You do not need to find the power to rise up against a seemingly mighty external power.
That external power is YOUR power. It's your own power that you have temporarily displaced into the hands of someone else.
You want that other person or group to hold onto your power for you, so that you can disown it.
This makes you think 'they' have power over you, since now you are left with like 10% power to their apparent 90% power. So now you see yourself as a vulnerable victim. And in that victimhood you will experience it as though.... I don't like how these other people have power.
But that's a fucking lie.
You want them to have the power because its YOUR power and you do not want to take YOUR power back from them.
And if you were to take back the 90% of YOUR power that you handed over to them, how much power would they be left with to hold over you?
ZERO!
So you do not need to find the courage to rise up and be like some kind of super opponent to a powerful enemy. You do not need to become some kind of dragon slayer or wage a massive war against a power that is completely fixed in the hands of others.
The war is YOU against YOURSELF.
You play them off as having power over you so that you can create a disguise, whereby it SEEMS like they conveniently have taken it from you against your will, and it can SEEM like you don't have any left. Oh, poor you, weak and powerless. Well, .... you are PLAY ACTING at being weak and powerless, when all the while you are fricking invincible.
So take YOUR power back. Take it back out of the hands of the people you have put it into, and recognize therefore that it was never THEIR power that you were afraid of, it was YOUR power that you were afraid of. You were afraid of it because in order TO put it into the hands of someone else, you have to use FEAR, which is a device for disownership and the illusion of rejection and is the greatest cover-up deceptive lie of all time. Fear makes it look like you are not having ANYTHING AT ALL to do with why your power has been displaced into someone else's hands, when in fact it is precisely this fear that GIVES it to them.
Take it back. Its yours. Own it. Be yourself. THEN.... who is out there with power over you? Who has power over the Son of God who knows that he is all powerful?
"I am not weak but strong". "I am not afraid but all powerful" - ACIM
So now instead of being a powerful opponent, or an equal power in a war, or rising up in protest and conflict with other people's apparent power, now in your empowerment you are invulnerable because THERE IS NO OTHER POWER OUT THERE.
You have the power. YOU are the one. And the ego has no power when you do not GIVE it any. And when you take back your power, you will have to stop being a victim and stop being afraid, and HAVING your power back will do that for you. You don't need to be super brave or courageous. You just need to own up to the fact that all the stuff outside of you that you are afraid of, ITS YOURS. Reclaim it and the fear device has no further purpose of separation and it must disappear. And you must be empowered.
And here is the climax.
Those who are empowered have no enemies.
Those who are empowered are invulnerable.
Those who are empowered are immortal.
Just as being forgiving ensures there is nothing to forgive, just as being awake ensures there is no reason to fall asleep, and just as being loving ensures there is nothing unloveable, so too does being empowered ensure there is nothing that you need to have power OVER because ALL of the power is yours.
If there were some power left out there that is not yours, you would still have enemies. There is ZERO power out there that is not yours. You share ALL POWER WITH GOD.
This is why.... Jesus says repeatedly...... FEAR NOT. You have nothing to fear because only love is real. If you choose to fear, you will STOP being powerful and lose your power. Don't do that.
Be all powerful.
When I had an awakening experience in the presence of God, it was so profound. I had no idea it was going to happen and had no idea that God would be so loving, gentle, soft and joyful. I especially did not know that God was not far away, but right under my own skin.
I was aware that God was real and that I was becoming merged with Christ and that my ego self was just about going to disappear. I felt myself "pull back" from the dream as though snapping out of it, into a state of such intense awareness the likes of which I had no idea was possible. I thought I was awake every day of the week when I got up in the morning, but this was a whole other level of wakefulness.
Later, when I had to go back to work, it was surprisingly bizarre how I seemed to be aware of something as though it was totally obvious, and yet nobody else seemed to be aware of it. I couldn't figure out why they didn't know about it.
They acted like they were in some kind of unconscious sleep, seemingly awake but somehow not, totally oblivious to the presence of God which was everywhere. It was like there was this huge elephant in the room that I was aware of, and nobody else even had the slightest idea that it was there.
Trying to interact with people was very peculiar because I had to sort of pretend to be at their level, and all the things they thought were important were not important at all. It was kind of funny how fixated on "small stuff" they were.
It was like looking in on the scene from outside of it, watching the people go about their lives seemingly normally but as though they were half asleep, not even realizing what they weren't realizing.
As I "fell back asleep" over the following weeks, I returned to the same state of mind as them, more or less, and once again was not aware of the presence of God. At this time was quite devastating and I had a huge sense of loss and grief.
But from time to time, God pops in to say hello and I gradually inch my way back to an awareness that I now know is possible. But I can at least understand that when we do wake up, it's going to be a bit bizarre being in a world where almost everyone is still sleeping. I guess we'll have to tiptoe quietly.
"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus KEEPING it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made, in order to BE forgiven."
Here Jesus again outlines the simplicity of "forgiveness". He says that if you will overlook error - which means the entire illusory unreal dream world - then you will KEEP IT UNREAL. If you keep it unreal, you do not even enter INTO a state where you become confused about what it is, nor do you give reality to its content. If you do not MAKE it real, you won't have to "atone" to fix this error.
You must not turn the world's forms into realities, you must not give strength to its attacks, you must not give power to its lies, and you must not give truth to its sufferings. You overlook it and effectively ignore it and look beyond it to the face of Christ. To the light of truth where it really is.
If you KEEP THE WORLD UNREAL, then you do not go INTO false judgements or evaluations of what the world is. You simply recognize it as an illusion. An illusion, totally DEVOID of any sense of reality, seriousness, weight, validity, or truth, is no more powerful or threatening or causal than a thin veil of nothingness. But if you fail to stay IN THE STATE of forgiveness, you enter into judgement.
"He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive."
If you FAIL to stay forgiving, you go INTO the state of GIVING REALITY to the unreal world. You go into attack, into confusion, you confuse reality with unreality, you GIVE reality to the illusory world, and now the world SEEMS real.
All the things which happen in it which are utterly strange and unnatural, now APPEAR to be VERY REAL to you. And this makes them threatening and upsetting, dangerous and powerful, able to hurt you and destroy your peace. But it is only the sense of REALITY that gives it this apparent power.
Having MADE the world real, you will now believe that there ARE actually real problems, real attacks, real dangers, real impossible situations, real threats, real murders, real deaths and real sickness. And now you will be in suffering and hell having a nightmare because now a dream of death will have become REAL to you, threatening you at every turn and promising to destroy you. You cannot ESCAPE from this while you believe it is real.
So if you make the world real you will believe you now have to DO SOMETHING in order to fix the problem. But having bound reality to illusions, you will now think the source of the problem is the "real things" you see, and so to solve the problem you have to do something about those things. But this won't really work.
The only way to move back OUT of unforgiveness into forgiveness, is to TAKE BACK THE REALITY that you yourself gave TO the illusory world, SEPARATE THE WORLD FROM REALITY, give reality back to God, and recognize the false world is unreal again. Get your mind back into the "world is not real at all" mode, which overlooks it and doesn't GIVE it any power.
"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."
To "take back" the projections of REALITY that you gave to the unreal world, is to take back the POWER that you mis-placed and gave away to EMpower illusions against you. Dis-empowering illusions gives back power to God, and to your shared self. When the world has no power of its own, which it doesn't, the ego and the world and the body have NO POWER OVER YOU. This is a return to the STATE of forgiveness.
Ideally we should aim for a state in which we do not LEAVE forgiveness, or step OUT OF a state of power, so that we do not MAKE ERRORS. If we do not make errors, ie do not give reality to errors, then we will not have to do a purification or correction process to undo what we have done. But if we DO slip and fall into judgement, then a miracle is needed to RESTORE us to the state of forgiveness.
"Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made."
"And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."
Forgiveness then is simply the recognition that only God's reality is real, only his truth is true, nothing in the world you made has any truth or reality, and therefore your entire attention is fixed upon The Kingdom.
Miracles can only properly be understood from the perspective of looking "down" from a higher vantage point, a vantage point of unconditional love.
They cannot so easily be understood when lookup "up" from below, as one who is attempting to awaken. Those awakening do not understand love and cannot grasp or experience how a single thing - an expression of love - could encompass the entire scope of what miracles entail.
They are nothing more than emissions of love, coming from a higher level to a lower level, causing that which is lower to be raised up and brought back into the light. In doing so, "the dead" are raised back up to life.
It's all about the love. Real love, not special love.
Miracles of love are expressed from above to below "like drops of healing rain" which give life back to starved and thirsty creatures, restoring "life" where there appeared to be death.
Love is life-giving. Love has healing power. Love can undo and cancel the entire ego illusion, and everything to do with bodies and worlds.
Miracles are a heart-felt love expressed in softness and gentleness and depth, innocent yet strong, unhidden yet powerful. These expressions of love are like a healing balm for the mind, immediately loosening and dissolving all forms of lack.
Miracles supply a lack of love, with love, so that the life-giving presence of God is restored, producing healing. All forms of sickness come from a lack of love, ie separation from love, so miracles repair the lack and provide "life", producing health where there once was sickness and loss.
Miracles are the light which shine away all darkness with their presence. Nothing can withstand them. They know no order of difficulty because all expressions of love are maximum love - whole love, full love.
Love can be expressed to others and instantly provide the lack of love they've been experiencing, producing instantaneous healing. All suffering is the absence of love. Miracles express love in order to undo the absence of God.
God heals.
I am told frequently, "let go". And I frequently have no idea what this means.
But I seem to be learning that it means I am more 'involved' in things that I should be. I am engaged with the ego, with the story, with the drama. I've gotten into it and now I am trying to control it.
I need to let go of it, step back, stop interfering, stop being caught up in it. That means being willing to drop it and to stop trying to prevent things from happening, or to force things to happen a certain way.
I feel this in my body and in my mind/emotions. It's as though, when I am not letting go, my mind has projected out like a giant 'sucker' and its latched onto someone or a story, energetically, and now it's fixated on it like I'm connected to it. And whatever happens to it is happening to me. This is because my mind has become involved and caught up in it.
So letting go then means, withdrawing my mind-sucker and just coming back to myself, coming back to just being me, just little me, simple me, detached, just being myself and not carrying burdens or trying to fix people or trying to prevent things from happening.
It's like emptying myself and dropping baggage and not being the one to carry all the weight of the world. It's freeing. I just get to like, sit on the sidelines, and observe, and not get involved. I can just be calm, then, just letting the world do its thing and not worrying about it. Being passerby
A light way to look at things and a dark way. It is similar to how, from above the clouds, the sun shines on everything, and yet beneath the clouds, everything looks dark and threatening.
Looking back toward the light with obstacles in the way, creates the impression of threat and danger and doom and gloom. When the clouds are there, the light seems obscured and it feels like you've got walls keeping you from it. It seems like you're trapped in a prison and that everything is against you.
Looking toward the light from a position of being separated from the light, by the clouds, creates the ego. The ego is an attempt to turn around and look back at God and find him blocked from vision as if he doesn't exist. And when the clouds are heavy, it will feel as if God doesn't exist, as if there is no light.
Shifting back into alignment with the source of light, means getting "above the battlefield", through and beyond the clouds, past the illusion of separateness and self importance, and turning around 180-degrees so that you too are a part of the light that shines outward. You need to become a sunbeam, of sorts, extending love outward.
Looking up to the sun with clouds between you is akin to the ego looking inside at itself. The ego wants to catch a glimpse of itself as if it really exists as a separate identity. What you are 'is', and you can't identify it as something separate from you. Yet when you're "under the weather" and trying to wrestle with upsets and darkness you keep trying to look 'at' yourself, similar to how you keep trying to look back at the sun. You don't really need to look at yourself or to look at the source of light, you need to BE IT.
Changing your vantage point changes your perspective. If your vantage point is rooted in your ego then your ego will do the looking and it will look toward the clouds and tell you the clouds are real and that you're separate from God. This will of course be frightening and horrifying. And it's not true, but it will seem true, and you will feel stuck.
Changing your vantage point to that of Holy Spirit (the sun) changes everything. It changes how everything looks to you and what it means. Your light shines ONTO everything you see illuminating it and revealing its beauty and happiness. It helps you to see clearly and fully. It helps you to not be deceived by the strange shadows that play out on the landscape when you are "in the dark". And it helps you to remember there is ALWAYS another way, ALWAYS a better way than any ego viewpoint.
And you need to be reminded... the light of God is always present and always available and always true and always powerful, and no amount of ego or darkness or horror will EVER obliterate it or shut it out or make it permanently lost. EVER. The light is always stronger than the darkness because the darkness is weakness. The light is always there. It is sanity. It is reason. It is truth. Sooner or later you have to admit to it and allow it and accept it and be it. You can prolong suffering but you cannot make it permanent. The light is calling to you to join it and to laugh at the silliness of the ego's mistakes.
God loves you.
"And reason now can lead you to the logical conclusion of your union. It must extend, as you extended when you joined."
Some of us like to describe reality as oneness, or perhaps that "its all God", or "non-duality". A state with no separations or differences. But there is a problem with this.
If you take something and you "boil it down" to something else, you end up with this idea of something very simple. Something seemingly singular. Perhaps even a single word which represents it. So maybe we'll say that there is just oneness and that's an entire description of reality.
But the problem is this. If you can't take that boiled-down simplified concept, and arrive at the original state, condition, nature, contents, of reality by building upon it, extending it, then something has become lost in the process. If you START WITH e.g. "God is all there is", you can't logically get to "God has a son".
There is an analogy in the world of data compressionm like when you "zip" some files on your computer. When you try to compress a file, you can do so losslessly or with some acceptable loss. If you want to get every single byte of the file back in its original condition when you decompress it, you have to use a lossless algorithm or process.
Whatever it "boils down to" or compresses to, it has to be detailed enough that when you reassemble the original file, every single detail is still there. If you omit even a tiny bit of "information", you can't get the original file back. How much it can boil down is determined by how much information there is, and relates to the "entropy" of the data. This is why your big image file cannot be compressed below a certain level. It has to maintain enough information to get the original back.
What happens is, if your method of boiling down leaves out some details, omits some information, doesn't fully and accurately represent the original data, then when you go to re-expand the file you don't get back the same data you started with. It becomes "inaccurate." Something has been lost in translation. That means, whatever you boiled it down too was too generalized, too simplified, too basic, and not descriptive enough. Trying to get back the original data is then impossible because too much information is lost. So the simplified file no longer accurately REPRESENTS the "actual reality" of the file.
The same thing happens when we try to describe reality and use concepts or terms which are TOO simple, too basic, and omit too much information. They seem like nice handy symbols but logically they are lacking too much information. You should be able to take a simplified description of reality and derive the full contents of reality from it, by "decompressing it" or reversing the boiling-down process.
You should get back what you started with. So if your description is the "starting point" you MUST be able to fully ACCOUNT FOR every possible detail or characteristic of that reality. And your description of reality in its "most condensed" or most simplified form MUST have enough descriptive information, otherwise you simply cannot end up with what you started with. And when you try to do so, you will produce massive errors.
Particular culprits of this kind of loss of information are conceptual terms such as oneness, "its all God", "God is", "non-duality", "no differences", "no separation" "no self" "unity" etc. These all sound plausibly realistic or representative of the full details about reality, but they're not. They in fact are too generalizing, too basic, and not accurate enough. They leave out some details. And so when you then try to base the description of heaven, for example, on this "premise", on this basic generalization, you CANNOT get back the details of heaven. And in fact you will get back conclusions you did not bargain on.
So if you say ok, it's all oneness, or one thing. Well, now you cannot get a son of God out of that. At all, in any way. Or if you say "its all God", you cannot get out of that an accurate description of why the son of God dreamed and God DID NOT because God has been too mixed in or included in the tiny mad idea. Or if you say it's non-duality and there are no separations, you can't get back the fact God has a Son, yet alone that there is a holy trinity and a bunch of creations.
So there is a big risk, actually an error, in using these really super basic ego-logic-derived terms and concepts to try to describe the reality or God. There is such a thing as something being TOO lacking in detail to accurately describe it. Yes God HIMSELF is one, and reality itself is singular, and there is no opposite to reality, but this unfortunately is not the WHOLE STORY. And so major aspects of the picture become lost in the process of over-simplifying. To the extent that they BLOT OUT key characteristics of reality's true contents.
When you look at what ACIM says about the contents of reality, it is a very different picture to just "its all one" or "there's only God there" or "there are no separations". Yes, there are aspects of reality which ARE only one, or that it IS all just God, but that is only PART OF the story. There are more facts, there is more information needed, and more has HAPPENED in reality because God is a creator. Just the fact God creates results in these ideas being not sufficient to ACCURATELY AND FULLY describe reality.
So if God is to for example have even one son, we cannot JUST say that it's all one because that's now illogical. Yet it IS all one, and that is always true, but it MUST also be true that there is SOME WAY for there to be a son. Otherwise God is not a father or a creator and he is alone and cannot love and there is no extension of life and so on.
In fact the PUREST possible non-duality concept logically ends up with the conclusion that God is dead because He has nothing to give or extend or share or create. It makes him lifeless. You get all kinds of utterly nonsense conclusions deriving FROM that "basis" of what reality IS, when you leave out some facts. So if you start out your reasoning based on things like "its all God" you WILL end up with some horrendously wrong conclusions.
So if you take for example what ACIM says, which is that God has one son, which is also many sons, who have their own sons ad infinitum, and also there is the holy spirit and the angels, apparently in many legions and with a hierarchy, and who knows what else you've created, to describe that ACCURATELY, you can't JUST say "its one thing". A blob is one thing. A state is one thing. A singular entity like God is one thing. But there is MUCH MORE going on in reality than that according to what Jesus tells us. And we should be trusting his word.
So describing it as oneness, or generalizing too far and blotting out the details, or boiling it down so much that the nice soup mixture of various key ingredients becomes just a singular meaningless slush, is actually an error in logical reasoning. It does NOT accurately describe reality or what is happening in reality. It does not accurately describe God's nature either.
It in fact in some ways it can be far better to be MORE DETAILED in describing the nature of God and His Kingdom than it is to be LESS detailed. Just saying "God is" is a premise SO BASIC that it is massively open to huge false conclusions when you try to derive the Kingdom out of it. If God is were the WHOLE story, God would not have a creation at all.
The ego only leans towards less detail because it reasons, if I remove all sense of separations and divisions and multiplicity, I will end up with ONE THING, and this one thing SEEMS like it might most accurately describe the idea of what is all encompassing and infinite. Except that it doesn't. Its a total fail.
It does not take into account that God has a mind, has thoughts, creates beings, or that there are relationships, or that the beings he creates have their own children, minds, and will, or that there are millions of angels for example, or that God doesn't will to be alone. That all goes out the window because the EGO'S conclusion about God IRONS OUT all the details to the point of nothing - the loss of information. It's a great way to become BLIND to what reality is really like.
In the ego's thought system, its sense of logic is that something is either this or that, but not both. This results in differences, and it sees the existence of the separation between those differences as "separation". It even labels that separation as "ego". And then it seeks to get rid of those separations, to attack itself, to remove all separations, in order to end up with "no separation", thinking that this is what it will be like when you have "undone the separation", and must therefore describe God.
And so it reasons, reality is one thing, a oneness, a pool of singularity in which nothing happens and there is no creation. This is only PARTLY correct because it loses too much information. And so the ego cannot accurately describe reality with THIS thought process. You have to become open to thinking outside the box and using God's reasoning in order to describe what God and His creations are like. And since God does have at least one son, it certainly is not a state of logically pure non-duality, nor is it "only oneness", and certainly it's not "just God" because he has ADDED you to Himself.
"YOUR creations add to Him, as YOU do. But nothing is added that is different, because everything has always BEEN."
If you end up with "it is oneness" or "its all God", and then you decompress that idea to address for example the issue of the making of death, you have to conclude God is death, or God is a body, or God separated from God, or God is a pile of shit, or God went insane, or even God is an illusion that doesn't really exist. Without enough information you cannot "get back" the full picture of what God is, what has happened, what we dreamed, and what has not really occurred, without making some CRAZY false conclusions.
When I'm projecting my own stuff onto someone else, I can't possibly see them as innocent. I'm putting my guilt onto them and I'm seeing it in them.
While the guilt is 'out there', there is simply no way my perception can show me their innocence. I have a screen in the way, a filter, a layer of dirt and noise.
I used to try to see other people as innocent, like, you know, they say to 'see everyone as Christ'. Well you can't do that if you're projecting. You can't just immediately launch into seeing them as Christ because you see them as guilty.
It is not until you take back your guilt, which you tried to make them responsible for, on your behalf, that you can possibly see them as innocent. Until you withdraw your projection from them, you can't see them for who they really are.
So you take back your stuff, and you own up to being the one who believes YOU are guilty. And you take the guilt back from their hands, recognizing it was NOT their guilt you were seeing, but your own. Having taken it back you CAN now see that they are innocent.
Also at this point, seeing that the other person is innocent isn't really a process, and it's also not some kind of label you put onto them, and it's not that you 'make' them innocent. In fact, all you've done is reveal the truth that is already there. Underneath your projected guilt, they already ARE innocent.
So you don't really have to be in the business of trying to talk yourself into 'believing' that the person is innocent. You don't have to try to convince yourself that someone else is Christ or holy. It's not something you need to make happen or do to the person or bestow upon them. Remember you are in the business of removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which means when you remove the block to your awareness, by taking back YOUR guilt that you gave to another, having accused them of your own sin, you naturally REVEAL what was there all along - their in-built, inherent, God-given innocence. Their innocence is there all by itself.
This is similar to how you need to go up into Holy Spirit's thought system, above the battlefield, stepping out of the projection of guilt, and entering closer to your own innocence, before you can look down IN forgiveness to see that everything below/outside is forgiven. Looking back on others WITH Holy Spirit/forgiveness allows you to recognize and see their innocence. You didn't give their innocent back to them because it was never taken away. You just had covered it up with your own stuff.
Note that when you look WITH Holy Spirit's forgiveness you will see innocence, and this is what it means to BE forgiving, rather than to 'do' forgiving. If there is a 'doing' of forgiveness (commonly thought of as 'applying'), that refers to you taking back your guilt and going to Holy Spirit with it so that you can come to be able to SEE the innocence in you and your brother. That process itself does not make innocent, it only uncovers it, and forgiveness then is the light in which you SEE.
So now you can also go to Holy Spirit and ask, hey, I think this guilt is mine, which I was putting onto them, and I now take it back and recognize it's not theirs, so they are innocent, but I still feel this guilt about myself. I think I'm guilty. Is it true Holy Spirit? I want you to decide. Tell me your verdict. "You are innocent", Holy Spirit will say, in one way or another. And then you will accept this with relief, let go of the guilt, allow Holy Spirit to HEAL IT FOR YOU, and release you from your own delusion that you are guilty. Now you can see your own innocence as well.
They say that by seeing the innocence in someone else you will see the innocence in yourself because your minds are One, and there is some truth to that. But this never really worked for me. I couldn't simultaneously lift guilt off their mind and my own, on my own, just based on the concept that this works. I can see now that I have to at least take back my guilty projection first in order to see my brother's innocence, and THEN I can take it to Holy Spirit and get it fully corrected. Then I will see my own innocence AND the unified innocence of my brother.
When you perceive yourself as being at the effect of an external power, that it has the power to do something to you or cause you, you will experience fear and weakness.
You may not realize that it is the way you are perceiving yourself in this 'role' of victim, where someone else owns the power, that makes you experience fear.
Then when you are in this state, you've disassociated from that power and think that it is not yours. You think someone else can use it against you, against your will, and you have no power to stop this. It's terrifying. But untrue.
That power you perceive as not yours, which goes hand in hand with experiencing fear, IS your power. You've disassociated from it. You need to reclaim ownership of it.
You reclaim it by changing how you perceive yourself. You must stop seeing yourself as playing a victim role, where that power is separate from you and threatening you. Instead you must integrate that power, reclaim ownership of it, recognize it as your own, realize what you're doing to yourself and stop doing it.
What you're doing to yourself is you've basically chopped off your arms and legs and are holding them out in front of you at a distance threatening to hit yourself with them. And now you feel that you have nothing to defend yourself with because you have no arms and legs. And so you are terrified. This is how ridiculous it is.
Take your arms and legs back.
And then what happens when you've taken it back?
Now there is no power outside of you. There is no separate alien will about to use that power against you. You are not a victim. And therefore you have no grounds for fear because you don't perceive an enemy.
Now you are empowered.
And guess what? When you are empowered... *paradox alert*... when you are empowered, you will not perceive that there is anything you NEED to have power over. There IS nothing out there that you need to have a lot of power to conquer. Because that power was your power, and so there is no other power.
This is the same as saying, love has no opposite. When you love yourself and stop disempowering yourself and stop projecting and disowning your power, you take it back and return to love and now there is no enemy out there. So you are safe. You are powerful, with no enemy.
When you are in situations where you think you have an enemy and where you 'need' power and have to muster enough courage and power to fight then.... that's all entirely a bullshit ego game. That's the ego fighting itself. Both sides are losers. That's got nothing to do with empowerment. "War" is nothing to do with real power, it's to do with artificial power, which is always weak and limited because it always has enemies that threaten to destroy it.
Real power has no enemies. Real power has no threats.
It is the same as the fact that true forgiveness means... being in a state of 'forgivingness', such that you do not even SEE that there is anything that NEEDS to be forgiven... because your fore-giving is pro-active and prevents the arising of errors in your awareness, so you have a forgiving attitude toward everyone and do not see anyone as judged harshly.
It's the same with true power. When you are truly empowered, there IS NO ENEMY, and there is no external cause of terror, and there is no alien will out there doing stuff against your will. The power ensures that you see yourself empowered, invulnerable, immortal and eternal, SO THAT you do not see yourself as dis-empower-able. It fulfills its own prophecy.
Take your power back. It's still yours.
I find very often that if I am not constantly "rebuking" everything the world seems to portray, I will fall into temptation and buy into problems. Then I'll have reactions based on ego and form and bodies and appearances, and will suffer, wondering how to get out of it.
The fact is that we're presented with a false word, right in our faces, 24/7, every single day. The body continuously reports on it as if it's real and makes it seem real. Every single sensory input is a lie to the mind, suggesting that something untrue is true, something impossible is possible, and something that can never happen in reality is happening.
It may seem completely casual, living our everyday lives, interacting with objects, doing household tasks, looking at things and commenting on them, seeing bodies, etc... as though this is totally normal and natural. We can just "live an ego life", a body life, functioning the same way we always have. Immersed in space and time and physicality. Interacting with the world as if it's just another day, things are just ticking over as they always do, as is this is totally normal.
But as we start trying to wake up to reality, we start to find that the world is absolutely opposite to reality. And now we're tasked with trying to peel ourselves away from absolutely everything the world throws at us. Every appearance is false, every body sickness is a lie, every picture of death is unnatural, every problem isn't really there. If we don't counteract these inputs, they become overwhelming and we just sink down into them like it's what everyone does.
It seems then that we have to constantly fight against illusions. Every second. The kind of life we live without even thinking about it, as if it's normal, is riddled with deception. If we drop our guard and just go through the motions acting like everything in the world is how things are supposed to be, within seconds we'll find ourselves thinking and speaking and acting based on what the body says is real. And now we're lost all over again. And every morning we wake up immersed back into the same dungeon of deception and darkness.
It sure as heck seems that if we aren't CONSTANTLY asserting God's truth, constantly denying what is not of God, constantly stating and affirming that body states are not fact, constantly PUSHING and broadcasting God's truth and light all the time, repelling sin and hell, then we will just once again fall for the next subtle trap. The next little everyday seemingly insignificant scrap of an illusory world which is just as deceptive and distorting as all the rest.
The impression I'm getting lately then is that we have to eventually get to a state where we are "professing christ" all the time. And I mean like, being on our guard at all times. In a sense, praying a higher prayer all the time. Giving off happier more loving vibes all the time. Teaching only love, all the time. Refusing to accept anything we see in the world, all the time. And that means being really heavily centered in God's truth and laws and mindset and just constantly vigilant for staying in that mindset as much as possible, even when the world is sandblasting you in the face with visual lies.
Jesus says in the course that atonement is our natural profession. That we should PROFESS christ. Which means to express, emit, teach, radiate, give christ at all times. To counteract and fly in the face of the world. To be coming from God at all times. To be healers at all times, in the world but not of it at all times. Under no worldly laws but God's at all times.
Because, quite frankly, what I've found is that if I DON'T attempt to do that, I will just sink right back down into ego land, body sensations, false perceptions, reactions to bodies and sicknesses appearing real. At every turn, someone's sick body is attempting to testify to them having been changed and corrupted against God's will. And it is our task to NOT believe that, to assert and SEE and claim the truth of the person that they are still as God created them. Which is in complete defiance of what their body looks like, staring you in the face with its fake suffering and temptation.
The degree of temptation is just so totally off the charts. It seems that if we don't rise above it and stay above it and continually REPEL it every minute of the day, we're just going to keep falling back into it. Maybe over time we can talk ourselves into such a state of conviction that we can more effortlessly remain in the light and the truth and not have to make such an effort of it. But meanwhile it seems like a constant fight, a constantly struggle, to get out of hell and get back into a more heavenly state. Day after day after day of the world trying to pull us back down.
"The Disciples were officially and specifically told to heal others, as Physicians of the Lord. They were also told to heal themselves, and were promised that I would never leave them or forsake them. Atonement is the natural profession of the Children of God, because they have professed Me."
"In His perception of the world, nothing is seen but justifies forgiveness and the sight of perfect sinlessness. Nothing arises but is met with instant and complete forgiveness."
If we are to INSTANTLY meet every perception with forgiveness, that means we have to CONSTANTLY be in a state of forgiveness every single second. We have to be on our toes. We have to be totally ready and right minded at all times. As in keeping our mind right-side up at all times and sane in order to be ready to perform miracles.
"Readiness here means keep your perception right side up, (or valid), so you will ALWAYS be ready, willing, and able. These are the essentials for "listen, learn, and do. You must be READY to listen WILLING to learn and ABLE to do"
To stay OUT of deception and temptation and distraction is difficult. Everything the world believes is not true. Everything physical matter shows is false. We have to pierce the veil and push past the body and connect with the divine. To have "reality contact".
"Miracles are examples of right thinking. Reality contact at all levels becomes strong and accurate, thus permitting correct delineation of intra- and interpersonal boundaries. As a result, the doer sees the truth as God created it. This is what is meant by the point on "perspective adjustment."
It really seems to me that in order to be a consistent miracle worker we have to be practically from another world, a temporary visitor here, come to help and heal and uplift, siding entirely with God, falling for no temptation, buying into nothing the world suggests. As if we were briefed before we came, that the world was going to try to eat us alive, and that we had to stay on our toes and not for a second believe a single bit of it. To float above the battlefield constantly lest we fall off the wagon again and again and again. To clarify just how extremely difficult it can be, Jesus even says that the most advanced teachers still succumb to temptation at times.
The world can seem insurmountable in its immensity, its diversity of illusions, its deceptions. Gradually the mind HAS to be trained away from believing any of it. Has to learn to see through and past illusory things. Has to learn NOT to believe in what the body reports. And that takes time to reinforce the mind's attitude over and over and over and over again with affirmations and restatements and reframing.
"Even the most advanced of God's teachers will give way to temptation in this world."
Every day, every hour, every minute, every second, we have to be watchful for buying into the world. Over and over again we will keep slipping back down the slippery slope to hell, and have to keep pulling ourselves back out of the muck again and again and again until we can learn to fly enough that we stay out of it for good.