"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally"

In the separation from God, each of us has condemned ourselves. We've accused ourselves of sin, and condemned ourselves to suffer. We want ourselves to be punished, murdered, and destroyed. Ultimately this is a death wish, in which we have become suicidal because we don't believe we deserve to live or to be loved by God. You might be thinking, suicidal? I'm not suicidal. Well think again.

At the same time as trying to destroy yourself to prove you don't exist in God, your true self is utterly sinless, guiltless, innocent, holy and pure. You have never sinned or hurt or commit a crime or broke a law. You have never done anything to anyone, and no-one has ever attacked you. You are immortal and eternal and endless and permanent. And no harm can come to you because God himself protects you.

"The Thought of God protects you, cares for you"

The problem is, there is a seeming "gap" between what is really true of you, and what you currently BELIEVE. And if you are not in touch with your utter immaculate sinlessness, then some part of you DOES believe you are condemned to hell. God isn't doing this condemnation, nor are your brothers.

It's all an inside job of your own self attack. It is your self destruction. And this is suicidal. Even though death isn't real, this needs to be undone because the belief in your non-existence keeps you from being happy.

Looking at what you are doing to yourself is not pretty. If you are not accepting your sinlessness, it means you are believing you are sinful. It means you don't love yourself. It means you actively attack yourself and are trying to destroy yourself. Such as in "my attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability." It means you don't really like yourself, yet alone love yourself with the love of God.

So now if you think about it in terms of the "relationship" that you have "with yourself", as if you could relate to yourself like a third party, how do you really feel about yourself? What is your honest current attitude towards yourself? If it's not one of total unconditional perfect love, then it isn't a very healthy relationship.

If there is a belief in being sinful, or evil, or a monster, or unworthy, or not good enough, or you resent yourself, or are angry at yourself, or keep judging yourself, or see yourself as weak, or hurt yourself emotionally or physically, or keep being abusive towards yourself, there are all signs of a breakdown in relationship.

And what that ultimately means is that you have not forgiven yourself. You're in this relationship with someone that you don't want to be with. And that is going to split your mind and hurt your mind. If you don't love yourself and embrace yourself with acceptance then how can you possibly relate to yourself at all?

Think of yourself as in the shoes of a person that you don't like in a similar way. If you don't like that person you don't want to be near them. You don't want to give them things. You don't want to share with them or spend time with them. You don't want them to exist. You don't care if they get hurt or suffer. You want them to suffer. And you may even feel so bitter towards them that you wish they were dead. Is that the relationship you are having with YOURSELF?

You have to look deep within yourself with much honesty to find this out. And it's probably going to be somewhat painful or even scary. You may not actually even realize or recognize that you have it in for yourself, or want yourself to suffer, because you may be so used to a general level of background destructiveness that you think it's totally normal. You might not have even seen how much you hate yourself.

"You who think you hate your bodies, deceive yourselves. YOU HATE YOUR MINDS, for guilt has entered into them, and they would remain separate, which they CANNOT DO."

"You HATE the prison that you made, and would destroy it."

"You are afraid of Him, and do not see you hate and fear your Self as enemy."

"And why do you attack them anywhere except you hate yourself?"

"But if you hate part of your own Soul, ALL your understanding is lost, because you are looking on what God creates AS YOURSELF without love."

"You do not realize how much you hate each other. You will not get rid of this until you DO realize it, for UNTIL then, you will think you want to get rid of EACH OTHER and KEEP THE HATRED. "

So you have to look at this stuff. And typically you need a strong contrast in order to recognize it. Get in touch with what it means to be sinless. That your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. Get a feel for total pure innocence and the complete absence of all attack, even slight annoyances. And then in that light, look at how you feel about yourself.

Do you still feel like attacking? Do you still feel a need or requirement to judge and blame? Do you condemn others to hide your self condemnation? Are you constantly fighting with people? Do you feel unhappy most of the time? If you have any of the "symptoms" of the ego, which is anything not of God, then certainly there is room for improvement in your relationship with yourself.

First you need to recognize that you even DO hate yourself, before you can be willing to take steps to heal that relationship. And you can't see that unless you have some kind of higher truth about you to compare it to. Your utter pure sinlessness in God, your immortal innocence, the guarantee of eternal life, can act as a contrast and at reality-tester to find out just how you really do feel about yourself. And once you find that out, you have healing work to be done upon yourself. You need correction and forgiveness. You need to FORGIVE YOURSELF, in order to recognize you are sinless and free.

"You have condemned yourself, but condemnation is not of God."

"You who believe you have condemned the Son of God"

"But in the dream of judgment, you attack and ARE condemned."

"And unless He had given you a way to remember, you would have condemned yourselves to oblivion."

"Now has the mind condemned itself to seek without finding; to be forever dissatisfied and discontented; to know not what it really wants to find."

"If the Son of God is guilty, then is he condemned, and he DESERVES no mercy from the God of justice."

"Guilt is ALWAYS in your OWN mind, WHICH HAS CONDEMNED ITSELF. Project it not, for while you do, it cannot BE undone."

"The delusional can be very destructive, for they do not recognize they have condemned THEMSELVES."

"It is not God Who has condemned His Son. But ONLY you, to save his specialness, and kill his Self."

"Remember, then, that whenever you look without and react unfavorably to what you see, you have judged yourself unworthy, and have condemned yourself to death."

"You have handled this wish TO KILL YOURSELF by NOT KNOWING WHO YOU ARE, and identifying with something ELSE. You have projected guilt blindly and indiscriminately, but you have NOT uncovered its source. For the ego DOES want to kill you, and if you identify WITH it, you MUST believe ITS GOAL IS YOURS."

You don't need to die. You need to forgive yourself.

For something to be special it has to have a value that is different to the value of something else. We give it its value by taking away value from something else.

So if I have an apple and an orange, which are essentially equal, and I say, well, I like apples more than oranges, I have to 'demote' the orange and withdraw some of its value and give it to the apple. Now I have a sense that the apple is more important or 'special' than the orange.

What this does, is it makes me have a 'special love' relationship with the apple, and a 'special hate' relationship with the orange. I've also turned the apple into an idol, and the orange into an enemy.

The Course also talks about how we use special love to cover up special hate. The ego has made a world from separation and has made everything in the world be separate. This is based on hate. It is an attack on God. However, the ego then comes along and tries to 'cover up' and deny this hate by creating the illusion that things are somehow joined. It does this by the illusion of 'sameness', things being similar, of like mind, or having minimal conflict.

Minimally conflicting individuals end up as 'friends and allies'. And as the Course says, these allegiances are formed because two people temporarily agree to be against something else. Thus their allegiance still 'includes' an idea of attack and rejection, because it can't exist unless 'everyone else' is not like them. Thus the friends become special and have a special love relationship. But this special love is at best temporary, and covers up the foundation of the relationship which is hate. Separation from others. Isolation. Exclusivity. And so if something takes away that veneer of special love, it 'reveals' the hate beneath it and the claws come out.

While we attempt to make certain parts of the world more important or valuable than others, we make them special. This is our attempt to 'spiritualize' the dream. We attempt to make some parts more spiritual than others, so that at least some of the parts seem sacred, spiritual, holy, valuable, rather than it all being equal and neutral. In this way the ego holds onto these parts of the dream to make it real and to be attracted to it. And of course, to be attracted to one part of the dream requires the formation of a 'shadow' attitude which is against other parts.

So for example, to me, Apple Mac computers are more special than Windows PC's. Green grass is more special than brown. Summer days are more special than winter. Certain TV shows are more special than others. The olympics are more special than regular team sports. And raspberry-anything is more special than most other flavors. These are things I've made special, at the expense of other things being despised and disliked.

This is where the Holy Relationship comes in. With a goal of true holiness, we recognize that instead of depending on another separate thing to 'get' what we lack, or to reinforce our own self-specialness, we instead become wholly dependent on God. It is now God who created us, not our parents. God now also created our children, and he is responsible for them, not us. This of course dissolves all family structures. Absolute equality is the only family - God's family. Equality dissolves specialness and sees everything with unconditional love.

You can still be having your relationships and your favorite foods and whatever, but eventually we will let Holy Spirit choose everything for us and we will live in freedom. We may well remain with those we had special love with and no longer see them with specialness. But this doesn't mean we don't love them. It means we love them even MORE. We love them with an unconditional, ego-free love. One where being together is voluntary and not forced, or maintained out of guilt. But not until we are truly ready to accept this. It can't be forced while we still value specialness or we will experience sacrifice and loss.

You can still be in a one-to-one parternship all the way to waking up. Just look at Jesus and Mary as an example.

Separation is the idea that there is an opposite to love.

It has given rise to a world where both love and hate seem to coexist, where there is both joy and sadness, and where there is both Life and death.

The "duality" of the world is therefore a picture of the belief that Life and death both coexist, that death has been added to the realm of God's existence, and that it's possible for opposites to occur simultaneously.

There seems to be duality in the world because the ego believes in conflicting goals and opposite possibilities. We seem to now experience a world of both life and death, happiness and sadness, love and hate, certainty and fear.

We say that the hate and the unhappiness and the death and the fear are the problem that the ego created. But moreso it's the belief that these things can exist and that they are separate from the good stuff - love/light/joy/peace - that creates this illusion of a split.

The world is an idea of the introduction of an opposite to Life, an opposite to love and an opposite to happiness. It therefore has to manifest forms which depict both of those opposites. To have one without the other would seem to be impossible. Where there is life there must be death.

But in truth, real life does not require death in order to exist. Death on the other hand requires life in order to define itself as its opposite. Death is not a true opposite to life. Life is eternal and death is nothing.

Hell is a state of total denial. It is the end result of "seek and do not find".

It happens metaphysically, based entirely on previous logical steps, and having gone through all the "laws of chaos" which are stages in the ego thought system.

1) You believe you lack love/God.

2) You believe love must be somewhere else, outside of you.

3) You believe others are responsible for providing it.

4) You try to manipulate others into providing it.

5) If they provide it, you temporarily think you are in heaven, since you are getting specialness, which tries to substitute for a lack of love (and fails)

6) If they do not provide it, you are FUCKED.

What happens then, if others do not fulfill your "need" or lack, is that you have absolutely nowhere to turn. You can't get it from God because you believe He stopped loving you. You can't get it from yourself because you denied it's in you. You can't get it from others because they are refusing to give it.

So now you are left in this state of lack, neediness, emptiness, lovelessness, with no "way" or tool or mechanism through which you can correct the emptiness. And the seeming absence of love DOES seem like a nightmarish hell of judgement, attack, hate, suffering, guilt, fear, sickness, torment and death, with no peace anywhere. Hell is psychological.

It's like having something wrong with you with absolutely no way to correct it. The ego has no further options or solutions available to you, and has led you away from all solutions to an oblivion of desperation and horror. There is no-one who can seemingly offer salvation to you because they are all refusing it, and so there is no way to "satisfy" the craving for love. It then seems you are in a state of CONSTANT LACK of love - the idea of absolute permanent unlove - the ego's opposite to heaven and eternal happiness.

This produces the state of HELL - the idea that love (you/God) does not exist.

This is also what surfaces when someone is needy and others fail to meet the needs and reject them. Or someone who is supposed to love you turns into an enemy. All of a sudden there is no special love to cover up your self hate - the same self hate which denied the love that was in you to begin with which created the need for a substitute - and so now the lid comes off the self hate and out it comes in a rage of hellish proportions.

It then seems like a nightmare that no-one loves you, you are alone, you have this huge problem which you cannot solve, you see no way out, no way to heal it or resolve it, there seems to be no-one who wants to save you, and so you are totally fucked and have nowhere to go.

Except there is one way out of hell. And that's through forgiveness.

Because what really needs to happen is the recognition that love is not lacking, therefore you have no need to find it, therefore you do not need a savior, therefore it doesn't matter if other people are filling the need or not, and therefore you are already supplied with love, and therefore you are with God, and therefore YOU ARE IN HEAVEN.

"Forgiveness is the way out of hell for you."

When you feel angry at someone and believe they are guilty, you will also feel afraid of them. And you will find that behind this fear, YOU feel guilty for some reason. You feel guilty because you have attacked this person with your mind. And you attacked "them" in trying to get rid of the guilt that arose from your self-attack.

You will also find that this idea that you have of them in your mind, this picture, of some kind of monster that you hate, is not really THEM. It's not the person. It's actually a separate image that you've invented which you hate. You hold this image up and hate IT, but it's not really targeted at the person. You see IT, INSTEAD of them, and it blinds you to their light.

"Who sees a brother's body has laid a JUDGMENT on him, and sees him not. He does not REALLY see him as sinful; he does not see him at all. In the darkness of sin, he is INVISIBLE. He can but be IMAGINED in the darkness, and it is here that the illusions you hold about him are NOT held up to his reality."

Images of guilty people in your mind STAND IN FOR the actual people, which you project ONTO them and think you see IN them. You aim your guilt at this image and you try to destroy it, thinking it is the person, because the image blinds you. You cannot see past it. So you see it instead of them. And while you think you are hating them, you are not really.

In truth, this guilty monster in your mind, your so-called enemy, which comes up every time you think you're thinking of that person, is really just a way that you're separating off YOUR OWN GUILT, and holding it within your own mind, and trying to destroy it. It's part of how you are attacking yourself.

You think you're finding this other person to be guilty, and that the hate is directed NOT at you, but it really is. "Ideas leave not their source", nor does the guilt leave your mind. You are just dissociated, which means your mind is splitting apart and your sense of identity has broken away from this guilty part of you.

To forgive, you have to actually work on forgiving this "idea" of the person, this image that you have of them. It's not really anything to do with the ACTUAL person. It's this overlay that you've put together and built up, a case against them, a frame around them, in which you PICTURE them as guilty and wrong.

This picturing, this projection of guilt, needs to be healed. It's actually your mind that needs the healing. You need to forgive this IMAGE of the person, by seeing light and goodness and innocence in it, giving the imagined person credit, letting them off the hook, seeing what they've done that deserves praise and worthiness. Because you're actually talking about your own self here, a part of YOU that you find guilty.

As you work on this, undoing your false PICTURES of people, which look like other people, but are actually PARTS OF YOU, you are forgiving yourself. You only really need to forgive yourself. It's your mind that has guilt and has become split apart, and needs reintegrating. It's nothing to do with these other actual people out there, you just have used them to form faulty interpretations, and it is the INTERPRETATION of them that you hate.

You need to forgive the images of guilty people that are in your mind, because it's really YOUR MIND that needs forgiveness. Those images are NOT those people, they are stand-ins, and just take on the form of those people while being PARTS OF YOU. Thus you forgive yourself by forgiving "them", by giving these split-off personalities/identities innocence and guiltlessness, so that YOU become guiltless and forgiven.

"Exclusion and separation are synonymous. So are separation and dissociation. We have said before that the separation was and IS dissociation, and also that once it had occurred, projection became its main defense, or the device which KEEPS IT GOING. The reason, however, may not be as clear to you as you think. What you project you disown, and therefore DO NOT BELIEVE IS YOURS. You are therefore EXCLUDING yourself from it, by the very statement you are making that you are DIFFERENT from someone else. Since you have also judged AGAINST what you project, you attack it because you have already attacked it BY rejecting it. By doing this UNCONSCIOUSLY, you try to keep the fact that you must have attacked yourself FIRST out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe."

One thing people in the world don't realize, is that when you make one part of the world 'special', it HAS to make other parts of the world rejected.

So if I say, I really love Mac computers, it tends to make me feel that I dislike PC's. Or if I say, I like sporty-looking cars, it tends to make me believe that other cars are 'uglier'. Or if I say, I like the summer, it tends to make me feel antagonistic toward winter.

We do this every day, but we just don't really realize how we are actually *creating* the enemies that we despise, indirectly, by elevating various other things to special/hero/idol-worshipped status.

If I worship an idol and put something on a pedestal and believe it is my savior, that's all well and good but I don't realize that simultaneously I've created a nemesis somewhere else. It may not even seem to be in my conscious awareness, but I can't MAKE something an idol without using a tool of attack on everything the idol is not.

So people are going around for example trying to be good, trying to people please, trying to have the right behavior, trying to choose the right political candidate, trying to be in love with a special something, trying to save a special group of individuals, trying to stand up for some kind of social justice, or trying to eat the right foods etc. And what does this do?

What happens in the mind when we say "only this part of the world is acceptable?". We reject the rest of it, which is an act of denial, which is an attack, which throws all kinds of darkness and secret hate onto the 'rest' of the world. And since this is all really about the MIND, it basically creates an unconscious mind filled with everything we don't want.

And then this unconscious mind turns around and projects into the world and manifests as enemies, examples of what we hate, examples of the kind of people we think are sinners, examples of behaviors and actions that we consider not allowed, etc. And the more we try to really intensely focus on what is 'right', we inadvertently keep CREATING what is 'wrong' and reinforcing it.

Then all this extra wrong stuff shows up in the world and we hate it more and try to separate from it more, which is secretly an ego ploy to reinforce and keep it. We go on our crusade and blow our trumpet in defense of 'all that is good' which is exactly what actually creates and manifests 'all that is bad'.

If we're not being neutral, if we're attached to outcomes, it we're judging something as right or wrong, if we're invested in seeing a certain thing be kept while other things are destroyed, we just keep creating a greater TENSION between 'right and wrong' rather than actually undoing what's wrong. And this tension grows the more we try to separate from what's 'wrong', because the pursuit of what's 'right' ISN'T a pursuit of the truth - its a pursuit of one-sidedness and is a spiritualizing of the world.

So everyone's on this ego rollercoaster of chasing after what they have decided means 'right' and 'correct' and 'not sinful' and not realizing that this is directly and explicitly creating even more of the stuff they are trying to get away from. Because all that they're really doing is trying to escape from, deny, and shut out, everything they consider bad. You can't have a happy life by being in FUCKING DENIAL!

The world is neutral. It's we who give it all the meaning it has and label it with all our made-up labels of 'oh that's ok' and 'oh thats not ok'. And this constant effort to separate out the ok from the not-ok is just more ego separation which leads to war, hate, anger, and attack. It does not WORK. And it does not lead to progress. If you want the kind of progress where you create a world where everything is only 'good' and nothing 'bad' happens, you will never attain it, because the very desire to do so is a desire to DENY that 'bad' exists and therefore create it. And so the world is spinning its wheels. Isn't it horrifying to realize that YOU are creating the very enemies that you hate the most, and that you will keep doing so while you keep trying to reject a part of yourself?

Have you ever had a dream at night where you're being chased by someone and you're running away in fear and you just can't seem to get away, and the more you run away or fight with the person the stronger and more adamant they seem to become? This is exactly this dynamic, because the person chasing you is YOURSELF who is only appearing as an attacker because you keep rejecting yourself. In your dreams, when you stop running, and you surrender, and you do what the ego would say is 'letting yourself be caught', the person stops chasing you, and they stop attacking you, and all of a sudden you are friends. How about that?

We have to become able to ACCEPT and ALLOW everything. Not split it out and say one part is ok and one part isn't. This is true equality. This is a value worth pursuing. Unconditional love, not conditional love. Not a love that's only given to friends and not enemies. Not a love that, in being given only to friends, turns everyone else INTO an enemy, for the sake of being able to reject them further.

What would Jesus do? He would overlook all sin and recognize the innocence and equality of everyone.

Ok.. stepping off the righteous soap-box for now.

"18. A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

This touches on the essence of A Course in Miracles and the Golden Rule. Jesus is literally telling us that YOU ARE ONE WITH OTHERS. This means you are literally IN THEM. And therefore the way that you treat them is the SAME as the way you treat yourself.

There is no exception to this. You treat BOTH yourself and others the same way at the same time. To recoil for another is to recoil from yourself. To not love another is to not love yourself. To hate another is to hate yourself. There is no escaping this because fundamentally, by the Law of God, you ARE them.

"One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds. Such is the truth."

So per the Golden Rule, that means that every person you encounter, you should love them, IF you want to be loved and if you love yourself. You should SEE YOUR SELF in them. Because both you AND them are Christ. And your love of them IS your love of yourself, directly. What you give to them you receive. What you transmit to them, you transmit to the part of you that is in them.

The "part of you" that is "in them" is the target of everything you give to them, so you have a VESTED INTEREST - a shared interest, in treating them well in order for YOU to be treated well. This is not a play on words or an option. This is how minds share and relate. This is how they were created. This is the dynamics of the laws of God which are always applying.

It is always the ego that suggests, the way you treat another is NOT the way you are treating yourself. Or that you can attack without being attacked. Or you can be murderous without experiencing the consequences. Or you can judge without being judged. Or you can hate without being hated. Or you can be right and they can be wrong and there is no equality between you.

These are all LIES because they fly in the face of the inescapable LAW. It can SEEM as if you can treat someone differently to how you treat yourself, but all of that MUST be an illusion. Because the only truth is that ALL of God's children are perfect EQUALS. Making them perfect brothers in the sonship. And this is permanent fact.

Any kind of inequality is an illusion. And that not only means that you and your brother are SEPARATELY EQUAL as individuals, like two identical twins standing next to each other. It in fact means that you SHARE EVERYTHING, which means you OVERLAP with each other, are ONE with each other, JOINED with each other, IN each other. You literally are in your brother's mind with him. Even if that means part of you seems to be "over there" in another person, from a separated point of view.

This is really the only thing to be learned. How to love yourself AND others equally. How to recognize that you are ONE with all people. To realize that, you cannot GET AWAY WITH anything. You cannot hurt without being hurt. You cannot attack without being attacked. Scapegoating and blame are delusional and denial. When you attack anyone you are hurting yourself, and you have to ask yourself, do you want to keep hurting yourself?

Anger and attack towards "others" drives a RIFT into your mind between the part of your mind which seems to be isolated to "inside your body" and the part of you which seems to be "inside other people's bodies". The more you attack what you THINK is a "separate them", the more you are SPLITTING OFF part of you which is in "you" (as a body identified self) and the part of you which is ONE WITH THEM. Which means you are directly attacking yourself and splitting your mind.

The split mind is divided by bodily boundaries, and as you focus on the ways in which you are NOT ONE, by emphasizing the solidity and reality and restriction of bodily obstacles, it simply SPLITS your mind and causes you to disassociate from yourself. And now you think you are literally two selves, with one part of you trapped in your body and the other part of you trapped in another person's body. You've now made an ego for both of you. And now you want to attack another to steal back from them the part of your SELF that you believe they have kept from you. As discussed in "the laws of chaos", everyone is looking for the self they think they lost.

So this seems to be a catch. The catch is, that if you choose to attack someone, you WILL be attacked, and you will suffer consequences, directly inflicted BY YOURSELF upon yourself. This is the secret of salvation, that you are doing it to yourself. And the only way to alleviate this suffering is to LOVE the other person. If you love them you will be loved. If you hate them you will be hated. By yourself. You cannot escape this "clause". It is the law of God. It is the Golden Rule. It is both a curse if ignored, and a clue to how to be happy if embraced.

The Golden Rule doesn't just mean that if you might treat someone as you would have them treat you, they MIGHT elect to treat you in a similar fashion. If there is any possibility that cause and effect breaks down and they MIGHT NOT treat you how you are treating them, then the law is breakable, and it is not a law, and it has devolved to the level of physical behaviors. The true nature of the Golden Rule is the oneness you always have with everyone in the mind, whereby you LITERALLY are DIRECTLY treating yourself the way you are treating them, because you are IN THEM.

"Do unto others because you ARE doing unto yourself." is what it should say.

If there is a person you hate, you will drive a separation between you. In this separation you will believe that person is completely separate from you, and you want to have as much distance and dis-association between you as possible. You do not want to be associated with them. You want to destroy them and have them not exist. And in this intensity of hatred and rage and attack and anger, you believe THEY ARE NOT YOU. And as such you can hurl as much blame and condemnation upon them as you can muster, and it seems to be 100% about their faults, and 0% about yours. This is a state of insanity.

This is a great way to split your mind, leading to states of personal suffering, unlove, a total lack of peace, and literal self destruction. Those who murder are trying to kill themselves. And those who attack are undermining their own integrity. And those who hate do not love themselves. Just as those who are sick have made themselves sick in an attempt to accuse OTHERS of sin as well as themselves.

"You but accuse your brothers of your own sin."

"Damaged bodies remain accusers."

The only solution, and the only option, and the only law which you HAVE to abide by, and cannot escape, is the law of God, that how you DO treat others IS how you are treating yourself, because YOU ARE ONE WITH THEM. And being literally part of that person, anything you hurl at them you are hurling at yourself. And you WILL experience the consequences. So really, your hands are tied and you do not have any loopholes or ways to get out of it.

Either you love BOTH you and your brother, or you hate both you and your brother. Either you love both you and your brother, or you attack both you and your brother. Either you attempt to make both you and your brother sick, or you HEAL both you and your brother. When you suffer you suffer along with him. The truth that applies to you applies to them equally and to the same degree. And not simply because they are your equal, but because THEY ARE YOU.

"Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad."When this is recognized as true, when cause and effect are reunited so that anything you cause you also experience the effects of instantly, and when there is no way to attack without attacking yourself, you now have shared interests and the only option is to love. The only sane choice is to love. If you don't love you will hurt yourself and others. If you do love you will uplift and heal yourself and others. And "when I heal I am not healed alone."

It is by recognizing that you have a vested interest in loving others, because it allows you to be loved, that you will automatically steer clear of attack upon yourself. You will realize that you CANNOT attack another person WITHOUT suffering the consequences. And there is no way to hurt them without being hurt. So your only sane choice is to love unconditionally, so that you will be loved. Otherwise a failure to recognize your oneness leads to it seeming plausible, justifiable and warranted, that you can attack without consequence. And then you are on the slippery slope to hell.

The world's idea of the most ideal relationship is where you find the chosen one and give them all your love. But you don't give that same love to anyone else. The chosen one gets exclusive access, special rights, permissions and trust. But this exclusivity means that the love is conditional, and is switched off around other people. The two of you will likely side with each other against everyone else.

While the ego and the body and the world might suggest that this is the only natural way to relate, as if everyone is supposed to be paired up with one person, it is actually highly unnatural. If you follow this kind of relationship dynamic to its extreme conclusion, it would mean that the person you love is the person you most imprison, and you live in a prison with them in order to keep everyone else away from you. They become a safe haven in the storm, and everyone else is left outside.

Unconditional love is a kind of love that doesn't change based on who you are with or where you are or what you're doing. It gives all of the love to all of the people all of the time. It doesn't pick favourites, nor does it hold back the love only to give it to those who have met your standards, or you like them, or they have something in common, or they aren't seemingly against you. Love just loves always in one single response to everything. This is total holy relationship, which is inclusive not exclusive.

Trying to love only one person or only a small group of people is quite a confined and ego-driven form of love. It's an attempt to narrow love down and only hand it out to the most special winners of the human contest. And if you can only trust that one person you will have mistrust of just about everyone. What would Jesus do? Would Jesus hold off on loving someone because they aren't apparently his closet companion?

Special love is imprisoned love, conditional love, and limited love. Special love is actually an attempt to cover up all the special hate you have for everyone by selecting the most ideal and agreeable person that you seem have the least hate for.

"The special love relationship is an attempt to limit the destructive EFFECTS of hate, by finding a haven in the storm of guilt."

"The special love relationship is NOT perceived as of value IN ITSELF, but as a place of safety, from which hatred is split off, and KEPT APART. The special love partner is acceptable ONLY as long as he serves this purpose."

"the special love relationship is an attempt TO BRING LOVE INTO SEPARATION."

"The special love relationship is the ego's chief weapon for keeping you from Heaven."

"To believe that SPECIAL relationships, with SPECIAL love, can offer you salvation, IS the belief that separation is salvation."

"Beyond the poor attraction of the special love relationship, and ALWAYS obscured by it, is the powerful attraction of the Father for His Son. There is no OTHER love that can satisfy you, because there IS no other love. This is the ONLY love that is fully given, AND FULLY RETURNED. Being complete, it asks nothing. Being wholly pure, everyone joined in it HAS everything. This is NOT the basis for ANY love relationship in which the ego enters. For EVERY relationship on which the ego embarks IS special. The ego establishes relationships ONLY to GET something. And it would keep the giver BOUND TO ITSELF, through guilt."

It is not possible to hold a thought of accusation in your own mind, which seems to be about someone else, without YOU also receiving side-effects from that thought. That thought is toxic.

A thought of attack, even if it's a justified attack, is still an attack. And attack thoughts have attacking properties. It's like a nasty, dark, spiky, painful energy in your mind. Do you think you get away with not being affected by that?

So here's the conundrum. You cannot have a negative thought about anyone else without it affecting you. You have to put the negative thought into your own interior mind-garden, and it's going to grow a bunch of weeds there. It's going to attack YOU as much as it attacks someone else.

It's all or nothing. Either the thought applies to you AND them, or it doesn't apply to either of you.

When you're in the business of having the kind of thoughts that apply 'separately' to separate people, those are INSANE thoughts.

If you would realize that your attack thoughts (about other people) are attacking your invulnerability, you would not have them.

If you would realize that you cannot hate someone without hating yourself, you would not hate.

If you would realize that you can't judge and condemn someone without you also feeling condemned, you would not do it.

There is no 'separate justice'. There is no person A being guilty and person B being innocent. Either all are innocent or all are guilty. The accused and the accuser are both guilty.

The ego's laws, the law of the land, are all based on this idea. Someone is to blame, and someone is not. This is not a law based in sanity.

God's law says that whatever is true of one, is true of all. Whatever applies to one, applies to all. One law that applies equally to everyone and finds everyone equally innocent. That is the only sane law.

As you attempt to get rid of parts of yourself that you do not like, such as parts that you have condemned as sinful and guilty, you will gradually be running out of Self to get rid of.

Yet, trying to keep only the good parts and get rid of the bad parts appears to make you seem like an increasingly good person. And that's because you're progressively denying more and more that there is any bad stuff in you.

If your strategy is to become more innocent by denying your own belief that there's unlovability in you, and if the only way to get rid of those unlovable parts is to unlove them even more, pretty soon you're going to be perfecting your innocence. And that really means, you will find that there is none of you left to BE innocent.

This attempt at denial and suppression of your belief in your sinfulness, will eventually put so much self-hate into your unconscious that it will erupt into consciousness and be perceived as an attack. You won't be able to keep it concealed forever, and the more you censor yourself the more you'll feel threatened by anything that lets the hate leak out.

This is the ego's strategy for finding a way to prove that you're innocent. It logically concludes that if it can isolate outside conscious awareness all of the stuff about you which is less than innocent and good, and if nobody (including you) ever sees the bad parts, then you'll finally be recognized as innocent.

And conveniently you'll find lots of opportunities to project and blame the relegated self-hatred in yourself onto others, giving you yet another way to displace your sinfulness and get rid of it. Or at least you believe you're getting rid of it, when in fact you are just lost in a private world where your unloved parts are at war with your acceptable parts.

Eventually the end of the war will only happen when you run out of goodness, because the ego suspiciousness will always undermine the potential for you to be truly good. Good is never good enough, and your efforts to people-please will always make you suffer. Your attempt to wear a mask of innocence is actually an attempt to destroy you, because it creates in your mind the very toxic enemy - your own hated self - which will haunt you incessantly.

There is no real escape in this arrangement. There is no real way to be free of guilt without self-sacrifice. There is no way you can truly be free of it without dying. And this is why you see death as a logical and worthwhile conclusion to your efforts at being "good" all the time. Being good, in denial of being bad, leads to death and is a choice to die.

It is a choice to die because feeding your persona and trying to *pretend* that you don't believe in your own guilt is diminishing what's left of you. Pretty soon you'll run out of anything that's good enough about you, and meanwhile your hated self will be making plans for your funeral.

While sin and guilt are real, or true of you, there is no escape. While you believe in them, you will try to cut off parts of yourself that you deem the locations of that sinfulness, and attack it to try to get rid of it. You will attack it with denial and disassociation as well as hate.

The only true escape for you is to learn that you have not really sinned and that guilt is therefore never justified. When you can see that you must be innocent because you did not sin "in reality", you no longer need to try to make yourself be innocent in the face of sin being real. Instead, you are simply innocent because there is no real sin. And this is forgiveness, and it is also the atonement.

So either you will use the ego's strategy to make you innocent, which will kill you, or you will use the Holy Spirit's strategy to make you innocent, which will save your life.