I was thinking for a while that maybe certain people were inept. Maybe it was certain groups of people. Maybe it was medical people. And maybe it was the body. Maybe it was just some portion of things. But the more I look at it the more I realize that the ENTIRE WORLD, the whole SYSTEM of thought of this lower-order reality of spacetime, is fundamentally broken. It is an impossible system, based on laws of failure and lack and insufficiency.

The whole thing functions in a ridiculously faulty way. Every motion, every action, every doing, every impulse, causes a disruption and changes and side effects. You cannot do anything physical without it potentially leading to more problems. Everything you do to fix something gives rise to new problems. Every use of materials degrades the material. Every aspect of this entire cosmos is fundamentally stupid as fuck and ridiculously backwards.

The whole thing simultaneously gives one thing and takes away another, in a two-faced self-contradicting self-denying expression of incapability and limitation. Nothing in the world has any ability ever to truly do anything unconditionally or perfectly. There is no unlimited giving, no flawless correction, no ultimate solution, no perfect response, no clear answer, and no magical salvation.

There is literally no salvation in the world which produces a state of utter hopelessness. This is the stupidity of the world at large, and the whole thing is one big giant fuckup. There is no escape from it. The only way out of this hell is through transcendence and forgiveness, recognizing it is NOT REAL, and therefore thankfully there ARE no unsolvable problems. Such is the miracle's ability to reverse everything the world says can never be undone.

The world is an ILLUSION. An illusion that presents itself as being one thing when in fact it is its opposite. Everything it tries to do it does the opposite. Every way it helps it hurts. Every pleasure leads to pain. Every solution becomes broken. It cannot go towards God because everything if offers ALWAYS points towards death and destruction. Even its so-called "life" has death in it.

Contemplating this fact of the world's bullshittery made me laugh so much.

"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."

"It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give."

"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."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt."

"Perhaps there is a fear of failure and shame associated with a sense of inadequacy."

"As long as you perceive the body as your reality, so long will you perceive yourself as lonely and deprived. And so long will you also perceive yourself as a victim of sacrifice, justified in sacrificing others."

If there is some way that you are found, or find yourself to be, not equal, it will induce a sense of inadequacy. This is based on a perceive lack of value or worth. And this in turn will induce a feeling of shame and unworthiness.

Whatever is considered the ideal, or the optimum or best way to be, if you do not "measure up", or you are evaluated to be less than or lacking, this inadequacy will present shameful feelings. As if you are lacking something.

Ultimately if you look at the body, the body was made on purpose to limit you, confine you, define you as very restricted, with only a small handful of abilities. It can only move so fast, perform so good, look so attractive, etc. If you identify with a body, you fundamentally identify with being inadequate. Which produces automatic shame.

So anyone who has identified with a body is automatically grandfathered in to feeling a sense of shame and unworthiness. Because no body, no matter how great it seems to be, is free of limitations. And every body was made from the idea of imperfection and is inehrently inadequate.

It doesn't therefore matter how beautiful you make it look, how much muscle you build, how tall and hansom it is, how fair and lovely, it can never fully represent your perfection. It can never be "good enough". So if you think of it as your self, and you take personally anything about it, you are doomed to find yourself not good enough.No-one who believes they are a body can be satisfied with their "self image". Even those who believe their body is god-like and fantastic, must at some level suspect their flawed and limited nature. Any amount of body identification is going to condemn you as less than whole and less than perfect.

Sometimes also the things that bodies do, or the we use them for, fall far short of perfection. And that means that almost everything we do with them is prone to result in a judgement of inadequacy. It doesn't even matter if you try to be proud of it or pleased with it or amazed by its greatness, these are all forms of denial of the inherent limitation and lack that the body represents.

There is also a fear of failure that automatically must be present for anyone who considers themselves a body. Since it is recognized how limited you are, that you do not know how to do something, or be guaranteed to do it perfectly, it presents an inherent recognition that it WILL fail to some degree. And this induces fear. So the inadequate and the shameful are afraid of failure, knowing that they ARE a failure, having identified with failure.

The only way to transcend inadequacy and be fully released from shame, is to embrace your REAL perfection, which is your spirit. To be spirit identified is to overcome all limitation and thus all inability, insufficiency and incapability. There can be no grounds for shame in owning up to being immortal and divine.

"This perception places you in a position in which your problem solving must be inadequate, and failure must be inevitable. ""Being unable to love, the ego would be totally inadequate in Love's presence, for it could not respond at all. You would HAVE to abandon its guidance, for it would be quite apparent that it had not taught you the response pattern you NEED."

"But the means are tedious and very time consuming, for all of them LOOK TO THE FUTURE for release from a state of present unworthiness and inadequacy."

"God is the strength in which I trust. Now try to slip past all concerns related to your own sense of inadequacy."

"Perhaps there is a fear of failure and shame associated with a sense of inadequacy."

Perhaps worse than guilt, shame is self destructive and a form of self imprisonment. There is not much spoken of this in ACIM. But shame is very prevalent and heavy and harmful.

I looked up psychology definitions of how shame and guilt are different. A loose summary goes like this...

GUILT - A kind of internal judgement that you feel, based on what you did outside of yourself. Like attacking another person or breaking some moral or social code. It's not too far removed from remorse or regret, and somewhat "feels sorry for" the person. It to some degree recognizes that your behavior was wrong but it doesn't condemn your entire self.

SHAME - A kind of external judgement upon your entire inner self, based on what seems to be true of you. This can be based on something you did that you're guilty of, or just on some condition that you have. It can be based on your body's state or life situation or relationship status or whatever.

It's a condemnation that you are not deserving of love, you're lacking, deficient, inadequate, not good enough, weak, decrepit, insufficient, inferior, bad, sinful, evil, unlovable. Somehow that your SELF is fundamentally judged as "of lesser or no value". That you are not equal to others, you're beneath them.

When you apply shame to yourself, it's like a form of self punishment and imprisonment. ACIM does say that when you attack in any way, it induces guilt. But what it doesn't go into is that once you've found yourself to be guilty, you now decide that BECAUSE OF your guilt, you do not deserve forgiveness. To be found guilty is to sin and NOT forgive it. Having found yourself guilty, you've decided you are UNFORGIVABLE. And that also means you should not be loved, you are unworthy, and you should be ashamed. That you should feel deeply bad about yourself as if you've "become a permanent sinner".

Feeling ashamed is feeling really bad about who you are, as if you are inherently flawed. It causes you to withdraw and separate and hide and shrivel up. It's a disempowered state. Shame can also be fairly closely tied to embarassment. E.g. if you get pulled over by the cops for speeding for you might feel guilty for breaking the law, and then feel ashamed at having to "face the judgement" and be found guilty, for it to be proven that you were deficient and flawed. And if that's taking place in public with a crowd watching, you're going to feel shameful.

Shame is very self destructive. It's one thing to feel guilty, and the course talks a lot about guilt. But once you've found yourself guilty, you start to punish yourself. You agree you do not deserve forgiveness, which relegates you to being some kind of inferior creature. Something that does not DESERVE to be treated well. Like some caged animal that has no rights.

Because surely there is something inherently WRONG with you, that you did this. And this puts a major dent in your sense of worthiness. You feel unworthy of love and forgiveness. You feel unworthy of happiness. You feel unworthy of having relationships. You feel unworthy of existing, because you're not valuable enough to "qualify".

Within that state, a person moves further towards suicide. It's like they are bringing a ton of bricks down upon their own head. It's self condemnation. A desire to hurt and destroy oneself. And it's rooted in this belief that you don't deserve to live or be happy, therefore you deserve to DIE and be unhappy. And if death were to come to punish you, you'd practically welcome it, unwilling to choose against it, because you yourself think it would be justified, based on your self loathing.

You can become ashamed even just through simple mistakes. You can mistakenly accidentally hurt someone. And then you might feel ashamed of yourself that you were so incapable of avoiding it that there must be something wrong with you. You can also take on shame through public judgement by others, peer pressure, social pressures and so on.

You can feel ashamed from not fitting in, being different, looking and moving differently, not matching up to some kind of ideal standard. Shame is always a discrepancy between what you are "meant" to be like ideally, and what you are actually like (due to ego). You can feel ashamed for having an uncommon trait or body shape or being "too this" or "not enough of that." Not measuring up. Shame evaluates that you are simply LACKING, which places you below everyone else in the pits of hell.

Feeling ashamed makes you feel like you are some kind of lesser creature. That you don't have the same rights as others. That you can be used and stepped upon and mistreated, and you have no right to stand up to it. It's welcomed as though you think you deserve it, like you're this hideous unlovable ugly wart of inhumanity that everyone hates. And because you then believe you do not deserve love or respect or freedom, your only seeming remaining option is to seek out distorted forms of affection and attention - little conditional scraps here and there, from those who typically want highly special relationships and to take from you. Which feeds right into becoming a martyr, a slave, a victim and a punching bag for others.

Perhaps the worst part about shame is that it's really an attempt to destroy your very self, and your identity. To de-value and de-humanize you. It strips you of your freedom, your rights, your validity, your sacredness. It labels you and puts you in a box. It cuts you down and diminishes you and stomps all over your dignity.

It puts you out of touch with who you really are. It's a major loss of power and a state of weakness and fear. It makes you live in a little darkened cage like an animal, with no friends and no allies. It puts you into isolation, separates you off, portrays you as worth nothing, and seeks your destruction. Shame is like being eaten alive from the inside out.

When you have shame, therefore... through "secret sins", this HAS to be healed. You have to find forgiveness. And you have to find a way to regain your "self worth" - to recognize your value. You have to get your power back and become able to stand up to those who might try to diminish your light or limit you. In particular you have to find a way to forgive YOURSELF, in order to approach a sense of being valuable to God, to regain acceptance of your innocence.

In shame, it will always seem like everyone else has power over you, that you are not good enough, strong enough, capable enough, powerful enough, smart enough, creative enough, good enough, loveable enough etc.... just not enough... for anything or anyone. And this will make you feel limited and like a constant failure.

You'll avoid doing things because you believe you'll fail at it because you're already a failure. You'll fear the judgement and rejection and punishment of what you think is others, for an inevitable insufficiency and heaps of mistakes that you are destined to make, because you believe you are fundamentally flawed. And this will turn you away from expressing and creating and playing and enjoying simply on the basis that it threatens to expose you. It threatens to put you in the spotlight in the arena where you are much more likely to be called out for being unworthy.

The only way though that this can seem to affect you is by you yourself agreeing to it. Which means its your own harsh judgement of yourself that you have to get past. It's really not other people holding you down or making you inferior, it's you. It's your decision that you are unworthy because of your guilt. That has to go, so that you're not constantly second-guessing everything you do. You cannot feel confident about anything while you're riddled with self-sacrificing martyrdom and making yourself small and playing the part of weak and helpless.

Then you'll find that what was really holding you back was YOUR shame, which you imposed upon yourself. And it wasn't really that other people were keeping you locked in a tiny corner of the world, but your own unwillingness to be seen, to be heard, to stand up, to own yourself, to be authentically you, or to stand firm in the face of un-called-for criticism. You have to grow in your strength and power and your imperviousness to judgement.

Ultimately the fact is that all mistakes are forgivable, everyone is worthy to God, no-one ever needs to feel guilty or ashamed, and everyone is loveable. Whatever you did that you feel so bad about, that you're dragging along the ground like a ball and chain around your ankle, you don't deserve that. And because you don't deserve punishment, you don't deserve to die. And that means you deserve to live and resurrect and enjoy your life. You deserve freedom and power and health and joy and relationships.

Below are some of the very brief things ACIM says about shame...

"Perhaps there is a fear of failure and shame associated with a sense of inadequacy."

"The seeds of sickness and the shame of guilt He cannot bridge,..."

"For specialness is triumph, and its victory is his defeat and shame. 9 How can he live, with all your sins upon him?"

"Let not some dreams be more acceptable, reserving shame and secrecy for others."