Something just popped into my mind on our lovely walk home from the cafe.... there are different LEVELS of forgiveness.

The dream was created through this process:

Separation idea > sin > guilt > fear of punishment > death.

At each of these 'stages' there are different kinds of perceptions and choices being made for different reasons. When we're in the world faced with something that seems upsetting, it's usually an experience somewhere between the last two stages - fear and death. When we apply forgiveness, we tend to work on undoing the projections of fear, and perhaps if we dig deeper we undo some of the projections of guilt as well.

But what I found myself noticing was, I don't often get even deeper into the undoing of sin, or deeper than that - the undoing of the idea of separation.

The idea of separation entails our CHOICE to be separate from God, which was a disowning of responsibility and a desire to be different. If I am to take 100% responsibility for what I've chosen, realizing I've only done this to myself, I have to take my forgiveness ALL the way to that original 'source point' in my mind - the decision to die - to be opposite of Life.

So if I'm mainly caught up in forgiving projections and blame, that's helpful but it's maybe confined to some of the 'lower levels' or more external levels of the mind. I need to go deeper. I need to get to where I can see that I CHOSE everything about this because I wanted to be separate. That's the 'root cause' in my mind. I need to admit that I wanted to deny God and wanted to be dead. That's the pivotal point. To get there I need to make sure I am undoing the layers of fear and guilt but also the layer of a belief in sin and come to realize that this is ALL something I chose to do to myself.

Undoing fear: Seems fairly simple, recognizing we're choosing to be afraid and are projecting causes for it outside of ourselves. I can take that back. But I might still believe someone is guilty, maybe myself.

Undoing guilt: I need to now see that I'm not guilty, or at least that guilt is stemming from a sense of sin. I'm afraid because I feel guilty. Well, I need to get past feeling guilty. And as I get past it I'm going to confront a deeper level - a sense of having sinned. The reason WHY I'm guilty. And that deeper level is going to seem even MORE upsetting to admit to. Layers of fear and guilt are weaker than the layer of sin, which is also weaker than the layer of separation. These surface layers were made to cover up the deeper layers and make them more palatable.

Undoing sin: Now I'm aware that I believe I really did something bad, that it cannot be healed, that it cannot be undone or reversed. Something I'm ashamed of and guilty for. Something that supposedly 'happened'. I need to undo that and get past this perception that it's permanent, unhealable, irreversible and has had a real serious effect. This is digging into the depths of 'what I've done' and the root of my guilt. And this should lead me to ask, why did I sin in the first place? It seems like I as I progress here I should be finding out that I am more innocent, but so far it seems I'm more to blame. But I'm moving past it. It's difficult to admit to guilt, but even harder to admit to sin. The ego says, see, you shouldn't have looked at the guilt because now you've uncovered a deeper darker layer of horror. But we can move past this - we have to. Because underneath the idea that 'we really did this' (sin) is an even darker idea - that we WANTED to be separate.

Undoing separation: Sin can only arise out of some kind of separation idea, which actually is a CHOICE and DECISION to be separate. I must've wanted to sin. I must've wanted to do this, to be sinful. So underneath the sin is a choice. It's the awareness that I DID THIS TO MYSELF ON PURPOSE, for a reason. And what is that reason? Why would I separate? I have to own up to this. I wanted to be separate because I wanted to deny that God exists so that I could have an ego. I wanted to be different. I wanted to be not loved. I wanted to die. If I can't get all the way to seeing that I made this choice, then I am not going to truly be ready to COMPLETELY RELINQUISH it. I need to admit to all of the sorrow that came from this choice, and that the choice was mine. Nobody else was to blame. No-one did this to me. I wanted it. And now I'm realizing it hasn't worked - because sin hasn't really worked - and I'm not guilty, and don't need to be afraid or get punished. I'd rather be happy. I might as well give up, surrender this choice, and CHOOSE AGAIN.

And it's at that point that you actually fully let go of the decision for separation, which dissolves the ego and unifies you with God.

So as I forgive now I plan to remind myself of this - exactly how deep am I willing to go in forgiving? Am I just giving up surface projections or am I willing to get all the way to the CORE IDEA - the death wish - the decision to be without God? And am I willing to let that go. Having let go of all the projections and blame and consequences of ALL the other levels, I should be ready to squarely admit to and own up to this decision, and subsequently choose differently. I'd rather choose Holy Spirit's truth at this point and join with His version of the truth and ACCEPT GOD instead of trying to deny God. ACCEPTING GOD is ACCEPTING THE ATONEMENT.

So it seems that as we dig deeper, we uncover darker and more vicious levels of disaster. First it was palatable fear, then some tolerable guilt, but now it's serious sin and hate, and beneath that - a death wish, a desire to be without God on purpose. That's not easy to want to look at or to admit to. And it can seem like the worst thing you could possibly admit - that I wanted this suffering - I wanted to not be with God. I wanted to get rid of God. Or even as some describe it - a murderous thought - the desire to kill God's son. Pretty heavy stuff! We need to come to admit to this so that we choose differently. If I can't own up to having made this CHOICE then I'm not going to be able to UNDO that choice and choose God/Atonement instead. And if I don't, I will continue to die. It IS a life-or-death decision, although we must remember death is an illusion.

So the choice is up to us. Do we want to accept God again and allow Him to love us, or do we want to keep choosing suffering and despair and lack and destruction? It's up to us.

If you think that they are causing your problems, and that they need to change, you're mistaken. If you could get them to change, your problem won't really go away.

Because you are the one who is attacking you.

You just think it's someone else's fault, but really your blame is just your attempt to get rid of your own self-blame. You attacked yourself, and now you are trying to find someone else guilty for it.

If you were to get someone else to behave differently or treat you differently, it still wouldn't undo your suffering. It might remove from your experience, temporarily, the current projection of your self-attack, but as soon as someone else comes along that fits the bill, you'll do it all over again.

You do not have a problem with other people. You have a problem with yourself. You can't fix this problem by trying to force someone else to be responsible for it, or to get them to fix it for you.

You have to recognize that you're doing this to yourself, and you were all along. Then undo that. Stop hating yourself, and your need to blame will disappear. Stop hating yourself, and your need to find other people guilty will disappear.

Your finding other people guilty is not really the problem, and your hating other people is not really the problem, and your blaming of people is not really the problem. But your problem is that you do these things in order to deny what YOU believe is true about yourself. These attacks are just cover-ups for your own self-attack. They are indirect self-abuse.

You don't even particularly need to be concerned about trying to become more loving towards others. Love will reveal itself naturally when you remove your own blocks to it. Your own blocks are your belief that you're sinful. It's your self-condemnation and judgement of yourself. You but accuse others of your own sinfulness.

Once you remove your own crap and clean up your own attitude about yourself, automatically you will see this renewed self in other people, because you won't be putting tons of guilt into them. You'll see them for how they really are because you're seeing yourself for how you really are.

As within, so without. You are the one who needs forgiveness.

You are attacking victims with your false empathy. It's time for some honesty.

When you see someone as a victim, such as that they are sick, diseased, suffering, afraid, being victimized by someone else, are disabled, weak, helpless, vulnerable, at a loss, unhappy etc... you might take the position of caring, wanting to help them, saving them, being their hero, or wanting their suffering to stop.

The desire to want their suffering to stop can become very strong. It seems justified. It seems like you care a lot about what they're going through and want all this stuff to stop happening to them. It seems like you want to take it away and that you would if you could. But this is completely fake.

Every time you perceive someone as anything other than perfect love, it is an ego attack and you are using them as a scapegoat to get rid of your sin.

It can seem like your reaction to their victimhood is justified. It can seem like you really want to help them and take away their pain. However, what you're not admitting is that you have a secret benefit from seeing them this way, and you positioning yourself as their savior is actually a cover-up for how you are using them for your diabolical plan.

Even if you are coming across as caring and wanting them to stop suffering, you actually deep down want them to keep suffering. You want their pain to continue. You want to keep seeing them as a victim, and to keep pretending that you are their savior and not in any way someone who would be hurting them further. You would seem shocked and horrified at the suggestion that you are attacking them with your attempt at salvation.

Secretly, you have a belief that you sinned, and hold a lot of guilt to go along with it. You want to get rid of it and deny it's you who did it. Along comes a nice victim which someone or something else has set up to be in a state of suffering and punishment.

Fortunately for you, they are already appearing to be punished by causes outside of you, so you don't have any need to attack them overtly. You don't need to turn them into a victim because they are already being one. How convenient! Now all you have to do is take the opportunity of their victimhood to keep them being a victim, so that you can use them to scapegoat your sin.

Therefore instead of reacting with justified anger, as though they attacked you and you need to now establish them as the one who is wrong, you've already seen that they appear to be wrong already. So all that's left is to keep them in their suffering while making it look like you are here to save them from it.

Your perception of them as a victim IS an attack, but it seems to be an invisible attack because its effects are already implemented by circumstances. By making their EXISTING victimhood real, you get to appear as though you were not the one who did this to them, even though your AGREEING with it is just as much an attack - a veiled attack, which seems like it isn't even happening. You join in the attack by agreeing that they are a victim. Then you react instead with false empathy, a false attitude of caring and wanting them to be better.

Your desire to want them to be better, while still perceiving that their victimhood is real, is actually a choice to perceive them as wrong for being the way they are. You think they should not be being victimized, they should not be suffering, they should not be sick, that it's unfair that they've been mistreated, and you just want to "help" the poor fuckers get out of their situation.

But you don't. Your belief that they should NOT be being real victims is actually an attack. You're trying to deny them and get rid of them. You can't accept them the way they are. You will position yourself as the innocent hero who comes to save them, while secretly using them to prove that THEY are the one who is a sinner and not you.

Even though you might label a victim in such a way as to frame them as guiltless and sinless, as though innocent and not wanting their situation, by making their victimhood real and reacting to it with false empathy or false compassion, you are actually condemning them.

Your ego really wants them to stay being the one who is sick, to keep suffering, to maintain their diseases and their strife, because if they were to genuinely stop being a victim you wouldn't have a way to get rid of your unconscious sin and guilt.

So long as you can see them as a victim and pretend to care, you can enjoy a secret gladness that they are the one who is worse off and not you. "There but for the grace of God go I" - or rather, "I'm glad those fuckers are suffering because they must be guilty and not me." They are the one who must have sinned, in order to suffer, and you are clearly the one who didn't.

Even if you go to great lengths to help them and want to alleviate their situation, you're really doing so on false grounds. You do not recognize that they have attacked themselves. You do not recognize that they have chosen to suffer. You do not recognize that they want to be a victim. You don't see the ways that they are being vicious and attacking and using their ego illusions of victimhood to accuse others of sin. You do not see this because you do not want to admit to doing the same.

Eventually, someone who becomes very "helpful" in this way is actually an under-cover attacker. A wolf in sheep's clothing. A devil appearing as an angel. Helping disempowers. Helping takes away, it does not give. Becoming a fixer, and becoming addicted to fixing, simply indicates that you want other people to be broken as much as possible so that you can remain in denial about your own brokenness.

If they are the one who needs the help, it's not you. If they are the victim, it's not you. If there is something "wrong with them", then you get to look all innocent and have an illusion of being "loving". Your seemingly sincere wish to take away all their suffering and pain is actually making it real and adding to it.

YOU are causing them to suffer more. That's hard to look at and admit to. Your ego WANTS them to suffer so that you can use them and make yourself look innocent. Every time you move into false empathy and set yourself up with an ego reaction of "oh poor them, they're so sad", you are attacking them and keeping them imprisoned. You're not shining truth onto them or really helping them. Your "help" is actually HURT.

To be truly helpful can only mean that you apply forgiveness. Whatever their victimhood appears to be, IT IS NOT THAT, and something else is going on, both with you and with them. There must be a lot of denial involved and there must be a lot of self attack involved. Victims are not victims. They choose to make themselves appear to have stuff happen to them "unfairly", tragically, awfully, so that their ego can get away with murder. Your belief that their victimhood is justified and unfair is you getting away with murder as well.

Only through a correction of your perception, which is going to require you to own up to what you are using this person for, and admitting to the truth of WHY you want them to suffer, i.e. to keep your own self-attack hidden behind denial, will you then have any hope of helping YOU, OR them. You can release them from their prison by NOT agreeing with their victimhood and NOT seeing them as suffering needlessly and NOT believing the appearance of the story as to how things are happening against their will. Behind every victim is Christ pretending to suffer.

False empathy is deceit. It is not justified. It is an ego reaction. It is a tool to get rid of your own sin. It does not work, because it keeps your own sin intact and creates more. Only forgiveness of yourself will work.

Fear is really resistance to what is. It's an attack on what is. It's a desire to make what is go away. It's the feeling you have when you a refusing to receive something. Per the golden rule, giving and receiving are one. If you refuse to receive, you also refuse to give.

Not giving is hateful and separating and selfish. Fear becomes a repression of self and others, a murderous attempt to destroy. Fear is a desire to separate and hold back and hold extension within and not extend God. It's what it feels like to want to not give anything, in order to try to not get anything, and it results in a sense of emptiness and lack and weakness and frailty, of vulnerability and limitation and eventually paralysis. As if you have nothing left to stand up to anything with and are overpowered (by your projected power).

Fear is the opposite of love because it is what you get when you try to deny the golden rule. If you are not willing to give, you will get a lack of love back, and it will appear as danger and threat and something you do not want. By giving "I don't want to", you receive things that you do not want, and they seem to loom over you as something you don't want. And the more you don't want them the worse it gets.

Fear is the ego's problem solving solution, the way by which it says you are "protected" from what you're getting. But really it's an attempt to be protected from receiving God. Fear is a defence against God and against love. It is an attack on love and is vicious and victimising, which is why it also appears like a victim role. Giving and receiving are one. If you give victimisation you get victimisation. Ego is really a fearful idea and is very afraid.

The antidote to fear is always through trust development and giving love. Love has to be extended in order to be received. Its safety comes to you as you give it away. In the extension of love there is no fear because you are only giving love and so are only receiving love. It is the way out of hell.

Resisting what-is represses your being and your presence. Resistance is fear and what you resist persists, because what you give you receive. When you stop resisting what happens you are saying "yes" to it rather than "no". This yes embraces it with full attention and presence, which actually counter-intuitively makes you feel stronger and more safe. It's how you shine your light, and that light dispels darkness, makes fear go away, and heals.

Strangely enough, what you are afraid of you are not really letting happen. It's the resistance to it that makes it difficult to deal with. And it would seem insane to fully embrace it, because the ego would suggest if you do that you will get more of it and will be consumed by it - why would anyone in their right mind want to go towards the thing they are fearing?

But when you confront it head-on without resisting it and just sit with it and watch it, radiating your fuller presence toward it, it becomes transmuted into love. Because then you are giving love and seeing from love. The thing you are confronting then starts to disappear and is shone away, healed away, by the presence of your mind and the extension of power. Dropping resistance increases exposure and darkness cannot remain in the light.

You can see this in stores, where people are standing looking at several shelves filled with basically the same product, wondering which one to pick. And this is also me ;-)

In ego metaphysical terms, what's happening is the ego presents a vast variety of FORMS, each of which presents the ILLUSION that these forms are unique and different. They distinguish themselves as being unrelated to and distinct from each other.

So instead of, you know, going to get the one headache pill, you go and have to wade through 5 different brands each of which has like 10 variations and subtleties, which you were not expecting.

So you enter into confusion. If it's true that these objects are unique and different, then this suggests a great degree of fragmentation. And in order to understand what you're faced with, your mind is going to be in so much conflict, trying to discern or balance the subtle differences as if they are important.

The more ego problems you are given, and the more they seem to present distinctly different options, the more you get lost in trying to find MEANING. Meaning only really comes from oneness, so the more fragmentation there is, the less sense it makes.

It's like being faced with a complicated puzzle, which your mind just doesn't know how to deal with. It scrambles your brain. You are completely befuddled trying to find 'clarity' or 'confidence' or 'certainty' in the face of so many conflicting viewpoints.

So commercialism, in this way, is the ego's way to get people to believe in separate problems. And the more options and choices and 'freedom of choice' there is, the LESS certain you become.

Stores are filled with thousands of brands, millions of products, all vying for attention, trying to prove to you that they are what you want and need, when you really need God. It is a huge ego distraction.

Commercialism and ever increasing choices builds up the ILLUSION that different forms have a different value, or different content. Like, exactly how many different varieties of something does anyone really need?

I work at a company that sells a certain type of product, and there are like over 30,000 products being sold, and honestly, for most people, you would've seen all the majorly 'unique' options within about 50 products.

Take a look at Amazon, millions upon millions of products. Each time I go on there, I can browse for ages and not find anything I want. I'm not too picky ;-)

Anyway, the whole point is, is not to get you to find exactly the perfect item that you really really want....it's to get you so conditioned to think that this is what you want that you end up NOT FINDING ANYTHING. It is another part of "seek and do not find".

You get what you ask for and nothing else.

How you "ask", is a state of prayer.

"Prayer is the medium of miracles."

Another way to describe asking, is INVITATION.

If you INVITE GOD, by showing up in a role of miracle-worker, trusting God to support and work through you to move mountains, God WILL COME.

Your act of faith of trusting God to show up to support you, without you relying on your own self, and therefore being free of FEAR, is you "asking" for miraculous results. God results.

When you are trusting in your own strength, relying on your ego knowledge, and only acting based on what you feel certain of yourself - separate from and not including God or not being based on God's truth, you will be in FEAR.

And being in fear, you will lack faith, and will not see miracles, because you are not flowing them, you are not INVITING them, because you are not ASKING for them.

You ask for miracles by being miracle-minded, which means letting God work through you and TRUSTING God to do so, simply showing up empty-handed with a WILLINGNESS for God to work through you, instead of relying on your ego whatsoever.

In fear, you are not asking for God to come, because you are not showing an invitation, because you are not willing to let Him be the source of the miracle. Instead, you are trying to be the source, which is the authority problem, which is a block to awareness. This means you are then "praying for nothing", and you will receive nothing, and something has gone wrong - so you will not see a miracle.

You will then seem to get what you did not want, because you asked IN fear, and so are afraid OF what you get.

So either invite the ego by being a channel/vessel for your ego and trusting your separate self, OR you invite God by being a channel/vessel for God and trusting HIM and his support.

We are always praying, as laid out in the "Song of Prayer" pamphlet. We're always asking. If we ask with the ego we'll get ego. If we show up in an ego, self-reliant way, we'll get what we do not want. But if we show up to be of service to God, to let Him work through us, and to trust Him to take care of everything for us, miracles will happen.

Prayer as the medium for miracles, also means prayer is an ACTIVE STATE OF MIRACLE WORKING, not something you just done once in a while in private.

The ego in you will cleverly point out just how much you are "being ego", in an attempt to compel you to want to "get rid of the ego".

Once you fall for this trick, you will be not only reinforcing the belief that you are not spiritual enough, but will also add to this unspirituality by adding force and attack and sacrifice to your life. You'll "should yourself" and guilt yourself for being guilty.

Feeling bad because you feel bad. Feeling guilty because you feel guilty. Criticizing yourself for being too critical. Attacking yourself for attacking. Demanding you be a better person for not being good enough. These are all ego traps.

The way out is to not believe what the ego is saying is true. Is it true that you are being too guilty, too unworthy, too ego? Is it true that what you are doing is not spiritual? Is it true that you are so behind in your forgiveness? Is it true that you haven't done enough of the workbook today? Is it true that you've been buying into the ego again in a big way? Is it true that you're not where you're supposed to be? Is it true that you are behaving in an ego way and must stop immediately? All ego temptations.

The ego loves to play the role of "spirit in charge" or "teacher of the course" or "spiritual police" or "enforcer of spiritual ways". The ego will always pretend to be separate from itself and to stand apart from itself, so that it can stand in judgement of itself and hand out rules and regulations against itself for how it needs to get into line and conform. It will even do this in the name of being "more spiritual", based on the assertion you are not spiritual already.

It will put on a disguise to pretend it is `not the ego` and then hand down some kind of sentence for how `the rest of the ego` needs to stop being ego. You wouldn't think of this because you're so used to the idea that what one person does to another has no effect on themselves. But the ego's entire mechanism is SELF-ATTACK, and it will happily stand over itself and destroy itself and attack itself in the name of attempting to improve itself. It tells you to get rid of the ego, with vigor, so that you will attack the ego and try to chop it out of your life... all the while enforcing the ego and keeping it.

So when it is telling you to get rid of ego... beware... its a trap, especially if it is making a big deal about just how awful the ego is and how wrong it is to have one.

I think perhaps we under appreciate what being "ruler of the universe" really entails. It seems fanciful and lofty and like some kind of fake superhero idea.

"My self is ruler of the Universe." - "It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen."

What Jesus is saying is that we should, in our more natural state of mind, adopt a position of great responsibility. We should be powerful beings who cannot be affected by the world. We are free from fear, causing us to be decisive and certain. We no longer are tossed around by the world and its changes, but instead remain in a continual state of calm and strength, acting deliberately, fully conscious and purposeful.

"It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences."

It is not a state in which you are a victim, or affected by the world, or upset by anything, or caused in any way by any person. It is not a state in which you are constantly changing and adapting and reacting and cleaning up a mess. It's not a state in which you are being bossed around, intimidated, offended, attacked, persuaded or caused against your will.

Jesus is asking us to step into shoes of authority. Shoes of responsibility not only for everything we feel and see and experience, but even responsibility for causing things to happen. As he states clearly, you as ruler of the universe rule your destiny, even in this world. You DECIDE what you want to happen and it MUST happen. You decide what you do not want to happen, and it DOES NOT happen. This is not wishful thinking. This is the power of God to alter the world and affect events. This is being a miracle worker.

In our lives we are probably used to being pushed around, caused to changed, made to feel upset, affected and stressed, scared and attacked. At the same time, the very world that we give power to upset us, is also given power to do things "favorable" to us. We want to get from the world, but only the stuff we approve of, and the rest remains an enemy. But this is not an enlightened or empowered state.

To move out of victimhood into authority, we have to learn to exercise our power consciously and deliberately. We have to learn to stop giving our power away, and we have to learn to take it back from where we have disowned it.

"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."

It is only because you give your power away to the world and to people and events that you seem to allow them to DECIDE FOR YOU what you are, what you feel, what you experience and what happens. You have to learn to stop doing that. Stop enabling people, in your mind, to have possession of YOUR authority, and stop USING them to attack yourself.

The problem mainly is that by giving power to things that have no power, we keep asking them to give us what we want. We keep searching externally for salvation. We want it to do things to us. We want it to give us peace, make us happy, love us, worship us, please us, and bestow gifts upon us. And when it doesn't, or does the opposite, we instead allow it to decide for us that we will not be happy, will not be at peace, and will be upset. As Jesus says, any time that we search externally for the gifts of God, we are mentally ill.

"Peace is an attribute in YOU. You cannot find it outside. All mental illness is some form of EXTERNAL searching. Mental health is INNER peace. It enables you to remain unshaken by lack of love from without, and capable, through your own miracles of correcting the external conditions, which proceed from lack of love in others."

Being the ruler of the universe, you get to be a boss, of sorts, along with the Holy Spirit working with and through you. You use the POWER of your decision, your decisiveness, to DECIDE what will and will not happen. You make it so with the power in your mind. If you say something will be healed it will be healed. If you say something will not happen, it will not happen. You get to decide your destiny. You get to decide who will or will not do what.

"What do you think "the meek shall inherit the earth" MEANS? They will literally take it over because of their strength."

This is not the same as "control" or "manipulation", or other ego fantasies of tyranny and dictatorship. This is your true freedom and power. If you want to not be a victim, you have to step into the role of being an authority and a powerful being, of being responsible and in command, of choosing and deliberately deciding what will occur for you, and NOT assigning responsibility for it to other people or the world. You have to stop sitting on the sidelines and stand up to be counted.

You get to call the shots here, you get to direct your life, and you get to never have to tolerate or put up with any shit ever again - knowing that you only ever put up with what you did to yourself to begin with.

"I am not weak, but strong."

"I am not helpless, but all powerful."

"I am not limited, but unlimited."

"I am not doubtful, but certain."

"I am not an illusion, but a reality."

"I cannot see in darkness, but in light."

"It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events OUTSIDE him. It is impossible that the happenings that come to him were NOT his choice. His power of decision is the DETERMINER of every situation in which he seems to FIND himself by chance or accident. No accident or chance is POSSIBLE within the universe as God created it, OUTSIDE of which is nothing. Suffer, and YOU decided sin was your goal. Be happy, and you GAVE the power of decision to Him Who MUST decide for God for you."

"The Holy Spirit does NOT work by chance, and the healing that is of HIM ALWAYS works. And unless the healer ALWAYS heals BY Him, the results WILL vary. But healing itself IS consistence, because ONLY consistence is conflict-free, and only the conflict-free ARE whole."

Sometimes someone will tell you that they love you, and they want you to know you are loved. But you feel like you can't reciprocate because you see yourself as "in need". You feel like you have a lack, that you're not enough, there isn't enough love in you, because you feel guilty and afraid.

Once you're `in need` you actually are attempting to 'take and get' from others because you think you are lacking, so this is your top priority. When someone loves you it reminds you of how much love you don't have and you feel guilty about this. You see the other person as being needy, because YOU are needy. And because you see them this way, you will think that their love is actually neediness and that it is demanding something from you.

You especially don't want to be demanded from at the moment because you're already in need and don't have enough to give as it is. So your neediness is basically making it seem like suddenly everyone is taking from you and being selfish, and that love is selfishness and not unconditional. So then you might retaliate to this perceived 'attempt to get' that you see coming from another, even though its your own 'attempt to get' reflected back at you.

So sometimes we do not want to be loved. Sometimes we want to get, because we believe we are not loved, and that getting will solve it, but really we still feel unloved. We can't allow and accept love from others if we are not able to first recognize it within ourselves. If we see ourselves as lacking and unworthy and in need, then we will reject love even if its given freely with no strings attached.

So just because you love someone, it doesn't mean they can or will accept it. You can't force them to. They have to love themselves, and somehow their sense of neediness has to not be MET but actually REMOVED, because it is FALSE. The sense of neediness is an illusion that blocks awareness of love's presence.

You are already love. You don't have any needs in love. And love is not taking away the love you have. But you must open to receive and to recognize and appreciate the love that you are otherwise you will see rejection where there is none and won't allow yourself to be supported.

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.