attack. This alone was enough to trigger me to hide myself even more than I already was. So I smiled a lot. He, having just gone through life-changing events, started up a conversation with me, which was horrifying. He saw I was smiling and thought that it meant I was happy, and therefore wanted to know what my 'secret to a happy life' was. This put tremendous extra pressure on me (as I saw it) and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. To do this, I intensified even more this persona of hiding myself, which was an attempt to reject him, smiling even more, being very tight-lipped, and just wanting the ordeal to end. I just became more and more quiet. For some reason I seemed to just do this as an automatic defense that I'd learned.
Once I got off the bus, I was just about ready to hurl. I put so much effort into psychologically rejecting the man, and hiding myself, that I felt literally sick. I reached/retched uncontrollably for several minutes before I could calm down. This put a huge damper on my day and was somewhat traumatic. But this wasn't the only effect of this.
See, when I used my persona to hide my real Self, this wouldn't just mean rejecting the other person, it would mean rejecting me. The more I tried to shut them out, the more I shut myself out. I had no idea I was doing this. But what I did know was how it felt. Absolutely horrible. I would come away from bad experiences like this, which occurred many many times in all kinds of public scenarios, with a feeling of tremendous tension in my head from intense embarrassment/shame/humiliation. I'd get a horrible headache, but even worse, I would feel deeply, deeply, deeply hurt. This hurt was more intense and horrible than ANY other emotion I have ever felt for any reason. Psychologically it was like I had experienced every single form of rejection, abandonment, hurt and pain all at once. The absolute only way to move past this was to have a huge cry.
So, as a result of putting on a persona and pretending to be someone I was not, regardless of whether that fake self seemed to be 'nice' or 'kind' or anything anyone values, the only way I could appear to be literally 'someone else' was to horrendously suppress, deny, reject and abandon myself. I thought I was using separation 'against' other people to separate myself from them in order to protect myself, but this separation did nothing but hurt me.
I also had a huge fear of other people judging me, and a fear of rejection. What I didn't realize was that each time that I tried to put on a persona mask of nice, likable, happy-smiley, quiet or whatever, I was buying into an ego thought system. And by doing that, I was taking a gamble. Either I would 'get' the result I wanted which was that people would be deflected and ignore me and I would pass by 'safely', OR other people would attack me or pressure me in some way and I'd end up suffering. By believing in the potential of being seen to be accepted or liked or pleasing to others, I was also simultaneously believing in the 'potential' that others would judge me. I wanted them to judge me favorably, which would feed my 'goodie goodie' persona, which meant I had to believe in judgement. And because I believed in judgement, I lived in fear of it.
So I thought I had an issue of being afraid of judgement from others. A fear of rejection. And this fear of rejection cycled around in a vicious cycle, compelling me to want to NOT be rejected, and therefore to put on a smiley persona face in order to get other people to not reject or hurt me. But of course that merely put me closer in touch with rejection and judgement, if not by others then much moreso by myself. The amount of rejection I experienced from myself TO myself as a result of self-suppression, was far worse than anything anyone else did. So this strategy really didn't actually work, even though I kept trying to use it, and each time it got worse. Over time I just became more and more uptight and quiet and withdrawn from society, eventually jobless and depressed and deeply unhappy and unable to see a way to be different.
Over time, through various avenues of healing, not least of which was the support by my wife who showed up right when I was at my worst, I gradually have learned about the dynamics of what I do to myself versus what I thought other people were going to do to me. I learned painfully and slowly to see that I only saw other people as 'attacking judging strangers' because *I* had already attacked them first. Through the years of working with A Course in Miracles and various other things I've come to very gradually realize exactly why my use of the persona is completely self-defeating and does not help at all. All the persona does is section off everything I think is wrong with me into a tidy little box and shove it away into the dark recesses of my mind, later to surface as pain and suffering.
Yet, over time I've still held onto a belief that I am mainly afraid of rejection or judgement, rather than realizing that my attempt to use the persona is what actually causes the problem. Every time I try to do what other people would want, or make myself like able, or appease others, or focus on what other people like or would buy, or whether I'd get approval, or showing only the parts of myself that I think are acceptable to others, this AUTOMATICALLY creates a fear of rejection and judgement. Because really, by using the persona (i.e. wanting to feed it by creating a self-image/persona of being pleasing) I am actually already rejecting myself and judging myself. Why would I want to put a facade on myself to cover up my True Self? Why would I want to soften the blow of someone else's attitude by abandoning myself first, so that I then need a defense?
The truth that is starting to reveal itself to me now, is that if I actually just be true to myself, and completely drop all need to use the persona to be 'likable' or 'acceptable to others' or 'what they want' etc, I actually stay in a STRENGTH and a authenticity that empowers me and completely overrides the apparent need, either for a fake persona self, or for a defense against rejection. And so this reveals what really is underneath all this.
If I reject myself FIRST, I will then believe I have to use a false self-image-persona to show other people a version of me that they will like, so that they won't point out how shitty I am. Once i'm in persona mode, I cannot escape the fear of rejection because I've already rejected myself and more will be forthcoming through the projection of it.
So the task in front of me now is, to learn to accept myself fully, to be true to the truth in me, to open up to reveal and expose who I really am, to 'let loose' without any shame or censorship, to stop trying to hide myself for any reason, and to basically 'be myself'. But it also HAS to mean, a willingness to stop putting on a show, to stop presenting myself in a fake way, to stop trying to 'appear' likable, to stop people-pleasing, to stop trying to feed my persona image, to stop trying to get everyone to approve of me, and to just drop that whole pile of horseshit. I only enter into a perception that I need 'protection' when I have already judged myself and have seen myself as vulnerable. I am not vulnerable if I am truth-filled. And I don't need to please anyone.
So the key to FREEDOM in all this, is awakening into Holy Spirit's view of me, in acceptance of the truth of me, and in completely surrendering BOTH the fear of rejection AND the attempt to 'win approval' through the persona. By stopping using a persona this solves every problem that ever arose out of its use. What I thought was helping me was hurting me deeply. And stopping the use of the persona stops the creation of the shadow (pain) as well.
Standing firmly in who I AM, brings all of the certainty, strength, assertiveness, disregard for other's opinions, invulnerability, and empowerment, that seemed to be MISSING when I chose to use the ego. And which could never be fulfilled by using the ego. Because once again, it's a case of seek and do not find. "I don't have to worry about what to say or what to do knowing He goes there with me" - ACIM, i.e. I am in my true self and my true self is completely uninterested in pretense or rejection.
Who knew - trying to please people makes you rejected!!!
Learning to love myself more. Learning to drop the ego more. Learning to be what I am, instead of trying to be something I'm not. And in that, there is no fear.
Consider the idea of a script for your life which you fully planned, consented to, and passionately wanted, before you came into this lifetime. Imagine that you organized and orchestrated every single interaction. You created agreements with every single person you would ever meet and you asked them to do to you every single thing they were to do, with which they would comply. Imagine also that only what you planned would happen and nothing else would happen - except you would also forget that you planned it.
ACIM does speak to this, in that it says that nothing happens to you that you have not asked for, and that you get *everything* you ask for, and that you get *nothing* that you did not ask for. It also speaks to this when it says that nobody dies without his own consent. NOBODY DIES WITHOUT THEIR OWN CONSENT.
At some point, somewhere, whether it's in this life or before this life, but somewhere, for ACIM to be TRUE on this matter, you ****MUST**** have consented to every single thing that has ever happened in your life. ABSOLUTELY ALL OF IT. Not only consented to it but created it, asked for it, wanted it, designed it and even set it in motion YOURSELF. Not by any outside force or coercion or ANY amount of victimhood whatsoever. (this is somewhat described in the "song of prayer" pamphlet as well)
Remember the Course also says the key to salvation is this - that you are but doing this to yourself.
IF the Course is telling the truth (and it is), then everything that has ever happened in 'your life' has been exactly designed by and asked for by you. All of it. So this takes quite a lot of 'fessing up', which also means your life must become totally void of victimhood.
If you look now, and you look back at some things that you recognize as having 'happened' in your life, particularly events which involved people where they seemed to influence you in ANY way, and in particular in what *looked like* any kind of negative way, then you need to now reinterpret that. If you can allow yourself to ACCEPT that you planned and asked for every single detail of what occurred, then a few insights must arise:
1) You have to realize there was a REASON WHY you planned what you did, and that reason was FOR YOUR GOOD. Every single thing that you designed must have been for an intended purpose of, ultimately, leading you to a spiritual awakening. Every single 'lesson' or scenario that you put together, MUST have been intended to HELP YOU in some way.
2) With the information that all events are helpful, this must then shed a new light on all of these tragic past experiences, to show you that SOMEHOW, whatever happened, and no matter how it looked at the time, somehow that event and that person were ONLY doing what was in your script and they performed it perfectly. Therefore they weren't REALLY a victimizer. And you weren't REALLY a victim. At the time, yes, you believed you were, but here's the thing. You only believe you are a victim when you are UNAWARE that you are a script-writer.
3) This now gives rise to the insight that every way you've experienced being a victim in the past, was a result of a lack of awareness on your part, in which you experienced something designed to HELP YOU but interpreted it initially as HURTING YOU. This symbolically is the same thing as being loved by God but believing that you're actually being attacked by God. Ie it seemed against you rather than for you. So all of the ways that you STILL hold onto past events with a grievance, thinking of them as 'wrong' or 'unwanted' or 'bad' or 'unpleasant' or whatever, blaming the other person, all of that INTERPRETATION of events came about ONLY because you did not remember that you wrote the script. It looked like you didn't ask for what happened, which, IF it were true, WOULD justify your anger and hurt and offense. And that means, you need to to be more truly forgiving, ultimately accepting the atonement.
4) This now helps you to see that, ultimately, everyone involved is INNOCENT, because nobody has done anything outside of the contract and nobody ELSE is responsible for having done anything TO YOU against your will. Your will is embedded in your script which YOU WROTE, so even if you now find yourself unaware of this and experiencing victimhood, YOU DID STILL WRITE IT. So you can hardly blame the other person. So now you need to go look at all the unhealed grievances that you still haven't let go of, and which you still interpret in a victim consciousness that says "I didn't want this to happen", "this wasn't fair", "they did it to me against my will" etc.... you HAVE to reinterpret that.
5) This now leads us to TAKING RESPONSIBILITY. This might seem like a step which places a shitload of guilt on your shoulders, blaming yourself for what happened, bla bla bla. That's ego. What it really means is actually a doorway to FREEDOM and RELIEF. You see, if you scripted all this, and you asked xyz person to do what they did, and you can admit that and own that fact, then you can let them off the hook. You can realize they did not victimize you. YOU victimized you. You hired them to carry out your wishes. If you are responsible for writing your script (and maybe you had help on the other side to do this gently/realistically etc), then you can no longer blame anyone else for what happens, in the past or in the future. It also means you can no longer view experiences as unwanted, bad, against you, unhelpful, hurtful, something to resist, as an attack, or any other form of victimization. That means, yes, whatever they did, whatever happened, you wanted it and got what you wanted, FOR A REASON, to HELP YOU to wake up.
6) Having now admitted to this responsibility, and started to access the sense of RELIEF and freedom that this gives you... because dropping the whole victim drama is a RELIEF from suffering, you can now enter into GRATITUDE. You cannot be grateful to an attacker while you think you didn't ask them to attack you. But you can be grateful to them when you realize you DID ask them to AND you can turn your mind to look at the situation as helpful/for you. It's like looking for the silver linings. What's happening is NOT a terrible tragedy or a horrible event gone wrong. That's illusion. What's happening is trying to help you to be steered in the right direction or to keep you safe or to help you learn who you are or to guide you to remembering whats true or to learn to love and care etc.. whatever the purposes are in your plan for spiritual "growth."
7) Finally then you have to learn to change the 'direction' or angle from which you look at events. If you're responsible and everything is for your good, then you need to learn to 'take it' that way. Look for the helpfulness. Look for how it is 'positive'. Look for the silver lining, the learning, the opportunity its giving you. Look at how it is making you grow or what you're learning from it. Ultimately then there is only one LESSON, in the form of all lessons. And it's this. You need to overcome the NEED for the lesson by recognizing the truth, owning up to the responsibility of who you really are (owning your innocence), entering into the mindset of the Holy Spirit which shows you that you are never a victim, and reclaiming your FREEDOM from the dramas of the ego. Ultimately this translates to you OVERLOOKING (forgiveness) all of the ways that you get LOST in the 'game' that you set up, so that you literally are no longer CAPABLE of playing the game. Once the truth is revealed, you can never forget it. And so you no longer need to create these dramas ever again.
Remember, nothing happens to you against your will. There are no accidents. Nothing happens that wasn't planned at some point in time BY YOU. Nothing is being forced upon you against your will.
You might find yourself 'inside a lesson' in this lifetime and feeling stuck in it, victmized by it, limited by it. But you might not also remember the benefits of this situation. Maybe it has indirect effects on the spiritual growth of other people. Maybe by suffering a sickness you HELP other people to learn compassion. Maybe by being afraid you give others an opportunity to learn to nurture. We're all this big soup of roleplay and side-effects and responses.
Also let's just finish by saying you're not stuck with a lesson. Holy Spirit WANTS you to learn the lesson. The answer to it is not being hidden from you. Often Holy Spirit tells me, in the midst of some frustration and confusion, "its a lesson". So them I'm like.. hmm... what is this lesson, what am I meant to learn? And it's not like Holy Spirit is withholding the answer, but I need to experientially becoming willing to accept some measure of truth in order to complete the need for the situation. The lesson may not be obvious.
In fact a recent lesson for me was to learn to DROP the idea of miraculously healing a problem with my eye, so that i would let go of false ideas about control and spiritualization of my ego, even though this outcome seemed at the time to be totally the opposite of what I thought I needed to do. Holy Spirit eventually revealed, when I was at the readiness to admit to it, that the whole point was to help me to 'see' the truth - that I was trying to do/be something beyond what is asked of me.
Also I can't begin to tell you how much I have learned compassion and a heart-opening as a result of various challenges that a person close to me has been through. For which I'm grateful, even though it sounds 'sick' to say you're grateful for sickness.
Holy Spirit said to me, "there is a plan". I'm learning to trust that more. And thus learning to take responsibility for my part in that plan, and thus relinquishing all of the support for victim mentality and blame. Even now as I start to look back at past events in 'this new light' I can see that I need to become grateful to people that I thought were against me or who I thought did the wrong thing. They were only helping and they only DID help. I just didn't recognize it.
Ultimately you want to get to where you have no more need for writing scripts, having learned everything they offer. Then you are free from the cycle of reincarnation forever.
The ego has built some very terrible things which we regard as extremely real. These include pain, disease/sickness, fear, death, emergency, intensity, attack, and separation. When these things seems to be happening, the ego is sending out a very strong message to us.
The message says, "you should stay the hell away from this it's really bad". (Beware, this advice may be misleading ;-)
Pain quite literally tells you in an experiential way that it is something you do not want. And nobody wholeheartedly wants to be sick or dying. And attack can be particularly upsetting. The ego keeps reinforcing the idea:
"This is really really terrible and it's really happening and you should want it to stop" (Beware again, this ego advice may not work ;-)
And so typically that is the reaction that we have. If I've got pain, I want it to go away. If someone is attacking someone, I want them to stop doing it. If I am sick or diseased, I want to get rid of it.
The trouble is, these attitudes... These reactions... These ways of experiencing these 'temptation', is precisely the OPPOSITE of what will actually HELP the situation. The ego's counsel is ALWAYS completely opposite of the truth and leading you down exactly the wrong path that results in things becoming far worse. What it claims will save you, and what it claims will heal you, and what it claims will fix the situation, DOES NOT, and so you seek for but you do not find peace.
So let's look at the opposite, which the ego warns you against.
If you are in pain, love the living FUCK out of it. Welcome it. Don't resist it. Drop all desire to get rid of it. Don't make it wrong. Don't judge it as bad or a mistake or something that shouldn't be there. And in particular, stop being a victim and OWN the CHOICE to put it there.
Instead of being a passive victim of it, instead be proactive in choosing how you wish to perceive it. It is also useful to extremely exaggerate how much you WELCOME the problem. For example:
"I am choosing this pain (or whatever the thing is)."
"I really wanted to have this and this is what I've received."
"This pain is absolutely beautiful and lovely and I love it with all my heart."
"I am the one who chose this pain and I've done a really excellent job of choosing it."
"This pain is absolutely amazing I totally love it and welcome it and want it."
"I allow this pain to stay for as long as it wants to, it is completely free to do so and I don't even want to get rid of it or make it go away."
"I feel really happy about this pain being there, and I am truly grateful that it has shown up just like I planned."
"I love this pain. This is the best pain I've ever created. This pain makes me completely happy because it is exactly how I wanted it to be and it has met all my conditions."
"I accept this pain and allow it to remain."
"I let go of resisting this pain or trying to make it go away."
"I let go of labelling this pain as negative or a fault or something I did wrong, there is no guilt in it at all. I am completely innocent."
"I surrender all attack on this pain and give it to you Holy Spirit."
"I am open to being completely still with this pain and simply observing it without any desire to change it or judge it."
"I surreneder this pain to you God, please heal it in my mind and I gently let it go to you now."
Notice that we're having an ATTITUDE which is completely the opposite of what the ego says your attitude SHOULD be. When something goes wrong, the ego puts it into the hierarchy of illusions and tells you exactly what kind of severity of reaction this calls for. If you let it, you'll react according to this hierarchy and be a victim. So the ego says this pain is not something you can possible want - that YOU are not something you can possibly want - so go ahead and WANT IT, to defy the ego and reverse its assertions.
The keys here are you need to include:
1. Complete ownership for having created this
2. Complete ownership for actively still creating it and wanting to
3. Gratitude for having created exactly what you wanted
4. Openness and welcome that is heartfelt
5. Allowing and accepting whatever it, letting it BE without you changing it
6. Surrender of all of the reactions you were having about it and all the ways you were making it out to be something wrong
7. Willingness to let it be free so that you can be free
8. Offering it up to Holy Spirit now that you have LET GO OF IT and have stopped trying to attack it or make it wrong or get rid of it yourself
9. Willingness to ASK Holy Spirit/Jesus/God to now heal it and take it from you
10. Actually DOING SO and letting go of it in peaceful surrender.
To the ego this is total madness. It will tell you if you try to accept or allow something that's clearly bad or awful, that you have regarded as real and upsetting, you will just condone it and keep it. This is not true. It will tell you that you should stop even trying to 'live with it' because if you do, you literally will be stuck keeping it and have to live with it. This is also not true.
The reason the ego's attitude is false is because there are a whole shitload of attitudes that you are having which are REINFORCING the pain and making it worse. In fact, you are the one who put it there. But while you keep REACTING to its appearance, which typically is "I want to get rid of it because it shouldn't be there", that just makes it worse and keeps it. When you lift away all of those reactions and layers of condemnation, judgement, guilt and wrongfulness, you are stripping away layers of 'making it real' and holding it in your mind, which actually FREES YOUR MIND from the illusions surrounding this. So you're actually undoing your reactions, seeing innocence and harmlessness in the thing, and thus getting yourself to the point where you can LET GO of it. You can't be free while you won't let IT be free.
The reason for this is that whenever there is pain or suffering or sickness, it is because there's some part of you that you do not LOVE. Some part of you where you see guilt or wrongness or non-acceptance or sinfulness. So that part of you that you refuse to accept HURTS and turns into sickness. This may or may not produce physical sickness but often it does. So you're not really dealing with your body being sick, you're dealing with your mind being sick - some part of YOU (not the body) needs love. So as you look at the body sickness and you keep launching counter-attacks and defenses against it, all you're doing is hurting the part of you that hurts, even more. That only compounds it and keeps it. Plus it makes you very unhappy because the ego's default reaction to pain and sickness is unhappiness. And yet the fact is, it is a choice to BE unhappy by not loving a part of yourself that MAKES the sickness appear in the first place.
Do you really HAVE to be unhappy and afraid and guilty and lost and hopeless 'because of' a pain or sickness? Do you not have any choice in the matter? At the very least, even if changing your attitude about it does not have any effect on making the sickness BETTER at all, physically, at least you will FEEL GOOD instead of feeling like shit. It IS far better for you to choose to be happy because of sickness than to add a layer of feeling shit on top of the physical sensations or symptoms. Having a headache is one thing, but also having a headache and feeling depressed and unhappy is a whole extra layer of despair. You don't HAVE to have that experience. And what you might find is, if you CHOOSE to have a happier experience about what is happening - a more welcoming, loving, open, allowing experience, then maybe, just maybe, your body will fall into line and actually HEAL to match your change in attitude. Since the physical sickness is just a symptom/projection of your unhealed attitude about yourself, internally, changing your attitude MUST change the projection.
The more support for sickness you can strip away the better, and all of your default negativity and victimhood about being sick DOES compound and support and reinforce it. What happens when you withdraw that support? How can a sickness have a strength, when you weaken it by withdrawing all of your mind's support for it? Make no mistaken, seeing yourself as victimized BY sickness or BY attack or BY someone dying or whatever, that very much strengthens the EFFECTS of that thing happening. Choosing to be happy and loving toward it, instead, which is completely against the ego and does take some WILL (affirmations help too), CANCELS OUT your belief in the effects. When you deny that something has affected you, the cause is undone and you are HEALED.
Jesus DOES ask us in ACIM to cancel out all of the effects of things in order to undo them and to DEMONSTRATE that you are invulnerable. You can't do that if you insist that there's no way you can love or be happy about whatever seems to have gone wrong. You've got to start somewhere. Worth a try?
How much of your life have you spend in the default reactionary space of feeling shitty about bad things that are happening? Has it worked? How much effort have you spent fighting against things that have gone wrong and failed and that are malfunctioning? Has that really helped at all? It has not worked. Try something radical. Try the exact opposite way of dealing with it and see what happens. Holy Spirit can amplify the effects of your willingness to SEE YOURSELF AS WHOLE AND HEALED, because it is in line with the truth.
The only thing you need to be wary of is the ego turning this into a reason to become SARCASTIC, which means that you're saying one thing and believing another. You need to find some amount of belief and meaning in what you're affirming. And because you're trying to UNDO the beliefs you already put in place in your negative reactions, it may take some effort of will and persistence to change your beliefs and to actually FEEL that what you're saying is true. After a while of saying it and MEANING it, you should feel a growing sense of peace and acceptance about the issue, and it should seem easier to be less upset about, and to surrender all of your counter-attacks upon it. Then you will have a GENUINE WILLINGNESS to hand it over to Holy Spirit.
Go for it.