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"Whenever you question your value, say, "God Himself is incomplete without me."

"God is incomplete without you, simply because His grandeur is total, and you cannot BE missing from it."

"YOU are the work of God, and
His Work is wholly loveable and wholly loving. This is how a man MUST think of himself in his heart, because this is what he IS."

Worth, is really a question of value, but even moreso a question of whether something QUALIFIES or "deserves". It's also related to appropriateness. Is it right, that you be loved. So we're also talking about your "rights", or what you are entitled to. Which also relates to what you are allowed, or what is yours, or what belongs to you inherently.

When we form any idea of having sinned, believing in separation, we are actually saying that we no longer qualify. If we have become sinful or guilty, instead of innocent, we have kind of "dropped out" of the running. We've positioned ourselves as not worthy or not capable or not of a quality sufficiently high or appropriate enough to meet the "requirements". By changing the premise to "I'm sinful", the logical conclusion is that you are no longer worthy. And the only sense of unworthiness is a sense of sinfulness against God.

Those who are innocent do meet the requirements of heaven, and so are entitled to heaven. They are entitled to the inheritance of God, and everything belongs to them. But when they attack themselves, they undermine their authority or "permission to access" the benefits which correlate to innocence. By stepping out of innocence we step out of deserving the love of God. At least, we believe this is the case.

If you believe you have sinned, are criminal, are evil or guilty, have done something wrong, messed up, or failed in some way, you will regard yourself as a failure. This is a view of yourself as weak and frail, powerless, hopeless, lost, alone, valueless, incapable, ineffective, not deserving freedom or love, and generally feeling horrible about yourself.

Feeling "unworthy" is kind of a logical conclusion based on the supposed evidence of what you think you did, or what you failed to do. If you see yourself as innocent you see yourself as deserving all of heaven. If you see yourself as guilty you see yourself as deserving all of hell.

This ties in very strongly to the victim role. If you feel unworthy, you will feel deflated, defective, lacking, having nothing much to offer, having very low "value", having no rights and no freedoms. You will feel like a prisoner, as though everyone else gets to decide your fate, as if you have no say in your own life. You'll feel like a kind of slave, undeserving of having any of your needs met, yet feeling very much in need.

Impoverished and empty, you'll regard yourself as not worth being given any attention, or anything. You'll also be afraid all the time because you'll see the whole world as defining your fate on a whim. Secretly this is an attempt to project self-blame onto the world, believing it is blaming you. The world will now seem like it's taking everything away from you and having power over you, because that's what YOU are doing to yourself.

If your value is so low, you will regard yourself as having failed, and therefore as being a failure. If you are a failure, you will feel like there is no point in trying to do anything, because not only do you see yourself as very likely to fail, you'll believe you have already failed before you even begin. This will stop you from doing many things on the basis that you "can't", rooted in some belief that "no-one wants me." Secretly this is your belief that YOU don't want you, projected and reflected back at you.

Of course, being unworthy, you have to believe no-one loves you. That everyone is against you and can "use you" for whatever purposes they see fit, for their own gains, with no regard for yours. This of course is a state that also results from such things as abuse, violence, attack, sexual assault, trauma and so on.

It can leave you feeling helpless and powerless and very "low", like you don't mean anything and have no value. That, even in your own eyes, you don't deserve anything because you aren't worth anything. Like something to be discarded and thrown away which no-one wants. Of course this is how YOU feel about yourself, because it's really you who has decided you are worthless. But by asserting "you're not worth anything" to the world, it reflects back to you from the outside in. A projection of self-hate.

Clearly when you're in such a state, although it feels unfair, and imposed from outside of you, much more likely you are actually the one who has decided that you are unworthy. You have in some way depleted your own idea of your own value. And we're not so much talking here about self-esteem as we are about God-esteem.

The only real value is the value God has of you, regarding your true nature. And so really the only thing in your mind that you care about is whether or not you qualify or meet God's "standards". Whether you are worthy of his love. Whether you deserve forgiveness or punishment. If you believe you are a weak and miseable valueless sinner who isn't worth anything and should be punished and hurt, then you are trying to decide for God what God thinks of you.

You'll do this on the basis of what you think you did. ie, which sins you think you committed, the reasons why you are guilty, the faults and lacks and insufficiencies of your personality or body or mind. The various value systems you yourself have invented and then judged yourself harshly by. Systems which God doesn't even use, because he simply ALWAYS finds you worthy of him.

If you are feeling unworthy, it's really kind of a severe case of a pity party. It's self-inflicted, just as the secret of salvation says. It might seem like it was induced or enforced by someone outside of you but really you went along with it and believed it. You allowed it to affect you and decided to comply with it, because deep down something far worse than other people condemning you is YOU condemning yourself. Only you can hurt yourself so deeply. And it's really just a matter of a lack of self-love.

We have to own up to this because really it's not God who is thinking of you as a miserable sinner or a worthless piece of shit. It's you. It's your self-talk and your self-attack. It's your self-destructiveness. Which when you think about it is quite weird because there you are, feeling utterly shit about yourself, while simultaneously having the total freedom and power to choose to feel that way. And you must've made a wrong decision because you're not at peace.

Taking ownership of your decision to reject God's evaluation of you, and your attempt to overthrow his will, and to ignore his unconditional love, is the only way out of it. You have to be willing to see that you are the one who has decided that your value is extremely low. That you're so worthless you pretty much just deserve to die, because no-one would want you. But hey, even if it seems true that no-one DOES want you, that's their problem and not yours. And it has nothing to do with whether YOU want you.

While you may think well, I can't do this or that because I am a failure and no-one would want me or anything I do, it's really you telling yourself this. It's you not wanting what you do. It's you being hard on yourself. And you shouldn't even be giving other people power over you to decide for you whether you are worthy or not. It's none of their business. God is the only one in the privileged position to determine your real value, and he finds you to be permanently worthy forever. It's not even really up to you.

You can't therefore really obliterate your value or worth, or decide that you deserve to die against God's will. You can pretend to do this, and you can believe in it, but even underneath your utter self-hate there is total self-love. You can't change what is really true of you, no matter how hard you try to destroy yourself. God has guaranteed your sinlessness forever. Your value is inestimable and infinite. And you are worthy and qualify for everything he has to offer. You qualified in your creation!

So if you're feeling low, down, bad about yourself, unworthy, not good enough, undeserving, a failure, weak, powerless, barely worth wiping a shoe on, recognize that this can't be true of you. It's absolutely not true in God's eyes. And it doesn't even matter what other people think of you or how they fail to properly value you. Everyone should be loving you, unless they themselves have failed to love themselves. It says nothing about your worth.

You have to decide to accept your perfection, your innocence, your value, your worth to God, your infinite credibility, your integrity, your divine honor, your holiness and your entitlement to the Kingdom of God. And that means you have to put aside all of the abuse and hurt and pain and misery and reasons "why" you deserve suffering. God does not will that you suffer, and nor should you.

"I who am host to God AM worthy of Him. He Who ESTABLISHED His dwelling-place in me created it as He would have it be."

"The truth about YOU is so lofty that nothing that is unworthy of God is worthy of you."

"But you COULD not make YOURSELF unworthy because YOU ARE THE TREASURE OF GOD. What HE values IS valuable. There CAN be no question of its worth, because its value lies in God's sharing Himself with it and ESTABLISHING ITS VALUE FOREVER."

"EVERY mind that God created is equally worthy of being healed because GOD CREATED IT WHOLE."

"You should know that all God's children are fully worthy of COMPLETE courtesy."

"He always teaches you the inestimable worth of EVERY Son of God, teaching it with infinite patience born of the Love of Him for whom He speaks."

"The Atonement is the only gift which is worthy of being offered to the Altar of God. This is because of the inestimable value of the Altar itself. It was created perfect, and is entirely worthy of receiving perfection. God IS lonely without His SOULS, and THEY are lonely without Him."

"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."

As I recently have been undoing my own belief in my own sinfulness, which is also the general belief that sin is real, I've been coming up against challenges. I had several days of some pretty heavy "release" which was overwhelming.

Holy Spirit was glad that I could realize I was only releasing because I had been willing to let go of some old belief in my sinfulness/guilt, but also advised that I should be gentle and slow down a bit. Trying too hard to undo all of it so quickly.

A major cornerstone of what was releasing, was the feeling and belief of not being lovable by God, because of sin and guilt that I still think is true of me. So I was trying to dig all of that out. Even though that's worthwhile and helpful, in the big picture, we do have to pace ourselves a bit.

What came after this release, though, was a feeling of self-love the likes of which I have never felt before. For about half a day I just felt really soft and loving toward myself and others. This proves to me that this undoing of beliefs is very worth pursuing.

I've also noticed, as I "push" myself or challenge myself to question ... do I REALLY believe I am sinless? ... it is pushing into my awareness various beliefs that I have that I'm going to have to look at. Here are some of the strong ones which have been coming up for me lately, and these might be the same for you. I think these beliefs are strong because they have a lot of social support and emphasis. Beliefs like:

Cancer

Evil

Death

Unworthiness

Being attacked

Loss of a loved one

etc...

I've quite often heard the word "cancer" come up from my ego, at stupid times, and I know it's a false belief but it still comes up driven entirely by fear. And it comes up because I still believe in it. There has been so much attention given to cancer, making it seem REAL, making it out to be a huge dangerous threat, an enemy, that everyone is trying to avoid and attack etc. That has seeped into and formed a belief in me - my own doing really, but I've created this belief that it has truth and reality to it. So now that shows me that I have the job of undoing my belief that cancer has ANY reality to it whatsoever.

Similarly, I have started to come up against questioning whether "evil" is real. I found myself for a few days getting lost again in trying to figure out what evil IS, how it operates, WHY it is doing what it appears to be doing etc. I've had some experiences that involve "evil spirits", if you can call them that. They're not friendly. I cast one out of me a few months ago kind of by accident when Jesus was helping me with a healing. I felt it leave. And I've had other encounters.

In the illusory dream world they "seem" to exist, and putting any amount of attention on them may attract them. But also, fearing them is just as bad. The "fear that evil is real" is a quite fundemanal ego belief. As a belief that "evil is real" it must produce fear, which is the suggestion you don't want it but the belief in it is a choice to want it. You become scared because of your OWN belief in it being real, which sort of pushes you into a confrontation with the thing you want to get away from.

Ultimately these things are illusions and love has no opposite. Jesus told me that they are "just fear". Just as this whole world is based on fear. And fearing it is not helpful. We have to be firm in Christ and in truth. Belief in sin being real produces the conditions for the ego to attack in all its ways, not just through hellish beings. We are not meant to fear these things or try to get into trying to understand or explain them too much, because it's really easy to get lost in that.

I found myself getting lost in the attempt to figure out what and how and why these things exist, only to find myself feeling more afraid and to be in a stronger mode of "questioning". Being in a mode of questioning is not a mode of answers OR answer-finding. Jesus's instruction to me again was "decide", which I've come to learn means I am not a victim and have the power to choose, and if I choose to believe that these things are not real and that they have no effect on me, then THAT WILL BE my experience. If I choose to believe in them, I will experience them as such. I get to decide. If I am in indecision, I'm actually unconsciously choosing to believe evil is real.

So I think we have these quite basic, quite strong beliefs we have to unearth and sort out. There is nothing about evil that is other than just another description of the ego. And the Holy Spirit knows that the ego does not really exist. That needs to become our belief also, and then we will be in celebration and joy and safety and fearlessness, knowing this truth. The truth shall set you free of evil because there IS no real evil. Evil is just as much an illusion as everything else the ego made.

It's a bit of a challenge though... confronting these beliefs and being in that place of "uncertainty" about whether it MIGHT be true and real. The sense of threat that comes from actually really considering it to be a real possibility. And then feeling unsure whether to believe it is real or not. That just means we're trusting the ego too much and are choosing to make it real. We just need to keep chipping away at these beliefs and keep undoing them to get to the point where we can truly accept the Atonement fully and recognize illusions for what they are.

Concern about being noticed in public, wanting to hide, feeling anxious etc... stemming from a sense of guilt or shame. You walk around with it believing that people will find out or point it out. You feel exposed by it, as if it is a label that everyone can see and which you must recoil from just as they would. It makes you experience yourself as though you are highly visible, like a red flag with a wailing siren, drawing all attention to what you are ashamed of. It makes you think you stand out like a sore thumb, which makes you afraid of attack or judgement, which makes you hide even more. You feel unsafe, because your shame and guilt have condemned you and now you think it's only a matter of time before punishment comes, which you try to avoid all the time.

You don't have to be ashamed of what you think you did. It is forgivable. Doesn't matter what it is or how serious or dark or twisted. You still deserve love and forgiveness. God still smiles and shines upon you with happy acceptance. You don't have to walk around feeling vulnerable and exposed and afraid of revenge. Stop attacking yourself with it. Its your own belief in your own self-attack that makes you believe in the attacking advances of others. In your innocence you no longer have something about you that you need be concerned about, or self-conscious about, or worried that people will agree with and attack you for. Defenses which hide your self-condemnation doesnt make you feel safe. But in your innocence lies your safety.

Jesus suggested to me that some form of meditation might help me to find some 'clarity and hope'. His instruction was to relax.

So the past couple of mornings I've done a very simple, easy meditation which completely quiets the mind very quickly with no effort. In fact I don't even focus on trying to quiet the mind, it was an unexpected side effect.

The 'meditation' is simply to lay down and thoroughly relax the body. That's all. The only part my mind plays is to constantly focus on relaxing, letting tensions ease, noticing any muscle tightness, sinking down into the bed, letting the fascial muscles relax, the shoulders sink down, etc. My goal is a 'feeling' I get when the body is really deeply relaxed.

As I focus constantly on relaxing as much as possible, very unexpectedly, no thoughts happen. I don't even need to try to stop any thoughts, there just aren't any. My mind is fully focused on getting the body to relax physically.

As the body relaxes physically, when it truly is relaxed, you get this sensation of physical stillness. Breathing is still happening. I pay no attention to trying to control the breath. The breath automatically slows down and becomes smaller as a side-effect of focusing on relaxing. There is no breath control needed.

After a time, maybe 10-15 minutes, I find that I need to be extra soft, gentle, and subtle, in terms of my attention to keeping things relaxed, because the sensation of relaxation is quite easily disturbed or stirred up. This focus on calmness and minimal interference and letting go, seems to tune the mind and keeps all thoughts silent. Probably also the focus on the whole body relaxing at once is a 'big enough' target that the mind has no attention left to create thoughts. The goal is simply the sensation you get when the body is completely relaxed all over, which is a feeling of being very settled, still, calm, almost like levitating.

As I do this I generally find myself falling asleep as well, it's a good way to get to sleep. I'm not bothered by that. What I did find this second time is that toward the end, I had a sudden unexpected moment of 'awareness', in which I became more aware and it seemed as though that was accompanied by an even further 'stilling' of the mind, beyond what I thought was possible. It felt like a clarifying, a sharpening, and a clearing. It wasn't like enlightenment or anything but it was a definite sudden burst of awareness.

The main thing I am getting from the meditation, besides feeling very relaxed, which also has the side-effect of helping to tune out of other people's energies that I've empathed and I 'come back to myself', is that it gives me a subtler clarity about certain situations in life, and also about the activities of my mind, what my thoughts are doing, etc. It shines a light on things and shows me a greater truth somehow, things I didn't realize I was doing. I didn't realize how much mind-chatter I have, normally, contrasted by absolutely no thoughts during this exercise.

I'm most surprised that thoughts stop completely when doing this. I know that focusing the mind can do that - focusing on a breath or a mantra or word or single idea or whatever... but when I do those things, my mind is still noisy and doesn't shut up all the way, and after a while it starts to go into deeper daydreams and stuff. Doing this body relaxation exercise I get absolutely no thoughts of any kind the whole time, provided I keep my focus on being as gentle and subtly relaxed as possible. It makes me wonder what this connection is between agitation in the body and agitation in the mind. But probably it's that I'm getting my mind to focus on calmness, quietness, stillness, being settled, and the body is sort of a 'prop' for the mind to use to achieve that, through focusing on its relaxation. Tying the mind and body together perhaps, so that the mind relaxes with the body.

Of course, meditations also produce emotional releases afterwards.

Sometimes in the heat of conversations, people throw forth the "you'd rather be right than happy" quote. Funnily enough this quote is usually given by someone trying to be right. ;-)

Anyway, what is this "being right" thing? It begins when someone believes they are wrong, ie guilty of something. The wrongfulness is projected. You accuse your brother of your own belief in your own sinfulness. And before you know it, you're trying to defend yourself against what appears to be something wrong outside of you. Being right "against" another is actually your split mind trying to be right against itself, by making itself wrong.

There is lack of a desire to admit to doing this, because the "righteousness" is a form of denial, actually an attempt to suppress and cover up the sense of guilt and sin or "wrongfulness" within. To admit that you believe you are wrong seems hurtful. Trying to cover this over with "the face of innocence" seems to allow you to portray yourself as not wrong. And of course this requires finding someone else to put the sin onto. If you look you'll notice you more often project wrongfulness when you're feeling unhappy to begin with.

Those who are right, therefore, believe they are wrong, and are projecting their wrongfulness. When a person admits to this, and goes deeper to realize they are not truly wrong, ie not guilty or sinful, it alleviates the need to project the wrongfulness onto others. And thus the need to be seen as the one who is right or "not guilty" disappears also.

The interesting thing is that when someone is not believing they are wrong, genuinely, they have no problem admitting to being mistaken or wrong. It doesn't matter, because they know they are not wrong, in the psychological sense. They know they are innocent. They don't have any guilt to hide or project. And so there's no need to "be right" to cover it up. They laugh at suggestions they are wrong because they know they are not wrong. But the opposite of being wrong isn't bright right, it's being correct.

When you are correct, you are accurate in your acceptance of what is true. When you are correct, you are not mistaken. In your correctness you are not deceived or in denial or needing to be right or wrong. You are above both righteousness and wrongfulness. In this state, it is possible to be correct on a matter, without necessarily being "right" about it. You can be correct without ego attachment. You can be correct without it entailing some form of guilt projection. And you can be correct without feeling a need to defend an ego position.

Someone pointing out that you are seeming to be right by putting forth something which is correct, is mistaken in their evaluation of what you're doing. There's a distinct difference between presenting something which is truthful and correct, versus presenting it at the same time as having a need to project wrongfulness, or as part of an attack, or to use it as a weapon of guilt. You can be very correct without it entailing any kind of righteousness at all. And of course that means you are not really "attached" to whether this correctness is recognized by or accepted by others at all. It has nothing to do with others, because the inner peace is being projected, not sin.

You can be happy and be correct. You can be happy and assert correctness. You can also be happy and defend a position. It has nothing to do with whether you are psychologically having a bad day or feeling irritable or wanting to blame someone. There is a difference between what is true and what's happening in the mind simultaneous to that truth being presented. You can also be happy and incorrect, without it in any way meaning you are sinful or wrong.

Is this entire post an attempt to be right? Hmmmm. Maybe.

If you're angry at someone, test to see if it's possible that you are angry at them at the same time as loving yourself. Can you actually feel both self-love (genuine) and anger at the same time?

You cannot.

The reason you cannot is because what you do to others, you do to yourself.

While you're being angry towards the other person, YOU are suffering from that anger as well. You might be feeling righteous or justified, but you're not feeling love. And then you might say, well, when I'm not angry at this person for a short while, I can go back to loving ME because I'm innocent, but they're not. And then you flip-flop back and forth. And you think that you love yourself but the unhealed grievance STAYS with you and lurks in the background, undermining your own self-love.

The ego's trick is to make you believe you can have an attitude about someone else that does not apply to you. That there is a separation between the two of you, and therefore they can be wrong while you are right, or your anger is about them and not about yourself. Mistake.

You can't love yourself fully if you don't love others, and vice versa. You can't pick and choose. Either you share love for the benefit of everyone or you are attacking everyone, and in both cases that includes you.

So try it next time you're mad at someone or upset by someone... see if you can feel complete self-love at the same time. You won't be able to, because you're being unloving to yourself.

If it were true that we are all separate, then you would have to have the ability to love and hate at the same time. That is clearly impossible to any rational person.

We are all one.

I've recently been noticing that my work with the course has shifted to the undoing of guilt. And that this was not the case in previous years. Overall it seemed I was working on undoing fear much more often.

Just theorizing here, but maybe when we're starting out with forgiveness our mind is just too "low" in its degree of truth and light. Sin and guilt still seem too buried and unconscious, hidden behind blocks. Our conscious mind may more likely find itself so blocked that it deals with fear and punishment on a daily basis more than anything else.

Over time, we work on forgiving, and it gradually chisels away at this overall "large block" of mind-junk. From the bottom up, we are gradually removing layers of stuff and raising our overall level of awareness and mastery. While there may be some issues or lessons where we undo fear, or guilt, or sin, or are working on sickness perhaps, overall we're still deeply immersed in "the lower levels" of mind.

I've done such a lot of work on fear that I think I have a much better grip on it now. And while fearful challenges still arise, I am much less deceivable. So I feel that my focus is "rising-up" or "going deeper" into the prior level that comes before fear - which is guilt. If you recall basically we get into sin first, which demands guilt, leads to fear of punishment etc.

So my focus now, or what I'm most often presented with, is the undoing of guilt. In fact I recently seemed to be only just starting to become aware that I even feel guilty at all. I did not recognize it. I did not know that I was guilty and the guilt I was feeling didn't seem to fit into a common definition of what guilt is. I am learning about it first-hand as I dig into it. Because for example guilt can often express as anger or a strong desire to project, and can feel like being offended even.

What I have noticed is that in working on this guilt, which is dredging up a lot of old crap as well, fear goes bye bye very quickly. You can't be afraid of punishment if you are not guilty. Without guilt there is no fear. So I now experience that as I work to undo guilt about stuff, it seems to have a "more powerful" effect in lifting me upwards towards light and truth. It feels more rapid in its consequences, and the fear literally just vanishes without a trace without having to do anything to work on it.

I noticed this when one day, I suddenly recognized I felt very guilty that I thought I caused someone to be sick, although this was not true. I still felt it. And I acknowledged it and spoke about it and let it out. And since bringing that to light, the next day I immediately noticed I felt much less afraid. A whole swath of fear melted.

And then I also was working through some feelings about when my wife was in the hospital etc and how that felt, and suddenly was recognizing that it felt so hellish because I was actually feeling guilty, which was causing fear. Undoing that guilt has really shifted things quickly. It in fact removed what seemed like a looming resistance and sense of dread about what would happen next, that was hanging around all the time.

I know also from experience that if you go straight to the core, the belief in sin, which is really the ultimate turning point of a total change of mind, it has the power to undo not only fear but guilt as well, very rapidly. But you have to be able to unearth and look at the feeling and belief in sinfulness. Sinfuless feels pretty awful. I got in touch with it one time and it felt like a desire to be dead, so bleak and desperate and so strongly believing that I was criminal or evil or had done something so terrible there was no other way out.

But at the moment I think that level of ego crap is still mostly buried beneath the "guilt layer". As I move through the guilt and clear it out, I rise up in mind closer to complete forgiveness and atonement. And as I rise up I go deeper within and uncover the secret sins and hidden hates.

Overall there seems to be the stuff we go through to try to forgive specific issues, which vary a lot, but in the big picture there seems to also be this very gradual movement towards God, truth, light, forgiveness, which takes you through these clouds of ego crap. First through layers of fear, then through layers of guilt, then through layers of sin, and then into the light. We seem to be undoing this from the bottom up, gradually ascending as we do.

To accomplish this you need to portray yourself as different from God - not loving and not lovable.

You proceed to arrange for a whole bunch of people to come along and attack you. They are to do it out of the blue and it should appear to be uncalled for.

To make it uncalled for, you go into denial (amnesia) which puts you into a body. This body-self can now be attacked by the people you hired.

They come along and attack you and you feel affected. It changes your view of yourself. It makes you feel unloved. You use it to redefine yourself as unloved and unworthy of love. Apparently their actions proved it to you.

Now you, as the so-called victim, get to pretend that you did not ask for this at all. You also get to use this entire "I've been victimized" STORY, to describe and rationalize and justify why you're perfectly entitled to feeling unworthy. It was other people's choices, not your own. You claim you never hired them and didn't ask for it.

You feel sorry for yourself, hurt, destroyed, unloved, unworthy, sometimes to a very serious degree. It feels awful and you feel unfairly treated and sad about what happened to you. But, this is a fantastic disguise.

The unworthiness rejects love and portrays you as separate from God, because if God can't love you then you've had power over God's will. So indirectly, by way of your own self-arranged role of victim, you get to explain why God can't love you, which fulfills your WISH - your secret plan - to deny and reject God.

At some point you have to admit what you've done. You have to realize that you arranged everything to happen, you asked everyone to attack you, you orchestrated all of the events before you came into them, and you positioned yourself as a victim in order to disguise your secret death wish. You wanted to be dead because that would prove you are not like God, who is Life.

So if you're going to get honest, you will have to admit you did all of this. And since you arranged it all, you can no longer blame anyone. You can't blame the attackers. You can't use them to justify your unworthiness. And you can't keep up the PRETENSE that you are unworthy because, let's face it, you WANT to be unworthy on purpose so that you can deny God.

So really, as you allow this TRUTH to sink in, it is setting you free, because it's showing you that, really, nobody else has done anything against your will. You chose all of this. Sick as it may be, you did this to yourself.

Once you become REALLY CLEAR about this fact, completely owning up to this 100% without any blame on any external cause or anyone doing it to you or you being unfairly treated in any way, that it's all a big LIE, you are left with a simple situation.

There you are, all alone, having let everyone else off the hook (they were just doing their job which you hired them to do), you no longer can pin the responsibility on anyone else. Not even on God. It's not God's fault. So you're holding this whole game in your own hands, and you realize - the secret to salvation: You have done this to YOURSELF. All of it. The whole drama and the whole story that backed it up.

So if you did this to yourself, and if there is nowhere to PROJECT the blame, and you're taking full responsibility, THEN ...... you're going to experience something very obvious. You're going to experience what it feels like to admit that you have done nothing but be SELF DEFEATING. You haven't been defeated by anyone else or any other will. You've defeated yourself. And how does defeat feel?

Self defeat feels like TOTAL FUTILITY. That it is pointless. If nobody else is doing this to you - and you're fully clear on that - then - what's the point? Why continue with this game? Why continue with doing this to yourself when all of the 'reasons' - the false justifications and blame - has been shown for what it is, a lie? Why WOULD you do this to yourself?

When you get to this point and with nobody to project this onto, you ONLY have one decision. Either you keep feeling like SHIT, or you stop playing this silly ego game. Are you enjoying feeling unworthy for NO reason, especially when you DON'T HAVE TO? Accepting love starts to look a heck of a lot more attractive when you start to compare what your two options really are - do I give up this FUTILE fight against myself, which is only making me feel SHIT, or do I ADMIT that this isn't WORKING - it isn't making me HAPPY, and just drop the whole God-dam thing?

Why not just drop it and go back to God? Why keep fighting and denying and trying not to be loved, when love is perfectly on offer? You can't stop God from loving you. And he hasn't born a grudge because of your reluctance to accept it. So love is on offer, and you feel shit, and now what? Are you done feeling shit? Or do you want some more shit? Go ahead if you want some more. Maybe you are not ready yet. But typically (I am being presumptuous), once you take that full responsibility and stop projecting, and OWN the decision YOU made to WANT to deny love, you're probably going to realize how tremendously ridiculous it is, with no real merit at all. And that's probably enough to make you decide to SURRENDER.

Like, over here there's this big gleaming CAKE that you can eat and have as much as you like and it tastes great, OR you can go and starve and die. Your choice. Or, over here there is massive amounts of love that is totally FREE with no strings attached, being offered unconditionally, OR you can go rot in a corner feeling miserable.

Your choice. It was your choice to deny that God exists. It is still your choice whether you are WILLING to ACCEPT His love again. And this is where acceptance comes in. The opposite of denial is acceptance. Either you're denying love, or you're accepting it. Either you're choosing against love, or you're choosing FOR love.

And this is where it is decision time. You now get to CHOOSE. Do I want life, or death? Do I want happiness, or hell? Do I want love, or war? You choose. Nobody's forcing you. There's no pressure. You are free.

HOPEFULLY .... you will see enough SENSE, that you will choose to admit to the futility of your choice, and you will admit it is futile, and you will drop it. You'll drop your fight and just say, FUCK IT, I'm going back to God... going back Home to love. Why not! THERE IS NOTHING TO LOSE - because you already lost everything when you denied love. THERE IS EVERYTHING TO GAIN, because God is offering everything you could possibly want that you've been missing out on. It's a total WIN.

So now you choose God, by ACCEPTING what God is offering - the truth about God - love - and thus accepting that you are NOT separate from God, that the denial is a lie - God DOES exist, that God DOES love you, and that nothing has changed. This is accepting the ATONEMENT. You are becoming at-one with what you previously thought was separate.

Acceptance is peace.

Surrender your will and allow God to restore your sanity.

You need His love.

Choose again.

True prayer, which is the medium of miracles, and is how you "ask", occurs in the heart, not in words necessarily. There is a guy who performs a lot of miracles who teaches to "pray with your whole heart". The heart has to be experiencing love, in order to be experiencing wholeness. Whatever is "in your heart", that is what you are asking for. Being "pure of heart" is important.

God doesn't care about your words or whether they really match what you are asking for or not. Your asking actually happens in the heart in terms of what it is you "want" or feel a "genuine" desire for. And typically that means that your prayer has to be aligned with God's Will and reflect His Laws in order to produce a miracle.

I was trying to do miracles and had a moment of feeling love and Holy Spirit excitedly said to me "that is all you need!" - the love, in the heart, heartfelt prayers. The intellect is good at saying words and all that, but the heart has to be involved. Words without the heart part, does nothing. Heart part with words does something. Heart part without words does something. The heart is all that's needed.

Finding enough LOVE in your heart to pray this way... it's not exactly easy if you are not "naturally" in a play of significant love. You may have to really stretch yourself and dig deep. Really go within and not only receive love (can only give the miracles you have received) and create as much feeling of love as you can, first, before you pray. And having this much love for total strangers is not easy, if you still have blocks to love or judgements to undo. "One instant of love without fear is all that's required that all of this should happen".

Here it is in Jesus's own words:

"M-21.1. Strictly speaking, words play no part at all in healing. 2 The motivating factor is prayer, or asking. 3 What you ask for you receive. 4 But this refers to the prayer of the heart, not to the words you use in praying. 5 Sometimes the words and the prayer are contradictory; sometimes they agree. 6 It does not matter. 7 God does not understand words, for they were made by separated minds to keep them in the illusion of separation."

Lately what I've been trying to focus on is what can be *experienced*. The truth can be described in thousands of words but really it is an experience. We're really talking about you getting to the point where you can experience happiness, experience love, experience peace, experience God. God is an experience.

So what this means is looking at what you are experiencing NOW, and looking at what tools you can practically USE to actaully shift your experience to a happier, fuller, more truthful/authentic one.

And this has nothing really to do with what you are thinking about what you're experiencing or what's going on around it or what you should be experiencing, but the actual direct immediate experience - your feelings, your psychological reactions, your perception of reality, your union with God. What is reality to you right now, in honesty and not trying to 'please' Jesus?

This isn't done on a mental level or in terms of theory or discussion. What you really need is practical tools that WORK that bring about a real TRANSFORMATION of what you are experiencing. You are meant to LIVE the truth, not just talk about it. You're meant to actually feel God's love, live in God's love and be God's love.

What I've been seeing also is that when you try to be or attain a goal or theoretical truth that is too far beyond what you can actually EXPERIENCE, all of your energies start to flow into the intellect because they aren't grounded or rooted in what is real to you. You try to grasp at it and affirm it and think about it and make it seem like you understand it but you're not actually *experiencing* it because it's outside your envelope. It's very easy to conceptualize 'oneness' but, are you actually fully omnipresent and experience absolute unlimited psychological access to every part of existence? Nope.

I can testify that I went to great lengths in my mind and intellect in understanding the Course and the metaphysics and the high-level statements of truth and how it all fits together and all that. I was looking for some kind of a way to experience truth by having the biggest or best thought about it, or the widest grasp of where it fits, or the most abstract or subtle aspects of what Jesus has taught about the truth.

But even when I thought I really really really was getting it and understanding it, mentally, it was NOT followed by a result of experiencing love, or experiencing God. It did not bring peace. And it was like getting to the end of a path that you thought would lead you to the truth or to God only to find out that it does NOT lead there.

It doesn't lead there because its a journey in thinking and intellectualizing rather than the much more real, direct EXPERIENCING of truth. So I had to learn this, the hard way, that it can't be all about the talk or all about the theory or all about the metaphysics. It IS okay to seek for understanding (ACIM says understanding is appreciation of the truth), but you can't EXPERIENCE it on a purely theoretical level.

When we're not actually dealing with what we are experiencing - the immediate interaction of you vs what's in front of your face right now and how your mind is having a RELATIONSHIP with it - then it moves away from here-and-now and becomes removed and distant, turning into just a theory or concept.

Your head, your intellect, is quite capable of handling concepts and theories and thoughts about them, but its as though the intellect is an artificial ego device to be separated from reality, from the here and now. I would find myself tending to even intellectualize my feelings, transferring emotional energy into my head and trying to process it there through thought. Instead of feeling. Instead of experiencing.

I've also seen people get caught up in what they 'should' be doing or are supposed to be believing, launching into 'trying' really hard to force yourself to be those things, without ACTUALLY being able to do so. It creates the spiritualized ego. And when asked questions about what they are experiencing now or what they are really feeling, they are disconnected from it.

They will respond about what they think of it or what it means or what they think they're supposed to say or what lofty course idea they're meant to believe, but they don't REALLY believe it. They don't REALLY mean it. And they're out of touch with where they're really at, cut off from FEELING. Feeling is much closer to being than intellectualizing. But people don't want to feel. They don't want the immediate experience of reality, preferring to be buffered against it by all of these intellectual walls of thought and guilt and shame and force and pressure and ... using the wrong tool for the job.

What you may find as I have, as well, is that what I can experience has certain boundaries that prevent me from experiencing anything too far outside my 'comfort zone'. My mind won't stretch that far. If there's a suggestion to be or do something that I'm just not ready for, there's no way I'm going to be ABLE to do it yet alone willing to do it.

You can be willing enough to take small steps from where you actually are to where you want to get to next, but giant leaps are next to impossible. And when you try to make giant leaps before you're really ready, you will BYPASS, which means you're in denial about what you're really believing and experiencing and are pretending to be further along than you want to admit to. It's the ego that tries to throw you into 'advanced spirituality' before you are really ready or willing or able to actually BE it, because it wants the prowess of 'mastery' without ACTUALLY letting go of enough ego to experience it truly.

So you need to stop, go within, and look much closer to home, much closer to where you are realistically at right now. What are you experiencing right now. What are you feeling. And this is where you have to be really honest. Do you REALLY believe what the course is saying? Probably not. What do you believe instead? You have to work through this stuff. You can't pretend not to have blocks to awareness, you have to ACTUALLY look for them and acknowledge that they're there and then work on transforming your beliefs/viewpoints/attitudes so that you can ACTUALLY be free of these blocks.

They don't go away by sweeping them under the carpet, or by using denial, or by shutting them out, or making yourself unconscious, or bypassing to a level of advancement you're not ready for. There is nothing to be ashamed of in admitting that you are NOT the advanced spiritual successor to Jesus just yet. If you don't acknowledge what you're actually experiencing then you aren't going to be able to change your experience. And I think that's what this is all about - transforming what you are experiencing so that you can experience something better. And this means dealing with the 'reality' of your situation, not some ACIM-driven fairytale about how spiritual you are or how lofty the concepts are or what you are 'supposed' to be like.

How do you feel? Where are you at? What is honestly true for you right now? Have the courage to look at it, feel it, experience it, be with it. Acknowledge how fucked up you are. Then re-interpret your evaluation of yourself and transform your experience of yourself into a genuinely higher version of yourself.

Authenticity.

A Course in Miracles - Urtext material - reproduced with permission from the Foundation for Inner Peace (acim.org), and the Foundation for A Course in Miracles (facim.org).
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