Have you done this? I know I have done it many times: "Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real?"

Something happens, typically something related to a body - something physical which the body reports as happening. Then I observe it and judge - THIS IS REAL - something's happening, something's going wrong.

Then there is a whole cascade of reactions, starting with immediate fear. There are defenses, attempts to escape, attempts to find cures, attempts to explain the causes. All attempts are me trying to defend against the "reality" of the problem, which, because it IS real to me, cannot BE escaped.

And always no matter what I do, what I think, how I approach it, there is still the fear response to something that seems unchangeable, fixed, stuck, irreversible, and deadly.

This is always because at the "core", I've given REALITY to something that the body showed me. I've decided this is real, and have interpreted it as totally real. By making it real, I locked it in place, turned it into an inescapable sin, gave it permanence, and set it up as the truth.

Now it cannot be questioned, undone, changed, healed, or corrected. Knowing this produces inevitable unresolvable fear. If it is real, there is nothing I can do about it. And this always leads to a feeling of powerlessness, hopelessness, weakness, incapability, inadequacy and shame. As if the thing is just dangling there in front of my face taunting me and haunting me with its threats of inevitable suffering.

"NOT because it has the power to hurt, but just because YOU have denied it is but an illusion, AND MADE IT REAL."

"Its plan is to have you SEE ERROR CLEARLY FIRST, and THEN overlook it. But how CAN you overlook what you have made real? By seeing it clearly, you HAVE made it real, and CANNOT overlook it."

All of this begins the moment that I look at something and decide for myself, "this is real". This one act of reading reality into it, taking it seriously, forgetting to laugh, focusing on it like it's literally right there in front of my face as proof that it exists, is enough to cement it into my mind. As soon as it is locked in, nothing whatsoever can dislodge it and it looms over me like a constant threat.

The ego has counseled that I need to look clearly and closely at what is an error - an illusion of something going wrong - as if it is real, and examine it, and figure out what it is, and analyze it, and describe it, and find the cause of it. And that only by looking intensely at it as a real problem can I possibly find a solution to it. But this does not work because all it does it holds the problem in place.

The ONLY thing which can truly uproot and solve the problem, is the recognition that I am the one who decided it was real in the first place. I bought into the illusion. I fell for the temptation. I forgot to laugh at it. I thought it was serious. I gave it meaning. I decided what it was and why it meant. And only by this decision, based on inputs from the body senses, did I convince myself "this is really happening, holy shit, there is no escaping it."

I must then reverse this belief, this core key moment, realizing that since I gave it this reality, I can withdraw this power from it also. And I must do this is if I want to experience atonement and freedom.

"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 means I have given my power away to an illusory world, have set it up to have power over me, and now I see it as causing me. And now I am starting to experience the consequences and effects that it implies. And only by taking its power away can I free myself from my self-made imprisonment.

This problem has no power, it is not real, it is not happening, it is not true, it does not exist, it is not there, it is already gone, it never happened, it is an illusion and is nothing.

And then I can laugh and be free from the clutches of this tiny anchoring black-hole of despair and deception. It is truly nothing and I has no power over me.

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

"He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

The world's got issues. But do you think the world will ever not have issues?

Certainly it's not actually able to be problem-free. Problems are its nature. They arise from differences, which produce incompatibilities and difficulty. And then from that we get things acting against other things, and before you know it hell breaks loose.

You can try to fix it up and solve some of its problems but at best it will only ever be temporary. And even the things you fix will develop problems. It all requires constant maintenance because it can't help falling apart at the seams.

It might be better to accept that the world is fundamentally flawed, than to keep fighting to try to force it to look like it can be perfect. No matter how hard we try to make it work better, it still will always have issues. The fact that it is based on space and time means it is based on murderousness and destruction and impossibility.

We'd probably be better off psychologically admitting that the world is just a broken system which can NEVER work right. Because then we can stop resisting its nature, and stop the futile insane efforts to work against its nature. You can't get blood out of a stone as they say.

If you can accept that the world is a limited system, designed to destroy itself, to eat itself alive, to undermine its own existence, filled with incompatilities and conflict and self-destruction, then you can let it have its ways.

The payoff isn't that you somehow solve unsolveable problems and make things seem better, it's that you psychologically enter a state of greater acceptance and allowing. It's not that you have to accept that the world is perfect - it isn't. But if you can accept that it is imperfect, and always will be, you drop all of the insane attempts to turn it into something better.

Acknowledging its brokenness and its dysfunction and its self-attack and recognizing that this is the ONLY way it CAN function - it was designed to be like this - allows you to be more forgiving toward it. You can recognize it is simply following orders and carrying out the desire of impossibility, conflict, nonsense, contradiction and frustration that it was designed to do.

At least then you can be in a state of greater peace and sanity and acceptance rather than trying to force something which CAN NEVER WORK, to work better. Then you can let go of the insane idea of saving it, against its will. And funnily enough, that will save it from projections of sin and guilt more than the impossible attempt to turn it into heaven.

The world is not heaven and it will never ever be heaven. It is opposite to heaven in every way. If you let it be heaven's opposite instead of mistaking it FOR heaven, you will enter a state of mind in which you can be closer to heaven within yourself.

Because to be heavenly you have to not resist reality, and have to accept atonement. So if you use the unacceptable world to reach acceptance, then you'll get into a more heaven'y state within. And when you'll project that out and see it reflected in the impossible world. And now you can linger for a while in a world which doesn't seem quite so intolerable, but only because you admit to just how intolerable it is.

You cannot convert a world that was designed to oppose the laws of God, into a world that obeys them. Separation is its foundation, not oneness. Everything in it is driven by relativity, not the absolute. You can't even have atoms and molecules bodies and planets without a separation idea. Let it have its separation and its murder and its death and don't deny it. You can't fight with its nature, there's no point.

The world was made to die and to follow death's purpose. It was made so that you cannot escape problems. It was made so that nothign ever works right. It was made in order to act like a prison and to keep everyone isolated. It is not meant to function perfectly or heaven-like or to be free from cruelty. Everone keeps trying to dress it up and figure out what went wrong to try to stop it happneing again, it it completley futile. All that leads to is a straight-jacket.

Let what dies die, it's not supposed to last forever. Then in the allowing you can be free to live.

Time to get your mind out of the gutter?

"Eternity is an idea of God, so the soul understands it perfectly. Time is a belief of the ego, so the lower mind, which IS the ego's domain, accepts it without question."

Jesus refers to you having a lower mind and a higher mind. The lower mind, or the place where you have a "thought system" of spacetime and ego, arose in the separation from God.

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity."

"Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

The lower mind, or egoic false perception, tends to look at things in a narrow, hateful, judgemental way. It's kind of like the mind is coming at the things it seems from a "lower" vantage point, down on the landscape or battlefield. What we need is a "higher" vantage point which "overlooks" ("To forgive is to overlook") and sees with love.

Forgiveness, or being forgiving, is a gift given by the Holy Spirit. It's a true-perception viewpoint that looks from a high vantage point of holiness, harmlessness, innocence and love. The Holy Spirit sees with Christ Vision, and looks upon everything correctly, ie based on God's truth and love.

We might spend a lot of time trying to figure out "how to forgive", which is really the lower mind trying to stay in control. Instead, consider that we simply need to join with the Holy Spirit. We need to not simply ask for his help, but invite him in. We need to allow him to operate on us, and to help us to share in how he is seeing things.

That means getting your mind to see what and how he is seeing. Your mind has to experientially, not in theory, actually "shift" or move into a higher position, in which you receive the Holy Spirit's healing vision. In which you allow yourself to BE forgiven and to see with HIS forgiveness. A forgiveness that is GIVEN you, rather than one you keep trying to make yourself.

"Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function. Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven."

Notice how it says that overlooking guilt - in which to forgive is to overlook - means that forgiving must entail letting HIM forgive, and simply trying to line your mind up with his to be open to entering into, joining with, and experiencing, his sight. A little willingness is all that is needed to invite him to help, and to ask for his viewpoint, not to merely hand it down to you but to actually orient yourself so that you let his perspective become your own. Such that God's will becomes your own.

Also, although this is not stated often, forgiveness is the same thing as love. A forgiving perspective is a loving perspective. The mind has to be willing to want a HIGHER way to look at things.

"Forgiveness is an earthly form of love which as it is in Heaven has no form. Yet what is needed here is given here as it is needed. In this form you can fulfill your function even here, although what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still."

Part of our challenge is we often do not recognize that we're in need of moving into a higher perspective. We are stuck and lost in our lower ego mind having false perceptions, which act like prisons and traps, and may not even realize that we're doing it. We think it's normal and don't question it. But we need to try to be vigilant and notice what we're doing, when we're being unforgiving, when we're going it alone, and when we need to ask for help.

The holy spirit is there to help you. God created him entirely TO help you, to heal you, to guide you, and to love and support you. You can't very well move closer to God without sharing in his mindset, his viewpoint, and his higher perception. But to move into it you have to be willing to let go of attack and sin and guilt and death. To be wiling to admit, you might be mistaken, you might've made a wrong choice, and you want something better. The only thing that is ever better is something closer to God.

"While I am not attacking your egos, I AM working with your higher mind whether you are asleep or awake, (just as your ego does with your lower mind.)"

In the Holy Mind (whole mind, one mind), what applies to you applies to others, because they are one with you. There is nothing you can do to them that you don’t *directly* do to yourself. Because you are AWARE that you are "in" other people, in harmony with them, it is in your best interests to ONLY LOVE them, in order for you to love yourself.

It is impossible in the shared mind to attack another without attacking yourself. You can’t have something apply to someone that does not apply to you.

Enter then into the ego’s game of death, it’s vast illusion of separation. The game has one rule. If you play within the game, you will die. It’s a very simple rule. However, it is possible to be in DENIAL of the rule, and to start believing there is SOME WAY that you can have something apply to someone else that does not apply to you.

As you lose awareness, you will forget that you have SHARED INTERESTS with everyone because of your Oneness with them. You will start to think they are not one with you, something applies to them differently than applies to you, and therefore there are victims. This also means, you believe you can get away with murder - that you can CAUSE something without experiencing the EFFECTS.

Even if you are under this illusion, believing that this is true and that you’re SUCCEEDING at getting away with murder, rest assured that the RULE of the game does not change. Even if you are in DENIAL of the rule, it applies to you. The law is fixed because it is part of the metaphysics of the one mind. What applies to you ALWAYS applies to others, immediately, directly, and without exception, EVEN if you are in a dream pretending that this is not true.

When you play the ego’s game and take sides, hold a grievance, maintain an enemy, hate someone, attack someone, judge someone, be against or opposed to something, or in any other way USE SEPARATION, it means you are using the EGO. This immediately enacts the one rule of the game - that you will DIE. It also means, that you will have DONE IT TO YOURSELF.

Since the mind of oneness is a mind where what you do to others you do to yourself, you cannot escape the EFFECTS that you attempt to cause. You cannot get away with murder. When you try to, you will KILL YOURSELF.

There is no way to play the game in any special, skilled, clever, educated kind of way. To do so is an attempt to CHANGE THE RULES, which you will NEVER be able to do. Belief in and use of separation is a belief in death, and it will "cause" you to die. This is why all death is suicide, because when you attempt to attack your brother, it destroys YOU, one way or another, sooner or later.

The secret to salvation is the *recognition* that you are doing this all to yourself. You cannot SUCCEED at the game, win over someone else, win a war, or be the victor. Every time you attempt to win, YOU WILL LOSE, beacuse you used separation, and that is self-attack. You cannot WIN the ego’s game of death. Its one rule always applies. If you play it at all, you will die, because that is what you will be choosing.

It doesn’t matter how much you think you can change the rules, find loopholes, figure it out, compete better, one-up someone, make someone else the scapegoat, judge another, or inventively get rid of your sin. If you are playing the ego’s game, YOU WILL DIE, and you will have done it to yourself.

This is why you MUST at some point FORGIVE absolutely everyone. If you don’t, you will hold a grievance against YOURSELF while pretending it is about someone else. You cannot get to heaven with an ego. You cannot win the ego’s game. It is not escaped or won by death or by playing it better. Success at the ego’s game is FAILURE. The only way out, is truth. You MUST surrender the ego, or you will keep weaving illusions of self destruction.

It is perhaps sad news that you have to forgive EVERYONE. It is not welcomed by the ego to recognize the rule of the game clearly. Recognizing the game helps you to NOT PLAY. Only by not playing it can you have awareness of eternal life. This is all metaphysical fact. There is no exception.

"Forgive or die." It is in your best interests to forgive absolutely everything for what it has not done, in order to RECOGNIZE your own innocence. You can only be innocent if the same is true of everyone. It’s all or nothing. The entire sonship is holy, or none of it.

You cannot play the game of death and live. Truth is the ONLY exit.

A Course in Miracles teaches:

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom."

"Love did not create the body."

"The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate parts of his Self from other parts."

"The body will not stay."

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love."

"God cannot come into a body, nor can you join Him there."

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea."

"Love's answer is inevitable. It will come, because you came WITHOUT the body, and interposed no barriers which would INTERFERE with its glad coming."

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that YOU will last forever"

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom."

"The body is the symbol of what you THINK you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist."

"To be of one mind is meaningful, but to be of one body is meaningless. By the laws of mind, then, the body IS meaningless. "

"The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it, MAKING it sick because of its identification WITH it. "

"Grace is not given to a BODY, but to a MIND."

"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but NEVER experienced just now."

"The ego is idolatry; the sign of limited and separated self, born in a body, doomed to suffer and to end its life in death."

"You can escape the body if you choose."

"The Christ in you inhabits NOT a body. Yet He IS in you. And thus MUST it be that YOU are not within a body."

"The body needs NO healing. But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed!"

"A mind and body cannot both exist."

"If you are physical your mind is gone from your self-concept, for it has no place in which it could be really part of you. If you are Spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality."

"You CANNOT make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will NEVER be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love's condemnation."

"The special relationship is a device for limiting Your self to a body, and for limiting your perception of others to THEIRS."

"Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster illness."

"The body does not really exist, except as a learning device for the mind"

"It offers nothing, and does not exist."

"The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream, in which it acts as if it were a person."

"The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive SOMETHING, and WITH something."

"I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body AND the power of the mind, by uniting MY will with that of my Creator, which naturally remembered the Soul and its own real purpose."

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. It merely became what it always was. And that is what 'rolling the stone away means.' The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness."

"I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body's worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand."

"Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there any time you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does. And then-and then-I cannot speak of that. A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death."

A major way the ego tempts us to seek outside of ourselves and to not find what we are seeking, is to suggest that the truth really is out there somewhere. The belief that you can actually find it outside of yourself, is simultaneously the belief that it does not exist inside of you.

Establishing that the truth is not IN you already, fully and completely, or that you do not have it, is the entire foundation of the ego‘s thought system. Once this is believed, you will cease looking within for it, and start on a quest, which you might even call a "spiritual journey", attempting to "seek" for the truth.

This seeking can show up as very earnest and well-intentioned and an attempt to find the ultimate spiritual answer. BUT, because you are fundamentally looking in the wrong place, you are guaranteed never to find it.

The ego is very sneaky about this. It will tempt you to believe that reality, and truth, are outside of yourself. This means the entire world is real. It also means the world contains the truth. And this then justifies your seeking IN the world to try to find it. The ego has promised you can succeed at this, but it is utterly impossible. The truth is already inside you, where you are not looking, and where the ego will NEVER have you look.

Looking outside yourself CAN also include finding the truth within a book such as A Course in Miracles. Especially if the FORM of the book seems to be more of a truth than other forms. If the words seem to show symbols which don’t even look like symbols, but look like concrete pieces of the truth itself, which is the ego’s way of turning illusions into reality, you can become quite fixated on picking apart the tiniest nuances of what specific words say, become extremely specific, and pull apart even the tiniest of statements, which completely loses all sense of context and increases your insanity. The truth is NOT THERE!

You will go deeply into the Course words and the form of the words. You will not recognize them as mere symbols twice removed from the truth, and will not acknowledge the Course’s holographic nature. You will instead attempt to turn the Course into a linear, finite, concrete piece of "evidence", an attempt to PROVE that the truth is outside of you.

The result of this is an OBSESSION in trying to find the truth. You will feel compelled by the lack of truth in you. And yet, here‘s the problem. The more you seek for it, the more you dwell on what the Coure says, the more you become obsessed with the exact specific words of a given version, the more you dissect it and analyze it and try to figure out what it means based on its form, the more it will slip through your fingers! And the more you do this, the more desperate you will become, because you continue to fail to truly FIND what it is the ego promised you would find there.

The form of the Course IS NOT THE TRUTH. The truth is an inner experience of direct reality with God. It is not intellectual. It has nothing to do with study. It absolutely has nothing whatsoever to do with quote fests or throwing quotes at people to correct them. It definitely has nothing to do with pitting different FORMS of the course against each other. It’s completely nothing whatsoever to do with what exact words were said, who can find the best citations, or who can use the Course as a weapon.

THE TRUTH IS NOT OUTSIDE OF YOU.

There is nothing so blinding as sight of FORM!

The Course is ONLY there to help point you AWAY from the form of the Course and towards an experience of God, which is already in you, just covered up. The more you obsess over the Course’s words the more you are going to get lost in the intellect. And the more you do that, the more you will believe you are "finding" the truth, and are delusional.

The words are just symbols, *representing* a truth that is quite removed from those symbols. When we fight about which exact words are used where, or what they mean, or what they "say", we’re completely forgetting they are symbols and are trying to break the Course out into some kind of direct truth in its own right. This was never how it was intended. This is an ego trap.

Blocks to awareness of the fact that you are ALREADY WITH GOD need to be removed. That’s all. Period. This is nothing more than the undoing of denial and stopping searching outside yourslf, even within the course, for something which is not there. The Course if understood is telling you to do this. You are supposed to leave the Course behind at some point and go within to God with empty hands! You can’t do this, and you cannot experience the truth, while trying to make yourself RIGHT about what exactly the FORM says or seems to prove. There is NO PROOF in the Course. It’s an illusion.

Go within.

Everything about this world points in the direction of death. "All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death." It was designed to do so. Our job as beings from another world, is to demonstrate that we are not under any of these laws, all of them can be broken, and that it is possible to reconfigure the body to symbolize eternal life here in the dream. A body that shows health and vitality and life, has no scars, has no damage, is perfectly functioning, rejuvenated by the Holy Spirit, and filled with what we'll call "life". Its condition must be completely under the "control" of the mind, requiring not a single belief that there are any other external separate causes of sickness or death.

To overcome death, death MUST be a choice. And the only way to surmount death must entail the ability to choose not to produce death. To choose not to die physically. It has to be possible for the mind to have power over and be stronger than not only the body but all supposed external worldly causes, otherwise the belief remains that something "out there" can come along with an alien will and decide for you against your will that the body should die. The secret of salvation tells us we do EVERYTHING to ourselves, and therefore have the power, should we so choose, to simply choose NOT TO "do death".

The body has to respond, it has no will of its own, no decision of its own, and is ONLY an effect of the mind, not the world. It must line up and obey and correspond to mental health. The belief that the body has its own choice/mind/power to make itself sick or well, or that the world can do the same, IS the belief in death ie the belief in an external separate power that can choose FOR you (the dream choosing for you) that you shall be affected and powerless to stop it. A child of God could never be in a position to be powerless to stop such an attempted attack. God does not will that we be in a position where something can ever happen that we do not ask for. "My self is ruler of the universe" ... "nothing comes to me unbidden by myself" .... "what I want to happen I receive" .... "what I do not want does not occur" etc.

It's a position of tremendous empowerment and causality. Mastery over the world, the body, sickness and death. A living demonstration of life and holiness - wholeness, which is health. Taking a hold of a body of this world, from a vantage point of another world, with a power not of this world, and using it as a tool, a window, through which the light of heaven can extend and shine with healing and love into this world, causing this bodily figure to be animated like a puppet via supernatural power that breaks and defies all the laws of the world. Spirit is in charge, not the dream world. The primary laws of the Kingdom overthrow the secondary laws of spacetime. All laws of physics can be broken by the Spirit. "There is nothing my holiness cannot do." "What the holy spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."

Death ultimately is learned to be not even a threat, not even a thing, not even a possibility, to one who recognizes that the only way to die is to choose to do so. "You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No one dies without their own consent" "You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself." Ultimately the teaching is that we are IMMORTAL, invulnerable, unassailable, invincible, unlimited beings. Any testifying of any other kind can only result when we, ourselves, consent to misuse our free will to weave what must be lies and illusions and fictions, trying to prove that we are not immortal. "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt." You cannot be hurt if you are immortal.

The body is used by a twisted mind to pretend it is not immortal, to put on a show and to try to convince itself and others that it can die. It cannot. "You are immortal and you cannot die." When we recognize the futility and pointlessness of trying to die when we never can, we'll stop MAKING it happen, and will simply choose to live eternally. The supernatural power of God will protect us and make sickness and death impossible. Nothing can happen against our will. Not even death. There are no "accidents" or "environmental influences" or "acts of nature" or "just old age" creeping in like some kind of unwanted invader. There is only our own mind and what it is doing to itself. When it chooses never again to die, it will make death impossible and raise the dead. "Swear not to die you holy son of God, you've made a bargain that you cannot keep" .... you cannot die, you cannot succeed at it, it does not work, you carry on. You already have eternal life.

It makes sense that if you keep seeing people as being able to affect you, as being the cause of your problems, as being to blame, as being an enemy, or having power over you, you will simply have to experience fear. Fear will be present in the mind because the mind is now split and has diminished its perception of itself.

Now that you are 'suppressed', you will sense that you have much less power, and that this power has been displaced outward to other people who now have power over you. You will see enemies all over the place and will not feel safe, but rather will be afraid all the time.

Fear isn't just a reaction. Fear is a state of mind in which you are perceiving enemies. Fear is what it is like when the mind is experiencing itself being at war with itself, where its inner conflict is overlaid on top of the world, filtering out the beauty and peace and causing you to only see part of what's there, which then looks harrowing and insane and a threat.

Fear is a reversal of cause and effect, and fear is also the mechanism of perceptual distortion that forces you to see enemies where there are none.

You'll also find that once you're in a victim consciousness like this, you will feel afraid all the time and not even imagine that it's possible to be less afraid. And more importantly, you won't realize that you feel afraid because of some attitude you have, OR that it's really got anything to do with how other people are behaving.

You will think your fear is just your separate problem, and that other people probably aren't this afraid and there's something wrong with just you. You'll notice everyone else seems to be more confident and you can't figure out why you're the scared one.

You imagine ways you might stand up to the intensity and terror of everyone you meet, by bolstering yourself up or talking yourself into being tougher, but it doesn't work. You still feel insecure, until you realize what part you play in doing this to yourself.

Something marvelous happens when you start to change your perception. What you need to do is to take back your power, by realizing how your way of perceiving is attacking you. You have to realize that people look like enemies to you because of how much you are attacking yourself and them. And you have to see in your mind the processes that go into trying to separate you from yourself.

You can't feel strong and safe when you're perceiving yourself in a split way, which means there is a strong contrast between what applies to you and what applies to others. So long as you imagine that other people have taken something away from you, that they are the cause of you feeling afraid, that they are doing this to you, you are going to experience fear. But you have to realize, that's just how YOU are choosing to perceive. It's got nothing to do with other people, and you're not really seeing them correctly.

When your mind is split, you will project your shadow mind onto other people and see it in them, and will be threatened by it. This makes other people seem like an enemy, like they are powerful and dark and evil and scary. They're not. But you will see this in them because it's in your mind like a filter. And within your mind, that dark evil stuff is at war with the part of you that you think is you - the positive-seeking goodie-goodie self that people pleases and wants to be adored. Both of these are within your own mind, having a war between them, and that's entirely down to the fact your perception is broken.

That also tells you that if you would heal the separation between these two parts of yourself, undoing all of that attack content, you would not see people AS threatening because you would not have this negativity in your perception, and therefore would not HAVE grounds for feeling afraid.

This healing will lead to a feeling of continually increasing strength and empowerment. It will make you literally less afraid. You will marvel at how you feel stronger, brighter, more energetic, more expressive. You will be surprised at how less anxious you are around others. You will feel more aware and awake and will be happier more often. And you'll be quite surprised at how you don't feel terrorized like you used to. Because you've stopped doing it to yourself.

And as such the forgiven world starts to rise up before your perception instead of a world of hate and vengeance. As you forgive yourself, the world will appear to be a happier place. It will seem like it doesn't contain the threats and guilts that it once did. And it will be like unveiling a beautiful world that was right in front of your face all along but you didn't see it because it was all covered up with your blocks to awareness.

And eventually too this will mean, you will come to realize that God is right here in front of you and with you and inside you, and that you can experience Him. For real! And how joyful that will be.

In many areas of life at the moment, Holy Spirit's guidance to me is to "try".

I have seen in many ways how I stop myself or don't do something, on the basis of the ego's justifications, which basically goes like this:

"I don't think I know how to do that, so I won't"

However, the way Holy Spirit's mind works, the act of "attempting" to do something is actually an act of faith, which only needs to be a "little willingness" to START, to just TRY to do it.

The reason is that as you begin to try to do something, a FLOW starts to happen, Heaven comes to support you, you become receptive to guidance, and you get help. But you don't get the help UNTIL YOU TRY.

An insight here is that your WILLINGNESS TO TRY to represent God, is an invitation for God to enter and support you, to heal through you, and this is how you ASK or "PRAY" and how you receive what you asked for.

So you have to overcome the "I don't know how, so I won't", and turn that into "I don't know how, but I trust Holy Spirit to help me, so I will try".

This actually has a lot to do with learning to work miracles.

Miracles require that you be trusting God/Spirit to work through you, support you, guide you, direct you, in a very spontaneous state of trust/faith, where you simply show up to "do God's bidding"... .ie God's will. It requires you to make yourself available and just be empty and open to receive, and just go along with it, even if you have no idea what's going to happen.

So we have to learn this difficult lesson, of stopping relying on the ego's huge body of thought and learning and information, or the ability to intellectually "figure out on your own" everything you need. We have to shift into a mode of fluid, trust-based willingness to extend God's truth. And there is not really anything the ego can do to prepare you for this.

It takes a lot of BALLS, or guts, in a way, to have COURAGE, to have the confidence to just step up and "do it" with a sense of believing that it simply is going to work out WHEN you do, even if you have NO CLUE how that's going to happen up-front.

That sense of certainty, of dependency on Higher Help, to just go out there and step into the shoes or the role and just fly by the seat of your pants, not alone and frightened to hell (because you will fail if you try to do this with the ego), but based on a deep trust in being supported SUPERNATURALLY if you do so, will lead to miracles.

You have to show up and fulfill your function, in order for Heaven to help you to fulfill that function. It really does take a leap of faith, stepping into the UNKNOWN, stepping into the spontaneous state of trust and being in the moment and not premeditating or practicing or rehearsing or learning ahead of time. Just being flexible and free and WILLING to be used by God.

This is why you often see people doing miracles on the streets where they just go up to total strangers and offer a prayer and just start doing it and Jesus/Holy Spirit show up and people get healed. That takes some pretty major faith/trust that that supernatural help is going to be there. You can't fake it, either. It won't work if you don't "believe" ie have come to believe the truth of God.

The truth of God is that God wants to heal immediately right now and is totally ready to do so right now. It's only you not stepping into the ROLE of healer that is holding the miracles back. This is how Jesus was able to just go around and spontaneously "miracle the shit out of everything." - you can quote me on that ;-) He had no preparation, no reliance on ego skills, He just trusted God really strongly and the support was right there because he got into a flow and was of service.

But if we don't even try to do something, thinking that we are relying entirely on ourselves only, and that we don't have the knowledge or ability, we have already failed. We're in a state of failure. And we know we will fail if we keep trusting only in our own strength. Which is fear. Fear will block miracles because its an attempt to trust only what you know and not what God knows, believing you are the source of miracles or that something about how you perform them gives them their power. All power is from God and can only be SHARED AND EXTENDED by you, and you must learn to trust it.

Once we do learn to get over our ego objections and "I can't so I won't", we'll get more into the miracle-working mindset and miracles will flow naturally. When these miracles aren't flowing, something has gone wrong.

People are all different. One of the most harmful aspects of this ego world is the attempt to make everyone the same and gloss over their differences. This is the ego's attempt to pretend that 'everything is ok' and 'we are all equal' as a form of denial and repression. It thus leads to people feeling like they have to 'pretend that they agree', when around individuals who are different.

For me, for example, I am an introverted person. That means I am more independent from society and social interactions and tend to be more sensitive and introspective. What seems 'natural' for me is quite different to what is natural for extroverted people. When the two worlds collide there is almost always a sense of tension and miscommunication and people-pleasing and dishonesty and lack of authenticity

For years and years I always felt compelled to have to try to 'be like others', or fit in, or just automatically accept sociable situations, as if not doing so was wrong and anti-social. This I think is largely because more extroverted people `push` sociability as though it is normal and exalted (especially with the whole idol worship/celebrity/hollywood ideals). But what is ideal for them is not ideal for me. Layers and layers of guilt and shame have had to be released and healed to come to feel that it is `ok` to be truer to my personality and my own standards and that I do not 'have to' just go along with other people.

The main area I experience this is in social interactions especially with strangers or where more sociable people are engaged. Just even the mere fact that people decide to suddenly stop and connect and converse is to me an uninvited intrusion, and due to my sensitivity I experience it as jumping ahead several steps in the amount of `trust` or depth of connection I would need to establish first. It's especially difficult around people that I think of as - social bloodsuckers - the people who suddenly decide to include themselves and involve themselves and start yacking on about themselves, especially filled with complaining and other forms of social attention-seeking, as a way to kind of `hold me hostage`. I want to tell them to shut the fuck up and leave me alone and stop invading my space.

So you can see that if you are different in some fundamental ways, whichever side of the fence you fall on, it can really produce a lot of tension and conflict, either externally or internally. That discomfort makes it feel like it's not okay to be the way you are or its not normal or its not acceptable, and that can lead to profound shame and emotional pain.

The term 'painfully shy' can arise for introverted people quite easily and the pain actually comes from social embarrassment, a lack of social prowess, troubles speaking (at all), troubles finding things to engage about conversationally (to even have the mental thoughts that lead to conversation), not belonging or fitting in, feeling inadequate socially and thus as a person, feeling lacking and insufficient and defective, feeling unheard (because more extroverted people actually don't connect at the same depth as introverted people - they are shallow and enjoy social-lies rather than truth), etc... this all can add up to a tremendous sense of 'being attacked' (either internally or by others) and that produces profound emotional pain. I suffered with that for years and years thinking it was not okay to be the way I am.

Gradually, and this is thanks in large part to A Course in Miracles and other healing and loving support, I've been learning two things - how to be more comfortable being the way I am - at least in terms of personality and needs - and consequently, being more comfortable to be around people and converse. The `opening up` of the Course has helped me to heal from 'social torture' to a large degree and to feel more confident in being `myself`. Even if that means just being my ego self more authentically. Because that authenticity is a doorway to my True Self.

Being true to yourself no matter what your `self` is, is empowering. And it also has helped me to learn healthier boundaries, that I don't have to people-please, that I can just walk away from people when I don't want to be social, that I'm not `held captive` by anyone's need for attention or domination, and generally an overall sense of ... greater peace, I suppose. These weren't necessarily goals I had with the Course but it has definitely healed to bring about healing in these areas, to remove fear and inhibitions, and to build a deeper connection of trust - and yet personal power - when interacting with others.

I don't know what kind of a moron I am in the eyes of extroverted people. I must come across as some kind of inept antisocial lifeless idiot or something. I have more to learn about how the majority of society functions. This is why it is very hard for me to envisage ever standing in front of some audience and giving a speech or being a highly visible public figure. Jesus has me doing things on a much lower-key and more behind closed doors, lol. Whatever your style is though, I'm just glad to finally be feeling a sense of RELIEF from years of torment and misery trying to be something I'm not, and I hope extroverted people can also learn they don't have to be like those annoying, antisocial, holier-than-thou, wimpy introverts ;-)

There is, as always, a paradox - the truer you are to yourself and to how you are different, not trying to pretend you are the same, actually allows you to become inter-dependent and open to true communication, understanding and compassion. And that is joining. Everyone has their gifts and talents. Let's celebrate how our differences can be acknowledged so that we can all experience peace. Political correctness out the window - we need to embrace who we are (even as an ego) in order to let others be who they are, in order to accept others and not be insensitive to their differences.

Thank you Jesus!