"When you forgive the world YOUR guilt, YOU will be free of it. Its innocence does NOT demand your guilt, nor does your guiltlessness rest on ITS sins. This is the obvious, a secret kept from no-one but yourself. And it is this that has maintained you SEPARATE from the world, and kept your brother SEPARATE from you. Now need you but to learn that BOTH of you are innocent OR guilty. The one thing that is impossible is that you be UNLIKE each other; that they BOTH be true. This is the only secret yet to learn. And it will be NO secret you are healed."

If you are innocent, you recognize that everyone is innocent, because your innocence overlooks their guilt and looks to the truth about them. Truth is eternal and unchanging, so their innocence is permanent, as is yours.

If you are guilty, you will see everyone as guilty. Having lost sight of the truth you will not recognize it, and will mistake everyone's innocence for guilt. Seeing the guilt in them results from seeing it in yourself. Seeing them as guilty you will assume this means you are not guilty, which disguises this fact.

It works kind of like wearing either clean or dirty glasses on your eyes. When your own glasses are clean you will see a clean world free of guilt. When your own glasses are dirty you will see a dirty guilty world. And how you see them you see yourself reflected in the mirror.

It is not possible to accurately determine whether someone is innocent or guilty, from the perspective of ego. You are not sitting on a fence being neutral. You have no neutral thoughts. Either you are making everyone appear innocent or you are making everyone appear guilty. You are contributing to what you see.

If you think you can determine that someone is guilty, but you are innocent, you are mistaken. If you think you can call someone innocent while you believe in your own guilt, you are mistaken. You cannot see past what's in you own mind.

The ego counsels that you can find someone guilty and yet you can escape this guilt. This is impossible. Either BOTH you and your brother are guilty, or BOTH you and your brother are innocent.

You actually therefore are blind to whether or not your brother is innocent or guilty, independently. You cannot tell this independently because your brother IS NOT independent of you in a separate, compartmentalized way. You cannot section off his worth from your own.

The Golden Rule, the law of God, is always in effect no matter where you are or what you believe. What you believe is true of you is always believed to be true of others, even if consciously you think there is a difference between the two. You cannot find someone guilty without making yourself guilty first. And you cannot see your brothers innocence if you are not willing to accept your own.

This is how your brother is your savior. He does not actually save you in the sense of doing something for you that you have not done for yourself. He merely is recognized as reflecting back to you either your own innocence or guilt, depending on what you believe is true. If you regard yourself as innocent, you will regard him as innocent also. If you find him guilty, you have condemned yourself.

You do not have the faculty to be able to say, ok, my brother is the guilty one, and I am a passive observer, and I can tell he's guilty because I'm neutral and objective. There is no such thing as objective judgement. All judgementalism is inherently biased and pulls the judger INTO the judgement. Think not you can judge lest ye be judged.

Unfortunately, its not possible to find someone guilty, if you want to find your own innocence. It will drag you down. Maintaining enemies and scapegoats and pointing fingers at people keeps YOU in hell. You HAVE to find everyone to be innocent if you want to find yourself to be innocent. And so long as you find even one person to be guilty, you have relegated yourself to death.

The truth (about you and your brother) is always true, and nothing else is true.

What our minds really need is a paradigm shift. That means a really radical sweeping upgrade in terms of premise, context and outlook. Some kind of system-wide "shift" out of an entire field of form into some radically greater perspective.

It's not enough to be dwelling in the realm of problems and trying to solve them. We have to get our minds out of the entire belief in problems. That's a paradigm shift, a refusal to engage with the level of suffering and a desire to completely transcend it.

This is why Jesus tells us for example to not to try to find freedom in the body, or in the world. It doesn't exist there. Or to not seek for love outside yourself, but within.

We've been looking to solve problems and suffering at the level of the problems and the suffering, which at best makes illusions of solutions but doesn't stop it happening. If you want it to all stop completely you have to stop the entire system, to not play the game.

The same applies with death and sickness. Questioning whether such things even exist at all, instead of dwelling on how to solve them. It's the withdrawal of power from illusions that undoes them, just as forgiveness is an entire perspective above the battlefield that renders the whole system obsolete.

The ego for example counsels that a war is real, and that you should play the game of war, and that if you take a side you will win, or alternatively you will lose. What it doesn't tell you is that both sides of the war is a loss, because to exterminate anyone is to lose yourself, because you are one. It is not interested in oneness only in separation. If you play the game, you lose, regardless of the outcome. The only way to shift the entire paradigm is not to play at all.

All reactions to a suffering world that you've made real, which compel you to change it so that you don't seem to suffer, are faulty. They might seem to produce some changes and make the illusion more palatable, but it doesn't really wake you up. What wakes you up is questioning the entire premise of the thing and whether or not it's even possible.

Shifting from a premise that this world is real, to a premise that it is just an unreal dream with no real consequences, is a total paradigm shift. It's always about adopting a much broader and higher context which completely reframes everything. A whole new paradigm, a new thought system, a new perception, a new truth, which is so far reaching and deep that it completely redefines the meaning of everything, and puts everything in its proper perspective.

"Freud was more clear-sighted about this, because he knew a BAD thing when he perceived it, but he failed to recognize that a bad thing cannot exist. It is therefore wholly unnecessary to try to get out of it. As you very rightly observed yourself, the thing to do with a desert is to LEAVE."

"Yet freedom of the body HAS no meaning. And so the mind is DEDICATED to serve illusions."

"Fear not to cross to the abode of peace and perfect holiness. Only there is the completion of God and of His Son established forever. Seek not for this in the bleak world of illusion, where nothing is certain, and where everything fails to satisfy. And, in the Name of God, be wholly willing to abandon ALL illusion."

"Judgment is but a toy, a whim, the senseless means to play the idle game of death in your imagination. But vision sets all things right, bringing them gently within the kindly sway of Heaven's laws."

This is the title of ACIM lesson 125. The essence here is to realize that everything you give, you receive, because giving and receiving are one. Per the golden rule, whatever you "do to another", you literally and directly and personally do to yourself. Anything at all that comes out of you, goes back into you.

This is the law of God, and it is inescapable. But it seems to be very difficult to recognize this law is in effect. It seems possible that you do something to another and experience none of the consequences. That somehow there is a separation between what applies to the giver and the receiver.

The body in particular makes it seem possible to do something to another while escaping the effects. One body can seem to hurt another, and yet come away with no apparent harm. This violates the law of God and seems to suggest the golden rule does not apply. But the laws of God always apply.

If you were aware that anything you do is done to BOTH yourself and others, you would be very careful in choosing what to do. If when you poked another's body, you felt a poke of your own body, you would hesitate to poke them. If you attacked their body and immediately felt the hurt and impact and effects of the attack, you would instantly recoil and reconsider your actions.

If it were impossible for you to do something to another without it also being done instantly to you, you would realize that you cannot do anything harmful without hurting yourself. You would literally find it insane to suggest that you WON'T be hurt when you hurt someone else. You would know this is not true, and that you are guaranteed to suffer when you inflict suffering.

The motivation this gives you then is the clear sanity that, in order to be happy and loved, your only option is to give happiness and love to others. If for an instant you choose to give hurt or to make guilty, you know that you will instantly feel awful and would be quick to stop yourself. If the very dagger with which you attempt to pierce the heart of a brother literally sticks into your own body, you would stop in your tracks.

In truth, when you are more aware of reality, you actually are in touch with this law. It may not appear to apply at the physical level, but it does apply at the level of mind. Any seeming psychological state of attack which you think you project onto another, you do not escape. Any angry attempt to make another guilty reinforces your guilt. Any desire to be murderous and hurtful threatens you and instills fear.

v There IS no escape from the golden rule. The ego counsels that you can easily escape it, even that you can commit the most horrendous attack and come away without remorse or damage. That you can get away with murder. But the only way you would seem to convince yourself that you've done this, is to be in denial.

It requires you to separate yourself off, dis-associate from your brother, form a separate identity which is different and at war, believe that your brother is in no way part of yourself, isolate and imprison yourself in the body, and then perhaps be convinced that your actions won't hurt you. Only by severing yourself from the sonship could you possibly convince yourself that this would work, but at the cost of making you imprisoned and alone.

In truth, your real nature is that you are one with all others. That we are all joined together in sharing as a single family of equality. I am you and you are me and we are each other.

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

Everyone is everyone. We are each individually the whole sonship. Everyone else is a part of your self. Not one single thing can occur against a single individual without it happening to the whole. When one suffers, the whole suffers, because the whole is in every part. We have a holographic relationship and this is the will of God.

The fact is then that if we fall into the ego delusion that we are separate from each other, we will then automatically believe that we can indeed attack without being attacked. And so begins the spiral down the slippery slope to hell in which you believe and then perceive that you are justified in murder, capable of revenge, and can get away with it unaffected. This state of mind itself is mental illness, suffering, self-attack, self-abuse, and self-destructive.

The simple truth then is that everything you give, you are included in the receipt of. Anything you do, you do to yourself. Anything you give or radiate or share or express, is being expressed toward you as well. It may seem on the physical level that something has to leave and travel and be sacrificed and lost, in order to be given or done to another, but in truth you always keep what you

give, because sharing is reality and not separation. To receive what you give is the golden rule and the inescapable law of God. It is functioning even when you don't believe it is functioning. It is functioning when you believe you are getting away with separating yourself off from receiving. It is also the secret of salvation, in the recognition that if you are suffering, you must have done this to yourself. You must have given suffering and then received it, believing that you would escape the receipt.

If you are suffering, you have attempted to attack the sonship. Not just yourself, but everyone. But just as every attack thought, and attitude, angry guilt-mongering, or outright violence, is always an attempt to give yourself death. It makes you unhappy to make others unhappy. It hurts you to hurt them. You cannot escape this. Anything you do to attempt to destroy a son of God will have self-inflicted repercussions. And as such, if you are not at peace, you must have made a wrong decision.

To find salvation therefore we have to learn the simplicity of lesson 125 - that at all times, what I am giving I am receiving. If I do not like what I am experiencing, I must recognize I have chosen it and have given it, and have therefore received it. And I have done this to myself. I must be mistaken if I have given myself suffering, and I made the decision myself, but I want to choose otherwise because I want to be at peace.

This is all tied together. It is the one law of God that everything is always shared, everyone is always included, and you will never escape the consequences of your giving. If want to stop suffering, learn to stop making others suffer. If you want to be happy, give happiness. If you want to feel loved, learn to love. You will heal as you let the Holy Spirit teach you to heal. And you will find God in your brother as you learn that your brother is a part of your shared identity in Christ.

It's important to realize the role of the Holy Spirit. We have A Course in Miracles, a book, which has teachings and theory and lessons and so on. And you could conclude this means all you need to do is use the book. But there are two things much bigger than the book.

1. The universal curriculum, is the plan of atonement, which applies to everyone in the universe regardless of backgrounds or beliefs or life experiences or religions, even if they've never heard of ACIM. Everything that happens, all lessons, all encounters, are orchestrated for a purpose of atonement. This goes way beyond the book. It includes everything that happens every day.

2. The Holy Spirit is God's literal answer to the separation. His function is not only to maintain an unbreakable bridge between your wandering mind and the Christ mind, guaranteeing that you will come home. He also is a healer, therapist, teacher, guide, helper, comforter, and friend. His presence isn't like some person sitting at the top of a mountain waiting for you to go up there to join him. He has an active function.

He is there to help you. He has been appointed to you, given to you, added to you. He is not just some principle or concept. He doesn't just sit there shining a light and asking you to join him. He actively comes INTO your dreaming mind. He can extend through the body. He can heal the body. He can perform miracles - he is the mechanism of miracles.

He enables you to do things which are so supernatural they are clearly not of this world and break all the laws of space and time and physics. He is the way by which Moses parted the oceans, and the way by which Jesus raised the dead. He can come into your body, into your emotions, into your thinking. He can influence you, direct you, guide you, even literally speak through your mouth. He can move your limbs. He tells you very specifically what to do. He counsels you and advises you and corrects you and steers you in the right direction.

He has the power to reverse death and sickness and all forms of suffering. He is a living spirit, with a mind, a Holy Spirit, able to literally guarantee the correction of every illusion, every form of mental or physical illness, to reverse death, and ultimately to completely undo the separation. He is the initiator of the atonement, he has the power to part oceans and to move mountains. There is nothing he cannot do.

So as we go forth working with the course, doing lessons and studying and discussing and so on, we really should be trying to get in touch with and develop trust in the Holy Spirit as much as possible. We need to be having a daily relationship with him. To talk to him, to ask questions, to have conversations. We need to be listening to and following his guidance with trust. We need to be allowing him to heal us and to heal through us, even physically.

The Holy Spirit is the power by which the disciples of Jesus go out to be physicians of the lord, healing the sick, casting out "evil spirits", raising the dead and so on. He was made accessible to all people when Jesus ascended, to stand in for Jesus and to be a way by which we can all express the same miraculous powers that Jesus demonstrated. We are to be livened and infused with him. Lifted up by him.

He is the power by which our physical bodies are supposed to be healed, for all signs of sickness and death and attack to be undone and reversed, so that He can use our bodies as "living examples" of harmlessness, symbolic eternal life, aliveness and health. To use our bodies to communicate the only thing that he can communicate - healing. We are to share his function with him on earth, which is healing. We are to be healers, using him and working with him to heal through us to help others be alleviated of suffering and darkness.

So the Holy Spirit is really super important. More important than the book. The book is only a beginning and a major goal is to put you in touch with and develop trust in the Holy Spirit so that he can continue to be your Teacher going forward, to continue to develop your miracle working abilities and to strength and support you. We are supposed to be using this help that God has sent to us, which absolutely means not doing everything yourself, not thinking of it as a "self study", opening ourselves up to rely on, depend on and trust the support of this living being that has been sent to guide us home.

It is our task to listen ONLY to the Voice for God and not to the ego.

"What the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."

"The Holy Spirit is the mechanism of miracles."

"The Holy Spirit can use ALL that you give to Him for your salvation."

"The Holy Spirit is the Bringer of Revelations"

"Power is of God, GIVEN by Him, and re-awakened by the Holy Spirit"

"When you hear the Holy Spirit, you merely feel BETTER, because loving seems POSSIBLE to you."

"Christ's Second Coming gives the Son of God the gift to hear the Voice for God proclaim that what is false is false, and what is true has never changed."

"Whatever your appointed role may be it was selected by the Voice for God"

"Henceforth, hear but the Voice for God and for your Self when you retire from the world, to seek reality instead."

"Be very still, and hear the gentle Voice for God assuring you"

"If you cannot hear the voice of God, it is because you do not choose to listen. "

"He will direct you VERY specifically. "

"Ask Him very specifically: "What would You have me do?" "Where would You have me go?" "What would You have me say, and to whom?" Give Him full charge"

"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."

"The happy dreams the Holy Spirit brings"

"Healing IS the Holy Spirit's form of communication, and the ONLY one He knows."

"Healing is the change of mind that the Holy Spirit in the patient's mind is seeking for him. And it is the Holy Spirit in the mind of the giver Who gives the gift to him."

"There is a way in which the Holy Spirit asks YOUR help, if you would have HIS."

"We have said that the Holy Spirit is the MOTIVATION for miracles."

"Right-mindedness listens to the Holy Spirit, forgives the world"

"To you who still believe you live in time, and know not it is gone, the Holy Spirit still guides you through the infinitely small and senseless maze you still perceive in time, though it has long since gone."

"You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you can see His manifestations. And unless you do, you will not realize He is there. Miracles are His witnesses, and speak for his Presence. What you cannot see becomes real to you only through the witnesses who speak for it. For you can be AWARE of what you cannot see, and it can become compellingly real to you, as its presence becomes manifest THROUGH you. Do His work, for you SHARE in His function. As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares His with you on earth."

"Say to yourselves the following, as sincerely as you can, remembering that the Holy Spirit will respond fully to your slightest invitation:

I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace.

I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise.

I WILL to decide otherwise, because I WANT to be at peace.

I do NOT feel guilty, because ***the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM.***

I WILL to let Him by allowing Him to decide for God for me."

You can either be selfish, or you can share. The entire separation from God is about becoming selfish. The atonement is entirely about learning how to share again. The entire problem in this world is that everyone is selfish, and we all need to learn to stop being selfish.

The ego is entirely the idea of being selfish. That means trying to be exclusive, to get only what you want, self-interest, denying and rejecting others, separating off, being autonomous, identifying with the body, believing you are special, relating to others through specialness, having a sense of neediness and lack, etc.

When we were in heaven before "the fall of man", the separation, we were all sharing everything. Everyone had everything, all the brothers in the sonship overlapped with each other and enjoyed being one. We were part of each other.

Everyone had simultaneous access to absolutely everything all at once without any sense of limits or greed or compromise or lack or finite amounts or special favor or favoritism or anything that could suggest inequality.

We already each had a self, a soul, which shared everything with all. But in the separation we each decided that we didn't want to share anymore. We wanted special favor from God, we wanted to have something exclusively our own, we wanted to regard ourselves as more important, we sought to become orphaned and to have our own world and our own separate something.

In essence we became selfish. We sought to think only of our own interests and not shared interests. We wanted a separate will and to make choices and to be tyrannical and get whatever we wanted in competition with everyone else. We wanted it all, but we didn't want anyone else to have it all. We became like little islands, cut off from each other and alone and concerned only with ourselves.

So now selfishness is really the entire problem. We have forgotten how to share and be one. We have become expert in various ways of being selfish little children. We see ourselves as lacking and lost and alone, and desperately in need.

This neediness fuels all kinds of manipulative special relationships, puts terms and conditions on love, seeks to get something to profit from everything, and is always thinking of what it means to me or what it does to me. Whether I stand to profit or lose. Relationships turn into bargaining transactions and covert exploitation. And all of our experiences of what happens revolves around me me me.

Ego is nothing more than this idea of being selfish, ie of not sharing. The mind sees itself as cut off and separate, isolated in a body, excluding the whole from its little patch of existence. In our selfishness we grovel in the dark for scraps and are in a kind of survival mode, desperate to get more and searching everywhere for what we've lost.

So the real issue is very close to home, because it's not really about the world or about what other people are doing to you. It's not about the body. It's about you being selfish. And that selfishness goes to the very "core" of the ego and the core of your sense of who and what you are. It's YOU that is the problem in your life. It's your sense of me me me me me that drives the entire ego thought system.

Your selfishness is the cause of all your suffering. It is the cause of all broken relationships, broken communication, loss and grief, all hurt and despair, all desperation and fear and neediness, all offense and defence and justifications for anger and attack. It all revolves around me me me, what they did or didn't do to me, what's happening to me without my permission, what I'm lacking, how I'm put out, what someone's taken from me. Me versus the world.

It's hard to look at because it's very much rooted deep inside you. This selfishness is right at the core of your sense of self, the ego self that your mind as identified with and as. It's you being selfish that's the problem, your desire not to share, your desire to have everything and lose nothing, your competition with everyone, your self interest and tyrannical disregard for the interests of others.

You being selfish is the cause of all your suffering. That includes grief and loss, sickness and death, loneliness and isolation, pain and misery, unhappiness and sadness, all of it revolves around this idea of.... there's a me that is like a forgotten lost little child crying alone in the desert... that just wants to get what it wants and doesn't care about anyone or anything else. That's where the problem is and that's what has to be undone if you want to return to heaven.

This is why in the course Jesus's is basically teaching us to SHARE again. That means opening up the sense of self to be more inclusive of others, joining with others in love and openness, developing trust again, overcoming boundaries, transcending limits, allowing yourself to receive love, extending the mind, etc, it' all about you coming out of your ego shell, out of your prison, out of your body, out of your separateness and rejoining the sonship in a holy communion of love and sharing and oneness.

In truth we need to learn to have a self that is whole. A self that includes the whole sonship. A self that is united and one. And this same self, the soul, is full of self, full of the identity of wholeness/Christ. And being full of this shared self is not at all selfish.

When someone is "full of themselves" it means that they are full of ONLY themselves and NOT of others. They lack the sharing and oneness. In their arrogance they reject everyone and think highly of themselves as more important and special. And so the ego counsels to not think of yourself at all otherwise you are selfish, while simultaneously thinking only of itself. And this leads to self-sacrifice which is martyrdom or greed, and not spiritual.

But you have to include yourself in everything if you want to be selfless, which means you are equal and a part of what is shared. And being selfless does NOT mean that you do not have a self, it means you actually have MORE self, because your self is shared with everyone and you are a whole self. It just means not being exclusively ONLY yourself. To be truly selfless is to gain the selves of everyone and to not be self-ish.

To be your true self is to be all self, one with all selves, and one with God. To know yourself as God created you is to know that you are the entire Kingdom of Heaven. And yet you are still you, yet you are all. To have the all you give the all to the all. That is sharing and extension per God's will and design. You can only be yourself by being everyone. Only when others are included in who and what you are do you have the basis and motivation to have truly shared interests. And those who have shared interests are Teachers of God.

"Selfishness is of the ego but self-fullness is of the Soul because that is how He created it."

"The full appreciation of its self-fullness makes selfishness impossible, and extension inevitable."

"The Atonement is a lesson in sharing, which is given you because YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO DO IT."

"The miracle therefore is a lesson in WHAT JOY IS. Being a lesson in SHARING, it is a lesson in love, which IS joy."

"The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is KNOW THYSELF. There is nothing else to learn. Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost. Whenever you are with anyone ELSE, you have another opportunity to find them. Your power and glory are in HIM BECAUSE they are yours. The ego tries to find them in YOURSELF, because he does not know where to look. But the Holy Spirit teaches you that if you look only at yourself you CANNOT find yourself because that is NOT what you are."

Looking for love outside of yourself is the primary function of the ego and one of the toughest lessons to overcome. We all seem to want other people to love us. We have some kind of need to have parents and children love us, to be loved by another special person or persons, to be surrounded with friends who love us, etc.

Being loved by a lot of people is a trap, if you depend on it. And if you haven't become willing to NOT be loved by others, you still are in the ego. You will not be able to be true to yourself or to speak the truth or demonstrate love's reality if you are not willing to allow others to reject it.

God is the source of love, as are all your brothers in Heaven, but the love they share with you is no different to the love that is in you, which you are created from. You already have this love inherently, so do not really need it at all from anywhere else. You are not being loved by God due to some "need", you are loved by God as an act of sharing His love with you who are already love. You were created by love, as love, to love, and there is no lack of love in you, therefore no neediness.

What happens is, due to the separation ie egoic blocks to the awareness that we already have all the love we need, we perceive a lack of love in ourselves. This is the same thing as believing God is absent - that we ourselves are absent. This perceived lack is a darkness, and it compels us to want to alleviate the unhappy sensation of that absence.

But the ego counsels, instead of actually questioning if the blocks are real, or that the love might STILL be present behind them (if you were to just remove them), to believe the blocks have really made the love go away and to then seek for a solution somewhere else.

This seeking is a sense of false neediness, which believes that the only way to have salvation is by finding it anywhere other than within yourself. The ego suggests it is not in you already, so you better look elsewhere, and that by looking elsewhere there is some kind of hope or possibility of finding it. This is a lie.

So then begins the external searching, and since you are not responsible for or aware of the love in yourself, you now look to make others responsible for providing it for you. So now they automatically are perceived as having to fulfill this "function" of being the source of love and salvation for you. Absolutely everyone will perceive this function as belonging to others if there is any block to awareness or ego present in the mind, guaranteed.

First of all, there is a fundamental problem with this. By believing there is not already the love of God in you, you believe it is absent due to some kind of unworthiness or impossibility. That belief, which is an error, when left uncorrected, lingers in the mind and asserts that you will NOT ACCEPT love within yourself. Separation from the awareness that love is in you already was an act of rejection, not acceptance, so now you are not willing to let there be love in you.

So even though your mind is now making others responsible for supplying the lack due to the belief that it's not inside you, and cannot come from God (this is one of the ego's "laws of chaos"), even IF someone external were to try to supply you with love, you would not be willing to actually let it enter you. You will do what you can to try to get it inside of you, but so long as you believe in your inner lack of it, and therefore the need for it, you are actively blocking its receipt. So then people could be surrounding you with the most magnificent love and you STILL would not believe you are loved enough.

The other part to this then, is that by believing the only possible location of love is "not in you" ie outside of you, you depend entirely on other people or objects or idols or false Gods or specialness to do FOR you and TO you what you refuse to do yourself. This is another step in the ego's laws of chaos - seeking for this "special something" which is supposed to solve your inner lack, by finding it outside of you in people or drugs or alcohol or possessions or money or success or idol worship etc.

IF those external sources, for some reason, seem to be willing to give to you something that you think you want, be it specialness or some kind of semblance of "love", your ego will to some degree seem to be satisfied. The problem is, you won't be able to fully receive it. Not only is it impossible to get fictional special love into you, you are not really wanting to receive it anyway. So now you will go back and forth between delighting in what this person "does to you", and resenting them for failing to undo your emptiness. You'll think that them loving you is the most wonderful thing you ever experienced, but it still falls short of the love of God or, more importantly, falls short of your own willingness to accept love for yourself.

IF on the other hand, the person or external source is taken away or denied or there is a refusal or rejection, well now you are really up shit creek. Because now your mind is believing the only source of salvation is external, you have this huge pressing need to "get" it, and the external is saying "no" and sticking its middle finger up at you. So now you are left hanging. You have this huge unconscious self hatred, a huge sense of neediness and lack, and no-one is willing to supply something to fill the hole.

That leaves you in a state of unfulfillable turmoil, like there is absolutely no way to solve your problem, and that throws you into a rage. This is essentially the definition of hell - a state in which you need something and the need can never be filled, so you have absolutely no hope of "escape", there is no one to save you, you are left suffering alone and with no way to solve it, and so you are more or less eternally damned. That is, unless you question the lies this is based on.

The unconscious self hatred will then surface as "special hate" and will blame the other for not doing to you what they are supposed to be doing to you. It will be all their fault that they are not "loving you" or giving you what you think you want. And this can be in the form of a bad parent or an abusive partner or a job that makes your life suck or the government sucking off all your money or whatever. When the love is denied you, you go off the rails with insanity because all you can see before you is a hopelessness and an impossibility of meeting your need.

This can also be the driving force behind people turning to crimes like rape and murder in an effort to forceably "take" from others what they are refusing to give you. It's a state of desperation. The ego has convinced the person they are so lacking in love that they are so empty and so unlovable that there is a really, really strong neediness and dependency on others to supply it, and no-one seems willing to supply it, so other people must be evil hoarders of the "specialness'' and it now has to be wrestled from them against their will.

This is the culmination of the ego's laws of chaos, in which it inspires attack and rape and murder and hatred in an effort to get from others what they refuse to give. And such a person will see those others are being entirely to blame for failing to love them, and they will see themselves as completely justified and entitled to take what they want, as if it is what they deserve and are being unfairly denied. They will believe that others have "stolen" what is theirs, and that they must rightfully take it back. Things get pretty vicious at this stage.

If you look at this with compassion and understanding you can see that when people get really desperate and needy for external sources of salvation like this, which is mental illness (inner peace is healthy, external searching is mental illness), they are really just trying to address this sense of lack and emptiness and the absence of love within themselves. They are just going about it in the only way that their broken perception tells them is possible - getting it from outside - and if the sense of it being denied is too great internally, they will feel *dependant* on getting it from outside and driven to HAVE to take it by force, almost like someone who is gasping for air and trying to stay alive.

Therefore the attempted rape and murder of others is actually someone who perceives such absence of love within themselves that no matter how hard they try they can't get the love into themselves, and so claw at others viciously and violently trying to take it, as if their life depends on it. All that's happening is their perception is very backwards and they are so convinced of their unworthiness and unlovability that they see others are unworthy and unlovable and so deserving of being taken from. It is really that the person has taken away from themselves and now perceives this denial of love as if coming from others.

So while some of us are in sort of in-between states of feeling a neediness or "why it is unfair that other people don't love me" and "surely I'm lovable, why are people not liking me" and "if only they would love me more" or whatever... we are still on the downward spiral towards viciousness. We just didn't become quite so desperate yet as for it to turn into a violent attempt to take it from others, but we're doing basically the same process. A perceived absence of love within, leads to an automatic quest to get it from without. And then it is everyone else's responsibility to supply it, and if they do not, it is their fault not ours. "What is not love is murder" because when love is perceived to be absent it produces a murderous desire to take it from someone else against their will.

Even if others were to supply huge amounts of love to us, if we are not willing to accept that it is deep inside of us and therefore has been deeply received and acknowledged as something we are worthy of, we will reject it. You can be surrounded by people loving the heck out of you and still believe there is something wrong with you. It's really got nothing to do with whether someone else loves you or not.

Them loving you does not make you believe you are lovable. Them not loving you does not make you believe you are lovable. The only way to believe you are lovable is for YOU to believe it ABOUT YOURSELF, IN SPITE OF what anyone else believes or does. And this boils down to simply accepting that love is INSIDE you, it is present, and it's there because God is there, and God is love, and God is the ONLY SOURCE OF LOVE. "There is no love but God's". God IS the only source of love, you cannot get it anywhere else, it does not exist separate from you, and seeking for it externally is absolutely guaranteed to fail every time because it is NOT OUT THERE.

So we all go through this dynamic and to varying degrees, some of us accept God's love more than others. It's all about degrees of awareness of the presence of love within us, and therefore a WILLINGNESS to ACCEPT that it is there and that we are worthy of it. We ARE worthy of God's love, but even though we are worthy of it, we can still choose to deny it believe otherwise if we want to. In other words, love does not FORCE us to be loved.

Love does not enter where it is not welcome! And that means, love from other people CANNOT get into you if it is not welcome. And so in order to welcome and receive the love from others, you HAVE to be willing to have love be welcome WITHIN YOU FIRST, which means you then accept there is love within you ALREADY, are aware of it (God's Presence in your mind and heart), and therefore DO NOT NEED TO GET IT FROM ELSEWHERE.

Opening up to accept the atonement, which is the acknowledgement and recognition and acceptance and awareness of the CONSTANT LOVE being shared by God and your TOTAL WILLINGNESS to receive it and accept it as the truth about you, is the *ONLY SOLUTION* to this problem of love's absence.

And once this problem is solved, there is no further need to get love from anywhere else, no need to have people love you or not love you, no need to be special, no need for special attention, no neediness or attention-seeking or acting out or being a sexual slave or selling yourself out or abandoning yourself or people pleasing or vicious attempts to take "yourself" from those who supposedly stole YOU from you. Since you are love, you believe that if others have the love and are supposed to give it to you, you believe they are supposed to give YOU to you and therefore are responsible for making you what you are. And it doesn't work.

You ARE love. Accepting that you are love accepts the love is IN YOU and therefore there is no LACK and therefore no NEED to seek for it where it does not exist, and therefore you couldn't GIVE A SHIT what anyone thinks of you, whether they love you or hate you, it has absolutely no bearing on whether you are happy or not. YOU are responsible for choosing your happiness, no-one else is responsible for your happiness, and no-one else has any power to take it from you.

Getting your love from within/God gives you thus tremendous psychological strength and invulnerability and resilience and confidence and certainty and knowing, which cannot be swayed or affected by anything external. Having not GIVEN anything external the power to give TO you the love you are lacking, you also have not given anything external the power to deny your lovability on your behalf, and therefore you are NOT at the effect of the world. Accepting the atonement is the key to immortality.

Once you accept it from God, it's a done deal. Permanent love within you and flowing through you. Then it becomes more about you extending love to others through you so that you SHARE IN IT and thus experience it as having been received by you from God (to have all, give all to all), rather than trying to manipulate others into making this decision for you. Now that you are able to love IN SPITE OF whether other people are loving you back or not, that is unconditional love. To love others even if they hate your guts, are attacking you, are pushing you away, and want nothing to do with you. Even if they don't see you, or acknowledge you, or recognize you. To love them anyway. Teach only love because that is what you are.

God loves you right now 100%. Can you accept it? You already ARE it, whether you accept it or not.