Denial is not inherently bad, it can be used to defend illusions against the truth, or to defend the truth against illusions. The proper use of denial is a powerful protective device and allows you side with and accept God's truth and reality, so that you no longer believe or are deceived by the lies of the ego.
We are encouraged to use denial in its proper form to protect our minds against ego illusions, suffering, guilt and even death. Resurrection itself is the denial of death. To deny anything not of God, is to accept only what IS of God.
Here are some quotes about the positive/proper uses of denial...
"Remember that what you deny you MUST have known. And if you can accept denial, YOU CAN ACCEPT ITS UNDOING."
"For this sight proves that you have exchanged your blindness for the seeing eyes of Christ; your mind has come to lay aside denial and accept the Thought of God as its inheritance."
"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth."
"Remember that knowledge PRECEDES denial, and that the separation was a descent from magnitude to littleness. And so the way back is to retrace the way to magnitude."
"To deny the denial of perfection is not so difficult as the denial of truth."
"This is the PROPER use of denial. It is not used to HIDE anything, but it IS used to correct error. It brings ALL error into the light, and since error and darkness are the same, it abolishes error automatically."
"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it."
"Denial of error is a very powerful defense of truth. We have slowly been shifting the emphasis from the negative to the positive use of denial. Remember, we have already stated that denial is not a purely negative device; it results in positive miscreation. That is the way the mentally ill DO employ it."
"But remember a very early thought of your own, "Never underestimate the power of denial." In the service of the "Right Mind", the denial of ERROR frees the mind and re-establishes the freedom of the will."
"My use of projection, which can also be yours, is NOT based on faulty denial. But it DOES involve the very powerful use of the denial of error."
"Denial should be directed only to error, and projection should be limited to truth. You should truly give as you have truly received. The Golden Rule can work effectively only on this basis."
"The weaker use of mis-projection is shown by my recognition that it can't REALLY be that way, which became possible as soon as denial was applied against error, NOT truth."
"Denial of fear, in human terms, is a strong defense"
"The miracle is ALWAYS a DENIAL of this error, and an affirmation of the truth. Only Right-Mindedness CAN create in a way that has any real effect."
"But denial is a defense, and so it is as capable of being used positively as it is of being used destructively. Used negatively, it WILL be destructive, because it will be used for attack. But in the service of the Holy Spirit, the law becomes as beneficent as all of the laws of God."
"Would you STRENGTHEN his denial of God, and thus lose sight of YOURSELF? Or would you remind him of his wholeness, and remember your Creator WITH him?"
"The ACCEPTANCE of peace is the denial of illusion, and sickness IS an illusion."
"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely."
"Your only calling here is to devote yourself, with active willingness, to the denial of guilt in ALL its forms."
"To accept yourself as He created you CANNOT be arrogant, because it is the DENIAL of arrogance. To accept your littleness IS arrogant, because it means that you believe that YOUR evaluation of yourself is TRUER THAN GOD's."
"What is One cannot be perceived as separate, and the denial of the separation IS the reinstatement of knowledge."
"It is denial of ILLUSIONS that calls on truth. For to deny illusions is to recognize that FEAR is meaningless."
"The perception of goodness is not knowledge, but the denial of the OPPOSITE of goodness enables you to perceive a condition in which opposites do not exist. And this IS the condition of knowledge."
You'll defend something to the death if you think it's true. Your effort to be "right" about it is a combination of something that you believe is true combined with a sense of certainty. The power of conviction is not wrong, it is just misplaced onto something false. It's okay to acknowledge that your mind is powerful, it's just that it is 'mis-creating'.
If you are believing something is true which is actually false, and you are really adamant about it, it's going to take some 'undoing' to reverse this sense of conviction. You've probably built up a lot of "story" that explains, justified, rationalizes and establishes "why" this is true.
The more evidence you have gathered and the more you've "proven" it to yourself and talked yourself and others into it, the more volume of material is going to need to be undone. Those who are really extremely convinced of a lie are heavily "conditioned" by all of this psychological support, which may have come from culture or where you live or the kinds of people around you or your upbringing or experiences you had etc.
You'll need to look at what, in your belief system, 'supports' this truth. Look at all the scaffolding you've erected around it, all the supporting ideas and background information, the opinions of others, sources of authority that you believe in that support this truth, experiences you had which led you to be even more convinced this is true, affirmations that you make about its righteousness, ways you spin stories about it which back it up and regurgitate and reinforce it, how you defend it against other truth which seems to not be in accord with it, etc. All of these things add "weight" to this sense of it being real and valuable and correct.
It's not a problem to be correct. It's okay to be correct when you ARE correct. It's okay to be correct about Holy Spirit's truth which IS correct, and a correction of all else. But when you are correct about something that is an error or mistake or faulty conclusion or something based on dishonesty, it's going to present problems for you. You don't REALLY want to be right about how you need to suffer and die, for the sake of some "truth" that the ego has convinced you of, do you?
So as you pull apart your thought system you'll need to realize you've got all this support built up that defends this belief/truth and that all of that needs to be examined with Holy Spirit's light. It needs to be seen from a vantage point of a greater truth, otherwise you cannot recognize the falseness of it. You need to get outside of it and look in from a wider perspective.
For example, let's say you believe that you're in mortal danger because some body part seems to be failing and all the doctors said it's seriously bad and all your family members are showering you with sympathy and all you coworkers are retelling their own stories of woe and you've got yourself all worked up and terrified. Well, now this means that not only do you believe in sickness and so on but you also believe what your family and neighbors and coworkers are all telling you is the truth as well. And maybe you also "taught yourself" that all the doctors are well-trained and totally know what they're talking about, and that you don't dare question their authority. And maybe you yourself have justified to yourself why you need to be sick because it proves how guilty you are about something. All of these attitudes and opinions support keeping the problem real and true for you. You must be willing to question whether ANY of these supports are true.
What if absolutely everyone involved is telling you a lie, to show you what YOU believe that's a lie, and that you need to change your mind about what YOU think is true, so that they will stop telling you you're sure to die? Where is the empowerment and strength in listening to the voice for death? Where is the empowerment in not taking back responsibility for choosing to believe something that is grossly mistaken? You have to dismantle all of the lies that support the main lie in order for the main lie to be recognized as holding no ground. That it has no support. That it can't be justified. That it doesn't have any proof. And thus that you can't believe it. While you think lies are believable, you are stuck. The ego is literally unbelievable.
Anything this side of the separation from God, comprises the ego's thought system, and the ego THINKS in terms of exclusion. "If this is true, and that is different, that is not true".
Anything the OTHER side of the separation from God - God Himself, creation, sonship, souls, heaven etc, is NOT governed by the ego thought system. It's rules and laws completely defy the ego. God functions in *inclusive logic*. The way that God "reasons" is totally unlike the ego.
When we use the ego's thought system, and the ego's way of thinking, to try to understand the meaning or nature of GOD's system, it is absolutely guaranteed every time to produce false conclusions. The ego looks at God and sees separations where there are none, and sees unity where there are divisions. It CANNOT see the whole of God's nature comprehensively or inclusively without rejecting some parts of it as false.
Any study of heaven or God or creation or anything not of the ego, cannot be accurately done *using* the way the ego thinks. It's not merely a matter of just "thinking about it better" - the ego's use of logical exclusions is fundamentally a FAULT based on separation that instantly pollutes the conclusions you'll come to.
The only way to correctly discern the nature of creation, heaven, sonship, God etc, is to THINK LIKE GOD. And this thinking like God comes to conclusions which are TOTAL NONSENSE to the ego's thinking, seems like they are "false conclusions" when in fact they are true, and produces the total opposite of what the ego would conclude.
This is why huge chunks of A Course in Miracles's metaphysics and statements have been GROSSLY MISUNDERSTOOD and mis-taught since the beginning of the Course's inception. And we are making this same mistake to this day.
In God, it is logical to say, "If this is true, and that is seemingly separate from this, that must be true also." See how that seems to make no sense to the ego? It sounds false, but it's not. Example: "If God has given all of His love to me, and there is another soul here, then God must have also given all of His love to that soul as well." The ego screams, "no" "that can't be" "there's not enough love to go around". And this is because the thought system of God is based on SHARING and INCREASE, which the ego totally opposes and cannot see sense in.
The ego says, "if I give this to you, I will lose it." God says, "if I give this to you, it will increase and we will both have it". They are fundamentally different modes of reasoning. The ego says, "if this statement Jesus just made about heaven is true, this other statement is saying something seemingly different so it must be false". God says, "this statement Jesus just said is true, AND that other statement is true, and there is NOT a contradiction."
The ego is fundamentally incapable of accurately depicting or representing God's nature. It's thought system, it's very WAY OF THINKING about God, is broken. It is limited. It CANNOT think "like God" in order to be able to "map God" or accurately "see" God. Instead it dissects God and splits Him up unnaturally and joins parts together which are not joined.
Any discussion about the nature of God or his creation MUST be made based on how God thinks, thinking about it LIKE the way that God thinks about it, which means "holographic logic", otherwise all manner of false conclusions will arise.
And MAJORLY FALSE CONCLUSIONS HAVE ARISEN pertaining to everything the course says about God's nature, heaven, the sonship, the existence of individual free-willed souls, the performance of miracles, the demonstration of the end of death, and various other things, which has massively watered-down A Course in Miracles and turned it into a sanitized powerless blob-forming heaven-splitting sonship-denying miracle-less lie.
We need to learn to "think like God thinks" if we are to be part of Holy Spirit's thought system. It' snot just a matter of still thinking like the ego but in a happy way. The Holy Spirit's thoughts are TOTALLY UNLIKE the ego's thoughts, and his reasoning and logic are TOTALLY UNLIKE the ego's reasoning and logic. To grasp heaven and to attune ourselves to it, we have to embark on embracing an entirely new way of thinking, one which does not dissect Jesus's statements and does not see contradictions where they don't exist.
The body is supposed to be used as a communication device. This is much misundestood. What it means is that the body is to be used in a way that reflects our function of extension in heaven. We (mind/soul) are a MEDIUM or "communication channel" of extension, through which God is hosted and extends. We are to pass on what we receive. And this produces a continuous outward expansion and increase of creation. This is also communication - the outward expression of love.
"Creation and communication are synonymous. God created every mind by communicating His Mind to it, thus establishing it forever as a channel for the reception of His Mind and Will." That means, the body is supposed to, from a higher repurposing perspective, be used solely to extend and join and communicate, like a medium that you express THROUGH and BEYOND. Whereby you use it solely like a tool to give to others, placing no focus ON the body itself, or on the bodies of others. Because bodies become a LIMIT on communication if you make them real. They turn into brick walls.
The entire problem comes when you begin to focus ON the body, making it an idol, worshipping it, mistaking it for a THING in its own right, considering it an entity, dwelling on its form and function, and identifying with it as if it is your self. This converts the "channel" from being a channel, to being a roadblock in the channel. It turns the body into a blockage of separation instead of extension.
All of the minds attention is put ON the MEDIUM ITSELF, as if the medium itself is important. This separates the mind off because it now stops at the body's limits and does not go past it to join with other minds beyond their bodies. This increases the rift in the mind and induces all forms of sickness including death. It's a mis-use of the body - trying to use what's supposed to be a PIPE, as though it's a brick wall.
This is also why holy relationship is important because you're supposed to USE the body to relate BEYOND the body. It's only supposed to be used temporarily as a device for this purpose, and is not supposed to be used to exalt itself or to act as a prison or barrier. When you become body focused, you literally "lose sight" of your brother and yourself. It means we're turning a device for learning into the FOCUS of learning, as if trying to make the body BE something in its own right, which it isn't. The body is used for communication when the body ITSELF becomes NOTHING and invisible in the equasion.
"Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind which is working THROUGH the body but not IN it. If the mind believes the body is its GOAL, it WILL distort its perception OF the body, and by blocking its own extension BEYOND it will INDUCE illness by FOSTERING SEPARATION. Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot BUT foster illness, because it is not true. A medium of communication WILL lose its usefulness if it is used for anything else."
"To confuse a learning device with a curriculum GOAL is a fundamental confusion. Learning can hardly be meaningfully arrested at its own aids, and hope to understand them OR its real purpose. Learning must lead BEYOND the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it. This can be accomplished ONLY if the mind EXTENDS to other minds, and does not ARREST ITSELF in its extension. The arrest of the mind's extension is the cause of all illness, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND's FUNCTION. Block this, and you have blocked health because you have BLOCKED THE MIND's JOY."
"The Holy Spirit's purpose lies safe in your RELATIONSHIP, and NOT your bodies. You have ESCAPED the body. Where you are now, the BODY cannot enter, for the Holy Spirit has set HIS temple there."
"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. For here is love made fearful, and hope abandoned. Even the idols that are worshipped here are shrouded deep in mystery, and kept APART from those who worship them. This is the temple dedicated to no relationships, and no return."
"The Holy Spirit's temple is NOT a body, but a RELATIONSHIP. The body is an isolated speck of darkness; a hidden secret room, a tiny spot of senseless mystery, a meaningless enclosure carefully protected, yet hiding nothing. Here, the unholy relationship escapes reality, and seeks for crumbs to keep itself alive. Here it would drag its brothers, holding them here in its idolatry. Here it is "safe," for here love CANNOT enter. The Holy Spirit does not build His temples where love can never be. Would He Who SEES the face of Christ choose as His home the only place in all the universe where it can NOT be seen?"
The way I see the world, I recognize at least in theory that it was made by mistake. It was made to oppose God's nature, even as an attack on God. It is unnatural and strange and filled with contradictions and conflict. It is inherently limited, problematic, confused and made from ideas of death and sin. Ok, so that's just what it is. A botched mis-creation.
But at the same time, while keeping that squarely in mind, and without using it to judge or condemn the world, I can also recognize that some of the "hell-like bullshit" that we made is not "all that bad". I mean, I just ate some pretty tasty French toast for breakfast. ie, "it's not all bad". The toast isn't heaven and must not substitute for it, but it can be enjoyed for what it is.
I'm finding out, the long hard way, that it's okay to enjoy some of the shit we made. To live a little. Because otherwise if all we do is label the world as a picture of crucifixion and death, our outlook can become a bit bleak.
I see that yes, on the one hand we did make a quite faulty, terrorizing, awkward and very bizarre world, but at the same time, it's possible to find a way to forgive it. To look at it without holding it against itself. It's flawed yes, but if I start labelling it as flawed I'm really accusing it of sin. And then I'll start experiencing it from a vantage point of suffering "from it".
The course seems to point to an attempt to "save" the world, and when we look at what it's being saved from, it's being saved from our accusation of sin. Saved from our projections of faulty meaning that we've given to it. Allowed to just be neutral and "what it is" without attacking or condemning it for being what it is. Without judging it wrongly and only sharing the Holy Spirit's judgement of it.
Yes it's a picture of hell and murder, but if I start holding that against it and using it as a way to condemn it, then I'm going to be dragged down into it. Even the ego knows that it slightly depends on God and accepts SOME good. It doesn't reject goodness entirely, but rather mixes it with evil ideas and confuses them.
Even if we made galaxies and planets and black holes in error, we could look at them from a more loving perspective and appreciate them for what they are, not making them into something they're not. We could be careful not to turn them into idols or something to depend on or artificially value, remembering always to recognize that the world is FALSE. But even a false world can become a forgiven world. And a forgiven world can be appreciated through beautiful vision.
"The real world can ACTUALLY BE PERCEIVED. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing ELSE. For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM. The ego sees SOME good, but never ONLY good. That is WHY its perceptions are so variable. It does not reject goodness entirely, for this you could not accept, but it always ADDS something that is NOT real TO the real, thus CONFUSING ILLUSION AND REALITY. For perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth AND illusion you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."
"Each spot HIS (Holy Spirit's) reason touches, grows alive with beauty. And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release."
"All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes."
"Father, Christ's vision is Your gift to me, and it has power to translate all that the body's eyes behold into the sight of a forgiven world. How glorious and gracious is this world! Yet how much more will I perceive in it than sight can give."
Lately for me what has become starkly evident and true of everyone, is the rather dark and twisted truth that everyone is self-destructive. Everyone is trying to die. Everyone is condemning themselves for a sin that never really happened, and the wages of sin is self-inflicted death. Everyone is being unfair to themselves, mis-representing themselves, attacking themselves and hurting themselves.
"...A dry and dusty world where starved and thirsty creatures come to die."
"Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."
EVERYONE!
It's a suicidal planet. I wouldn't go so far as to say that everyone has the same degree of "deep self-hatred", but it is certainly rampant. The guilt that people have over the separation has driven them insane. We've collaborated on making an insane and stupid world where suffering seems normal and punishment is atonement.
"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."
"Sin is belief attack can be projected OUTSIDE the mind where the belief arose. Here is the firm conviction that ideas CAN leave their source made real and meaningful. And FROM this error does the world of sin and sacrifice arise."
Let's just say it again. The whole world is MAD. And this is not merely an allegation or a speculation. It is EXTENSIVE. "This IS an insane world, and do not underestimate the actual extent of its insanity. There is no area of your perception that it has not touched, and your dream IS sacred to you."
"the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt"
Even in biblical terms, if I recall, we're sort of told that each of us on earth has become a "sinner" ie believing in sin, and that we need to "repent" ie find our innocence again.
So what I see now is the fact that we've got a huge population of people who believe they have separated from God. The course calls us "the separated ones." We believe we've accomplished separation by attacking God, or that which is in truth not attackable. And because it is not possible, yet we believe it, we are insane, because now we believe something impossible is true. And this all began with an insane idea.
"The instant that the mad idea of making your relationship with God unholy seemed to be possible, ALL relationships were made meaningless."
"In that unholy instant time was born, and bodies made to house the mad idea, and give it the ILLUSION of reality."
"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects."
We as immortal beings, accused ourselves of a sin we could never commit, made ourselves horrendously guilty for it, attacked ourselves, punished ourselves, entered an insane dreaming state in which we dream of being mortal, made up every form of suffering and sickness, and try to kill ourselves off to prove we are right. MADNESS!!!
Fortunately our entire state of insanity is entirely temporary, entirely unfounded, entirely untrue, and entirely correctable, without the slightest punishment called for. We are all just very mistaken people, who believe absolute bullshit lies that we've taught ourselves, and we need correction. We need help from outside of the hell we made to help us wake up to reality and recognize what is true.
"My call to you is that you offer help from all the dreams the holy Son of God imagines, from the time that first of dreams was given false reality until all dreaming ends forever."
"Everything OUTSIDE the Kingdom IS ILLUSION. But you must learn to ACCEPT truth because YOU THREW IT AWAY. You therefore saw yourself AS IF you were WITHOUT it. By making another Kingdom WHICH YOU VALUED, you did NOT keep the Kingdom of God alone in your minds, and thus placed part of your mind OUTSIDE of it. What you have made has thus DIVIDED YOUR WILL and given you a sick mind that MUST be healed. Your vigilance AGAINST this sickness IS the way to heal it."
You are never responsible for the freedom of others. If you make yourself responsible, you will believe they are part of your ego. Extending what you are responsible for, is like saying they are inside of the scope of yourself.
And now anything they choose, anything they do, anything that happens to them, is interpreted as being something you are responsible for. And you then are set up on a rocky boat in choppy waters, certain to be tossed around by forces you cannot control, and certain to be guilty for whatever happens.
When they suffer, you suffer along with them. When they are hurt, it hurts you. And when they die, you lose part of yourself. You will then actually grieve for what seems like part of your own self that has died along with them.
This can only possibly result from a sense of mis-identification, losing sight of who you are, and confusing yourself for another person. When you try to control the life of another person, you are effectively saying that you are them. Not in a spiritual way of oneness, but in a violating "shared suffering" kind of way.
You'll have constant concern, worry, fear, guilt and desperation, resulting from believing that this person is part of you, in an egoic way. They are part of you at the level of spirit, but not at the level of separate egos having special relationships.
Special relationships always entails a strange kind of manufactured "bond" or connection between two people. A two-way horizontal cause-effect relationship. It's like a way of trying to fuse two separate people together. To say, you are my ego and I am your ego. Or that you are the cause of me and I am the cause of you. This can only lead to mutual suffering.
In specialness, anything that happens to the "other", who you have tried to "possess", you feel as happening to your self. This can only mean that you literally believe they are you. Which also means you don't even really acknowledge them as a distinct whole person, and instead are really relating to a projected form of your own ego, which is overstepping its bounds."Yet the special relationship which the EGO seeks, does NOT include even ONE whole individual. For the ego WANTS but part of him, and sees ONLY this part, and nothing else."
Egos everywhere love the idea of violating other people's freedom. They are tyrannical rulers, selfish, hoarding, possessing and controlling. They overstep boundaries and invade other people. They are like psychic vampires. They feed off other people. They leave no room and have no humility for allowing others to be themselves. They want to devour and infest and take over other people. Egos overflow and try to spread, to inflate themselves and make themselves consume the space of those around them. And the worst of them even attempt to destroy others to remove the competition.
If a relationship entails any of this encroachment, and of this arrogance, this over-inflation of self, the invasion of other's boundaries and free willed choices, in any way tries to control or manipulate or coerce, or moves into areas of submission or dominance, then the relationship is ego driven and is unholy.
"The dominance-submission problem is related to the perception of helping others VERSUS helping the self. This is a misperception resulting from the failure to recognize the equal worth of both individuals in the interaction."
"No one CAN be "taken over" unless he wills to be. However, if he places his mind under tyranny, rather than authority, he intrudes the submission/dominance onto free will himself."
What we need to do is get our grubby little opinionated hands off other people's merchandise. Or as Jesus puts eloquently, "be passerby". We need to step back and let go of people. We need to withdraw control and stop coercing. And to do that we have to surrender not only the desire to be more than we are, but also let go of believing we are lacking in the first place.
It's really a sense of inadequacy, lack, inferiority, weakness, unworthiness or guilt that often drives us to overstep our bounds with others. We try to take from them through possession. We try to complete ourselves by assimilating someone else's soul. We try to unite in separation, through sacrifice and dominance. And this will always lead to a loss of peace.
The unwillingness to accept love for yourself is the key driving force behind all of this, producing compulsions of seeking outside of oneself. And that can only turn into an attempt expand the ego. Egos that see themselves as having nothing, attempt to possess everyone and everything.
"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."
The following passage from "if I defend myself I am attacked", speaks of "confusing" or merging mind and body, a level confusion, or a mis-identification of what you are. Seeing what’s in the mind as if it’s in the body, projected onto the body makes the body sick. ("Sickness is anger taken out upon the body." "All sickness comes from confusing the levels.")
Merging mind and body as if one thing results in sickness because it depicts mind as at the effect of the body/world. Believing that you, as mind, are the body, results in sickness. The body is an illusion, mind is real. Mind is cause, body is effect.
Confusing mind with body puts you at the effect of the body, believing the body is now causal. This is the belief in magic, that the effect is causing you, because of your confusion about which is which. Not believing you are the body heals the body. Not projecting mind stuff onto the body heals the body. The body is nothing and causes nothing. Believing otherwise is mental illness.
"The body needs NO healing. But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed! And it is here that Christ sets forth the remedy. His PURPOSE folds the body in His light, and fills it with the holiness that shines from HIM. And nothing that the body says or does but makes HIM manifest."
Basically, the mind is distinct from the body. If the mind is having an ego spaz, the mind is sick, and it will spaz all over the body, affecting the body negatively. It will project its spaz onto the body and see the spaz as if its in the body, confusing itself with the body due to level confusion/perception reversal.
The mind’s power/force will then distort the body to try to make it take on the shape/form of the mental illness. This skews the body, warps it, disfigures it, producing symptoms of distress. The body is practically an ‘innocent victim’ in this because it HAS NO WILL of its own and is completely passive to the raging mind’s self harm. Mind is just shitting all over it, destroying it senselessly. It is clearly therefore the mind that needs to be healed.
When the mind is healed and healthy it does not project shit onto the body or distort it or mangle it. It doesn’t try to make the body act out the "plans" derived from insane perceptions, and does not impose its tyrrany onto the body form. The body automatically is freed from these mental distortions and is instead healed by the mind. "The mind, being sane, HEALS THE BODY."!
"The "self " that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defence, NEED MERELY BE PERCEIVED AS QUITE APART FROM YOU, and it becomes a **healthy**, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?"
"Defend the body and you have attacked your mind. For you have seen in it the faults, the weaknesses, the limits and the lacks from which you think the body must be saved. YOU WILL NOT SEE THE MIND AS SEPARATE FROM BODILY CONDITIONS. And you will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from ***the conception of the mind as limited and fragile***, and apart from other minds and separate from its Source."
"These are the thoughts in need of healing, and **the body will respond with health** when they have been corrected and replaced with truth. This is the body's only real defence. Yet is this where you look for its defence? You offer it protection of a kind from which it gains no benefit at all, but merely adds to your distress of mind. You do not heal, but merely take away the hope of healing, for you fail to see where hope must lie if it be meaningful."
"Enslavement of the body to the plans the unhealed mind sets up to save itself must make the body sick. It is not free to be a means of helping in a plan which far exceeds its own protection, and which needs its service for a little while. In this capacity **is health assured**. For everything the mind employs for this will function flawlessly, and with the strength that has been given it and **cannot fail*
I was contemplating again any possible conceivable way that the physical world might somehow be part of heaven, or preserved, or keepable, or transformable. Like, if we all became very christly and "dreamed" it into some kind of much higher form, a forgiven world, a sparkling beautiful world full of life, could such a world be integrated into heaven and literally kept as an eternal thing? Could the mis-creation be converted into or replaced by a creation that lasts forever, such that Earth would essentially be "saved" to such an extent that it could qualify as a legitimate created part of the kingdom of God forever?
To this Jesus remarked, "No. Spacetime will end."
A key thing to realize is that the physical world, the planet, bodies etc, matter, atoms, it all DEPENDS entirely on separation. Space itself is the very idea that what is over here is not over there. That's a separation idea of exclusion. One atom is excluded from another. There might be a HINT of sharing but certainly not oneness.
Without separateness you can't have atoms and molecules or bodies or planets. You have to have a way that something is different over here than over there, forms lack other forms, what is found in one place is not found in another. That's the very idea of space itself. Without space, or spatial separation, physical matter is impossible. My car being separate from my house is impossible. My body being separate from other bodies is impossible. Without separation Earth is impossible.
When the spacetime world is forgiven, it no longer has a PURPOSE. Because the purpose of it originally was to attack God, and this purpose was exchanged for the purpose of forgiveness. Using the world to undo the NEED for the world. Using the body to undo the NEED for a body. And once perception has been perfected there is no longer any NEED for perception.
And so the body and perception and the world and space and time become PURPOSELESS, ie there is no need or USE for it, no further repurposing of it, and being completely pointless and unneeded it is simply forgotten and VANISHES COMPLETELY. Cast off and un-remembered, like a dream that passes and has no bearing on what really exists.
The world does not reach a state of becoming totally needed, totally wanted, totally valuable, totally eternal, or totally useful. Its usefulness is temporary because in and of itself it is meaningless. IT WILL END. And every single piece of content inside of the spacetime bubble will disappear, all matter, all bodies, along with space and time itself. And all that will remain is the heaven that existed BEFORE this whole illusion of a world emerged in our imaginations in the first place.
"The real world signifies the end of time, for its perception makes time purposeless."
"So do the parts of God's Son gradually join in time, and with each joining is the end of time brought nearer."
"Salvation is a promise, made by God, that you would find your way to Him at last. It cannot not be kept. It guarantees that time will have an end, and all the thoughts that have been born in time will end as well."
"And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time."
"Ultimately, of course, space is as meaningless as time. The concept is really one of space-time BELIEF."
"The Atonement was built into the space-time belief in order to set a limit on the need for the belief, and ultimately to make learning complete."
"And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant"
"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish."
"The world will end in an illusion, as it began. Yet will its ending be an illusion of mercy. The illusion of forgiveness, complete, excluding no-one, limitless in gentleness, will cover it, hiding all evil, concealing all sin and ending guilt forever. So ends the world that guilt had made, for now it has no purpose and is gone."
"The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment. The world will end with the benediction of holiness upon it. When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be."
"The world will end when its thought system has been completely reversed."
"Beyond the body, beyond the sun and stars, past EVERYTHING you see and yet somehow familiar, is an arc of golden light that stretches, as you look, into a great and shining circle. And all the circle fills with light before your eyes."