ALL of your ego's functioning stems from a very very simple premise. Once you start to realize what this foundation is, it frames everything the ego does as just another example of this one thing.

The foundation of the ego is simply the suggestion that you are not love - the love is not in you or what you are - so you are deprived of it - so now you need to go restore the sense of lack by finding it somewhere ELSE other than in you. You go off hunting for a way to fill the emptiness, which reinforces your belief in the emptiness. And even if you find something, it won't heal the sense of LACK, and you won't accept it, because it's not really what you want. You want yourself back. You want God's love.

The separation of your identity from God's Son leads to:

Seeking outside yourself

Creating sickness

All idol worship

Creating fear

All attack

All victimhood

All loss and grief and loneliness

All sense of abandonment and rejection

Seeing yourself as separate from God and others

Having nothing to depend on ("independence")

Insanity

Not being true to yourself

Seeking for what you lost where it does not exist and not finding it

Losing even more of what you are by being compelled to replace it

A belief that you can die

All vulnerability and sense of threat

Mistrust (in yourself)

All paths efforting to 'find yourself' but remain separate

The spiritualized ego

The inability to share or join

Condemnation and judgement and blame (of yourself)

Shame and guilt for who you are

Unworthiness and unloveability

Suffering and suicide and war (with yourself)

All anger and upset and disasters and terrible events

...And on and on.

Just this one thing. This one idea of - I'm not myself - where am I - who am I - I am separate from what I am - I am not as God created me - leads to all of these other dynamics and activities and perceptions.

You can't have any of them without this one foundation - this sense of separation from yourself. And since you and God are one, it is simultaneously a sense of separation from God.

"A sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct." - ACIM

And here's the clincher. Every single one of those things on that list above that you currently believe are caused by all kinds of things OTHER than the ego's foundation, are NOT caused by anything other than the ego's foundation. And so it is the sheer 'fact' of 'being' an ego - separate from the love you are - that causes every single problem you face. All hell comes from it. Being separate from God and your True Self is the ONLY problem that needs correction. All other problems are illusory problems masking the one problem so that you will not correct it.

So each time I am in the ego, in some way I must be believing that I am separate from God and myself. I must be going down some path which tells me it's going to help me RESTORE who I am and what I lost, BUT which will NOT restore it, because the entire NEED for that path comes from believing I LACK what I'm looking to restore, and until I stop beleiving that I won't ever be able to ACCEPT that I HAVE WHAT I REALLY HAVE ALREADY.

You ARE as God Created you. You ARE love already. This you need to accept, and let go of all these other ego pursuits that trick you and lead you away from it. Everyone is being deceived by the ego's suggestions of everything you need to do to 'fix' the separation, which seem to lead you to resolution but in fact lead you to an EVEN WORSE situation. Seek and do not find. Fix and do not correct. Pursue and fail. Search and lose. Try to have and do not have at all. Hold on and lose everything. This is all the ego's deceit.

One error, one correction. Holy Spirit's is the Answer from God because He Knows the solution to this problem - that the problem really IS NOT REAL. You are NOT separate from God or Your Self and the separation NEVER HAPPENED. So you are love. And that is why you need do nothing.

If you start with "I'm defective, I need to improve", you will end up with an ego.

If you start with "I'm perfect, I need not change", you will end up with a perfect self.

Most of us start with the approach that we're defective, full of guilt, unhappy, broken, lost, etc.... and then we start seeking on the basis of this premise.

But when you do that, there is huge risk of not questioning the premise itself, which is false. The premise says "there's something wrong with me, I need to improve myself." That's NOT true. But if you believe it, you'll start the "seek and do not find" spiritual journey.

Then you'll be trying to make yourself better, be more loving, have more wakefulness, gain more growth etc. The trouble is, this will cause you to AVOID the real problem. The real problem is your belief that you are defective in the first place.

If you start with "I'm not defective, I only need to accept I am already perfect", then you're starting out on the right foot. And it results in you questioning any belief that says otherwise, without you going off on a tangent based on a false premise.

So it's another sort of paradoxical thing. You have to start out as you mean to finish. You have to start as though you're already at the end, and sort of work backwards to accepting a pre-existing God-created condition of perfection.

If you do it the other way around, starting with lack and guilt and not good enough and all that, thinking this is true, and reacting to it, and feeling compelled to do something based on it, you'll be led astray by the ego. And then you'll become a spiritualised ego.

We've all fallen for this trap. Believing we even NEED to seek for a perfection, or to make it happen, or to construct a better self, when in fact God has already done the hard work.

If we adopt the ego's view that we need to perfect ourselves, then we avoid looking at the fact that we are IN DENIAL. We have DENIED that we are perfect, and this denial is the problem. We have DENIED happiness and peace and love, and the removal of the denial is necessary in order to become AWARE OF it again.

If we are in the business of trying to focus on the positives and the being more loving and more kindness and all these sort of non-denial happy-go-lucky perspectives, then we may inadvertently NOT LOOK at the DENIAL that we have. We may not look at the actual problem - the block to awareness - the barriers that we have built against a PRE-EXISTING perfection.

So in general we have it all backwards. We are looking for something in the wrong place and in the wrong way. The spiritual path is actually back to front. We need to be melting within, going within, finding the truth that God has already put there, finding the solution God has already established, accepting, recognizing, rather than going out of our minds trying to make it, build it, change it, author it, transform into it.

If you can't look at and question the ASSUMPTION of the belief "I'm not perfect", "there's something wrong with me", then you're not really making any headway. The trick is not to answer the question of what you have done wrong, it's to question WHETHER OR NOT you have done anything wrong.

There is nothing wrong with you. You're just pretending, and you don't really need fixing. But your belief that you need fixing needs fixing.

"We will but be making perfect TO you, what is ALREADY perfect IN you."

"To repeat an earlier statement, and also to extend it somewhat, the Soul is already perfect, and therefore does not require correction."

"Whatever is true and real is eternal, and CANNOT change or be changed. The Soul is therefore unalterable because it is ALREADY perfect, but the mind can elect the level it chooses to serve. The only limit which is put on its choice is that it CANNOT serve two masters."

There are two types of prayer. One works miracles, the other doesn't.

1) Pray for someone because you believe they need praying for.

2) Pray for someone to acknowledge that they don't need praying for.

The first kind is very common and it's because our ego first of all shows us that something is wrong with someone. This means we have made the problem seem real. The person could have a serious disease or disability, some financial crisis, just lost a job, is having relationship issues, or whatever. Particularly if this so-called "problem" can be seen visually, we especially believe in it.

But the problem is, just the mere act of believing that someone is ACTUALLY having a problem, that they "really are" sick, that something is happening that's "bad", or something has gone wrong... . just that basic assumption that this is REALITY, or truth, is actually an attack on that person.

This is what ACIM calls false empathy. It means you've actually entered into believing in and are agreeing with what seems to be happening, as though it is true and real. You take this for granted, because you are so incredibly accustomed to perceiving with the ego this way. You have been extremely fooled by appearances and keep buying into them like they are facts. In this world there is temptation and trickery EVERYWHERE.

If someone breaks a leg, you immediately just accept that their leg is broken. If something goes wrong, you immediately accept that it really has gone wrong. If someone becomes sick, you totally believe that the person has become sick. And whatever it is, if it seems to be 'happening', you just assume that it has to be this way.

Then you get stuck in what basically is a belief in SIN, which is the idea that something has really happened already, there's been a real serious consequence, and it cannot be undone. Sin is the idea of irreversability of separation, so as you just idly accept that stuff has gone wrong and nobody can really do anything about it, you're really buying into the illusion and have fallen for its trickery.

So then having made the problem seem real to you, and maybe even you yourself have become upset about it, maybe even afraid about what will happen to the person, you will then feel COMPELLED to try to do something about it. And then you will turn to God and you will pray. And you'll do this because you are making mistakes. It is a mistake to believe that God has not already given you the answer to all problems. It is a mistake to believe that this person has a real problem at all. And it is a mistake to think that you need to get God to do something about this real-seeming problem.

But you'll do it anyway. This is then praying with the ego.

You might say something like... dear God, Holy Father, please send lots of love and light to this person, help them to overcome their fear/sickness/problem, give them strength and courage and help them to not have this problem. Thanks.

Well.... there is some amount of recognition of truth in that, in that you're at least attempting to connect to a higher love and send that love and focus on a possible outcome or state of being which is less problematic, less corrupted. But you're also confused because you're only asking for this because you think the person has a dire problem. And in fact, the worse you believe in the person's problem, the more compelled you will be to think you have to pray extra extra much, because this really big problem calls for you to pull out all the stops and do a really great big prayer. Well.... thanks for attacking the person with everything that's already happening to them, right along with your prayer.

There is another kind of prayer which is a prayer of forgiveness which doesn't seek to DO something to or about the problem, but instead seeks to UNDO your faulty perception about the problem and the person's faulty perception about the problem. This is a prayer that you do WITH Holy Spirit, instead of with the ego. When I did one of these prayers last night, Holy Spirit said to me "it's about time!", lol

So what you need to do, is realize that everything in front of your face, every body that you see, every problem that you think someone has, no matter how much it appears to be true and real, no matter how serious it is... ITS AN ILLUSION. And it is your job in your forgiveness prayer to completely IGNORE that illusion. You should not even be addressing or giving energy to all the reasons why the person has a problem, or making it more real, or reacting to it out of fear or desperation or seriousness.

Instead, you need to be acknowledging, recognizing, remembering and affirming, all the ways in which the person DOES NOT HAVE THIS PROBLEM. You don't go saying, well this person has xyz problem, please fix it. You need to instead say, this person DOES NOT HAVE this problem, this person IS NOT SICK, this person DOES NOT have reason to be afraid, this person is HOLY AND INNOCENT, this person HAS NOT SINNED, this person is CHRIST, this person is a picture of TOTAL HEALTH, this person IS NOT REALLY DISEASED, this person CANNOT be guilty, etc.

You need to focus on who the person REALLY IS in Christ, as Christ. You need to affirm and see and clarify the REAL TRUTH about the person, not the fake truths which masquerade as things that you see or sense with your body's senses. And this means, that as you do this prayer/forgiveness, you need to OVERLOOK ALL APPEARANCES, not take them seriously, and make statements which fly in the face of what *seems* to be happening. This is how you cancel out the problem. This is how you make the problem NOT EXIST.

This is where it can be a real challenge, because in the ego we are really really used to seeing the world in such a way that we constantly are making problems real, are believing appearances, totally buying into illusions that victims are really victims and not willing participants, etc. We keep falling for these illusions and each time we do, it PREVENTS us from looking to the real truth.

What you need to learn to do, and this WILL take lots of time, is that no matter how things seem or appear to be, or what seems to be happening, no matter how serious it seems to be, YOU IGNORE THAT, and you FIXATE your vision only on the absolute TRUTH about the person/situation. You hold fast to a single, core truth, aligned with God's will. You affirm what HE has created and its absolute purity and innocence.

You believe strongly in what He has provided and the FACT that He has already created perfection. And therefore, no matter how it seems, and no matter how stubborn the symptoms are, and no matter how many people are telling you to give up, and no matter how much you are telling you to stop trying to kid yourself, you keep on ignoring all appearances and continue to affirm the single one truth. You HOLD YOUR GROUND.

This is one of the vital steps in miracle working. You must believe what is true of God, and not what is true of the ego/illusion/dream, and DO NOT WAVER. If you waver, if you go into fear, if you start buying into how things look, if you go along with appearances, or are fooled by the appearance of failure or "its not working" or "I might as well give up" or "this can't be healed" or whatever... its bullshit. It's ego. You will have to learn to ignore all of that. You have to learn to OVERLOOK/forgive every single appearance of every piece of this entire world. Because it's going to keep trying to convince you that God's will is false and irrelevant. God DOES want permanent healing and he IS READY to provide it right now AND ALREADY HAS.

If you waver from that, especially if the situation seems really serious or even if the person DIES, and if you think well... it looks like we failed and we might as well give up forgiving and stop praying or affirming the truth, then yes, that person will STAY DEAD. But what happens if EVEN in the face of death, you continue to affirm the truth of eternal life? What if you IGNORE appearances and do not take no for an answer and you get really certain and firm that this problem is NOT reality, it is NOT the truth, and the truth is with God? Maybe then with determination and persistence, that person is going to raise from the dead.

So this is how miracles work. Four fairly straightforward steps:

1) Believe in God's truth, and do not be tempted by illusions to waver or fear or doubt or be deceived by how things currently appear.

2) Bring in Holy Spirit and express and extend His Power, his consistency, his absoluteness, such that you are filled with God and are extending only love, not beliefs in attack.

3) Recognize the oneness between you and your brother, He is you, therefore you must recognize you are both One, are both Christ, and all other appearances are illusions that aren't real. Acknowledge only the absolute truth about the person.

4) Command authoritatively and assertively, even aggressively, for the problem to leave right now. Speak directly to it, not about it. Do not ask God about what to do. Do not ask God to do it. God has already set you up with a perfect connection to Him to funnel his power. It's just waiting on you to give the command and extend the authority of His Truth.

You are a miracle worker.

A major way the ego tempts us to seek outside of ourselves and to not find what we are seeking, is to suggest that the truth really is out there somewhere. The belief that you can actually find it outside of yourself, is simultaneously the belief that it does not exist inside of you.

Establishing that the truth is not IN you already, fully and completely, or that you do not have it, is the entire foundation of the ego‘s thought system. Once this is believed, you will cease looking within for it, and start on a quest, which you might even call a "spiritual journey", attempting to "seek" for the truth.

This seeking can show up as very earnest and well-intentioned and an attempt to find the ultimate spiritual answer. BUT, because you are fundamentally looking in the wrong place, you are guaranteed never to find it.

The ego is very sneaky about this. It will tempt you to believe that reality, and truth, are outside of yourself. This means the entire world is real. It also means the world contains the truth. And this then justifies your seeking IN the world to try to find it. The ego has promised you can succeed at this, but it is utterly impossible. The truth is already inside you, where you are not looking, and where the ego will NEVER have you look.

Looking outside yourself CAN also include finding the truth within a book such as A Course in Miracles. Especially if the FORM of the book seems to be more of a truth than other forms. If the words seem to show symbols which don’t even look like symbols, but look like concrete pieces of the truth itself, which is the ego’s way of turning illusions into reality, you can become quite fixated on picking apart the tiniest nuances of what specific words say, become extremely specific, and pull apart even the tiniest of statements, which completely loses all sense of context and increases your insanity. The truth is NOT THERE!

You will go deeply into the Course words and the form of the words. You will not recognize them as mere symbols twice removed from the truth, and will not acknowledge the Course’s holographic nature. You will instead attempt to turn the Course into a linear, finite, concrete piece of "evidence", an attempt to PROVE that the truth is outside of you.

The result of this is an OBSESSION in trying to find the truth. You will feel compelled by the lack of truth in you. And yet, here‘s the problem. The more you seek for it, the more you dwell on what the Coure says, the more you become obsessed with the exact specific words of a given version, the more you dissect it and analyze it and try to figure out what it means based on its form, the more it will slip through your fingers! And the more you do this, the more desperate you will become, because you continue to fail to truly FIND what it is the ego promised you would find there.

The form of the Course IS NOT THE TRUTH. The truth is an inner experience of direct reality with God. It is not intellectual. It has nothing to do with study. It absolutely has nothing whatsoever to do with quote fests or throwing quotes at people to correct them. It definitely has nothing to do with pitting different FORMS of the course against each other. It’s completely nothing whatsoever to do with what exact words were said, who can find the best citations, or who can use the Course as a weapon.

THE TRUTH IS NOT OUTSIDE OF YOU.

There is nothing so blinding as sight of FORM!

The Course is ONLY there to help point you AWAY from the form of the Course and towards an experience of God, which is already in you, just covered up. The more you obsess over the Course’s words the more you are going to get lost in the intellect. And the more you do that, the more you will believe you are "finding" the truth, and are delusional.

The words are just symbols, *representing* a truth that is quite removed from those symbols. When we fight about which exact words are used where, or what they mean, or what they "say", we’re completely forgetting they are symbols and are trying to break the Course out into some kind of direct truth in its own right. This was never how it was intended. This is an ego trap.

Blocks to awareness of the fact that you are ALREADY WITH GOD need to be removed. That’s all. Period. This is nothing more than the undoing of denial and stopping searching outside yourslf, even within the course, for something which is not there. The Course if understood is telling you to do this. You are supposed to leave the Course behind at some point and go within to God with empty hands! You can’t do this, and you cannot experience the truth, while trying to make yourself RIGHT about what exactly the FORM says or seems to prove. There is NO PROOF in the Course. It’s an illusion.

Go within.

People are all different. One of the most harmful aspects of this ego world is the attempt to make everyone the same and gloss over their differences. This is the ego's attempt to pretend that 'everything is ok' and 'we are all equal' as a form of denial and repression. It thus leads to people feeling like they have to 'pretend that they agree', when around individuals who are different.

For me, for example, I am an introverted person. That means I am more independent from society and social interactions and tend to be more sensitive and introspective. What seems 'natural' for me is quite different to what is natural for extroverted people. When the two worlds collide there is almost always a sense of tension and miscommunication and people-pleasing and dishonesty and lack of authenticity

For years and years I always felt compelled to have to try to 'be like others', or fit in, or just automatically accept sociable situations, as if not doing so was wrong and anti-social. This I think is largely because more extroverted people `push` sociability as though it is normal and exalted (especially with the whole idol worship/celebrity/hollywood ideals). But what is ideal for them is not ideal for me. Layers and layers of guilt and shame have had to be released and healed to come to feel that it is `ok` to be truer to my personality and my own standards and that I do not 'have to' just go along with other people.

The main area I experience this is in social interactions especially with strangers or where more sociable people are engaged. Just even the mere fact that people decide to suddenly stop and connect and converse is to me an uninvited intrusion, and due to my sensitivity I experience it as jumping ahead several steps in the amount of `trust` or depth of connection I would need to establish first. It's especially difficult around people that I think of as - social bloodsuckers - the people who suddenly decide to include themselves and involve themselves and start yacking on about themselves, especially filled with complaining and other forms of social attention-seeking, as a way to kind of `hold me hostage`. I want to tell them to shut the fuck up and leave me alone and stop invading my space.

So you can see that if you are different in some fundamental ways, whichever side of the fence you fall on, it can really produce a lot of tension and conflict, either externally or internally. That discomfort makes it feel like it's not okay to be the way you are or its not normal or its not acceptable, and that can lead to profound shame and emotional pain.

The term 'painfully shy' can arise for introverted people quite easily and the pain actually comes from social embarrassment, a lack of social prowess, troubles speaking (at all), troubles finding things to engage about conversationally (to even have the mental thoughts that lead to conversation), not belonging or fitting in, feeling inadequate socially and thus as a person, feeling lacking and insufficient and defective, feeling unheard (because more extroverted people actually don't connect at the same depth as introverted people - they are shallow and enjoy social-lies rather than truth), etc... this all can add up to a tremendous sense of 'being attacked' (either internally or by others) and that produces profound emotional pain. I suffered with that for years and years thinking it was not okay to be the way I am.

Gradually, and this is thanks in large part to A Course in Miracles and other healing and loving support, I've been learning two things - how to be more comfortable being the way I am - at least in terms of personality and needs - and consequently, being more comfortable to be around people and converse. The `opening up` of the Course has helped me to heal from 'social torture' to a large degree and to feel more confident in being `myself`. Even if that means just being my ego self more authentically. Because that authenticity is a doorway to my True Self.

Being true to yourself no matter what your `self` is, is empowering. And it also has helped me to learn healthier boundaries, that I don't have to people-please, that I can just walk away from people when I don't want to be social, that I'm not `held captive` by anyone's need for attention or domination, and generally an overall sense of ... greater peace, I suppose. These weren't necessarily goals I had with the Course but it has definitely healed to bring about healing in these areas, to remove fear and inhibitions, and to build a deeper connection of trust - and yet personal power - when interacting with others.

I don't know what kind of a moron I am in the eyes of extroverted people. I must come across as some kind of inept antisocial lifeless idiot or something. I have more to learn about how the majority of society functions. This is why it is very hard for me to envisage ever standing in front of some audience and giving a speech or being a highly visible public figure. Jesus has me doing things on a much lower-key and more behind closed doors, lol. Whatever your style is though, I'm just glad to finally be feeling a sense of RELIEF from years of torment and misery trying to be something I'm not, and I hope extroverted people can also learn they don't have to be like those annoying, antisocial, holier-than-thou, wimpy introverts ;-)

There is, as always, a paradox - the truer you are to yourself and to how you are different, not trying to pretend you are the same, actually allows you to become inter-dependent and open to true communication, understanding and compassion. And that is joining. Everyone has their gifts and talents. Let's celebrate how our differences can be acknowledged so that we can all experience peace. Political correctness out the window - we need to embrace who we are (even as an ego) in order to let others be who they are, in order to accept others and not be insensitive to their differences.

Thank you Jesus!

If there is fear in you, and if you are projecting it outward, you will project it onto specific things. This is because fear is divisive and not whole, so it attaches to PARTS OF the environment. And in particular it can project onto a specific body.

When fear is projected, another's body is seen in a very isolating way. Fear distorts perception heavily and anchors you into the physical. It then seems that only the physical exists, only the physical rules apply, only physical causation is real, and there is no escape from anything.

By making your brother's body his "reality", focusing on its condition or form or appearance, projecting fear onto it, you turn it into an enemy. You give it power over you. Your whole awareness sinks into the ego and you can find no way out.

As the body is given reality, which is very easy to do when you are afraid, your whole focus shuts out the mind and awareness of any higher truth. And now you feel like you are completely imprisoned and held captive by this "sinful body" you see. Like you are locked in and completely at its effect. Anything it does, or doesn't do, now seems to completely affect you against your will, as if you have no ability to stop it or do anything about it. If the person has a sickness or problem and cannot fix it, or isn't trying to, you will now feel like they are imposing limits on you and forcing you to suffer.

Seeing yourself as a victim of this dynamic, already deep in fear with nowhere to turn, everything now seems like a closed system. Having bound your brother to his body, imprisoning him, you see yourself as imprisoned. And now your brother's body seems to be attacking you. This incites reactions of even more fear, which turns into anger and rage, justified due to what he seems to be doing to you.

It will now feel like there is nothing you can do to be free, as if your mind is somehow locked onto their body state, as if you have merged with it and are kind of one with their body. You will feel exposed to it and completely vulnerable to it, as if you have opened up a conduit or bridge, a cord that has bound you to it. Its every move seems to dictate your suffering, and you cannot seem to be free unless the other person changes. And now you will demand they change, rather than look at the fact you are projecting fear.

This really is the ego's version of "forgiveness to destroy" taken to the extreme. The projection of fear blinds you to stepping back or looking into your mind, seeing yourself as doing anything to yourself. It warps your perception and turns it inside out. Cause and effect are backwards and you see yourself as completely victimized. The more you go into it the more you lose sight of the fact that you have any power or are choosing any of this.

Your whole sense of peace then seems to completely "depend" on the other person. If their body has any issue at all, you'll blow it out of proportion and see it as a threat and a danger. And how dare they not resolve it for your benefit. The only way out of this is to stop projecting fear, look at the fear within you, heal it and return to love.

True forgiveness is needed, and you must be clear that fear really is an attempt to attack. "The fearful are apt to be vicious." Viciousness comes out when you are afraid. And by attacking, you will see another as attacking you. And having attacked them by seeing them as only a body, you will see their body as attacking you. Just even by sitting there in its condition, it is experienced as a threat, because you have threatened it, having threatened yourself.

Fear is really part of your self-attack, resulting from guilt, resulting from a belief in sin. Your own sinlessness is the key to salvation and to removing the basis for fear. There is nothing to fear because only love is real.

"It seems to be the body we feel limits our freedom, makes us suffer and at last puts out our life. Yet bodies are but symbols of a concrete form of fear."

"But fear attaches to specifics, being false."

"Bodies attack, but minds do not." "This is the reason bodies easily become fear's symbols."

"The body is the target for attack, for no one thinks he hates a mind."

"When hatred rests upon a thing, it calls for death as surely as God's Voice proclaims there is no death. Fear is insatiable, consuming everything its eyes behold; seeing itself in everything; compelled to turn upon itself and to destroy."

"Who sees a brother as a body sees him as fear's symbol. And he will attack because what he beholds is his own fear external to himself, poised to attack, and howling to unite with him again. Mistake not the intensity of rage projected fear must spawn. It shrieks in wrath, and claws the air in frantic hope it can reach to its maker and devour him."

Punishment comes from a FAILURE to know what is an appropriate correction.

The only appropriate correction for any mistake, is a correction based in love. The Holy Spirit knows how to truly correct, thus heal, mistakes because he is loving and forgiving.

When we are not aligned with love, we're already in a state of having punished OURSELVES, and we are just ready to jump at any opportunity to find a SKAPEGOAT.

Conveniently, someone, perhaps a child or whomever, does something that seems to be a mistake, and it REMINDS us of our own mistake, which we've already condemned ourselves for, and we already believe in punishment (of ourselves), so now we try to get rid of this self-blame by putting it onto the person.

It's an excellent opportunity to try to convince ourselves and everyone that we are absolved of guilt, becaues this other person is the 'elected' guilty one. The one who gets to die on our behalf so that the rest of us can live. This is nothing more than sacrificing people to 'the God's in order to try to avoid the wrath. That's how archaic it is.

So when you punish someone else, it is because you have already punished yourself and you already believe in punishment, and you also believe that punishment is JUSTIFIED because you are WORTHY of it and it APPROPRIATE given that you have sinned. You get to try to project your own sin onto others when they slip up, because it triggers your own unworthiness and you want to cover up that awareness as quickly as possible. To get rid of an awareness of sin you use projection and denial.

So, punishing someone for a mistake, does not correct their mistake, because you're really punishing them for YOUR mistake, AND you are not actually correcting your mistake by doing so - or theirs. All you're doing is adding your own mistake to theirs, as if to say, if they carry the burden of both mistakes then you'll be set free.

And so as you believe their punishment is called for, secretly you are getting relief from your own sin and are performing an act of terrorism. So then how can you claim the other person is guilty when you are the one who is guilty? And it's your sin that you see in them.

This is why punishment doesn't help anyone. It doesn't provide a TRUE correction. It doesn't HEAL or UNDO the mistake. It doesn't properly correct the person so that they won't contain, in their mind, the same guilt that compelled them to make a mistake in the first place. You might think punishing them for the EFFECTS of their mistake will correct the CAUSE of it. But it's totally removed from the cause. All it does is gloss over the problem and the cause.

This is why most efforts to correct bullying also don't work. If you make it all about 'anti bullying' and you go after the bullies and get all pissed and angry at them or you punish them, it WILL NOT stop them from being bullies. They are bullies because they themselves have beaten themselves up and believe they are very guilty. They're finding skapegoats (the victims) because of the huge amount of guilt they already carry around which nobody is addressing. They need a lot of LOVE, not punishment. They need HEALING and compassion.

The same applies to all victimizers. Even murderors. Can you imagine the kind of nightmaring torment that goes on in such a person's mind, who feels so separated from others and so victimized and so guilty that they have to disassociate from their guilt and project it intensely onto someone else, to feel justified in committed a terrible act. They will always feel even more guilty for doing so, because it's an ego solution - the ego's attempt to destroy itself while preserving itself. Obviously that won't work. But the murderor also needs a lot of love and healing. They need compassion. Otherwise if you ADD punishment they will only feel even worse about themselves and enter into even more darkness and hell. This is also largely why locking people up in prisons with no real HEALING ("rehab") is largely an exercise in the rest of society committing a massive act of DENIAL, rather than actually correcting the problem.

Always with any policies you'll notice that they do not really address the true cause of any problems, only the effects further down the chain of consequences. And doing that will only chop off some of those consequences temporarily. It's like digging up weeds and leaving the 'root' in the ground, which will only sprout more weed eventually. If you're not truly healing the CAUSE of something, it is not getting fixed. Period. This is why I laugh when, for example, the British government orders more security cameras to 'fix crime'. Like that will do anything. Or how software companies increase 'security' in order to try to combat hacking, even though the increase in 'security' increasingly UNDERMINES trust and erodes safety. People don't really want to fix the true cause of anything and the world will just keep manifesting problems all over the place until the real cause in our mind is healed.

Punishment just doesn't work. Counter-meaures and reactions do not work. Only love can work.

You have everything. God shared it with you.

But then the ego comes along and says, "you don't have that". It tells you, "you're lacking what God gave you. what he supposedly gave you is not HERE. so you'd better go look for it somewhere ELSE."

So then you start to SEEK. And this seeking is like running away from what God gave you. And what God gave you is inside you, so you're running away fromyourself.

As Jesus says, all forms of sickness are produced by seeking externally outside of yourself. What this means is, if you believe and assert that you do not already HAVE what God has given you, that's actually an ATTACK on your invulnerability. And that attack now means that you are attempting to believe that a) you are not as God created you (you are sick), b) you have lack and emptiness in you (death), and c) you will not find God by going within (separation).

Then you go off looking for... basically yourself, for God.... anywhere OTHER than where it is. The ego's made sure you believe its not in you, and you don't have it, and you are not yourself, and God is not in your mind, so now you look everywhere ELSE for it. You therefore are now looking "outside yourself", somewhere beyond your is-ness, to try to find what you think you lack.

And as you do this, you are compounding the belief that you are lacking, that you're empty, that God is not with you for some reason, that you don't have health, that you are less than whole, that you are diminished and void in some way. And all of those attack thoughts produce SICKNESS. They are like evil curses.

Then as you seek, looking everywhere but where you'll find God/Self, out in the world, or even in the body, you WILL NOT FIND IT. You've separated yourself from it, so now you are blind to it, and aware UNAWARE of its presence, so you literally do not see it. You will therefore keep hunting around in the dark, worried, afraid, desperate that you need to get this 'something' back, and yet you will not find it. The 'it' is not out there, beyond your Self. The 'it' as God is not separate from you, lost in some world somewhere.

So you will then "seek and not find". And you'll not find pretty hard. And especially if your believe in being lacking in some way is strong, e.g. unworthy, or imperfect, or flawed, or whatever, you will be compelled even more strongly to SEEK. And yet the harder you seek, where the 'it' is not, i.e. outside of you, the more you will fail to find it. And you'll grow really frustrated that you are coming up empty handed and being led on wild goosechases. But, if you're really steeped in this belief in how much you are lacking, you'll still have yet another attempt at finding it. You'll tell yourself you didn't look hard enough (because you're defective), and that can be a vicious circle.

So then you seek and fail and seek harder and fail harder and it gets really desperate and exasperating. You feel like you just can't find a solution. You go into panic. The ego has really got you in its grips. And the fact is, it's because you are looking for something you DID NOT EVEN REALLY LOSE in the first place, in a location that it does not exist. You need to QUESTION THE NEED TO SEEK, by questioning whether it is TRUE that you actually 'lack' in the way that you believe.

So what that then boils down to is, it's a matter of awareness. You have blocks to your awareness which hide from your awareness the presence of everything God already gave you. And if you had full awareness of everything God gave you, you would KNOW that you do not lack ANYTHING and that you have NO NEEDS. Thus no need to seek. The block to awareness is all the ways that the ego tells you, you are not ALREADY fully equipped, that you are not ALREADY complete and whole, that you are not ALREADY holy and perfect, or that you are not ALREADY WITH GOD.

Yes, you are already with God. You just have a block to awareness covering it up.

So we need to stop seeking. After all, people who find, stop seeking, right? You might think that means you have to seek first in order to find second? Well, what if you just find? What if you just accept that you are already in a state of having found yourself, and found God, and that you are in the presence of what you THOUGHT you were lacking? What if you question all of the 'lacking' belief? What if you undo all of the 'don't deserve it' and all of the 'not perfect enough' and all of the 'I'm not God's beloved child'? What will be REVEALED?

The truth!

The truth will set you free, or rather, you will be set free INTO the truth. The truth is, God already loves you, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, you are not lacking at all, you are worthy of unconditional love, you are totally 100% acceptable, you are perfectly innocent and HOLY, and you have absolutely NO REASON to be afraid. All fear stems from a sense of separation from God, i.e. something's gone wrong and now you have to seek. Stop it. No fear is needed, only celebration, that "I was lost and now I'm found". Cus when you're a seeker, you're a loser. When you stop seeking, you win, because then the ego loses.

"Be still and know that I am God." See.

Everyone has free will. Which means that all experiences are chosen. And nothing happens to anyone without their consent or choice. If this weren't true, it would be possible that someone's free will could be taken away from them, violated, broken, or completely have no effect. This isn't possible because the free will was given by GOD, and is irrevocably permanent. Everyone has free will at all times.

"The world (heaven), in its original connotation, included both the proper creation of man (souls) by God, AND the proper creation by man (souls) in his Right Mind. The latter required the endowment of man (souls) by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given."

"It still remains within him to project as God projected his own Spirit to him. In reality, this is his ONLY choice, because his free will was made for his own joy in creating the perfect."

When a person seems incapable of exercising decision making on their own, such as with a baby or a child, a person who you are having to be guardian for due to their disabilities, some group of people that you're supposed to protect, the elderly who have lost their power of thought and seem unable to look after themselves etc, these all create scenarios where someone else seems to have to take "responsibility" for them.

It's interesting first of all that there even is such a scenario where someone could seem to be in a position to be unable to choose for themselves. This alone is the result of ego interfering with freedom. And just because e.g. newborn babies are heavily dependent on their parents for survival and for decision making, this doesn't mean it's natural. To place oneself in a position of having to depend on anyone else to make decisions, for any reason, is an aspect of self denial. Which is what leads to incarnation in the first place. In effect this makes the bodies of babies, a physical "face of innocence", denying responsibility for attacking God.

Beyond that, once you're in a situation where it seems you have "no choice" but to take responsibility for choosing for someone else, there is now a very slippery slope. If you truly are "held accountable" for someone else's well-being, and if anything whatsoever remotely happens to that person, it is now implied that this is "your fault". Whether it be that you are a parent who "has to" look after a young child, or an adult looking after an elderly parent, or an older sibling looking after a younger sibling, the same is true.

If in any way another person seems to lack the power of decision or free will, and you have to "take over responsibility", this is tantamount to forcing you into a state of guilt. Anything that do, anything that happens to them, now effectively happens "to you", because you have now extended the scope of what you are responsible for. Even to the extent that it makes you feel like they are "part of you", and what happens to them even starts to affect you against your will. When they suffer, you suffer, because of this belief that you are bound to them - that you being responsible for them makes them an extension of your self.

It's very difficult to avoid this "double responsibility" in this world. If parents would just ditch babies, the babies would not survive. If we would just let those with dementia or alzheimers or disabilities fend for themselves, they would not last long. The question then is, is it possible psychologically to still maintain a role of "looking after" another person, or seeming to be responsible for them, WITHOUT believing that you are taking over their free will, and without using their suffering as a way to induce guilt in yourself?

It is very difficult to not feel guilty for the suffering of others. If you feel responsible for them it induces guilt and fear. If you feel compelled to protect them from suffering, and something happens, you can potentially go into self blame. If they go through a difficult time, you can possibly feel like it's your fault even if it isn't. And any way in which they suffer, makes you suffer.

If what's happening in your mind is a lack of letting go, a sense of "owning the person" (very prevalent in parenting), efforts to control and coerce, or any other way in which the person's free will is violated, then this will lay the groundwork for your own suffering. Regardless of whether you are acting physically on the level of form to provide for, support, guide, "keep alive" or otherwise be "responsible for" someone else's life, you have to find a way to keep sight of free will. Otherwise you will lose yourself in it and accuse yourself of "irresponsibility", as a result of being overly responsible.

I was guided recently, that "She is God's responsibility, not yours". This was because I kept being overly responsible for the wellbeing of another person. This compels a need to constantly fix and control things. It results in a kind of fear-driven desperation to want things to be different. To try to get someone to make different choices, to avoid certain outcomes. But as soon as we're getting into territory of encroaching on free will, we're going to lose our own peace of mind.

It boils down to the simple fact that you can't retain a sense of freedom if you take over the freedom of others. You become excessively responsible for things you are not responsible for, when you see yourself as "the cause of" what others are experiencing. You move into states of guilt and fear and worry whenever you believe that someone is "not supposed to" or "supposed to" be in a certain state they are not electing to be in. And you cannot retain any sense of peace while you try to coerce anyone in any way.

It's a difficult thing to deal with. You have to continue possibly being physically and emotionally supportive of a person, but without getting lost in it. Without losing sight of your own free will and that of another. It can even seem frightening to entertain the idea of allowing someone to make poor decisions or to degrade or to head towards death. Mainly because this incites reactions of guilt at not preventing it, due to believing it's your fault, based on believing their free will is something for YOU to control.

Always it's about the confusion of who you are, who they are, who is responsible for what freedom, and who is doing what to whom. You have to let people go in order to truly helpful. Otherwise any help is really a combination of help and manipulation. And that can only lead to a special relationship.

It's interesting that it is people with egos who seek to become more spiritual.

This is based on the ego belief that they are not already perfect, complete, holy, innocent etc. Life probably sucks in some way, and this compels them to search for greater meaning or truth.

The problem is we have two identities rolled into one. The ego is one identity. Our Real Self is the other. The problem is we've become attached to, identified with, and confused with the ego. It wants us to think it is what we are and that we are nothing else. This gives us the impression we have one self, a separate self, but in fact we have another self - a Real Self, which is actually all of who we are.

So then as we become compelled by pain and suffering to 'seek for a better way', it's who we THINK we are that starts to seek. And that means, it's us plus the ego. The ego is along for the ride. And the ego will bring with it all of its baggage and misunderstanding and misinterpretation. And that's also what happens when anyone starts to study A Course in Miracles - they will filter it through their ego, bigtime, not really understand or accept it, and will distort the living crap out of it. I know because I did this too.

So what's happening is, the ego wants to compel us to be always seeking and never finding. It wants to take us away from accepting or having or being. So then we - the ego-infested self, starts to seek for the truth. And this might surprise you that the ego seeks for the truth, but seeking the truth and actually finding the truth are very different things. Seeking does NOT lead to finding! It's a trick. Seeking the truth actually takes you AWAY from the truth, because the truth is always PRESENT already. Any form of searching is actually a blindfold.

So at first, we want to be more spiritual because we cannot see that we already HAVE everything God gave us. That's because we have blocks to awareness. And so we'll go off seeking, and actually will take ourselves onto tangents and directions that actually lead AWAY from truth. And you will find as you do this, that you start to SACRIFICE. Ie you'll start to give up on things that were in your life that you suspect maybe are the definition of 'not spiritual'. You'll misinterpret the truth and think it's calling for you to give up stuff, to give up forms and people and things you enjoy, because your ego does not understand the truth. It comes to its own conclusions.

And then as you get to grips with the Course a bit more the ego gets undone a bit and you make some progress, but you also start to become a 'spiritual ego', or rather, you start trying to act like you are 'special' in your spirituality. You will spiritualize things in the world. You'll try to sound like you are spiritual. You'll try to act like you're spiritual. You'll basically try to 'integrate' spiritual truth into your EGO life, which is a realm of form and behavior. So the ego is trying to keep its life and the ways of living that it is used to, but bring the truth 'into' that realm so that the ego is retained. Yet it's quite possible to fill your life with a combination of sacrifice and spiritual specialness, to create the ILLUSION that you are becoming more truth-filled. The ego loves that you're thinking of being a spiritual savior/hero ;-)

At some point after this if you are making true progress through sincere honesty, purification, letting go, healing, surrender, and seeing through your OWN ego lies, you will see through the ego's efforts to seek, and all of these activities you've been doing even with the Course to try to 'get to' where the truth is. You'll learn more that the truth is already present, and that God is already present, and that even in your spiritual seeking it has been taking you AWAY from what is. So now your 'path', what's left of it, now becomes more like a form of surrendering, stopping searching, relinquishing trying so hard, maybe even letting go of sacrifice and opening up to reclaiming into your life things which are 'okay' that you thought were 'un-spiritual' before. You may start to bring joy back into your life. And you will start practice a simpler art of acceptance, listening to God, communing with God, being present, becoming aware of what is, and letting go of every 'block' that was telling you you needed to be a spiritual seeker to get back everything you don't have.

Even though the Course says you need to undo the blocks to awareness, to reveal the love that cannot be taught, which is hidden but already present underneath those blocks, the spiritual ego seeks to find love by seeking for it where it does not exist - externally. And instead of actually working on the undoing of those blocks, it would happily spend its time working on the 'accumulation' of 'spiritual information', intellectual understanding, special powers and so on, so long as you avoid actually healing the root cause of the spiritual seeking itself.

If you were to actually look within and see there is no sin, and heal the sense of lack, you would find the truth, but the ego does not want that, so it has you seeking everywhere that the truth is not. And then when you don't find the truth, the ego is happy that you might give up seeking and go back to ignorant unconsciousness. But what if instead you decide the ego was lying to you and you learn to stop trusting its voice? Maybe you become aware of a deeper truth that transcends it, and which is already in you. And maybe, as you realize the ego led you in the wrong direction, this will finally teach you what the right direction is - within! And so the ego has helped you awaken.

The real truth then starts to reveal itself. That you already have everything God gave you. You already are how he wants you (in Spirit, not form). That you are already loveable. That you are already forgiven. That nothing has really happened etc. And so you approach the real atonement, and true forgiveness, and Holy Spirit's mind of stillness and peace. You stop so much being a spiritual seeker as a spiritual finder, realizing the seeking stops you from finding, and the truth is already here. It was here in front of your nose all along, this whole time that you thought it was somewhere else. And so now you have uncovered the truth of who and what you are and have returned home to yourself in God. This is "the journey without distance", back to the True Self that you already are.

What comes next I have no idea, haha! To be continued...