When you blame another person or think that something outside of you has 'caused you' to change in some unwanted way, you THINK that you are being powerful by finding them guilty.

Jesus says in ACIM that anger is an attempt to make someone guilty.

Every time you are angry at someone you are trying to claim and prove that they are wrong.

You think that this makes you more powerful, because you feel JUSTIFIED, and you see yourself as having been unfairly treated.

You did not see what you did to yourself, so you think they did it to you. SOMEONE must be responsible! When you don't see that it was you, you start looking for another cause to pin it on. SOMEONE must be guilty.

It seems to feel empowering and justifying to find out who did this to you. It seems to make you more right and more innocent and more righteous, to point out how someone else was wrong - that it wasn't you.

You couple innocence with attack and justify it by explaining what it was someone ELSE caused.

But when you do this, although it seems like an experience of power and intensity, it is in fact a state of weakness. It is a state of disempowerment. Your attempt to find another person wrong means that you are finding them guilty and weak. But since they are YOU, you are indirectly finding this about yourself.

So as you project your blame, you will also feel guilty, because what you are accusing someone of, your mind (which is one with theirs) knows that you're talking about YOU as well. What applies to them applies to you even if you are in denial of that.

So having this angry reaction doesn't make you powerful, but it makes the ego seem powerful, and you will feel extra justified and innocent when you are like this. You will think this lets you off the hook. It's a way to conveniently shift attention away from YOUR guilt, to point out the guilt of others, so that people won't notice what YOU have been doing. It's a cover-up.

Thinking you have this angry power makes you disempowered, because you're giving away your certainty, peace, and are replacing your REAL innocence with a fake innocence. You're trading the strength and integrity of responsibility, for the weakness and loss induced by believing you are NOT responsible - that it's someone else who is.

If you are not responsible, you are not yourself. If you are not responsible, you are a victim. If you are not responsible, you are vulnerable to attack. If you are not responsible, you will go into unconscious insanity.

This is why as ACIM says, "anger is never justified". It literally is always a lie and always mistaken. You simply did not see what you did to yourself, what you chose, what you asked for, and what you created. If you are blind to your OWN responsibility, you will find everyone else to be responsible instead, because it's just you trying to make sense of WHY something happened.

When stuff goes wrong, it is not anyone's fault. Responsibility isn't fault. Responsibility is faultless.

"The problem which everyone MUST decide is the fundamental question of his own authorship. All fear comes ultimately, and sometimes by way of very devious routes, from the denial of Authorship."

The "authority problem" is where, in heaven, you who are an effect of God and a co-cause of creation, attempt to turn around and CAUSE GOD, while also DENYING YOU ARE HIS EFFECT. You deny his fatherhood and causation of you, you reject everything he has therefore GIVEN you, and therefore ORPHAN yourself - "separate yourself off" from sharing everything with him, collapsing your oneness and trying to "go it alone."

You then proceed to try to AUTHOR YOURSELF, which leads to you trying to reinvent yourself and make a self (ego), while simultaneously believing you have not BEEN authored, and this begins the fear that you DO NOT EXIST - which is the basis of all fear.

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

All fear is the fear of not existing - the fear of death - which is the same thing as the belief that you have not been created - that you have no source, and are therefore fundamentally UN-CAUSED, and not a co-cause, and so must be purely an effect/victim that is ceasing to exist.

AS you begin to open up to hand back to God HIS FUNCTION, in which you acknowledge that you share everything with him, what you have is what he has GIVEN you, you have nothing OTHER than what he has given you, he is your cause and creator and father, and you RECEIVE what he has given you by reclaiming your shared inheritance, you are once again acknowledging that God is the AUTHOR of you, and therefore the AUTHORITY in terms of causal power that has CREATED you. You as a creation are SECOND to him - his son, not his father.

Essentially this is a movement toward giving the role of God back to God, reinstating God as your creator, recognizing that you have BEEN created, allowing yourself to receive everything from God again, and to therefore recognize that you ARE LOVED, you are BEING given, and therefore your existence is being CAUSED BY something other than yourself. Which means that you do not establish or maintain or put in place the continuation of your existence - which you tried to do driven by the fear of death, but instead that God is the one who is causing you to exist FOREVER, and THEREFORE, you absolutely exist and will always exist. Which IS THE END OF FEAR - the reclamation of your GOD SUSTAINED immortality.

"The issue of authority is really a question of authorship. When an individual has a "authority problem," it is ALWAYS because he believes he is the author of himself"

"The authority problem remains the ONLY source of perceived conflict, because the ego was MADE out of the wish of God's Son to father HIM."

"The authority problem IS "the root of all evil."

"We spoke before of the authority problem as involving the concept of USURPING His power. The ego believes that this is what YOU did, because it believes it IS you. It follows, then, that if you identify WITH the ego, you MUST perceive yourself as guilty."

I found this to be quite eye-opening. Recognizing first that the world IS a meaningless world. But that meaninglessness should not have any connotations of negative, depressing, sad, lost, etc. It actually has NO meaning of any kind, good or bad. That's because earth is in fact NOTHING AT ALL, ie "there is no world." We then GIVE the world meaning by projecting meaning onto it.

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real. Perhaps you think you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came. There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly."

"What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy. But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be."

If you project the ego's meaning onto the world, which really is a depressing dark twisted kind of meaninglessness, it picks out aspects of the world and makes them seem like sin and attack. If you project God's meaning onto the world, it overlooks differences and sees a reflection of heaven in the world instead. You either WISH for hell or WISH for heaven, and what you wish for, you see, because you value it and believe in it and want it to be real. You project it ONTO the meaningless world to GIVE it whatever meaning you want it to have.

You use it like an EMPTY MIRROR, and can look at it through heavenly eyes (christ vision), where you've lifted AWAY the fales meanings you gave it, and project LOVE's meaningfulness onto it - your OWN face of christ. The world then can HOST A REFLECTION of heaven, seemingly harmless and safe and lovable. But this still is only because the world has no meaning of its OWN, and you are seeing reflected BACK to you the meaning you want to see, which is the meaning you PUT there. Seeing a reflection of heaven IN a mirror also doesn't change the fact Earth is still ONLY a meaningless world, in its own right. And being nothing, it will disappear.

"In the world you can become a spotless mirror, in which the holiness of your Creator shines forth from you, to all around you. You can REFLECT HEAVEN here. But no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it. Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean, and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it. God will shine upon it of Himself. Only the clear reflection OF Himself can BE perceived upon it."

This was something that our spiritual guides often told us years ago, and at the time it seemed to have some meaning. But I didn't realize just how far reaching it is.

You get to choose... everything. Total responsibility.

Part of our problem, being unconscious, is that we have attempted to HIDE the fact that we are responsible, and that we have a CHOICE. We seem to not even realize that we have a choice. The hallmark of the disempowered, victim mindset is the apparent absence of the freedom to choose.

In the victim mindset, it seems the victim didn't choose what's happening to them. And death is the ultimate expression of this where, allegedly, it "just happens" on its own. Not only that, there's nothing you can do to stop it or resist it. No choice whatsoever, or at least, that's how it appears.

So if you're in a situation where you are "being a victim", you for sure will in some way believe you do not have a choice. Instead, you'll talk about how such-and-such is going to happen and how you can't do anything about it.

An example of this is the weather. The weather is forecast and then everyone goes apeshit about how such-and-such a weather "is going to happen" (to me) because "they said". This is the victim mindset. You don't want to own the fact that you are responsible for the weather, or that you have power over it, or that you can choose it, or that you ARE choosing it. The weather forecast is just reflecting back to you what YOU already set in motion.

It always boils down to the belief, and the perception, that you do not have any choice and that choice has been taken away from you by some outside force and there's nothing you can do to change it. And these proclamations about how disempowered you are will always be loud and convinced as though you're saying, I don't want this to happen, but at the same time, really not doing ANYTHING to change it. This is "complaint".

Complaining is the act of making a situation real, seeing yourself as victimized by it, completely disowning your power to do anything to change anything, and yet making a great big tirade about why its unfair and who's fault it is and how there's nothing you can do about it. So you basically stay... STUCK. That's why complaining about the situation only KEEPS it, compounds it, and makes it worse. Complaint that you have no choice is a CHOICE to NOT have a choice.

You DO have a choice! But you're not going to be able to access the POWER of that state of "freedom" unless you're willing to drop all the victimhood shit and OWN up to actually having power. Why don't people want to own up to being responsible, or having freedom, or having a choice, or being able to make a change? There's no downsides to that, other than that it means less allegiance to the ego.

So you're not stuck. You can choose again. You have the power. You are free. And everything that's happening NOW is your choice. And if you don't like it, RECLAIM your power to choose and choose something else.

The ego mind is in the business of seeking to try to find whatever it is that it believes you do not have.

And that is pretty much everything, because the ego is quite adamant that you are totally empty and devoid of all-that-is and therefore MUST go off on a lonesome journey to try to REPLACE it.

And in that journey, you will attempt to replace it with things, stuff, artificial idols, false values, etc... which attempt to REPLACE what the ego says you lost.... i.e. replace it with something ELSE. You want something else instead of the real thing because you believe you CANNOT HAVE the real thing, so have to SETTLE for substitutes (unworthiness).

But this other 'stuff' that you try to replace God with, does not really satisfy you like God does. So you really continue to feel empty.

There are a lot of business people especially who are very much excited about the pursuit of money and riches or fame and fortune, who believe that they ACTUALLY WILL FIND and CAN ACQUIRE what it is they are lacking. Their sense of lack is so great, that they are profoundly COMPELLED to seek strongly. And with a passion.

And in so doing they may indeed seem to find a lot of success in business. But at some point, they may also find, that they have really not found a solution to the emptiness inside. They've tried to replace the need for God with a need for other stuff, thinking that to get other stuff fills the hole, but it doesn't work. There is still an emptiness. And this is why many people then eventually throw in the towel and realize that they need something more meaningful in their lives than shallow accumulation of wealth.

I know someone personally actually who was very successful in business and very driven and passionate about it, making a lot of money and having all the gifts of a wealthy life etc, and pretty much everyone assessed that he was not really a very spiritual person and seemed to be quite strongly egotistical... and then later in life he hit this very same realization that all of this 'stuff' wasn't getting rid of the empty void inside. He had some kind of breakdown/breakthrough and realized that all of that pursuit and seeking did not really 'work' and that he needed a deeper meaning. And so began his sudden 'flip' into the pursuit of spirituality and a deeper truth.

The problem is, once we realize that "the world holds nothing that I want" - ACIM - we might unfortunately flip into a continued ego activity of "seeking for the truth". The presence of the seeking is still strong, and the subject matter of the seeking has changed to trying to find meaning and truth, but it's still actually the intense seeking that is the problem itself. And as you seek, you may seem to find, or at least take steps closer to the truth. But to really find the truth, you have to get DONE WITH SEEKING.

You only sought in the first place due to the profound sense of emptiness and lack of God and separation from the awareness of His presence. So THAT has to be healed and undone. And then the truth will be revealed, that you do not need to seek for God at all because GOD IS HERE!

Liberation from ego requires only that we RECOGNIZE what is true and what is false. In that recognition, nothing needs to be added to the ego to explain why it is false. You don't need any special beliefs to organize it in a particular way. You don't need labels for it or anything. You only need to see clearly what it IS.

It's kind of like this... you're looking at an orange sitting on the table and you see it clearly. You can tell clearly its an orange. It's not an apple. It's not a banana. It's just an orange. But then if you enter into ego, you start taking things out of context, and you switch around your idea of what is true and what is false. So then you start thinking, well, maybe it's an orange-colored apple, or, maybe it's a squished-together banana.. and before you know it you don't even see it AS it is anymore. And you're insane.

So then all you need to do is become clear. Get your awareness back to clear seeing - vision of Christ - which is able to simply see without any distortions. And when it sees the ego for what it simply is - that is is an illusion, it is not real, it has no truth to it, it's a mistake, it isn't doing anything, it's imaginary and doesn't even really exist. That's the truth of it. That's seeing it WITH truth.

And then you don't need to really DO anything about the ego. You don't need to defend against it or control it or fix it or change it because you simply RECOGNIZE it isn't even really there. You recognize it is a completely ridiculous, unbelievable, wholly false idea with absolutely no value or meaning or purpose whatsoever. And then it is absolutely effortless to dismiss it.and let it go. It IS nothing and it never was.

The only struggle we have is when we believe that things which are false are true, or things which are true are false, and we're just not seeing clearly. We're mistaken. We become severely mistaken about all the ways we are stuck or sick or unhappy or lacking or deprived or abused or whatever... all these reasons which says... the truth is not true, the truth is false.. and this suffering and the need for it is true instead. That can only be perceived with a distorted, unclear perception. You must be seeing wrongly and it produces a vision of something which IS NOT TRUE.

So everything that you think is keeping you from love and happiness, is not TRUE at all. Anything anyone seemed to do to you, they didn't. Every piece of ego that you believe has the power to keep you from God, NO, it doesn't have any power.

This is all we're doing to wake up to the truth... sorting out what is true and what is false. Becoming clear. Becoming able to SEE clearly. And that's all we need to do in order to recognize the ego does not even exist. There IS NO SEPARATION. There is no sin. There is no death. This is TRUTH. But if you can't see it, you will believe otherwise (or you'll believe otherwise SO THAT you cannot see it).

"Father, I come to You through Him Who is Your Son and my true Self as well. Amen."

"To be alive and not to know yourself is to believe that you are really dead. For what is life except to be yourself, and what but you can be alive instead?"

"The sudden EXPANSION of the self that takes place with your DESIRE for it, is the irresistible appeal the holy instant holds. It calls to you to be yourself, within its safe embrace."

It's really just a matter of, are you really being your true self, or are you pretending to be something you're not?

If you're pretending, you're people-pleasing. That means you're putting on a persona. The persona is a fake mask, sometimes the "face of innocence", which tries to show people what you want them to see, or what you think will manipulate them into giving you the love and attention and validation that you yearn for as a result of hating your real self.

But even though the pleasing of others might please them, and maybe elicit some of the positive responses that you think you need, it's not really you that gets validated. It's the fake mask of a self that you put over the top of you. People like your little fake self but you only hold it up because you think people will hate and judge and reject the real you.

The truth though is that you yourself are hating and judging and rejecting the real you, by putting on this false image of yourself. While you try to be what you think other people want, and what will make them want you, you simultaneously hide and bury who you actually are.

It also prevents anyone from really loving you for who you are. Which means that even if you can get people to adore your fake presentation, it's still not you that they adore. And you constantly have to bend over backwards, walk on eggshells, hide yourself, stuff your feelings and avoid being seen, just to get some scraps of external love.

Another aspect to this is that by being unwilling to look within and to let people know that you have "defiled yourself", you also become unable to recognize the limitations of others. This produces false grandiose expectations that other people will be perfect toward you, because your persona is only willing to acknowledge what appears to be "good and acceptable". By only wanting to admit to that in yourself, in denial of the darkness, you become unable to see the darkness of others.

This then leads to an inability to acknowledge that other people are unloving, will never love you due to their chosen limits, that they can't give you what you want, cannot appease or validate you, and that they don't really want you because of their own egos. This harsh seeming truth lies hidden behind attempts to only find appealing "surface" signals that look as if nothing is wrong. It's an illusion of peace and acceptable and love that blinds you and covers over the deeper truth that things are not okay in you OR in them, and that therefore they can't save you from your self attack.

Often this all starts in childhood, seemingly, when the parents are not totally unconditionally loving, coupled with the physically-induced belief that you as a baby depend on the whole world to look after you. It sets up a dependency and an expectation that you will get everything from your parents or from the world. And if the world is not forthcoming with total love and validation, you'll feel empty and lost and alone, which will then compel you to overcompensate by busting a gut to try to get some response out of it/them, but it's like sucking blood from a stone. The broken saviours can't rescue you from your self destruction.

The less you can get the love from the world the more desperate you become, trying to suck up to it, putting yourself beneath it as though you are worthless, acting like a slave, hating yourself, castrating yourself and whipping yourself, trying to diminish who you are in order to only be what you think other people want you to be. And all this is a form of bargaining, trying to create a deal in which if you will let other people use you for their own selfish needs and wants, then you might at least get a little bit of something in return. So then you become a willing doormat with low self-esteem. Punish me please, thank you.

When you are not willing to confess to being broken, exposing the darkness and allowing others to see that you are not perfect, it makes it impossible for you to recognize that other people are imperfect also. Imagining that your ego is perfect and the your persona is without flaw, you other people as artificially flawless, which ignores their limitations and sets up huge expectations for them to serve you. And then they can't, and then there's anger and disappointment.

Only when you become willing to look at the dark stuff and let the light shine on it, will that same light illuminate the darkness of others, revealing their calls for love and their limitations. And this will bring an end to the external dependency, desperation for love, and the unwillingness to be your real self. And yet, paradoxically, by confessing to your "secret sins and hidden hates", which are not true of you anyway, it shines a light on them and dispels them. This reveals the real you, which has no faults or problems or weaknesses to be solved or defended against.

All of these disguises and facades and dishonesties and ways of not being yourself have to be undone. It means being willing to be exposed. And that means being willing to let people see and be aware of the various ways that you think you're defective. Your flaws, your sicknesses, your limitations, your faults, your bad attitudes, your off-days, the fact that things are sucking right now and you don't want to keep hiding it. That also leads to a willingness to be seen to be broken in public, crying and emoting and being upset around people and letting them know that no, you're not doing okay today, you're having a shit time of it.

But this exposure begins to let the truth in, admits the truth, and sheds light on what's going on. And actually this means that you're starting to step out into the light and let God see you. It means you're stopping hiding, no longer willing to be a fake self, wanting to be true to yourself. And you'll find that in fact your real self is profoundly strong and powerful and capable of remaining centred and peaceful no matter what is happening outside, if you'll only stay true to it and not keep abandoning yourself.

The more you are willing to be seen and heard, faults and all, crappy days and all, depression and anxiety and sickness and terrible attitudes and all, the more you're letting the healing come in. It means you're dropping your defences and lowering your walls and learning to trust yourself. It takes some courage to stand up and be seen. To tell people that you're not doing well. To own up to anything that's going on with you instead of just putting on a smile and pretending life is all roses. But this ownership is exactly what you need to own your true self, your real life, and your whole mind. Your sanity and freedom depends on it.

To know yourself, to be yourself, to trust yourself, to love yourself, to let yourself exist and be seen, to find peace from not having to modify who you are constantly, having a single unconditional response of love to everything, and meeting your brothers on this firm footing of reality and truth is our ultimate goal. Because God exists in the light and if we want to go home to God we have to expose ourselves fully. And in that exposure we are completely protected and safe. It is only the darkness that haunts us. And light always dispels darkness.

"It is only in darkness and in ignorance that you perceive the frightening, and you shrink away from it to further darkness."

"The steady brilliance of this light remains, and leads you out of darkness, nor will you be able to forget the way again."

"Everyone here has entered darkness, yet no-one has entered it alone. Nor need he stay more than an instant. For he has come with Heaven's help within him, ready to lead him OUT of darkness into light at ANY time."

"Coming out of the dark. I finally see the light now. It's shining on me. I know that love can save me." - Gloria Estephan

What seems to happen to the body, does not happen to the soul. The son of God is utterly unchanged and unaffected, even by physical death.

If we look to the body and see what the mind has mistakenly made of it, attacking it and disfiguring it with guilt, producing symptoms and sicknesses and disabilities, and if we regard these changes as truly happening to the person, we are mistaken.

It's more like a car that gets some dents in it, but the car driver is unscathed. If we regard the body as the person we'll start to feel awful at what has happened to the person, terrorised by their maladies, and deeply upset at the loss of their perfection. Especially if the body is driven all the way to death and destruction.

But this has to be mistaken. A person is not a body, and a body is not a reality. It is just a symbol in a dream. It's something that the mind projects a shadow of its guilts onto, which show up as physical forms. But the body is just an empty shell, and not the pilot. It's just an outer casing. Its condition doesn't really say that the soul or son of God has been wounded.

The interesting part perhaps is that even though this is true, the mind of the sufferer seems capable of experiencing the body's conditions as though they are real. There can be experiences of pain and torment, of sadness and loss, of fear and guilt and shame, revolving around the body. There can be upsetting sensations and troubling conditions and aches and pains and all manner of ways to suffer, and somehow the mind can experience these as though "real suffering."

But even if the mind if seeming to experience body conditions as real suffering, the soul still does not experience them as real suffering. The mind can be confused, and in effect suffering is a psychological thing. If the mind can be purified it cannot feel pain, or conceive of sickness, and instead heals the body and makes sickness impossible.

So when someone is sick and it seems that their sickness is making them suffer, and they feel depressed and upset, and in agony of pain and screaming in dis-ease, this still does not prove that something is really happening to the person. It's still a mistaken state of mind on top of a mistaken state of body, covering up a completely unmistaken central core of perfection.

So it's our job as a miracle worker to not be deceived, either by the physical appearance of disfigurement, or the psychological interaction with that disfigurement by the person's mind. Both are states of mistakenness. If we buy into it we support it, and have ourselves become mistaken, confused about the truth, deceived about a lie, associating a soul with a body or mind, and are now just as lost in the false empathy of suffering.

Ultimately there is nothing really going wrong. It's all an illusion, at both min and body levels. The reality of the soul or son of God is always immortal and perfect.

"The Soul never loses its communion with God. Only the mind and body need Atonement. The miracle joins in the Atonement of Christ by placing the mind in the service of the Spirit. This establishes the proper function of mind, and abolishes its errors." UrT1B27E

Perhaps rather than say everything in this world dies, which really only describes one aspect of it which seems to shut out the 'living' part of it ..... we should say instead, everything in this world changes. It's a place of change, in which everything is constantly transforming. Nothing stays the same. Everything is constantly in a state of turning into something else. Almost like it has a curse upon it which forces everything to stop being itself and transition into something different and strange.

The sperms and eggs turn into babies which turn into children and adults and old people and decayed corpses and compost and plants. It all just keeps changing. Change encompasses both birth and death and every illusion. Things becoming other things, transitioning between things, never stopping forever to be anything permanent. Always temporary, always shifting and modifying and losing itself. It's an entire system of things becoming unrecognisable, where truths turn to lies and everything becomes lost.

Seeds become plants which become flowers which become seeds which become dried up leaves which become soil which join again with seeds to become plants. It all just keeps changing all the time. It's not just that things die, because thing are also 'born', but all things here are encompassed by change. Nothing stable, nothing permanent, nothing trustable, nothing reliable, nothing consistent, nothing constantly true, nothing that is ever anything for very long.

All things that seem to be here now will not be here at some point, when time has converted them into who knows what like a systemic disfigurement and a constant distortion of reality. The world has always been this way and always will be until it disappears someday. Don't expect ANYTHING in this world to last forever. Illusions come and go, but what is of God is eternal and never changes and is not a world of change.

"The shifts and change are what the dream is made of."

"Sin shifts from pain to pleasure, and again to pain."

"Perception changes, MADE to take the place of changeless knowledge."

"Our very being seems to change as we experience a thousand shifts in mood, and our emotions raise us high indeed or dash us to the ground in hopelessness."

"The result is a weaving, changing pattern that never rests, and is never still. It shifts unceasingly across the mirror of your mind, and the reflections of Heaven last but a moment, and grow dim, as darkness blots them out. Where there was light, darkness removes it in an instant, and alternating patterns of light and darkness, darkness and light, sweep constantly across your minds. The little sanity that still remains is held together by a sense of order which YOU establish. The very fact that you can DO this, and bring ANY order into chaos, shows you that you are NOT an ego, and that MORE than an ego MUST be in you. For the ego IS chaos, and if it were all of you, no order at all would be possible."

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish. Perception will be meaningless, when it has been perfected. For everything that has been used for learning, will have no function. Nothing will ever change; no shifts nor shadings, no differences, no variations that made perception possible, will occur."

Sometimes bad things seem to happen. And usually our reaction is to want to get rid of them, stop them, prevent them, fix them.

But we have spiritual lessons to learn. And usually a lesson means that something starts out appearing to be something unwanted and upsetting. It seems like something has gone wrong.

Especially if this wrongness involves someone close to you or someone you're in a special relationship with, or someone you feel protective of or attached to, you'll feel compelled to want to 'take away' the problem.

But whatever it is that's happening, even if it looks bad, typically it is part of a person's 'script', and it is meant to be happening. It is something that was chosen at some point. Because this thing is happening, many things are going to be learned. It may seem painful to learn them, and indeed unwanted. That's in fact the ego resisting awakening.

So bad things happen, people come along to attack and provoke you, things go wrong, and shit hits the fan. This stimuli provokes and triggers stuff in YOU that represents areas of your unconsciousness. Maybe a sense of guilt that you have not released causes you to feel guilty that the person is suffering, and then you try to fix them instead of deal with your guilt. Or maybe the person attacks you such that you feel you cannot love them, and yet, this is your challenge to learn to love them in spite of their attack, as part of your lessons in unconditional love.

Lessons are not usually very pleasant. And the ego has this propensity to try to create and maintain the illusion of a nice, tidy, 'nothing is going wrong' life. This isn't a life where you genuinely are invulnerable or genuinely are experiencing a smooth flow of beautiful divine guidance, but rather a state of 'ignorance' and unconsciousness and specialness where all challenges to the ego's status quo are avoided.

So we develop this reflex reaction of wanting to 'take away' someone's pain, solve someone's problem, fix the situation or restore it to what we think it's supposed to be - i.e. free of anything 'going wrong'. But maybe what we're actually doing, is taking away the person's lesson. And maybe that will keep them asleep. And maybe that's not helpful.

And so this may mean, learning YOUR lessons that are being triggered by the problem you see in someone else. If you are upset, that's your lesson too. Someone else's lesson may be triggering lessons for you. And they might've chosen to experience those problems JUST SO that you will have an opportunity to wake up, by facing your own lessons in response to it. There are people who come into this world with disabilities and so on to 'teach' others to be more loving, patient and understanding, and they can't teach that if their disability is taken away.

So we need to learn our own lessons and that means, learning acceptance, learning to let go, learning unconditional love, etc... that MIGHT include bringing healing to the person through those more aware states of consciousness. Maybe you're meant to learn YOUR lessons in reaction to the other person's apparent difficulty, SO THAT you become able to heal the other person. And maybe if you don't do that, and you focus on fixing them, you won't ACTUALLY be able to help them.

All is not as it seems on the surface.