There is a risk of accepting the world. Because we have to be aware that our perception and beliefs have a lot to do with what we see in the world, or as the world.
If we are in ego and we believe the world is real, not an illusion, e.g. war is real, suffering is real, sickness is happening etc, and we try to "accept that", that's not going to work. Your belief in it as true and real will hold it in place and work against and effort to find peace about it. No one can ever find peace on the basis of believing the world's nightmares are reality. Trying to "adjust to" the world or accommodate it or "come to terms with it being shit" or "accepting that death happens" or trying to "die in peace" is all total ego bullshit.
We have to remember that whatever you accept into your mind becomes real to you. The world is not real. If you accept it into your mind "as real", through an act of "trying to accept everything that happens", you're going to be stuck. Accepting appearances as true is not right mindedness. Accepting that there "really is war, but I'm okay with it" is not right mindedness. Accepting that "I am sick but I'm at peace with it" is a lie. Accepting "something died but it's ok" is not really acceptance.
The only thing that can be truly accepted is true reality. Only the truth is true. You can accept the atonement truth, God's truth, as being true and real. It is acceptable while being simultaneously compatible with peace, because nothing unreal exists. Recognizing the world is an illusion, there is NOT really war, there IS no sin or sickness or death, is what brings peace, not trying to "integrate" a nightmare into your peaceful mindset.
We should focus on overlooking what the world is, which is forgiveness. NOT seeing it from a perspective which shows it to us as though it's really there and happening. Because otherwise we're just falling into an illusion, have false perception, believe a dream is reality, and now are trying to "withdraw" into the mind to sit on a fence of "i need do nothing" and pretend that this is peace. It's an illusion of peace.
You can only find true peace by accepting that only God's Kingdom is reality, nothing unreal exists, the world does not exist, and this is "acceptable" to you. You allow the truth ABOUT the world to enter your mind and accept it. You don't allow the FORM of the world to enter your mind or accept it as anything but false. Acceptance goes hand in hand with agreement, which goes hand in hand with belief in what's true. So you have to be careful what you are trying to find acceptance about. Getting "comfortable" with suffering is not peace or awakening or spiritual.
"The world you see must be denied"
Why do 'lessons' show up in your life as negative, unwanted, like things are going wrong, or something bad is happening?
Whatever your current beliefs are, your idea of truth is what you think of as 100% true. If there is anything that happens that seems to agree with these beliefs, you see those things as truth. You welcome them, see them as an ally, experience them as wanted and desirable. They reinforce your belief and confirm or provide evidence that your belief is the truth.
Even if something bad happens, let's say that you have a belief that you are unworthy of love. You will create in your life an experience where someone is mistreating you perhaps. But at first you won't really be able to see that this person is doing that, instead you'll believe that they are treating you how you are supposed to be treated, because you agree that you are unworthy. In contrast, if someone comes along and loves you unconditionally, you will recoil and attack them, certain that they are lying to you, deceiving you, and must have some secret ulterior motive. Your belief in suffering does not and cannot understand a healing presence.
So like any thought system or belief, whatever agrees with your belief you will experience as welcome and true, and anything that seems to be against your belief you will experience like it is your worst enemy. You will see everything 'false' in them and will reject them. This has nothing to do with whether they are actually the Real Truth or not, and hinges entirely around what you believe the truth is.
So now because you have a false belief, there is something that you believe falsely and so you are in need of 'learning' what the real truth is. It wouldn't really be helpful to you to send you a situation or event or person who simply exactly mirrors your own false belief, because you would see that as highly agreeable, as proof that what you believe is true. You would welcome them and learn nothing from them.
In the interests of your spiritual growth and awakening, it serves you to, instead, be given events and situations and people who seem to represent a Real Truth, or who 'carry a potential' to teach you a Real Truth, so that you will be challenged. When they show up, however, you will initially believe they fall into your 'false' category, you'll experience them as though they're your enemy, or exactly what you don't want, or you didn't ask for this, or you hate it when this happens etc. You do not yet recognize the opportunity or the benefit that's hiding in the presence of this thing. You don't recognize it AS a bringer of truth, so you think it's just there to piss you off.
Each thing that shows up in your life, that seems to be what you don't want, is put there by arrangement to help you awaken. But that means that you're going to have to go through some kind of transformation of your perspective. Your idea of truth is going to have to be challenged. It is directly challenged by what you think of as intolerably false, showing up and being *experienced* by you as unwanted, because of what you currently believe you want. You will hate and reject it and wish it weren't happening and like it's unfair and everything sucks. But, this thing, whatever it is, is actually there as your savior, attempting to help you to awaken to a shift in allegiance, from what is Truly false, to what is Truly True.
So this thing will trigger off and push your buttons and disturb your sense of status quo. It will put a crow bar in your resistance to Truth and leverage it to try to open you up. And often this happens because the thing that comes along to bother you practically 'forces' you to have to change your perspective, in order to deal with that stimuli.
For example, perhaps someone close to you becomes sick and you absolutely can't stand the fact this is happening, and it keeps triggering you, and you get upset about it a lot. Obviously this is very upsetting as though some curse has come upon your life. BUT, over the course of time, you will find that, if you are working some program of purification, healing and honesty, that this thing is triggering you only because you've got some kind of false belief or unhealed pain stuck in your awareness that needs to change.
The stimuli triggers that pain and it keeps coming up, so if you keep trying to make it go away, or if you keep trying to fix the seeming cause of the trigger - the other person or event - you are actually avoiding learning the lesson. And you WILL have this resistance to some extent especially at the beginning. Nobody in their right mind who believes they know what the truth is, would accept and not reject something that appears to be completely false. It's just that we're very mistaken about what its actually true and false.
Over time, in this example, you might come to realize that in order to not be upset and triggered, YOU need to change something about yourself. You need healing, correction, light, and a higher truth. You need to, and are often forced to, confront your own inner mental condition and belief system and bring it into question. You might even have to get down on your knees and be pleading with God before you become willing to surrender your false view of reality. But eventually, it will transform you and you will come to realize a greater truth, and you will actually let go of your false belief, and you will open up to a higher level of functioning that you never thought you were even capable of. You will find an unconditional love that you never thought you were capable of. And this was what the challenge came to give to you.
It's not until this so-called 'problem' has finished transforming you, or has 'completed the mission' that it has to stimulate your errors and to get you to look at and transform your false ATTITUDE, that it will be 'done with'. It's actually there to help you wake up, but it definitely doesn't look like this at first. It can take some time. And if you ask Holy Spirit for guidance along the way He might tell you, this is a lesson. And it's not as though the answer to the lesson is being concealed from you or made to be especially hard to 'get'... and many times you'll find yourself saying "I just don't get it!" "what am I supposed to be learning here?!".... it's just that, you need to be transformed by the situation and the transformation isn't quite complete yet. And whatever it is supposed to provoke in you, or push out of you, or get you to question, or however it's meant to open your heart or deepen your unconditionality, it has to DO that and finish doing that before the lesson is learned.
So let's say, someone comes along into your life with an attacking angry attitude. Maybe they accuse you of stuff. They seem like your enemy. They hate you. This provokes and upset you a lot and you seem victimized. You may find it unacceptable to allow them to be this way. And you may find yourself angry and having reactions and being triggered, because you believe deep down some of what they're saying. And maybe it takes time for you to realize and heal those deep-down beliefs that you have. And maybe you'll find yourself admitting, I just can't love this person.. there is just no way I can forgive and love them, I am very limited in my love.
And then if you STICK WITH IT, and persevere with learning, you will actually become willing to DIG EVEN DEEPER to find even more love and patience and unconditionality, such that you thought perhaps you could never access. And so you 'learn' how to love and forgive this person, not necessarily for their benefit, but so that YOU learn to receive and express unconditional love in the face of what appears to be an attack. And this is a GIFT that is hard-won, and this is what the attacking person was trying to GIVE you, through their role play.
So then after you've got past all the victimhood and 'why me' crap, you come to realize, the person has helped you. The person actually forced you to grow and to become more forgiving or loving or whatever. You actually gained in strength, you grew in patience, your heart opened. And that is what you needed to LEARN from this lesson. And then you can be grateful that this person came along to provoke the shit out of you, because now, on a spiritual level, you can recognize that what appeared at first to be the exact opposite of your truth, has transformed your truth to where you can now SEE, that this person is actually welcome, lovable, acceptable, forgiven - i.e. you now see Real Truth where you once saw something false.
This is why shit happens. We only see it as shit because we don't yet realize how it is not only helping us to wake up, but it is also a gift and blessing, in the bigger picture, disguised as something unwanted. It's important not to try to get rid of your lessons, or other people's lessons, or 'bad stuff', if it's meant to be there to transform you. This is not to say you have to suffer, but IF you need to grow, sometimes you need a catalist to coerce you into that growth. Into awakening. And eventually you will be grateful for every 'bad thing' that ever happened. And you can even then be grateful for what we call 'the ego', for having supplied us with every opportunity for awakening. This is how the Holy Spirit USES everything for His purposes.
Eventually it is the end of victimhood when we learn everything about the Real Truth that we need to experience it constantly. Thank you God for that.
Had a nice chat with Jesus last night.
One observation made is, that you can't just jump straight into fear or guilt. It's not like you can go from innocence straight to feeling afraid, although it seems this is what we do because it can happen quite fast. There are steps that MUST precede it.
e.g. if you are afraid, you have to:
1) separate from love, 2) believe its really happened (sin), 3) become guilty, 4) feel compelled to fear punishment.
So you don't just 'get afraid', you have to have first done these other things. Similarly if you find yourself mainly in guilt, you didn't just become guilty, there had be these other steps before it (ie separation and sin).
Once you see where you are on the spectrum between love and death, ie:
1) Love/atonement/Holy Spirit
2) Separation idea
3) Sin (something really has happened)
4) Guilt (guilty for making it happen)
5) Fear (afraid of the punishment that guilt suggests will come)
6) Punishment (actually experiencing punishment)
7) Death/ego
... then you can figure out how you need to 'undo' the preceding steps. If you find yourself mainly in fear on an issue, figure out what guilt it was based on. If you are afraid, you ALWAYS have guilt underneath it. If you mainly find yourself feeling guilty about something - at least you haven't moved into fear, but now you need to realize there was some sense of 'sin' underneath it.
As you move away from the 'death' end of the spectrum you are moving away from the ego. As you move away from the Love end of the spectrum you are moving towards the ego.
You need to move yourself toward the atonement end of the spectrum if you want to be at peace. AND... this is the important part, you need to go ALL the way. You don't want to go all the way because the closer you get to it the more it challenges the ego's deepest-held truths (e.g. that the world has happened - which is a 'sin' idea). It also means getting up-close and personal with God which your ego does not want to do.
Many people (me too) get stuck in the middle of the spectrum somewhere around the fear or guilt areas, and think we need to just undo the fear or guilt, but really we need to look at what the guilt is based on, which is some kind of sin, then look at what the sin is based on, which is some sense of separation from God and yourself, and then undo even the idea of being separate, so that you can REUNITE with God and yourself in the At-one-ment.
At any time, all you need to ask yourself is:
1) Where am I at on the spectrum between holy spirit and ego?
2) Where do I want to be? (ideally, with Holy Spirit)
Then work your way one step at a time uncovering the foundation of where you find yourself.
There is a pivotal moment when you let go of the ego's hand and decide to take the hand of Christ.
This can and will happen in many scenarios and many times over. And it's going to happen in your "real life" in relation to people and your beliefs about people.
Cate Grieves gave a good example of this recently in relation to her daughter where she would clash with the "ego" in her daughter, or rather, her own inner fight with her own ego projected there, but after having enough, one day she finally decided to recognize the Christ in her and to relate only to that identity, not to the ego. And everything shifted. That's an example of letting go of the ego's hand and taking the hand of Christ.
Similarly I had spent many many years believing in sickness, thinking it was real, irreversible, truth. Each time I saw it I had reactions and grief. I believed it was real. It was actually horrifying to see disability and very upsetting because I believed it was real, and how tragic it was what had been lost as a result of it. All that suffering was ego bullshit.
I had gone through many many periods of trying to heal it, fix it, rescue the person, trying to learn about what caused it, diagnosing it, figuring out why it happened etc. All of these ways that I was actually continually using the ego to try to find some kind of truth outside of me. Always it would lead me to dead ends and failing to find anything that made sense. It was infuriating. I tried and tried and tried to explain why and how the sickness happened and all that did was justify and keep it.
And this was all because I believed my own ego, my own intellect's ability to diagnose truthfully (which is impossible), and that if I would seek externally for truth I would actually be able to find it, if I looked hard enough. But this was all classic seek-and-do-not-find tactics. It was all based on me believing that the problem was real.
One day, I was getting to where I had really had enough, like, fucking hell I cannot put up with this bullshit any more. And I was starting to recognize with Jesus' help the ways that I kept trying to solve this "real problem", and He was just always trying to get me to surrender and stop doing that. When I was in 'fix it' mode my mind was just lost like in a tunnel vision of thinking that I was going to find the answer, not realizing and not having the awareness that this was fundamentally impossible. The entire basis for my searching was flawed and based in the ego, so I was trapped and failing before I even started.
Somehow enough of these events of futility and failure and gradual tiny steps in becoming aware of this, led to a moment where it started to dawn on me. I started to finally get it. This had all been based on the idea that sickness was REAL. And that also fed into an awareness that was growing in me that there just was no truth out there whatsoever. I had been looking in the wrong place - in the ego - for a truth that doesn't exist there. And that maybe this whole world had no truth in it at all.
Up until that point I'd been believing that the world was real and sickness was real and sin was real. Even if some part of me understood otherwise. And my belief that there is somehow a truth in this world just met with a total loss in finding it. That was GOOD, because it revealed to me that this ego pursuit was totally a distraction, and a pointless one at that. There IS no truth in the world. The truth is NOT out there. This really started a MAJOR shift in my awareness that has been leading to just a tremendous flood of insight and awakening lately.
But the main thing is, I had to question whether sickness was real. And that meant even going against everyone else who said sickness was real. Going against the doctors and the neighbors and the family members and even those closest to me who all believed in real sickness. I had to find enough certainty and be pissed off enough and fed up enough to finally say FUCK THAT. There is no truth there. So I decided, or at least found enough of a sense of conviction, like a ray of light peeking through the window for the first time, to open up to the idea that sickness is not reality, because this world is not reality.
This was a major turn of events because this has now laid a foundation for really huge strides forward, a foundation for hope, a foundation for miracles, and a foundation for healing. That would not have been possible had I remained in the ego belief that sickness is truth. So in this same way, I became able to let go of the ego's hand and take the hand of Christ. And because it took such tremendous frustration and desperation to exhaust the ego's bullshit and to really reveal to myself that this fundamentally major world-wide claim about real sickness was total f'ing bullshit.
So now something is different for me. It's a turning point, suddenly instead of looking at, believing in, and reacting to "real sickness", I am learning how it is an illusion, I am starting to actually overlook it, which means I am finally actually forgiving it. My mind and awareness are shifting and I'm seeing sickness in a whole different way. I'm no longer allowing the ego interpretation of it to be the limit of my belief or awareness, and instead am opening up to the Christ perspective that sickness is not the truth. It's not real, and because it is not real, it can be undone.
These shifts happen in big ways and small ways. Each time you come to question or doubt the ego and see that it's been leading you on a wild goosechase, and its claims are not the truth, you gradually let go of its hand and shift allegiance to Christ. You go from perceiving FORM as though it's real, and looking beyond it. You go from seeing people as real bodies, to no longer regarding them as "just that". Your vision no longer stops at sight of form and it starts to see a truth that transcends it. The person is not their body. The person is not their ego.
This basically means you are gradually de-coupling yourself from form, and are actually letting go of your own body at the same time. Everything in front of your eyes is an attempt to get you to see it as real, and to fail to overlook/forgive, leading to judgement. We need to learn to not believe it! It's not real. It's not truth. Form is just an effect of an idea, not a solid reality. Nor is it fixed, and nor is it identity.
Form is not the truth about a person. Their body is not the truth about them. Their personality/persona/shadow is not the truth about them. They actually are more than that. Even when they are filled with hate and rage, that's still not true about them. Their real self, holy and innocent, is still in there somewhere, just temporarily covered up. It doesn't go away! This justifies unconditional love at all times.
Basically, you simply just need to remember who you are, as God created you. To "know" your SELF again.
Jesus: "I was a man who remembered the Soul and its knowledge."
"I have nothing that does not come from God. The main difference between us as yet is that I have NOTHING ELSE. This leaves me in a state of true holiness"
Not knowing your self, or who and what you are, you believe you are something else. And this belief that something is true of you which isn't, is the ego. It's a false self that you invented to disguise your real self. And so the ONLY problem really is one of. .. what is your identity? Or rather, what do you identify with or as.
Are you spirit, or are you an ego/body? Becoming identified with your spirit is the goal. And this requires recognizing that you are not the "sense of self" that identifying with the ego brings, which is really based on belief and denial of knowledge, not knowledge. Just as "to sense is not to know."
The question is simply, who or what are you? What is true of you? Or more to the point, will you identify WITH and AS a fiction of specialness and exclusion, or will you identify WITH and AS the Christ-soul that God created you as... .which is an identity shared with all the other Christ-souls that are God's equal children.
Ego is merely a belief in being an isolated separated self which does not share with and is different to other selves. While the soul is the knowledge that you were created equal to all beings and that you share everything with them.
The way Jesus describes your self, in fact, is that you cannot know your self alone, or in isolation, because your self's "nature" is that it is SHARED WITH OTHER SELVES who exist as individuals simultaneously. And only by accepting your oneness with them as brothers can you fully embrace "your self".
Ego is the idea of rejecting oneness with your brothers. "Miracles unite you with your brother." So your self, as A son of God, cannot be a SINGLE son of God, it has to be an EQUAL son of God with other sons of God. And KNOWING that is knowing the fullness of your real identity.
"Ego is the idea of selfishness. Soul is the idea of self-fullness."
Jesus clarifies:
"***The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is Know thyself.*** There is nothing else to learn. Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost. Whenever you are with anyone ELSE, you have another opportunity to find them. Your power and glory are in HIM BECAUSE they are yours. **The ego tries to find them in yourself**, because he does not know where to look. But the Holy Spirit teaches you that ***if you look only at yourself you CANNOT find yourself*** because that is NOT what you are.
Whenever you are ***with a brother you are learning what you are***, because you are teaching what you are. He will respond either with pain or with joy, depending on which teacher you are following. He will be imprisoned or released according to your decision, and so will you. Never forget your responsibility to him, because it is your responsibility to yourself. ***Give him his place in the Kingdom, and you will have yours.*** ***The Kingdom cannot be found alone, and you who are the Kingdom cannot find yourselves alone.***
You can simply equate a holy relationship with the idea of wholeness. A whole-relationship happens when you yourself are whole, and therefore have no sense of lack, need, loss, deprivation, scarcity, victimhood, guilt, defects or any other form of unwholeness/unholiness.
In a state of wholeness, recognizing yourself as God created you, you realize that you are already complete and have no real needs. Therefore you do not need to get anything from the other person, you don't depend on them because you depend on God, you don't look to the other to complete you since God has completed you, and you therefore have nothing to "get" from the other.
This means you ONLY GIVE what you have been given by God, extending God to the other, extending your wholeness to the other and seeing it in them. As such you recognize the wholeness in them beyond any attempt on their part to shut it out. You look past (forgive) their ego if they still have one, and look to the wholeness of Christ in them, because you identify with and recognize Christ in and as yourself - one with them in wholeness.
The special relationship is a breakdown in the wholeness, in which you first attack yourself and see yourself as lacking. This includes self denial, self attack, self hate, condemnation, accusation of sinfulness, guilt and fear, identification with the ego or body, etc. . generally not being yourself as God created you. It's an attempt to deny wholeness and be partial or limited, narrowing yourself, turning your love into conditional love.
You then find yourself in a state of conditionality where you "depend on" certain things in order to feel certain ways, and generally have given power away to external people to "do for you" what you are unwilling to do for yourself. You then "use them" to try to get them to give you what you want, even though you are unwilling to really receive it because that would mean no longer being in need or needing to get it from them.
It's a state of simultaneously trying to milk the other person for all they are worth, taking everything from them, with self interest and dependency, yet at the same time not wanting to really receive love or wholeness or joy or peace because that would alleviate the need for the other person. This produces a tension of push-pull where you want something and don't want it at the same time. This turns into a lot of gameplay and manipulation and dishonesty.
Generally speaking the special relationship is about you having needs based on a self-imposed sense of lack, where you are not seeing yourself correctly and do not recognize or know who you are. Believing that love (wholeness) is not in you as you, you will think you are lacking it, and need it, and therefore have to get it from someone else. You then want them to love you for you so that they can cause you against your will to feel like you have it, even though this won't work.
It's the ego's model of seek-and-do-not-find, because then you are seeing anywhere other than within to find the love that you seem to lack. You then look to external saviours, special loves, chosen individuals, allies and so on, to set up exclusive channels of acquisition, in which you can use people to get what you want, to surround yourself with stuff you prefer, and to generally have the world do to and for you what you refuse to do yourself.
The real issue is the block to love, which is within your mind, and is something you are doing to yourself. This denial of love and identity hides the presence of God/love in your mind and awareness, causing you to believe that it's not there. And then you are lacking and needy and dependent and must seek for it. But you'll seek anywhere other than within where it actually does exist. You just believe you won't find it within because you think that the last time you looked it wasn't there.
The change that then needs to take place in order to transition from special relationship to holy relationship, is to reconsider and question whether or not love is in you, whether you are lacking, whether you are still as God created you in wholeness, and whether you actually have any real "special needs" at all. This requires looking within to reconnect with, find, accept, recognize, and become open to, the self and the love that God put in you already.
It's only ever a matter of you basically avoiding yourself as God created you, and trying to be something that you're not. That just leads to false senses of identity such as to be an ego or physical body. Or to identify with external people or objects or places and other things of no value. When you don't know yourself as God created you, you form relationship on faulty foundations and on a basis of mutual suffering, mutual using, mutual conditional love and mutual destruction.
To reach the state of holy relationship is then simply about waking up to and accepting the pre-existing truth about you, becoming experientially aware that you are still part of Christ, still part of God, still one with everyone, still whole and complete already. That God created you complete and his will is done, so in truth you have nothing wrong with you, you're already perfect, and therefore have no needs, no lack, no loss, no corruption, no damage and no death.
To be the whole of yourself is to be one with the whole of everyone and one with God. This is your natural state. When you are not whole you enter into unholiness, which is a state of dishonesty, irresponsibility, fear, suffering, victimhood, specialness, egotism, sickness and death. Returning to the state of wholeness and "lack of lack" by accepting atonement - undoing lies and self deception - you awaken to remember who you really are, and then you can unconditionally love everyone equally in perfect holiness.
"They come together, each to complete HIMSELF and ROB the other. They stay until they think there's nothing left to steal, and then move on. And so they wander through a world of strangers, UNLIKE themselves, living with their bodies perhaps beneath a common roof that shelters neither; in the same room and yet a world apart. A holy relationship starts from a different premise. Each one has looked within, and seen NO lack. ACCEPTING his completion, he would EXTEND it by JOINING with another, whole as himself."
Our only real need is for the love of God. All other needs are ones we've invented.
We invent a need when we first find ourselves lacking something. It is generally the apparent absence of God that we think we lack, that gives rise to all other needs.
So really, when we think that our one need - the love of God - is not fulfilled, it produces a sense of lack or emptiness, which does not feel good, and which then compels us to search for its fulfillment somewhere.
Typically then, because we see the need as having been lost within ourselves - as if, love is not in us, we then look elsewhere for it. Anywhere else but within. And that ultimately means, we look for this fulfillment anywhere other than where the love actually IS, ie within, and so we do not find it.
So then we're in a state of neediness and yearning and deprivation and lack, thirsting and hungry, and we then think that we need to 'get' from somewhere outside of ourselves. And we will actually attempt this getting. But even if we get ie take ie steal from others, we will not be able to actually accept it.
Accepting that our artificial needs are met, entails accepting that the lack of love within us has been restored. But we can't accept that because we believe, more deeply, that love is absent, ie God is absent.
So it's like... God has to fill our bucket, but then we're going around saying we only believe in empty buckets, and then we take our empty bucket to everyone else trying to get them to fill it with their piece of God, but as soon as they try to put their God into the bucket we refuse to let it be filled up because we're adamant that our bucket must be empty. We want to keep our bucket empty, even though we're desperately trying to fill us from any source other than where it can really be filled from. And every time we believe our own bucket is empty, we will see everyone else's buckets as empty also, and so there's no sign of the love you need.
Seek and do not find.
The ONLY solution is the reversal and undoing of the belief that your bucket is empty in the first place, which is an ILLUSION and a deception within yourself, covering up a tremendous FLOOD of love that resides in you as God, already. We have this entire lake of love flowing through us, an ocean of it, but we've simply blocked it out and made it seem to us like it's not there. It IS there. We have to uncover it, rediscover it, find out that it was NEVER LOST, and accept that it is present. That's all. This one need is then met and all other false needs disappear because they're absolutely unneeded.
When you have false needs you have a lot of questions because you have a lot of doubt about love's presence in you, and so you have a lot of fear about how you're going to manage without the strength of this love. So then you've got all this questioning and confusion. What happens to all that when you GO TO GOD? All of this doubt and questioning is based on the absence of God, staying away from God, so when you go to God, the entire foundation of all this questioning is completely mute. It's irrelevant. All of the questions are about how to meet a need that is FAKE - a need that you don't really have. When the true need is met, all else is taken care of.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God and your way will be made straight.
All you need is love.
"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer."
Whenever you are presented with a choice in this world, you'll find it always entails an impossible situation. It's not "you" that is making choices difficult, it is the nature of the world.
"It is the world you see that is impossible."
Option A will offer something which seems to be mostly what you want, but it will lack something.
Option B may have what the other lacks, and offer something it doesn't have.
But in all cases, you will never find two choices which offer exactly everything. Or even one.
This fundamentally makes for an impossible situation, in which you are torn. You cannot feel a sense of total certainty regardless of which one you choose.
If you choose A, you know you'll be missing out on something. If you choose B, you know you'll be missing out on something.
The thing is, with our egos, we actually believe that there is a "perfect choice" in this world. That its possible to find the exact perfect something, be it an item you're buying, or a person to relate with, or a place to hang out, or a tv show to watch, or whatever.
But there is nothing perfect in this world. This world is based on separation, which requires that nothing be whole, nothing be perfect, and everything be only partially anything.
Often then you'll find that if you are seeking the perfect choice, you will feel flrustrated, uncertain, doubtful, mis-trusting, not sure whether to go with this or that.
Option A seems to tantilize you with its offferings, but you know it's flawed. And option B seems to offer something of its own. Even if you have both, they still would lack something. But you can't decide, because neither of them seems to "do it all".
Sometimes, depending on if you lower your standards, or are open to compromise, or don't mind some shortcomings, or can live with the absence of certain features etc, you'll allow yourself to use this adjustment of attitude as a way to "settle" for one of the options. And you might talk yourself into that being satisfactory. Even though you know deep down it is less than ideal.
This in a way seems to give you a sense of less stress or more sanity, but it's only an illusion. Settling for the fact that the situation is an impossible choice, and then trying to justify why its okay that it's impossible, and settling for a compromise, is not really attaining perfection. So you make do.
And so once again, the world comes up short, and it offers you less than what you want, and it can never please you fully, never totally satisfy you, and is always disappointing.
"All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives."
Looking at this clearly, you can recognize that any choice to be made between illusions, will always be fundamentally impossible, incomplete and less than ideal. If you seek for the ideal you will be disappointed and lost and frustrated and disillusioned.
If you can accept that the world is fundamentally flawed and you cannot have everything here, accepting the fact that every option is less than whole, less than total life, and thus an idea of death, maybe you can choose on a more practical basis and just go with the devil you know, or the lesser of two evils.
There is no perfect choice in the world because the world was made in an effort to reject perfection and to offer no real choice. It is an assertion that you have no choice, that death is inevitable, and there is no alternative.
But there is a real choice. There is a perfect choice. That is, to choose NOT this world, and to instead choose the TRUE perfection of the Kingdom. God's world is the only world that offers you a total lack of compromise, total satisfaction, complete wholeness and perfect completion. There is no lack or frustration or impossibility or pointlessness in its offering.
To choose God again is to make a choice FOR perfection, which is a perfect choice. And it is the only choice that is perfect, when made. All other choosing is imperfect and unholy. And only a choice for holiness can bring you what you want.
"This world holds nothing that I want."
"It takes great learning to both recognize and accept that this world has nothing to give."
A Course in Miracles itself is over 550,000 words of deep and dense material. It appears filled with meaning dripping from every word, and seems to talk on many topics. But really the entire thing has very simple origins and a very simple goal.
You simply started off in heaven's reality with God, and then you tried to rebel against his will and put yourself to sleep. You had a strange dream of mortality, and now you're trying to remember what your immortal reality is like again, so that you can wake up. It's no more complex than that.
Jesus even summarizes what the course/atonement is encouraging you to accept, in just 4 words, as "only reality is true." Or similarly "only the truth is true and nothing else is true." Or "I am under no laws but God's."The "truth" is what is "real", what is actual, is the most encompassing and the least interpreted. Just simply, what really exists as given by God. That which is actually happening and its truest actual meaning without distortion or denial.
The whole course is simply saying that you fell into a strange sleep where you appear to be insane and have lost touch with reality. And now he is trying to help you to become sane again. It's funny when after a while he says: "you are no longer WHOLLY insane."
"Not wholly mad, you have been willing to look on much of your insanity, and recognize its madness. Your faith is moving inward, past insanity and on to reason."
"For you are no longer WHOLLY insane, and you WOULD recognize the guilt of SELF-betrayal FOR WHAT IT IS."
But it's worth realizing that words are symbols of symbolic things - dream things. Just as the body is a dream, it symbolizes separation and ego. And the word "body" symbolizes that symbol. And A Course in Miracle as a book of 550,000+ words is filled with symbols.
Symbols always point beyond themselves to something else that they represent. They are not ends in themselves and don't really have their own meaning. They are representatives of a state prior to themselves, from which they express. Just as the body is a symbol and an expression which represents the mind from which it comes.
Jesus teaches that "nothing so blinding as perception of form". And that believing form is real or true is false perception. So when you look at the forms of the words in the course and you take them to be the truth, in and of themselves, based on the form they take, you are in fact blinded by perception of form.
Some people become very enamored with the choice of symbols in the course, the beauty of its seeming artistic poetry, and its mastery of language. But it only appears this way because it came from an origin higher and beyond and prior to itself, who articulated otherwise random symbols into seemingly symbolic arrangements to convey a message.
It's possible to mistake the words in the book for the truth itself, to idolize those words, to put them on a pedestal and think of them as the word of God. It's also possible to then become blinded by them, unable to look deeper or see the meaning on which they are based. Ultimately the purpose of the course is to make itself unnecessary, all of it has to eventually be let go and all of its words overlooked through forgiveness.
There becomes fanatical defense against the words being changed, the preservation of the words, and the attempt to prove logical arguments based on whether or not the words show up in the book. But this is all a false perception of the course, taking an illusion to be reality.
What is really needed, to go deeper, is a forgiveness even of the course itself. What begins as false perceptions of very sophisticated wordings must at some point move past the appearance of its symbols. To mistake a symbol for the thing it symbolizes is a mistake.
If you want to really find out what things mean, where they came from, why those symbols were chosen, or what they are expressions of, then you have to move beyond the words. You have to overlook their form and not get hung up on whether or not something is explicitly written, or whether it's in its original form, or whether it's been edited all to hell.
Jesus expressed A Course in Miracles from a very lofty vantage point, a point in which words mean nothing. He translated his awareness and experience into symbols upon symbols and into sequences of symbols, to try to speak a language that you might understand, or which might at least serve as an in-road towards their origin.
The words in the book are signposts and pointers, aiming in the direction of the truth. But they are not the truth itself. Nor are they even capable of accurately representing that truth, although Jesus has done an exceptional job of being very careful to convey meaning as accurately as possible. But you still have to learn to look past the words if you want to find out what they really mean, otherwise the course is just another idol.
What I personally found is that behind all of the words in the book, there is a deeper metaphysics. There is a logic which is amazingly impeccable and self evident, a living logic. There are natural structures and perfect extensions of truth. That even God is a logical premise with a logical conclusion.
There are reasons for everything being the way it is in reality, and in the ego's realm. Even the separation and the nature of this world are a progression of logical reasoning. The descent into hell was a procession of logical steps leading away from the truth, and all of this can be carefully detailed.
"From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos must follow. It is because it follows that it seems to be a logical conclusion; a valid step in ordered thought. The steps to chaos do follow neatly from their starting point. Each is a different form in the progression of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror and away from truth."
What you eventually have to do is a total rewind of all learning back to the origin, back to the nature of God and his reality. You have to then look logically and with reason, and very carefully, at how and why God is the way he is. To look at what it means to be absolute, infinite, unlimited, immortal, eternal and so on. There are laws behind all of this.
This is because God is actually the logical premise of all reality. It is his nature which dictates the entire laws that heaven is based upon. He is the truth and the source of all reality. If you understand why he is the way he is, then you can begin to logically reason why everything else must be the way it is. Because everything began with God and everything else followed very precicely.
Even if you completely forget everything you ever learned in ACIM and just start over from the very beginning, with the nature of God's reality, and reason out from there, you will surprisingly find that you'll come to the exact same conclusions that are written in ACIM.
Thats's because everything ACIM is saying is logically perfect. It is completely true. And if it weren't, the logic would be out of alignment with it and show why it is flawed. But it's not flawed, because Jesus is not flawed, and he knew exactly what he was talking about, as he still does.
In fact the entire nature and structure of creation, of all real relationship, including the shared sonship and the laws of heaven, all derive according to very simple and clear logical rules. These rules and their extension can be followed perfectly and make absolutely perfect logical sense. They are completely impeccable and flawless in their clarity that only a fool would argue against them once explained.
When you take these very simple logical foundations and you look at what they mean and imply, and then you take A Course in Miracles and you look at what it says about God's reality and nature, you find that they EXACTLY match in every case. They validate each other. Which means that everything in reality is perfectly logical, is exactly is the way it is, and can only be that way, and cannot be any other way. And that therefore ACIM is in fact based on the real truth.
Looking to these logical foundations, the logic can be expressed in simple words or diagrams, and it can be shown step by step, exactly why God is the way God is, exactly why and how he creates, exactly what must be created and its nature, and why the Kingdom of God operates the way it does. It can all be accurately described, and in far less words than are in ACIM. The basics are quite simple.
When you get all the words out of the way, so to speak, and see the deeper connection or basis for all of it, then you realize that Jesus really is just basing all his expressions on very simple concepts. Seeing past the complexity of the many ways it has been expresed, and not being blinded by its forms is the hard part. And it can take many years to try to find the needles in the haystack.
See, Jesus doesn't really write at the level of the words. It's not like some regular human who is sitting in this world at a typewriter pounding the keys and coming up with an egoic novel about ego stuff. He has written the course from a maximally high level, translating truths into an elegant breakdown of its aspects. How it applies to the world, how it applies to the body, how it applies to relationship etc.
He's done this so that you can be reached wherever your starting point is, and in terms you are familiar with, and using language and references you can understand. But the purpose isn't to leave you there poking around in the dirt and arguing over words, but to raise you up and bring you closer to the origins of the course. To the state of reality Jesus shares, and to its divine truth.
The metaphysics that the course is based on, shows that the course itself is an expression of something higher and deeper. It comes from a source that is very simple and is in touch with reality. Just because a person is putting the same teaching into over half a million words, or even a trillion words, doesn't mean that even more than a few words are needed to convey the whole truth, such as that "God is".
You don't necessarily need all those words. You don't really need to learn every single word form or memorize every quote or only quote from a specific version. In fact if you cannot use reason to determine WHETHER or not something is true and accurate, you are already in a state of not only depending entirely on but being blinded by the words themselves. You're supposed to see the logic behind them.
You don't really have to even read the whole book. It has a holographic nature reflecting the holographic nature of reality, such that the whole truth is in every part, because every part is an expression from the whole truth, given wholly and truthfully. Jesus wrote it all from a single whole truth and all of it expresses a cohesive single message, which you can find on every page.
You do need to fully apply it yes. You need to fully learn the simple truth, the basic nature of your self. You do need to shift allegiance from the forms of error to the unified reality. And you do need to develop trust and learn to relate with actual love and so on. But you don't need hundreds of thousands of words to do that. Maybe at first it seems you do, then later you realize you don't.
What I'm doing in the book I'm working om right now, is stripping away all the words entirely and "starting over" with pure logic. I'm examining what is deeper than all these words. I'm going to present extremely clearly what the real logic of God is and what reality's nature is.
I'll be explaining in simple clear steps exactly how heaven came to be and why it is run by the laws that it is. How creation comes of it and what must be true of you. This can all be arrived at through simple logical steps. Even God's nature can be logically and accurately described, because what you find out is that reality is in fact a living logic system of divine states, with very specific rules.
The aim is to come up with a "reformulation" of the form of the course's teachings, in far fewer words and in much simpler terms. A deep look at the ideas behind its many words. A formulation which still represents the truth with perfect accuracy, but which can be learned very quickly and easily in its more purified form.
Really the metaphysics behind the course is very simple and clear-cut, its not all that complicated once you can see it. But for many people, seeing through the fog of the course's words can be a hurdle in itself. It needs to be laid out in the simplest and clearest way possible, to save time and effort and to provide accuracy and clarity. And it has to bypass the entire realm of "opinion" - the logic has to stand on its own two feet and speak for itself.
That's why I'm making the book that I'm making right now. It will cut through all the noise and all the opinions and all the ego arguments and all the confusion. It goes deeper than debate and countless theories and interpretations that are hung up on word choices.
It's kind of like brushing away all the many forms that have covered over the course's true origins, to reveal what's behind it at all. I hope it will act as a "primer" and easier introduction, especially for those who are newer to the course.
You'll see, once you read it, and as you follow its reasoning, that it is extremely hard to deny what it says, and it is ultra clear in making total sense. I'm deliberately making it so that it is practically impossible to find fault in it. The logical is very flawless, not because I'm "expert" at it but just because reality's laws are themselves flaweless. Such that the true metaphysics of the course will be revealed in the light and seen for what it must be, completely accurately and consistently.
Then the really interesting thing is that, once armed with this tool, a kind of magnifying glass for the course bringing its depths totally into the light, it actually shines a light of clarity onto all that the course says. It helps to frame its meaning, to clarify intentions, to properly identify what Jesus meant in his wordings, and to steer away from common misinterpretations. The logic even helps you to realize things which must be true, which may not even be written in ACIM itself, yet are completely consistent with it.
The book itself actually stands alone in that it comes to the same conclusions as the course through its own process. It doesn't even rely on the course or anything the course says, to make its points. It doesn't need any quotes from the book either. It simply uses clear reasoning to come up with a clear metaphysical foundation.
Then it looks to what the course says to find out IF it agrees. And it happens to validate and agree with everything it says. And both of them reflect each other perfectly because they're based on the same exact truth.
Somewhere seemingly inside you, there is a perfect self. The soul that God created, one in Christ. That's you. That's what you are.
This perfect self has nothing wrong with it at all. It is already absolutely perfect. God created it to be perfect with perfection, and it was created perfectly by perfection.
Your actual self, what you are, does not need fixing or healing or resurrecting or correcting. It is absolutely perfect right now.
This self already exists. It is NOT your job or role or function or ability to CREATE IT, to make it, to cause it, to define it, to add to it, to build it up, to produce it, or in any way to turn yourself into it.
All spiritual "learning" is geared towards typically trying to become something other than what you are. This has led you AWAY FROM what you are. Even if it seems like progress.
The truth of your being isn't actually something you need to gain or cause or accumulate. It's something you need to RECOGNIZE AN ACCEPT.
It's actually something that's already there. It's waiting for your acknowledgement. It's waiting for you to find it and see it and realize it's already there and it's always been there.
It was just covered up by your mind with its layers of denial and unwillingness and believing other things. As soon as you saw yourself as not yourself, you lost track of yourself, lost sight of yourself, and went off trying to reinvent yourself.
And the you thought that in order to become a better version of you you'd have to keep reinventing yourself, to become a spiritual being. But that's how you end up with a spiritualised ego. A converted polished tweaked alternative self that is still not the self that God created.
You'll find after a while that you cannot manipulate an artificial self into being real, you cannot perfect the imperfect, you cannot get your "not really my real self" to turn into something spiritual enough.
You can produce illusions and specialness and artificial forms of what may look more spiritual but you can't really escape the realm of illusions this way. You can polish a turd but it's still at turd. Or paint some lipstick on a skeleton, or put some clothes on a corpse. But you cannot convert this non-self into a self.
What you really need to do is very simply to seek within and find and become aware of, recognize, acknowledge, access, a self that is sitting there waiting for you to find it again. This is more an act of going within and just trying to become aware that you are ALREADY perfect.
Look for your pre-existing perfection, don't try to invent it. Look for your holy self, don't try to turn yourself into a holy self. Appreciate and acknowledge and become aware of what God has already created you to be. It's in you, lurking there behind the dark curtains.
It's in this sense that you need do nothing. You need do nothing to make yourself be perfect and happy and well, because God has already done this. He's give you absolute perfection. You tried to hide from it. Now you just need to stop hiding from it and own it.
You are Christ, already. You are sinless already. You are holy already. You are everything already, and always and forever. What was all this seeking and not finding for, but to pretend that's not true?
"Why wait for Heaven? Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. The light is in them now. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all." UrW188L1