"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally"

In the separation from God, each of us has condemned ourselves. We've accused ourselves of sin, and condemned ourselves to suffer. We want ourselves to be punished, murdered, and destroyed. Ultimately this is a death wish, in which we have become suicidal because we don't believe we deserve to live or to be loved by God. You might be thinking, suicidal? I'm not suicidal. Well think again.

At the same time as trying to destroy yourself to prove you don't exist in God, your true self is utterly sinless, guiltless, innocent, holy and pure. You have never sinned or hurt or commit a crime or broke a law. You have never done anything to anyone, and no-one has ever attacked you. You are immortal and eternal and endless and permanent. And no harm can come to you because God himself protects you.

"The Thought of God protects you, cares for you"

The problem is, there is a seeming "gap" between what is really true of you, and what you currently BELIEVE. And if you are not in touch with your utter immaculate sinlessness, then some part of you DOES believe you are condemned to hell. God isn't doing this condemnation, nor are your brothers.

It's all an inside job of your own self attack. It is your self destruction. And this is suicidal. Even though death isn't real, this needs to be undone because the belief in your non-existence keeps you from being happy.

Looking at what you are doing to yourself is not pretty. If you are not accepting your sinlessness, it means you are believing you are sinful. It means you don't love yourself. It means you actively attack yourself and are trying to destroy yourself. Such as in "my attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability." It means you don't really like yourself, yet alone love yourself with the love of God.

So now if you think about it in terms of the "relationship" that you have "with yourself", as if you could relate to yourself like a third party, how do you really feel about yourself? What is your honest current attitude towards yourself? If it's not one of total unconditional perfect love, then it isn't a very healthy relationship.

If there is a belief in being sinful, or evil, or a monster, or unworthy, or not good enough, or you resent yourself, or are angry at yourself, or keep judging yourself, or see yourself as weak, or hurt yourself emotionally or physically, or keep being abusive towards yourself, there are all signs of a breakdown in relationship.

And what that ultimately means is that you have not forgiven yourself. You're in this relationship with someone that you don't want to be with. And that is going to split your mind and hurt your mind. If you don't love yourself and embrace yourself with acceptance then how can you possibly relate to yourself at all?

Think of yourself as in the shoes of a person that you don't like in a similar way. If you don't like that person you don't want to be near them. You don't want to give them things. You don't want to share with them or spend time with them. You don't want them to exist. You don't care if they get hurt or suffer. You want them to suffer. And you may even feel so bitter towards them that you wish they were dead. Is that the relationship you are having with YOURSELF?

You have to look deep within yourself with much honesty to find this out. And it's probably going to be somewhat painful or even scary. You may not actually even realize or recognize that you have it in for yourself, or want yourself to suffer, because you may be so used to a general level of background destructiveness that you think it's totally normal. You might not have even seen how much you hate yourself.

"You who think you hate your bodies, deceive yourselves. YOU HATE YOUR MINDS, for guilt has entered into them, and they would remain separate, which they CANNOT DO."

"You HATE the prison that you made, and would destroy it."

"You are afraid of Him, and do not see you hate and fear your Self as enemy."

"And why do you attack them anywhere except you hate yourself?"

"But if you hate part of your own Soul, ALL your understanding is lost, because you are looking on what God creates AS YOURSELF without love."

"You do not realize how much you hate each other. You will not get rid of this until you DO realize it, for UNTIL then, you will think you want to get rid of EACH OTHER and KEEP THE HATRED. "

So you have to look at this stuff. And typically you need a strong contrast in order to recognize it. Get in touch with what it means to be sinless. That your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. Get a feel for total pure innocence and the complete absence of all attack, even slight annoyances. And then in that light, look at how you feel about yourself.

Do you still feel like attacking? Do you still feel a need or requirement to judge and blame? Do you condemn others to hide your self condemnation? Are you constantly fighting with people? Do you feel unhappy most of the time? If you have any of the "symptoms" of the ego, which is anything not of God, then certainly there is room for improvement in your relationship with yourself.

First you need to recognize that you even DO hate yourself, before you can be willing to take steps to heal that relationship. And you can't see that unless you have some kind of higher truth about you to compare it to. Your utter pure sinlessness in God, your immortal innocence, the guarantee of eternal life, can act as a contrast and at reality-tester to find out just how you really do feel about yourself. And once you find that out, you have healing work to be done upon yourself. You need correction and forgiveness. You need to FORGIVE YOURSELF, in order to recognize you are sinless and free.

"You have condemned yourself, but condemnation is not of God."

"You who believe you have condemned the Son of God"

"But in the dream of judgment, you attack and ARE condemned."

"And unless He had given you a way to remember, you would have condemned yourselves to oblivion."

"Now has the mind condemned itself to seek without finding; to be forever dissatisfied and discontented; to know not what it really wants to find."

"If the Son of God is guilty, then is he condemned, and he DESERVES no mercy from the God of justice."

"Guilt is ALWAYS in your OWN mind, WHICH HAS CONDEMNED ITSELF. Project it not, for while you do, it cannot BE undone."

"The delusional can be very destructive, for they do not recognize they have condemned THEMSELVES."

"It is not God Who has condemned His Son. But ONLY you, to save his specialness, and kill his Self."

"Remember, then, that whenever you look without and react unfavorably to what you see, you have judged yourself unworthy, and have condemned yourself to death."

"You have handled this wish TO KILL YOURSELF by NOT KNOWING WHO YOU ARE, and identifying with something ELSE. You have projected guilt blindly and indiscriminately, but you have NOT uncovered its source. For the ego DOES want to kill you, and if you identify WITH it, you MUST believe ITS GOAL IS YOURS."

You don't need to die. You need to forgive yourself.

Judgment is a fairly large topic in ACIM. The course teaches us to basically "not judge". But that's not the whole story. Judgement can relate to evaluating the meaning of something, but also can in its lower forms mean condemnation. It can devolve into hate and attack and sin, or it can elevate to true justice and forgiveness.

Judgment is tied into perception, which "selects and evaluates" the meaning of things. And because it's based on perception, it is uncertain and unstable. That is, until it is stabilized by the Holy Spirit.

He has correct judgement because he, in part, has perception, but he also has knowledge. You have to know EVERYTHING in order to correctly discern what anything is. It thus requires vision, based on knowledge. He is the only one who can judge correctly, until you can learn to share his judgement in place of the ego's judgment. The ego always judges harshly, producing what we call "condemnation" or "being judgmental."

This is because the ego does not know anything, and is always wrong. Its judgements are always harsh and attacking, accusing everything of sin and guilt. It cannot recognize the "true" judgements of the Holy Spirit, and so its judgements produce false perceptions.

If you let the Holy Spirit judge for you, and then you match, accept or align with his judgement, your own judgement will line up with his and be accurate. If you try to judge on your own, and given you lack knowledge, most of the time you will judge with the ego and make false judgements. These judgements will be attacks and they will hurt yourself.

As you learn to let your judgement rest upon the Holy Spirit's judgement, your own judgement aligns with the truth, causing your perception to become "true". You judge with the ego less and trust the Holy Spirit to judge for you. Eventually your own judgement becomes "as true" and equal to his, shared with him.

Only when your judgement is perfected, and your perception aligned with knowledge, are you in a position to judge correctly without ego. This is an advanced state.

Jesus doesn't entirely write off all judgement. He does want us to stop using our ego to judge, and to instead depend on the Holy Spirit to judge for us until we are better able to judge with him correctly and share his judgement. His judgements are not condemning, they are healing and forgiving.

Thus to him, true judgement or "the final judgement" is a way of evaluating everything as forgiven and innocent, in which judgement becomes "non-judgmental." In this way, the attacking judgementalism of the ego becomes repurposed and is used to cancel itself out. By using judgment to not attack, the need for judging at all is undone, and so the need for perception ends.

Ultimately, by using the Holy Spirit's nonjudgmental judgement, we escape from the world. The world was made BY judging, ie as an attack on God, as a condemnation of his son. The ego aligned with the world's nature (both based on separation) and judged the world harshly.

The Holy Spirit judges the world fairly and without condemning it. You thus escape from the world by not playing the world's game of condemnation and attack (which is also sin). By not attacking what is rooted in attack, by not judging those who condemn, by seeing sinners as innocent, judgement is repurposed as a way to evaluate that the judgmental attack-world is forgiven. Thus is our investment in its nature undone, and the world is gone with it.

When judgement is perfected, ie shared with and in agreement with the Holy Spirit, ego and the body and the world disappear. Perception ends and we return to a state of knowledge, waking up in the reality of the Kingdom. In the Kingdom there is no condemnation and no sin and no ego, and no need to judge or evaluate the meaning of anything. Everything there is inherently meaningful and means everything, which thus gives way to cognition and knowledge.

This all boils down to:

1) Do not condemn (hate, attack, sin, make guilty, attack-thoughts, grievances etc).

2) Do not evaluate anything on your own, recognizing you cannot (let Holy Spirit judge through you - extend his judgement).

"The intrusion of the ability to perceive, which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the Separation. No one has been sure of anything since then."

"Can this be judgment? You have often been urged to refrain from judging, not because it is a right to be withheld from you. You cannot judge. You merely can believe the ego's judgments, all of which are false. It guides your senses carefully, to prove how weak you are; how helpless and afraid, how apprehensive of just punishment, how black with sin, how wretched in your guilt."

"No-one who loves can judge, and what he sees is FREE of condemnation."

"How can His Son AWAKEN from the dream? It is a dream of judgment. So must he judge NOT, and he WILL waken. For the dream will seem to last while he is PART of it. Judge not, for he who judges WILL have need of idols, which will hold the judgment off from resting on himself. Nor CAN he know the Self he has condemned. Judge not, because you make yourself a PART of evil dreams, where idols are your "true" identity, and your salvation from the judgment laid, in terror and in guilt, upon yourself."

"Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearance that it likes. It merely looks and waits and judges not. He who would not forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive. But he who would forgive himself must learn to welcome truth exactly as it is."

"When the Bible says "Judge not that ye be not judged" it merely means that if you judge the reality of others at all, you will be unable to avoid judging your own. The choice to judge rather than know has been the cause of the loss of peace. Judgment is the process on which perception but not cognition rests."

"Yet will his perfect sinlessness RELEASE you both, for holiness is quite impartial, with one judgment made for all it looks upon. And that is made, not of itself, but through the Voice that speaks for God in everything that lives, and shares His Being."

"We will receive but what is given us from Judgment made beyond the world."

"Judge not, for you but judge yourself and thus delay this final judgment. What is your judgment on the world, teacher of God? Have you yet learned to stand aside and hear the Voice of Judgment in yourself? Or do you still attempt to take His role from Him? Learn to be quiet, for His Voice is heard in stillness. And His Judgment comes to all who stand aside in quiet listening, and wait for Him."

"How CAN specialness be just? Judge not because you cannot, NOT because you are a miserable sinner too."

"We cannot judge ourselves, nor need we do so. These are but attempts to hold decision off, and to delay commitment to our function. It is not our part to judge our worth, nor can we know what role is best for us; what we can do within a larger plan we cannot see in its entirety."

"Love cannot judge. As it is one itself, it looks on all as one."

"The Savior's vision is as innocent of what your brother is as it is free of any judgment made upon yourself. It sees no past in anyone at all. And thus it serves a wholly open mind, unclouded by old concepts and prepared to look on ONLY what the present holds. It cannot judge because it does not know. And RECOGNIZING this, it merely asks, "What is the meaning of what I behold?" Then is the Answer given, and the door held open for the Face of Christ to shine upon the one who asks in innocence to see BEYOND the veil of old ideas and ancient concepts held so long and dear AGAINST the vision of the Christ in you."

"Father, we wait with open mind today, to hear Your Judgment of the Son You love. We do not know him, and we cannot judge. And so we let Your Love decide what he whom You created as Your Son must be."

"Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me. Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction. Teach me how NOT to make of it an OBSTACLE to peace, but let You use it FOR me, to FACILITATE its coming."

"Good judgment" in these terms, does not mean anything. No more does "bad." It is necessary for the teacher of God to realize not that he should not judge, but that he cannot. In giving up judgment he merely gives up what he did not have. He gives up an illusion; or better, he has an illusion of giving up. He has actually merely become more honest. Recognizing that judgment was always impossible for him, he no longer attempts it. This is no sacrifice. On the contrary, he puts himself in a position where judgment through him rather than by him can occur. And this Judgment is neither "good" nor "bad." It is the only Judgment there is, and it is only one: "God's Son is guiltless, and sin does not exist."

"Remember how many times you thought you knew all the "facts" you needed for judgment, and how wrong you were! Is there anyone who has not had this experience? Would you know how many times you merely thought you were right, without ever realizing you were wrong? Why would you choose such an arbitrary basis for decision-making? Wisdom is not judgment; it is the relinquishment of judgment. Make then but one more judgment. It is this; there is Someone with you Whose judgment is perfect. He does know all the facts, past, present and to come. He does know all the effects of His judgment on everyone and everything involved in any way. And He is wholly fair to everyone, for there is no distortion in His perception."

"No-one can escape God's final judgment. Who could flee forever from the truth? But the final judgment will not come until it is no longer associated with fear."

"The final judgment on the world contains no condemnation. For it sees the world as totally forgiven, without sin, and wholly purposeless. Without a cause, and now without a function in Christ's sight, it merely slips away to nothingness. There it was born, and there it ends as well. And all the figures in the dream in which the world began go with it. Bodies now are useless, and will therefore fade away, because the Son of God is limitless."

"The aim of the Final Judgment is to RESTORE Right-Mindedness TO man. The Final Judgment might be called a process of Right-evaluation. It simply means that finally all men must come to understand what is worthy and what is not."

"Nothing the Son of God believes can be destroyed. But what is truth to him must be brought to the last comparison that he will ever make; the last evaluation that will be possible, the final judgment upon this world. It is the judgment of the truth upon illusion, of knowledge on perception; IT HAS NO MEANING AND DOES NOT EXIST. This is NOT your decision. It is but a simple statement of a simple fact."

The belief that sin is real, leads to all kinds of behavior modifications. If sin is real, i.e. certain activities or behaviors are "actually sinful", this will force you to have to avoid certain things, not do certain things, be instantly sinful if you did certain thing sin the past etc.

You will start to prepare yourself in behavioral ways for "the lord" and you will sacrifice. You will see certain behaviors are "good" and other behaviors are "bad". Sins apparently won't apply to ALL of the things in the world, only special select things. The special good things will be "spiritualized".

If sin is real, then all of the world is sinful. But this seems to escape people. Reason being that they believe the world is real, so they can't have the whole world being sinful, they instead section part of it off as sinful and call the other part "good".

They then strive to become "more good" by getting rid of, denying, literally avoiding, condemning, and judging the things which are considered sins. There will even be a list of what is a sin and what is not a sin. There may even be alleged commandments given by God which tell you what you can and cannot do.

You then will try to make yourself as good as possible, which emphasizes the persona, which, btw, reinforces the shadow, which produces evil. Oops!

This polarizing idea of sinfulness has produced so much LEVEL CONFUSION it's crazy.

If you believe in sin AT ALL, i.e. sin is real, and you can really sin, and that if you really sin God will not love you, you're going to be in for a shock. IF sin were real, it WOULD mean God could not love you because the real sin would prove WHY. So then you will avoid doing real sins to try to avoid having God not love you.

Well, here's the news. God permanently loves you and cannot find you sinful or guilty for any reason whatsoever.

So what does that say about sin?

SIN IS NOT REAL.

There are no sins. There is no real sin. The world is not real. Anything you seem to do in the world is not real. None of it is really happening because the world is entirely an illusion. And therefore, YOU CANNOT BE SINFUL.

God is already completely loving you 100% right now, with absolutely no unforgiveness, absolutely no judgement or condemnation. The concept of judgement and condemnation (to hell) by God is purely based on the idea that sin is real.

The idea of sin being real is a form of crowd control invented by the ego and expressed through religious dogma.

God isn't waiting for you to stop sinning in order for you to be forgiven. God already finds you worthy, innocent, holy, lovable.

The thing that God is actually waiting for you to get done with, is for you to STOP BELIEVING THAT ILLUSIONS ARE REAL.

Stop believing that the illusion of sin is real! That's what God wants. And as soon as you drop the belief in "real sin", innocence MUST follow. THAT is why and how you are innocent.

"What if you looked within and saw there is no sin?" - ACIM

In A Course in Miracles, Jesus speaks of the face of innocence. This is an aspect of the ego identity which tends to side with "positivity" and "being good" and "people pleasing" and trying to portray itself as innocent, harmless, even weak and frail. This face of innocence is "the innocent victim", and sides with victims. The illusion of innocence is there to cover up secret hidden desires to attack and victimize. And the innocent face is a way to pretend you are not the cause of anything that happens.

In psychological terms the face of innocence is what we also call "the persona". It's part of the split mind. It's a device we use to only accept that which appears to be acceptable, positive, good, desirable, etc. But it also acts like a knife, splitting the mind and rejecting parts that it finds not good enough. It is in fact a way that the mind attacks itself by identifying aspects which are unacceptable and dissociating from them. This places them into the "shadow" behind walls of denial (blocks to awareness). It is perfectionistic, because it always asserts that you are not perfect enough.

Jesus: "The concept of the self the world would teach is not the thing that it appears to be. For it is made to serve two purposes, but one of which the mind can recognize. The first presents the face of innocence, the aspect acted ON. It is this face that smiles and charms and even seems to love. It searches for companions, and it looks at times with pity on the suffering, and sometimes offers solace. It believes that it is good, within an evil world. This aspect can grow angry, for the world is wicked, and unable to provide the love and shelter innocence deserves. And so this face is often wet with tears, at the injustices the world accords to those who would be generous and good."

"This aspect NEVER makes the first attack. But every day a hundred little things make small assaults upon its innocence, provoking it to irritation, and at last to open insult and abuse."

He goes on to describe how this face of innocence covers up a terrible secret. That behind this "special love" there is "special hate". Underlying the face of innocence and the innocent victim, is an attack and judgement and condemnation. And in it, others stand accused of sinning against you. The face becomes a way to portray oneself as "at the effect of the world", such that if it appears to be the innocent party, then others must stand accused at the slightest provocation. It is a device for scapegoating.

"Beneath the face of innocence there is a lesson that the concept of the self was made to teach. It is a lesson in a terrible displacement, and a fear so devastating that the face which smiles above it must forever look away, lest it perceive the treachery it hides. The lesson teaches this; "I am the thing you made of me, and as you look on me you stand condemned, because of what I am." On this conception of the self the world smiles with approval, for it guarantees the pathways of the world are safely kept, and those who walk on them will not escape."

Behind the innocent face therefore, there is a hidden accusation that others are sinful, and the face is held up as a mask ready to "receive" their attack, like a trap. The face is easily offended and easily upset by the world and the acts of others, as it was designed to be. It is produced by the condemnation of oneself, the partitioning off of parts of self as "evil", hiding this from ones own awareness (in the shadow) and then projecting it onto others. Thus behind the face of innocence there is judgement and condemnation, unforgiveness and victimization of others.

"Here is the central lesson that ensures your brother is condemned eternally. For what YOU are has now become his sin. For this is no forgiveness possible. No longer does it matter what he does, for your accusing finger points to him, unwavering and deadly in its aim. It points to you as well, but this is kept still deeper in the mists below the face of innocence. And in these shrouded vaults are all his sins and yours preserved, and kept in darkness, where they cannot be perceived as errors, which the light would surely show. "

False innocence is not real innocence. It's a mask that people wear to pretend to be spiritual or holier than thou. It is not authentic and isn't your self. It's a disguise, designed to make you look like the innocent one so that you are not identified as the source of guilt. Always the ego takes steps to DENY what it does, to deny your soul, to deny even that you sinned, to deny that you are even guilty, resulting in the production of a facade which hides your own guilt from you. You will then "look" innocent but only in appearance, and no-one would suspect you are the one who is attacking.

The persona and the shadow - the accepted parts of self and the rejected parts of self, are the two halves of the split mind. You keep the rejected parts in darkness because, if they were brought into the light, you would see that the mind is one, not two. And this would heal and undo the split, removing both the persona and the shadow. And it is this the persona avoids at all costs.

"Dissociation is a distorted process of thinking, whereby two systems of belief, which CANNOT coexist, are BOTH MAINTAINED. It HAS BEEN recognized that, if they were BROUGHT TOGETHER, their joint acceptance WOULD become impossible. But, if one is kept in darkness FROM THE OTHER, their SEPARATION seems to keep them both alive, and equal in their reality. Their JOINING thus becomes the source of fear, for, if they meet, acceptance MUST be withdrawn from one of them."

"The light of guiltlessness shines guilt away because, when they are BROUGHT TOGETHER, the truth of one MUST make the falsity of its OPPOSITE perfectly clear. "

"WHAT DO YOU WANT? Light or darkness, knowledge or ignorance are yours, but not both. Opposites must be brought together, and not kept apart. For their separation is only in your mind, and they are reconciled by union, as YOU are. In union, everything that is not real MUST disappear, for truth IS union. As darkness disappears in light, so ignorance fades away when knowledge dawns."

"The sole responsibility of God's teacher is to accept the Atonement for himself."

The ego is completely against the idea of being responsible for everything.Since ego believes strongly in sin and guilt and the reality of victimhood, it believes that if you take responsibility, YOU are the one who is sinful and guilty and a victimizer.

It wants to avoid this at all costs. It believes that responsibility is condemnation. It sees responsibility as INDUCING GUILT.

But it is vital that we learn to be responsible WITHOUT the sin and guilt and accusation. We are responsible for BELIEVING IN and USING these things, but we are NOT at the effect of these things.

We need to own up to what we have done to ourselves, which we cannot do if we constantly blaming the cause of them on everything and everyone other than ourselves.

But while we believe in sin and guilt being real, we are going to be RELUCTANT to OWN THIS POWER, the power of decision, because it implies that we are the guilty ones.

We have to go through a phase of trying to take responsibility, while also sorting out the fact that the sin and the guilt are not real. And this usually will entail at first a strong ego REACTION to trying to be responsible. As if it's not possible to be responsible WITHOUT inducing guilt.

And when you tell people about how they are responsible for MAKING THEMSELVES SICK, you will often notice that there is an EGO REACTION along the lines of it being "guilt inducing". But this is because we struggle to distinguish between the power and freedom brought about by responsibility, and the EGO'S USE of responsibility for condemnation.

Ego believes that "if you did it", this is SIN. That it proves you are a sinner. And this is a DEFENSE against salvation. It's a way of AVOIDING ever becoming empowered or free from suffering. It's a way to keep the ego and the belief in sin going. So the ego will steer you AWAY from responsibility at all costs, believing that all it does is make you a criminal - which means imprisonment, not freedom.

While you FEAR RESPONSIBILITY, as an ego reaction to the mixing of responsibility with sin, you will not want to own up to the fact that YOU are being self destructive, ALL your suffering is self inflicted, and YOU have the power to STOP IT.

We have to take brave steps to entertain the possibility that we are responsible for everything we experience, which is really a matter of OWNING UP TO CAUSALITY, which really means OWNING YOURSELF. And so you can see that sin and guilt are attempts to disown yourself and to disown responsibility. In a strange way, the ego disowns responsibility by MAKING YOU RESPONSIBLE for something you DIDN'T do.... such as sin.

You have to sort out what it is you are responsible FOR, recognize you are NOT responsible for "really sinning", and therefore become willing to TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY (thus power and causation) WITHOUT the sin and guilt attached.

You ARE responsible for being innocent. You ARE responsible for accepting this innocence, which is accepting atonement for yourself. And you ARE responsible for BEING TRUE to yourself. Which means you are responsible for CAUSATION, and the freedom of choice, and the power of decision. And none of this has anything to do with inducing guilt.

When you are a people pleaser, it means that you hide yourself from others. You do this by putting a mask or "persona", a facade or "face" over the top of yourself, showing to the world only what you want them to see. You present yourself to them as all smiles, nothing going wrong, everything is great, as if you're amazing and happy and "fine" when in fact you're dying inside.

It may seem that in this effort to please others you're trying to please them, but you're not. You actually are trying to hide yourself from them so that you only show them what you think they will approve of, in order to hide what you think they will not approve of. It stems from secret sins and hidden hates, self condemnation and self judgement, by which you perceive yourself as flawed. You're not making them be pleased with YOU, you're making them pleased with a FAKE person that doesn't even exist.

The persona you put on as a fake self, a cover over your hideous insides, cuts you off from others and from yourself. It is the most horrible state to experience, emotionally. A sense of embarrassment, shame, being harshly judged. By you.

Make no mistake, what happens when you people please is you separate yourself from your oneness and openness with other people, and you also separate yourself from yourself. You lock yourself in an internal prison where no-one ever really sees who you are and you don't let anyone in. You don't share anything with anyone and you are too afraid to be vulnerable.

The funny thing is that by being exposed and vulnerable you become invulnerable. It's only when you think you need to hide that you develop something that needs hiding. Your dark secret sins are nothing in the light. They don't exist.

But hiding yourself behind this mask is your idea of an attempt to protect yourself. You think that it is shielding you from the threats of others, that if you will just show them a smiling face that seems agreeable and not upsetting, they will not hurt you. It's a coping mechanism to try to defend yourself. The problem is, you are attacked by your own defenses.

Because by believing that someone else is judging you harshly and that you have to put up the smiling-face shields, you are also condemning yourself harshly. And that self condemnation can result in the most horrendous deep emotional pain way beyond anything another person could seem to inflict on you. Deep, deep shame and embarrassment and the sense that you are very wrong. It hurts you. You hurt yourself, by pleasing others.

And newsflash, other people do not want your pleasing, and they do not want to be pleased. Not if they are unconditionally loving. They didn't ask for you to defend yourself or present yourself that way. You're not really doing it for their benefit. You just think you are. You think they are the one who judges you, when all along it is yourself judging yourself indirectly through what you think they think of you.

The simple truth is, you cannot be yourself, while you people please. You are not being honest or authentic. You are not free. You're not free to simply express yourself and let the chips fall where they may. You're not free to open up and be vulnerable or hurt or emotionally upset or to let people help you. It's a state of being very cut off and alone. It's the opposite of health and the opposite of life.

By hiding behind a persona/facade all you do is feel ignored, judged, not-belonging, dissociative, and wishing you were somewhere else. Because you are somewhere else. You're not present. You're not being yourself. You're trying to be something you're not. You're trying to portray yourself as some kind of image that has nothing to do with who you are. And this image is destroying you. Because so long as it stands in for your identity you are imprisoned and trapped and weak and afraid.

No-one can be happy when they are not being true to themselves. No-one can be happy and relaxed and free from fear when they are trying to show up as "always positive" when that's totally unrealistic. That persona, puts you into the darkness. It puts you in the shadows and turns you into a shameful guilty sinner lurking behind this public image of yourself that hides your dark evil ways. And if only you'd come out into the light you'd see that you are not even remotely evil. It's the darkness that's the problem, not you.

Learning to simply just BE YOURSELF is the entire curriculum of spiritual awakening. To be as God created you. To be so accepting and natural in being who you actually are, free of pretending and cover ups and denial. Pleasing others denies your soul. Learn to tell the world to fuck the hell off. You don't need to be pleasing anyone, not one single person. And if they don't approve of you, that has nothing to do with you. You will make yourself suffer far more through your rejection of yourself than anyone else ever could.

Be free. Be you. Be visible.

If you have not really sinned, you automatically have no reason to try to get rid of the responsibility for having sinned.

If you believe you HAVE really sinned, and believe in your own sinfulness, you will try to escape the EFFECTS of sin. Sin causes guilt, fear, punishment and death. It is condemning. That's a pretty big reason to want to escape those effects!

You will then find yourself PRETENDING that part of you is not yourself - that it is someone else. And then you will displace all of your SELF BLAME onto that part, disassociate your identity from it, and pretend that it belongs to a separate self.

You will attack this "not me" part of yourself and put all of your self condemnation onto it, accusing it and finding it sinful, berating it and hating it, like it's some kind of culprit, when in fact it's actually a part of yourself. This is self abuse. It's your "innocent persona" attacking and CREATING your "guilty shadow".

You will then overlay this hallucinated "other not self" on top of people, and believe that they are the ones who are guilty. You will think that your perception of this IN them, justifies you being angry AT them, and that therefore you SHOULD blame them for what you believe they are doing to YOU. Projection of your split mind onto others completes your ESCAPE PLAN.

But you are doing this all to yourself. And you're ONLY doing this because you believe you are really sinful. And because of that belief, you THINK that you can DENY that YOU YOURSELF believe in your own sinfulness, by hiding from it using denial, and then pretending that someone ELSE is the sinner.

It is simply clear that, if you did not believe that you are really sinful, yourself, you would have no NEED for denial, no NEED for a scapegoat, no NEED for disassociation, no NEED for projection onto "not me" (others), and you would not NEED to find other people guilty of YOUR OWN SINS. You would also not need to create persona at war with a shadow, and all that would remain is your REAL Self.

As Jesus teaches, "you but accuse your brother of your own sins." This is LITERALLY TRUE. You ONLY accuse your brother of your own belief that YOU are sinful. Your attempt to find someone else guilty is your secret belief that YOU are guilty. Your attempt to see someone as sinful is YOUR OWN BELIEF in YOUR OWN SINFULNESS, that you're trying to disown.

It is your OWN belief in your own sinfulness that you are trying to escape from. You want someone to take the blame for what YOU believe YOU really did! And that's the only reason why you are doing the denial/projectin/blame game at all. You have a vested interest in finding someone to take the blame FOR you, so that you can convince yourself you don't really hate yourself, even though deep down you STILL DO.

The answer to undoing this is obvious and simple.

1. ADMIT THAT *YOU* BELIEVE *YOU* ARE REALLY SINFUL

2. STOP BELIEVING THAT YOU ARE REALLY SINFUL AT ALL.

Where will be the need for denial, or a split mind, or a projection, or a persona being at war with a shadow, or scapegoating onto someone else then? You'll have absolutely no need to do so. And that also means, you will no longer have a DESIRE or a NEED to find other people sinful... you will not WANT to find them sinful, because doing so really means you are finding YOURSELF SINFUL! You cannot escape the effects of what you believe about yourself.

If you are not really sinful, because you did not REALLY sin, because sin is not REALITY, because nothing REALLY happened, then you MUST still be innocent. And only when you can accept that this is TRUE about you will you stop ATTACKING YOURSELF with the condemnation that you are a sinner. It is you doing this to yourself. It is your self attack, masquerading as an attack on others.

Nobody has ever attacked you, and you have never really attacked anyone else. You're incapable. You're just in a war with your OWN SELF, attempting to take sides WITHIN your own mind, attacking YOU, because YOU believe that you really sinned. And if you no longer are choosing to see YOURSELF as sinful, in all honesty, you will stop trying to see OTHERS as sinful and will stop splitting of fa part of your mind to house all of your self attack. Thus you will find others WORTHY OF YOUR LOVE, and you will be justified in loving them.

Real sin is the belief that separation REALLY happened, producing real consequences. If sin is not real, separation cannot have REALLY happened and you're still WITH God and exactly AS God created you. Innocent, holy, permanently forgiven, and completely WORTHY OF LOVE.

Once you are worthy of love, you are NOT worthy of sin or attack, and you will not feel that attack is JUSTIFIED, and you will STOP ATTACKING YOURSELF.

You are worthy of the love of God, and always will be. Once you stop WANTING to attack yourself through a belief in real sin, you will AUTOMATICALLY stop judging others and will desire to love them.

In the ego's world, someone has to be to blame for everything that happens. It's way of thinking is a very closed system. No matter what happens, if something happens, someone is to blame for it, even if that person had barely any control over it or much to do with it at all. To the ego, this is responsibility.

The ego wants you to confess that you are, in fact, guilty, and that you do, in fact, deserve punishment, because you did, in fact, separate from God and make all manner of shit happen. To the ego, this is being responsible and 'mature'.

In the ego's model there is zero room for forgiveness. Absolutely no forgiveness whatsoever. Everything that 'happens' in the physical world is proof, to the ego, that it has caused "real consequences" to occur as a result of separating from God. It is evidence of sin, and proves that everyone involved is guilty without question. To the ego, anything 'happening' in this world is a sin, and only sin can happen. To the ego, nothing unsinful can ever happen and God is impossible, meaning innocence is impossible.

So to the ego, when someone makes a mistake, maybe they bump into the fridge and it knocks a glass tray that was resting on the top and it crashes to the floor, you can bet, to the ego, that person is "responsible" for this entire thing. Not just the accidental bumping, not just the item falling down, not just the smashing, but all of it. Every single bit of it. And, to the ego, every single bit of it was ON PURPOSE, completely deliberate and intentional, producing real irreversible effects. It will point the finger in condemnation and declare "you have sinned". The ego has no concept of `not on purpose` or `unintentional` or `accidental` because that would suggest not guilty, which it refuses to accept.

To the ego there is no room for anything happening without it being involved in guilt in some way. To the ego, nothing occurs but without someone's deliberate intention and involvement, and therefore every single thing proves that someone is guilty. The ego claims that if you own up to this and "accept responsibility" for this and take full responsibility upon yourself for every single part of what happened, then and only then might you be excused or let off. If there is even the slightest hint of what seems like a resistance to accepting this "responsibility" it will condemn you further for avoidance and irresponsible carelessness. It demands you must own up to what you did (sin), that you must completely admit to it (it happened), that you did it intentionally (its your fault) and that you should enter into shame and guilt and suffering because you DESERVE it.

This is not responsibility. It is condemnation. It is a death sentence. When you hold other people to these standards, where the ego exalts the idea of getting someone to admit to being wrong, you hold yourself to that standard also and therefore find yourself constantly guilty for every little thing you do. You don't really want that. It's a way to be a victim and to be constantly tortured and therefore in need of being constantly 'good' in order to avoid making even a tiny mistake.

It's okay to make mistakes and break shit and do things wrong and be in error and not know everything and not be accountable for every single little consequence of events set in motion. You're not guilty for clouds moving, or objects falling, or people bumping into each other. You're not even guilty for seeming to deliberately do something wrong. Why does mistakedness have to always call for judgement and attack and the 'justice' of punishment? Punishment is never justified and it fails to correct anything, so it does not really stand for a pure or right way of living but only for how to get fucked over when you step out of line.

True responsibility MUST include the concept of you being 100% innocent. True responsibility must mean that no matter what you did or what effects it had or how serious or whatever, you are still innocent. It must mean you are unconditionally innocent. There is nothing like this in the ego's repertoir. To let you off the hook here and there it would see as begrudging pardons, or stern warnings, and it would never ever consider that you could be wholly found innocent for EVERYTHING that you seemed to do as a blanket statement. Yet Holy Spirit sees only your innocence.

Do you deserve judgement, condemnation, proof of fault, the justice of punishment, self hatred and shame, or some horrific shock treatment in retaliation for an accident? Nope. You're not guilty, no matter what. You made a big giant mess? You deserve love. You totally fucked up your life? You deserve love. And you broke everyone else's favorite toys? If they have a shit-fit that's not exactly your responsibility. Not to justify any behavior. But you're always innocent. Always. And only by being innocent can you be truly responsible. Because you have a responsibility to BE INNOCENT.

People that make mistakes need to be returned to a corrected state of not making those mistakes. They need to be returned to love. This is in the best interests of everyone. It is completely against everyone to punish that person or to feed lies and attack into them. That causes them to become your enemy. You don't want that. It's in everyone's interests that everyone be forgiven and reminded of the truth of who they are. We all need to own up to being God's innocent child. We all need to take responsibility for being who we authentically are, not who people condemn us for being. Responsibility WITHOUT the guilt.

True responsibility means ownership without blame. It also means that only the extension of God happens and there aren't any other consequences. It means everything is correctable. It means mistakes call for forgiveness and love, not punishment. It means you are let off the hook even before anything happens. It means that when stuff happens, you should be laughing, because it does NOT prove anything about your worth. It also means that you're not guilty when you make mistakes and you do not need to claim the guilt that surrounds them. You can own up to being mistaken, which is helpful, but this should never mean "I really did it".

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

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

If someone is afraid, reassuring them won't help remove the fear at all unless you can remove their belief that they are guilty. Trying to tell them that the punishment isn't going to happen will be hard to believe if they still think they deserve it.

Only if they are guilty do they have any reason to fear punishment. If they are not guilty, they can be reassured in knowing that they do not deserve punishment, and therefore will not believe in punishment, and therefore will stop scaring themselves.

The person is not afraid because of what is going to happen to them, they are afraid because they BELIEVE that it is going to happen to them, because they believe they deserve it. Having believing they are guilty, they actually believe in their own deserving of punishment, and so they KNOW it is going to come, because they themselves are going to MAKE it come, and they therefore see the punishment as inevitable. They cannot escape their OWN belief in self punishment, and so are frightened by their very own will and determination to harm themselves!

They are really afraid of their own punishment. This must be undone at the cause which is guilt, and not the effect, which is a projected cause of fear.

Beyond this, if someone is feeling guilty, you can't reassure them that they're not guilty either. Instead, you need to reassure them that they did not really sin at all. Sin produces guilt and the belief in sinfulness makes a person feel guilty. Undo the belief that they are sinful and there can be no need for guilt. Only the sinful will feel guilty.

If the person believes they sinned, they will attack themselves and condemn themselves with guilt. The condemnation is coming from themselves, not from anyone else. Even if it seems like shame or misplaced causes for guilt, the decision to be guilty is their own, based on their own belief in their own sinfulness. They themselves WANT to find themselves guilty, and so cannot help but feel that way, because they don't want to undo the belief that they sinned at all. Sin is not real. Nobody sinned. Hey presto, no guilt.