You do not need to find the power to rise up against a seemingly mighty external power.
That external power is YOUR power. It's your own power that you have temporarily displaced into the hands of someone else.
You want that other person or group to hold onto your power for you, so that you can disown it.
This makes you think 'they' have power over you, since now you are left with like 10% power to their apparent 90% power. So now you see yourself as a vulnerable victim. And in that victimhood you will experience it as though.... I don't like how these other people have power.
But that's a fucking lie.
You want them to have the power because its YOUR power and you do not want to take YOUR power back from them.
And if you were to take back the 90% of YOUR power that you handed over to them, how much power would they be left with to hold over you?
ZERO!
So you do not need to find the courage to rise up and be like some kind of super opponent to a powerful enemy. You do not need to become some kind of dragon slayer or wage a massive war against a power that is completely fixed in the hands of others.
The war is YOU against YOURSELF.
You play them off as having power over you so that you can create a disguise, whereby it SEEMS like they conveniently have taken it from you against your will, and it can SEEM like you don't have any left. Oh, poor you, weak and powerless. Well, .... you are PLAY ACTING at being weak and powerless, when all the while you are fricking invincible.
So take YOUR power back. Take it back out of the hands of the people you have put it into, and recognize therefore that it was never THEIR power that you were afraid of, it was YOUR power that you were afraid of. You were afraid of it because in order TO put it into the hands of someone else, you have to use FEAR, which is a device for disownership and the illusion of rejection and is the greatest cover-up deceptive lie of all time. Fear makes it look like you are not having ANYTHING AT ALL to do with why your power has been displaced into someone else's hands, when in fact it is precisely this fear that GIVES it to them.
Take it back. Its yours. Own it. Be yourself. THEN.... who is out there with power over you? Who has power over the Son of God who knows that he is all powerful?
"I am not weak but strong". "I am not afraid but all powerful" - ACIM
So now instead of being a powerful opponent, or an equal power in a war, or rising up in protest and conflict with other people's apparent power, now in your empowerment you are invulnerable because THERE IS NO OTHER POWER OUT THERE.
You have the power. YOU are the one. And the ego has no power when you do not GIVE it any. And when you take back your power, you will have to stop being a victim and stop being afraid, and HAVING your power back will do that for you. You don't need to be super brave or courageous. You just need to own up to the fact that all the stuff outside of you that you are afraid of, ITS YOURS. Reclaim it and the fear device has no further purpose of separation and it must disappear. And you must be empowered.
And here is the climax.
Those who are empowered have no enemies.
Those who are empowered are invulnerable.
Those who are empowered are immortal.
Just as being forgiving ensures there is nothing to forgive, just as being awake ensures there is no reason to fall asleep, and just as being loving ensures there is nothing unloveable, so too does being empowered ensure there is nothing that you need to have power OVER because ALL of the power is yours.
If there were some power left out there that is not yours, you would still have enemies. There is ZERO power out there that is not yours. You share ALL POWER WITH GOD.
This is why.... Jesus says repeatedly...... FEAR NOT. You have nothing to fear because only love is real. If you choose to fear, you will STOP being powerful and lose your power. Don't do that.
Be all powerful.
Fear is a psychological tool which you use to put yourself into the role of victim, where you then see yourself as being affected by something separate from you.
You are powerful, strong, confident, certain, loving, aware, filled with truth.
However, when you disown these properties, you do so by creating a split in your mind. You use separation to try to separate yourself from these properties, to disown and push them away, and you literally give them TO something separate from you.
So you take all your power, all your certainty, all your inherent love, and you separate it from yourself and push it outwards onto someone else.
This now means that in your perception, you see yourself as lacking confidence, lacking power, lacking certainty, and that will be experienced as "being afraid". It is a state of powerlessness and weakness and a vulnerability to be affected by a power greater than what you seem to possess.
You seem to them possess less power than what is outside of yourself, because you have displaced your own power out there and see yourself as having "less". Therefore those outside of you seem to have "more".
It will seem then that you are afraid because those outside of you have more power than yourself, ie have power over you, and are capable of causing you or affected you in some way. They seem to have control over you, able to decide against your will what you will be or experience. And that's frightening. But it's not the cause of the fear. It's just how the fear is experienced once it's put in place.
Fear is always an act of deliberately disowning yourself and giving yourself away, which RESULTS IN you perceiving that what you've given away is now outside of yourself in someone else's hands. It then seems frightening that they can use this power against you, which creates this whole victimhood story about what they're doing "to you" and why you don't have the power to stop them. But that's a cover-up for the fact that you are using fear IN ORDER TO see them as victimizing you.
That power which you perceive as being in them and not in you, is your own power, which you have disowned. You've tried to set up other people as more powerful than you so that you can appear weak and afraid and in threat of attack. To choose to be afraid is to deliberately position yourself a a victim and to see yourself as in danger of dying. It is a choice to try to bring about your own death. That it seems later as though someone else is going to "cause" this death for you, is a total cover-up lie which you orchestrate in order to make it seem like YOU are not the one choosing it.
Death is an attempt to relinquish the power and ability to choose, to cover up the power of choice, to disown everything about yourself and to allow the external separate imaginary source of power to decide FOR you what is going to happen TO you. But all along this fearful CHOICE is still a choice. It just looks like it's a loss of choice or of having no choice at all.
If you are afraid, you absolutely DO have a choice and you absolutely ARE using your choice, in a mis-creative and self-destructive way. To be afraid does not call for pity. It calls for you to get honest and reclaim responsibility for the power that you keep trying to make out that others are taking from you against your will. It's YOUR power that YOU have GIVEN to them BY your will! You need to take it back.
You only experience fear when you have disowned yourself and are being irresponsible for who and what you are - when you are unwilling to fulfill the FUNCTION that God has given you to represent Him and to extend love and power. When you try to give this function away, other people will seem to wield this function over you against your will. Or in other words, when you attempt to not want to fulfill this function, this function will seem to fulfill itself in opposition to you, because you are in opposition to it.
To escape from fear will NEVER be successful so long as you continue to believe your own lie, that the power you're afraid of belongs to everyone other than YOU. That the power you see in someone else is not your own power. If the power you see projected onto others is not your own, and it has power over you, then you will believe it is inherent to them and that it is real or true that they own it. They have not stolen it, you've given it to them.
Having made this seem real to yourself, which means you trust it (fear is trusting the ego), you will think that the only way to be safe in the face of something scary is to become "just as scary" or intimidating or have some sense of fake power or aggression or anger, in order to go up against this formidable foe to overpower them. It thus becomes a fight against a fictional enemy. The suggestion to stand up for yourself or to assert yourself then becomes a really frightening challenge, because it means being at WAR.
Confrontations with real-seeming enemies are not really solutions to the problem. Sometimes this seems to be the only thing you can do to stop them from attacking you, but this is according to the ego's rules. The only reason a so-called "attacker" is showing up in your life is to show you that you keep giving your power away and that you've put your own power outside of yourself. The challenge is not to make the enemy real and fight with them to "win", but to recognize that the power that you think is in them is YOUR OWN, to own it, take it back, be responsible for it, and thus return to a state of certainty and a stillness of confidence, a clarity about your power which makes you unmoved and unmovable, and a clarity in which you realize it was YOU that you have made into an enemy.
You don't need to fight an opponent to gain equal power. You need to realize it's your own power and reclaim it, to stop perceiving yourself as a victim, to stop using fear to project "cause" (really blame for causing sin) onto others, and to therefore become invulnerable. There is no need for the invulnerable to defend themselves or to fight or be at war. They are immovable, unchangeable, invulnerable, and cannot be attacked. That's what you really need to get to. And that means stopping putting yourself into the psychological perceptive mode of seeing yourself disempowered while others seem to be more powerful.
Ultimately you are doing this to yourself because it is a part of your own mind which you are up against, it's a part of your own power that you're threatened by, and it's a part of your own Self that seems separate from you and having a will of its own. This is all happening inside your own mind and has nothing to do with anyone else out there. There is no-one else out there. This fear is all just your own self-attack. Fear is a defense against the truth. Fear is denial. And no-one who is afraid is "innocent" of causing things to go wrong. It's all chosen on purpose.
"Be not afraid", Jesus would say... not because there is a real reason to be afraid, but because being afraid isn't becoming of you - it's a choice to be weak when you could be powerful, and it's not your best move. It works against yourself and is a way of you hurting yourself. You don't need it.
When you be afraid of something, you are attempting to increase a sense of separation between you and something. You hope that if you can separate yourself from it more, you will feel safer.
It doesn't work. It is the opposite.
The more you try to resist or push away or separate from what you think is the thing you do not want, the more intense it will become, the more threatening it will appear, and the more you will be magnetized to it.
It is as though, as you pull away from it, using a psychological 'force' of withdrawal, you simultaneously create a great 'pull' of equal and opposite effect, which draws that very scary thing to you.
Perhaps you've had a dream, where in the dream you are afraid and are running away from someone who is chasing you. It seems that the more you fight to get away, the more versatile they become at closing in on you. Eventually, however, you might find (if you chose well) that you surrender the fight, and you stop running. What happens when you stop running? The person stops chasing. And not only do they stop chasing, but they stop seeming like they even wanted to catch up to you, and they don't even attack you. How about that? This is the mind symbolizing what is happening in the psyche when you become afraid - what you resist persists, until you stop resisting and then it literally becomes your friend instead of your enemy.
It is hilarious that, therefore, the very thing you are trying to get rid of, you are intensely CAUSING to come after you. The very thing you try to separate yourself from, tries to come closer to you. The very thing you don't want, seems to show up even more as though you want it very much. This is the simple functioning of the mind. You are literally creating your own enemies because intensifying the sense of separation between you and your enemy simultaneously renders them appearing to be an even stronger enemy.
Surrender is the antidote of fear, whereby you stop fighting with yourself and give up the pursuit of freedom from enemies, which causes you to be free from enemies. A paradox it seems, but this is how the mind works. Stop fighting and your enemies stop fighting you back. Stop attacking and your enemies stop being attackers. Stop fearing and things stop seeming so fear-inducing.
Stop.
Can I ACTUALLY do anything to change this outcome/situation whatsoever?
If the answer is NO: surrender and accept what is.
If the answer is YES: surrender to Holy Spirit and let Him inspire you what action to take.
Either way surrender brings peace of mind. Letting go of control.
Is there actually anything you can really do to change [xyz problem] right now? And be honest about it. Usually the answer is no. If you can't change it, then why have any upset about it? Why fret or worry about it? Why even get into a STORY about it? Why even try to wrestle with it, resist it, fight it, be angry about it? None of that will change it, right? So it is actually FUTILE. Why bother spending your energy doing what is completely futile? Your energy is better spent in what is productive and constructive and possible.
Otherwise you are fighting with impossibility, and you will lose.
Surrender.
This is somewhat the basis of the AA idea "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the power to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
You need *discernment* in order to be able to tell if you can REALLY do anything at all to change matters. Discernment requires Holy Spirit's thought system, because you need to decide based on TRUE or FALSE, rather than right/wrong/good/bad/happy/sad etc. And thus you need a lot of HONESTY and willingness to admit the truth.
So discern. Is it true that you can change this? If not, then you might as well just surrender and accept it. There is much more peace to be had there. Then join with Holy Spirit for inspiration and guidance and proceed from there. Fighting an impossible fight is a complete waste of time.
I suppose this is also in line with what Eckhart Tolle suggested (and others) ... 'resist nothing' or as the Borg in Star Trek say, "resistance is futile".
Although God's kingdom is a state of changelessness and permanence, THIS world isn't. This world is a world of shifts and changes, transformations, beginnings and endings. Nothing here remains the same whatsoever.
In and of itself this wouldn't be a problem if we would LET IT CHANGE. If we would not fight against, resist, or try to control its fundamental changing nature. If we would not hold onto its states and conditions, not want it to be a certain way, not prefer even that it stay in a certain configuration, we would be better off. But to do this we would have to let the entire world go and be attached to nothing.
The world has to be allowed to change because that's all it CAN DO. And it will be a bit of a rude awakening to say this, but, regardless of what you WANT, you WILL NOT be able to stop it changing. And everything that came will go, and everything that arrived will leave, and everything that was born will die.
This is the nature of illusions, of unreality, or dreams. They are not permanent, they are not immortal, they are not eternal. They canont stay the same. They depend on relativity and differences. They have to constantly fluctuate and move and change form in order to seem to exist at all. There is no stillness, no peace, no rest, no constancy of any kind in spacetime.
In order to recognize this and allow the world to be like this, it means you have to stay entirely in the present moment, in which you resist nothing and have no issue whatsoever about how anything else. No resistance against what arrives, no holding on to what is leaving. And that would be enlightenment.
The problem we have is that we tend to live in a way that assumes things can NOT CHANGE. We form relationships, we build houses and cities, we spend time accumulating, we become attached, we develop favorites, we form emotional bonds, we cling to treasures. All of this is an attempt really to DENY that the world IS going to change, to dream a little while that we can find a way to make the world stay the way we want it.
Most of our urges to do something in the world are based on a drive to try to make it permanent in some way. We build the house we want to live in and decorate it and fill it with objects hoping to make a home that will last. We work on relationships and deepening bonds and falling in love with bodies in the hope that they will always be there. But inevitably it all comes tumbling down because the harsh truth is that the world MUST change, and it will.
"It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."
The suffering we experience is the direct result of attempting to CONTROL THE CHANGE. To resist it, to deny that the world has a fundamental nature of change, and attempting to keep things how we want them. Every time that we become invested in NEEDING or WANTING something to stay a certain way, we are going to suffer. Because it IS going to change, and then we are going to be unhappy because we've come to depend on it being that way.
We develop expectations that things will stay how we want them. And then our expectations are dashed and smashed. We set the world up to CAUSE US, to give us what we think we want in a certain specific form that we agreed to. And then it changes, and it fails to give, and then we are left hanging.
When there is a disconnect, a gap, a distance of spacetime, a contrast, between how the world IS NOW in its present configuration, and how we WANT it to be, that contrast is LOSS. It is discord and tension and stress and war. The ego says "I want it thus!", and the world just repeatedly says "no". And so the world moves on and you stay in the past, clinging to what once was, hoping it will continue, hoping it will return, and it never does.
"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."
As such, the world disappoints you over and over again WHEN you are expecting it to be a certain way that you prefer. It can't satisfy your wishes. It can't give you what you want. You can manipulate it and control it and manage it and rearrange it to try to fend off change (death), to try to keep an illusion that it is going to stay the same. You can repaint the walls and repair the rotten wood and redo the garden but again and again the onslaught of time - which is change and death - will keep happening.
The degree to which you have strings attached, psychological investment in, and desire to KEEP the things of the world, to that degree you will suffer when it ignores your wishes and changes anyway. Because it can't help it. You hold onto possessions, places, things, relationships, people, bodies. You resist them changing, you don't want to lose them, you fear loss, you try to preserve bodies for as long as possible, and maybe you don't even conceive of your favorite things coming to an end at some point. But they will.
This is not to be morbid. The world is a dream of death and it can't help but keep recycling itself. It transforms from birth to death and back to birth again. It is utterly incapable of staying the same forever. Expecting that it can and trying to live as though it can will make you suffer.
When something changes "against your will", and you cling to how it was, and live in the past, and don't want to accept the change, you will experience loss and despair. In order to "move on" from the perceived loss and stop perceiving it as a loss, you have to let go of CONTROL, and of wanting things to be how you want them. That means, to move on, is to move WITH the change and let it happen, accepting that change HAS occurred and surrendering to the fact that you can do nothing to stop it.
In a way that seems like beign powerless and a victim, in that you have to accept the change and LET IT change. To let go is to let go of the resistance against change, to admit it has changed, and to stop fighting against it. When you fight change you fight the world. When you fight the world you are also fighting reality and moving away from the present. The only way to live, is to live in the present and go with the flow of whatever happens with no resistance to it.
That means letting go of all your wishes, all your wants and desires and needs, all your dependencies, reclaiming all the power you gave to wordly things to affect you how you preferred, letting all bodies go, letting people come and go, surrendering control and allowing whatever happens. Ultimately you can only fully do that in the present, in the holy instant, in the eternal now. And it means relinquishing all attachmen to everything you value here, because the world holds NOTHING that you want.
It's in the present that you really transcend change, and become changeless, as you observe changes come and go without resistance. It's in the present that you find peace, and God, and love, and become open to what is. It's in the present that you gain "reality contact". And it's in the present that you find freedom from suffering. Dropping the "unreasonable expectation" that the world can be something it can never be, sets you free. Accepting how it is NOW, is the only way.
"Whenever we move from one instant to the next, the previous one no longer exists."
"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."
"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it into another world."
"Simply do this: Be still and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false or good or bad; of every thought it judges worthy and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God."
The ego does not exist. It cannot be loved or embraced. It cannot be turned into a friend. It cannot wake up or heal or convert into something spiritual. It is nothing but an artificial idea of impossibility, and as such is impossible. It does not exist, cannot exist, and has no reality. To have a relationship with it is it attempting to have a relationship with itself.
Light dispels darkness. Ego is darkness. Love is light. If you shine your love in the direction of the ego darkness, it simply will disappear, because it does not exist as anything other than the illusion of the absence of love, which is impossible. It's not there. Shadows are not truth, light is truth. And darkness cannot hide the light. You cannot "love your ego" without your love disappearing it.
While it may be a stepping stone to learn not to fight with the ego, since that is the ego fighting itself, and to not resist it, and to not attack the body, and to undo all basis for ego thinking and reactions "to" the ego, this is only so that the ego itself is undone. The ego is already undone, we just are hallucinating that it exists at all. It never existed to begin with.
Eventually we have to look within and be willing to see that not only is there no sin, there is no ego either. There IS no central core of isolation. As the clouds which promised to conceal an underlying artificial identity clear, you discover that there is nothing there. It was not what you expected. There is no ego to go up against or even to really undo. Enlightenment is a recognition and not a change at all.
Holy Spirit knows that the ego does not exist and this does this forgiveness teach:
"T-9.IV.5. Forgiveness that is learned of me does not use fear to undo fear."
(do not use fearfulness or making illusions real in an attempt to relate to or deal with or undo or address the ego at all)
"2 Nor does it make real the unreal and then destroy it."
(do not make the ego a real thing and then attempt to have a relationship with it or deal with it or change it or do anything really about it directly)
"3 Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus keeping it unreal for you."
(True forgiveness is fore-giveness, it gives ahead of time. That means, it looks WITH a forgiving attitude, IN ORDER TO ENSURE that it is not mistaken, so that it does not MAKE error or ego, so that there IS no ego or error to have to undo. Only when forgiveness fails do we enter judgement - he who would not forgive must judge - which makes the ego, and so if we simply remain fore-giving the ego does not come into manifestation at all.)
"4 Do not let any belief in its realness enter your mind, or you will also believe that you must undo what you have made in order to be forgiven."
(Pretty straightforward isn't it? If you make the ego real in any way then you will start to fight with it and believe that you have work to do or stuff to fix or whatever, and doing so you will be stuck.)
"5 What has no effect does not exist, and to the Holy Spirit the effects of error are nonexistent."
(Error does not exist because true forgiveness fore-gives, failing to make errors or perceive erroneously, and therefore RECOGNIZES that there IS no error, therefore there is no ego.)
"6 By steadily and consistently cancelling out all its effects, everywhere and in all respects, He teaches that the ego does not exist and proves it."
(There is no ego, period. Believing there is an ego, is an attempt to make an ego real, which is impossible. Ego is fiction. It's just a useful concept for teaching that it does not exist, and nothing else.)
Yet the ideal outcome is rarely achieved. But psychotherapy begins with the realization that healing is of the mind, and in psychotherapy those have come together who believe this. It may be they will not get much further, for no-one learns beyond his own readiness. Yet levels of readiness change, and when therapist or patient has reached the next one, there will be a relationship held out to them that meets the changing need. Perhaps they will come together again and advance in the same relationship, making it holier. Or perhaps each of them will enter into another commitment. Be assured of this; each will progress. Retrogression is temporary. The overall direction is one of progress toward the truth.
Psychotherapy itself cannot be creative. This is one of the errors which the ego fosters; that it is capable of true change, and therefore of true creativity. When we speak of "the saving illusion" or "the final dream," this is not what we mean, but here is the ego's last defense. "Resistance" is its way of looking at things; its interpretation of "progress" and "growth." These interpretations will be wrong of necessity, because they are delusional. The "changes" the ego seeks to make are not really changes. They are but deeper shadows, or perhaps different cloud patterns. Yet what is made of nothingness cannot be called new or different. Illusions are illusions; truth is truth.
Resistance as defined here can be characteristic of a therapist as well as of a patient. Either way, it sets a limit on psychotherapy because it restricts its aims. Nor can the Holy Spirit fight against the intrusions of the ego on the therapeutic process. But He will wait, and His patience is infinite. His goal is wholly undivided always. Whatever resolutions patient and therapist reach in connection with their own divergent goals, they cannot become completely reconciled as one until they join with His. Only then is all conflict over, for only then can there be certainty.
Ideally, psychotherapy is a series of holy encounters in which brothers meet to bless each other and to receive the peace of God. And this will one day come to pass for every "patient" on the face of this earth, for who except a patient could possibly have come here? The therapist is only a somewhat more specialized Teacher of God. He learns through teaching, and the more advanced he is the more he teaches and the more he learns. But whatever stage he is in, there are patients who need him just that way. They cannot take more than he can give for now. Yet they both will find sanity at last.
To experience peace, there must be no conflict. It's just not just some state where you can still be ego and expect to have peace happen to you. Peace is the absence of war and attack. Just as love is a lack of sin. You have to be done waging war if you want to be peaceful.
If attack and war are the battleground, then to be above the battleground is to be outside of the war, in a state of peace, in which you are not warring or attacking in any way.
Beyond the war, above the battle, away from the conflict, the peaceful self that is you is not within the fight. It is not the fighter or the soldier or the defender. It is out of reach of attack because it does not attack.
And so peace is your safety because it removes you from the realm of war. And now you are far away from the war zone, untouchable and undisturbed. Peace transcends war, and is your only escape.
"Yet when peace is found, the war is meaningless. And it is conflict now that is perceived as non-existent and unreal." UrM21A3
"A tranquil mind is not a little gift. Would you not rather live than choose to die?" UrM21A4
"Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war DOES deprive you of peace." UrT8A3
"The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It CANNOT come where there is conflict, for a mind at war against itself remembers not Eternal Gentleness. The means of war are NOT the means of peace. And what the warlike would remember is NOT love." UrT23B1
"Peace looking on itself EXTENDS itself. War is the condition in which fear is born, and grows and seeks to dominate. Peace is the state where love abides, and seeks to share itself. Conflict and peace are opposites; where one abides, the other CANNOT be; where either goes, the other disappears." UrT23B12
"In peace he needed nothing, and asked for nothing. In war he DEMANDED everything, and FOUND nothing." UrT12C12
"The holy instant is the miracle's abiding-place. From there, each one is born into this world, as witness to a state of mind which has TRANSCENDED conflict, and has reached to peace. It carries comfort from the place of peace into the battleground, and DEMONSTRATES that war has no effects." UrT27F3
"How strange indeed becomes this war against Yourself! You will believe that EVERYTHING you use for sin can hurt you, AND BECOME YOUR ENEMY. And you will fight AGAINST it, and try to weaken it, BECAUSE of this." UrT23A2
"Yet peace is stronger than war, because it heals. War is DIVISION, not increase. No-one gains from strife." UrT5D6
"What COULD you choose between, but life or death, waking or sleeping, war or peace, your dream or your reality?" UrT27H10
"Healing will flash across your open mind as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings." UrW136L16
In every conflict, it is not one side or another who is right or wins.
They are BOTH losers.
The only one winning is the ego.
If you knew that the ego has a secret agenda to pit you against others and make you become SEPARATE, you would realize there are no real grounds for conflict.
You would not argue with your enemy if you knew that that other person is not really the enemy in the situation. The enemy is the EGO, which wants you both to be fighting, and wants you both to separate.
It has pitted you against each other, because it believes in self attack. It doesn't care who wins. It knows that if you argue and fight, NEITHER of you will be at peace. You both lose.
It doesn't even matter if you think you have won or you are the one who is right. You still lose, because those beliefs are still a belief in attack and that attack will be enacted on you, BY you. Your belief in victory is a belief in your own defeat.
Would you be so quick to hate another person if you knew there was always a third party involved in the argument? How about if you knew that there was this secret ego lurking in the background always plotting for you to be separated from everyone else. And that it has this plan for both you AND that person that you dislike.
It wants both of you to be at war so that IT wins.
If you unite with your brother and recognize the COMMON ENEMY, which is the ego thought system - an idea of being SEPARATE from each other, you would not play the ego's game.
Each fight and argument you fall for the same ego trap and the same ILLUSION that it is possible to defeat another without hurting yourself. You both lose.
Only with what ACIM calls "shared interests" can there be a truly holy instant where you both agree to and recognize that you are on the same side, because you believe in the ONE TRUTH of God.
Only in the light of God's truth is it revealed that the ego's agenda is for you to be at war with this other person and they with you, and it doesn't care who wins just so long as you are fighting. It is an instigator of conflict.
Only when both of you recognize the ploy and the plot and the scheme which is underway to DESTROY YOU BOTH, might you recognize your shared interest of siding WITH each other and saying NO to the ego, instead of saying no to each other.
Then you unite in strength, you defy the ego, you reject conflict, you choose to surrender to peace, you accept each other with love, you support each other, you stop the war, and you completely disable the ego's only weapon - separation.
Come together in this vision of forgiveness. Be reunited with yourself.
If God created you perfect, and you cannot change because you are permanent, then what the heck are you doing trying to change yourself?
Ultimately, being able to accept the truth about you is all that is asked of you. And that means, surrendering everything else that you're trying to do to define yourself or be different from how God intended.
God is the one who created you, and He is the one who knows your 'natural', Real Self. And you cannot change that. I repeat, you cannot change that. It is permanent.
So really what we're doing is we are fighting with reality, a reality that we cannot change. And yet we keep trying to change it. And we believe we already changed it.
The only way we're going to be able to accept the truth, is to completely surrender everything else we're doing to avoid the truth, and that actually includes being a 'seeker', and attempting to 'grow', and trying to become something you are not already in truth.
So really, if you can't change the FIXED reality that God has put in place for you, you only really have two options. Either you fully accept it and just settle into it and give up trying to fight it (and be tremendously happy and at peace), or you fight against it (and be unhappy).
It would be sane of us to accept the truth of who we are. It is insane not to. Because to not accept it is an attempt to suggest reality/God can be changed, and this is impossible, and will never be accomplished. So to try to do that anyway, is completely futile and a ridiculous waste of effort.
But can we accept this? Can we completely just drop everything and accept what is true? Eventually at some point we're going to be to be willing to do this if we want to wake up to reality.
You may think there are things about yourself that are unacceptable. But think about that. What realm do those things live in? Do they live in the realm of reality and truth, in which you can ONLY be acceptable? Or do they live in a realm of unacceptability where there is only lies? So that means... everything about yourself that you cannot accept, is not true anyway. So its not true that you are unloveable. Its not true that you are flawed. Its not true you are imperfect.
And who would want to accept their imperfections? Imperfections are not real. Who would want to try to find peace by accepting separation from God, or death? You can't. But you can transcend these things with true acceptance, which means accepting the truth. And the truth is, you are immortal, and you've never changed.
So if you've never changed, then you are already as God would have you be (in your true self). So why not accept this already? This is why you ultimately need do nothing - provided you're not doing anything ELSE.