I am not weak, but strong.
I am not helpless, but all powerful.
I am not limited, but unlimited.
I am not doubtful, but certain.
I am not an illusion, but a reality.
I cannot see in darkness, but in light.
Let's continue...
I am not afraid, but confident.
I am not confused, but clear.
I am not lost, but found.
I am not false, but true.
I am not alone, but unified.
I am not separate, but one.
I am not lacking, but complete.
I am not guilty, but sinless.
I am not sinful, but innocent.
I am not in pain, but in health.
I am not deceived, but assured.
I am not deprived, but grateful.
I am not dead, but eternal.
I am not hopeless, but joyful.
I am not angry, but peaceful.
I am not worried, but reassured.
I am not forgetful, but aware.
I am not unconscious, but knowing.
I am not pressured, but free.
I am not tense, but relaxed.
I am not upset, but calm.
I am not hateful, but forgiving.
I am not hurt, but healed.
I am not harmful, but a blessing.
I am not ego, but Christ.
I am not a body, but immortal spirit.
I am not blameful, but welcoming.
I am not a liar, but truthful.
I am not pretentious, but honest.
I am not vengeful, but gifted.
I am not forgotten, but known.
I am not rejected, but loved.
I am not abandoned, but supported.
I am not evil, but pure.
I am not a dream, but God's Creation.
I am not a fantasy, but genuine.
I am not suffering, but a blessing.
I am not undone, but immortal.
I am not grieving, but reunited.
I am not lonely, but helped.
I am not sorrowful, but relieved.
I am not stressful, but blissful.
I am not in danger, but safe.
I am not hopeless, but saved.
I am not condemned, but forgiven.
I am not unloveable, but loving.
I am not unhappy, but joyous.
I am not depressed, but liberated.
I am not diminished, but enlightened.
I am not starving, but nourished.
I am not limited, but abundant.
I am not harsh, but gentle.
I am not cold, but heartfelt.
I am not fallen, but ascended.
I am not extinct, but omnipresent.
I am not troubled, but sane.
I am not a sinner, but a savior.
I am not ugly, but beautiful.
I am not without, but within.
I am not a reject, but chosen.
I am not meaningless, but meaningful.
Add one of your own...
"I am not weak, but strong.
I am not helpless, but all powerful.
I am not limited, but unlimited.
I am not doubtful, but certain.
I am not an illusion, but a reality.
I cannot see in darkness, but in light."
More...
I am not mortal but immortal.
I am not sick but healthy.
I am not dying but eternal.
I am not afraid but confident.
I am not a victim but empowered.
I am not guilty but innocent.
I am not sinful but holy.
I am not lost but united.
I am not alone but one.
I am not forgotten but remembered.
I am not upset but peaceful.
I am not unhappy but joyful.
I am not attacked but safe.
I am not hopeless but grateful.
I am not deprived but abundant.
I am not lacking but receiving.
I am not hurt but invulnerable.
I am not suffering but relieved.
I am not affected but causal.
I am not stuck but miraculous.
I am not imprisoned but free.
I am not angry but calm.
I am not condemned but forgiven.
I am not dark but light.
I am not separate but whole.
I am not an ego but as God created me.
I am not confused but clear.
I am not diseased but healed.
I am not broken but complete.
I am not isolated but expansive.
I am not asleep but awake.
I am not unconscious but aware.
I am not deadly but harmless.
I am not murderous but welcoming.
I am not a victimizer but truly helpful.
I am not misguided but directed.
I am not ugly but beautiful.
I am not depressed but happy.
I am not unwilling but willing.
I am not resistant but open.
I am not ill but well.
I am not damned but saved.
I am not in exile but in heaven.
I am not a body but spirit.
I am not a dream but God's creation.
I am not fictional but authentic.
I am not divided but undivided.
I am not adrift but purposeful.
I am not threatened but permanent.
I am not rejected but loved.
I am not abandoned but embraced.
I am not in hell but in God.
I am not offended but humored.
I am not suspicious but trusting.
I am not vicious but gentle.
I am not ashamed but appreciative.
I am not envious but fulfilled.
I am not idolizing but within.
I am not heroic but saved.
I am not horrified but passer-by.
I am not judging but forgiving.
I am not hateful but generous.
I am not resentful but thankful.
I am not in danger but protected.
I am not disgusting but acceptable.
I am not beyond help but supported.
I am not embarrassed but understood.
I am not grieving but reunited.
I am not controlled but powerful.
I am not terrified but strong.
I am not worried but filled with faith.
I am not dead but eternal life.
I am not lonely but home with God.
I am not sad but overjoyed.
I am not insane but sane.
I am not delusional but honest.
I am not empty but inspired.
I am not insecure but secure.
I am not anxious but reassured.
I am not cold but warm.
I am not tense but relaxed.
I am not disturbed but quiet.
I am not stressed but at ease.
I am not serious but playful.
I am not harsh but kind.
I am not weak but supernatural.
I am not in time but in eternity.
I am not separate but with God.
I don't just mean in some abstract way or as a concept. Actual love. Huge love. If you would experience God, it would feel like profound, heartfelt, meaningful, deep, real, relateable love, that feels so true and so genuine that nothing compares to it.
And God is in you and with you. And you are in that love and you are that love.
Here is our ONLY problem.
We've tried to deny that this love is there. We've tried to deny that this love is what you ARE.
Right now, unless you are like super awake to reality, you have no idea the profound immensity of unconditional love that is the experience of God. You've never felt anything like it ever in your entire life and cannot even imagine how powerful it is. It's hidden. It's covered up behind layers and layers of shit in your mind.
The shit in your mind is like a giant toilet filled with backed-up shit that's all swirling around and obstructing the awareness that everything is love. That love is present. You need to FLUSH. The shit is the ego. You've taken a huge shit all over yourself and you need to flush it.
The problem also is, that these so-called 'covers' in your mind, the blocks to awareness, make it SEEM LIKE they actually are capable of shutting out the light. This in itself is completely insane. It's like saying, darkness can make light go away. Like, somehow when darkness is present, it can act as a blanket and shut out the light and stop it from shining. Its completely ridiculous but this is exactly how we experience being on the OTHER SIDE of these blocks to awareness.
It's like being on THIS side of clouds... when its cloudy, it seems to block the sun, on this side of the clouds, even though on the other side of the clouds the sun is completely free to shine. When there is a seeming dark obstacle BETWEEN us and the light, it seems to block the light from the perspective of being IN the darkness looking for the light. If we were to be IN the light, looking at the darkness, we would DISPEL IT. We would recognize it does not exist because light shines away the darkness.
So really we've got all these blocks in our mind that are pretending to make it seem like light has GONE, it's left, God is dead, there's no value in God or any reason to want God. But it's not true, that's the illusion of it. God is NOT dead. The light has NOT been extinguished by the ego. The truth has not stopped. Who you really are has not been affected or changed. You are still as God created you and God still loves you completely.
So when the blocks are there, we think love is gone and all hope of finding it again is lost so we go off on a lonely journey trying to find it but hopelessly knowing that we never will. And we'll look everywhere for this salvation, in everything, and it's not there. And then eventually we'll realize, all the things that say you'll find the light in them, are not true. And that's a step toward going within. And then you'll have to look within and find all these things that are blocking the light. And gradually you'll question their motives also and learn they also are not true.
And then lo and behold the final joyous discovery... underneath all these layers of SHIT that you've gotten rid of and flushed... all the clearing out, all the letting go and surrendering of false hopes and ridiculous beliefs in fake needs, all the sense of lack and loss, underneath it is is STILL the intensely bright shining loving light of God, absolutely unchanged, absolutely unaffected by all your travels, and still loving you 100% unconditionally without requirements or needs.
ITS STILL THERE!
YOU'RE STILL THERE!
You are still the you that God created. You need but UNCOVER this in yourself. You don't need to ADD to yourself, or improve on yourself, or make yourself more of yourself. You're already complete, just in denial and hiding. Stop denying who you are. Stop denying God's presence. Accept the truth and be.
Think of yourself not as confined to a small body, but think of yourself as, in your natural state, being expansive and the size of the universe. You are omnipresent, you are everywhere and in all things. You share the entirety of existence with all other children of God. You overlap with everyone. You exist in the same space, share all of your being with other beings, and commune intimately in a state of oneness.
What happened to that self, which was a universe-sized fully sharing being, in the separation idea, is you attempted to withdraw from immersion in the whole, you confined yourself, you shrunk down, you limited yourself, you withdrew yourself from the communal experience, and so made yourself show up as an isolated body person.
You became small and little and weak and frail, fenced off from the rest, not wanting to share with anyone, wanting to have something special just to yourself, something exclusive, something that only you have, which makes you different and unique and selfish. Instead of being everywhere you decided to be somewhere, restricted in spacetime to a small tiny spot, around which you defend against the entire universe from entering.
This is what happened in the separation. This is how you took your pre-existing sharing self, and "made it separate". You separated it from its communal experience with other infinite beings, putting yourself in a corner and walling yourself in, in order to keep them out and you in. You did not want to share in them, and you didn't not want them to share in you. This was the purpose of the body idea, a separation device and a wall of flesh around the mind.
This produced what is termed "the separated self" which is a self who used to share with everyone, who now does not want to share at all. This imprisoned self, is still a real self, but has placed itself under limitations. And these limitations are made of illusions, which seem to now substitute for a sense of real, full self, making it seem as though you "made up a self" to replace the fullness of your soul. You made the body, and identified with and as it, in an attempt to isolate and exclude. This is all that happened in the separation. You just became selfish and special and different.
The restoration of your true nature simple entails the willingness to drop the walls, remove the isolation, transcend the body separation device, return to being the size of the universe, re-immerse yourself in creation, rejoin the community of the Sonship, and resume a state of perfectly unselfish sharing. The willingness to let others share you, as much as you share them. Restored to being your natural self as God created you, a self who is equal to all real brothers and who shares everything with everyone.
Once you can see what you were like BEFORE the separation - a limitless universal being who shares everything with every other limitless universal being - the family of God - you can easily contrast this against the position you now find yourself in, and realize that it was the attempt not to share that put yourself into this situation. Where you are now inside a body, everyone else is kept outside, you seem to inhabit it alone, and now no-one shares anything with you inside your little fence. Being kept apart and separated off and unwilling to join, is a lonely and isolating experience.
The walls of separation, the body itself, all physical matter, all illusions, the ego, body identification, forms, the world, all things little, every prison wall which keeps you from sharing and immersing yourself in communion with God and Sonship, which occurs only in Heaven, keeps you from being IN heaven, and keeps you imprisoned. This is why the body cannot contain you who are love, any more than God can enter a body or join you there. You must expand. You must become unlimited. You must return to being an eternal being who is everywhere and sharing with all other eternal beings in an unlimited, open and unselfish way.
"The ego is the idea of selfishness. The soul is the idea of self-fullness."
"Whenever you question your value, say, "God Himself is incomplete without me."
"God is incomplete without you, simply because His grandeur is total, and you cannot BE missing from it."
"YOU are the work of God, and His Work is wholly loveable and wholly loving. This is how a man MUST think of himself in his heart, because this is what he IS."
Worth, is really a question of value, but even moreso a question of whether something QUALIFIES or "deserves". It's also related to appropriateness. Is it right, that you be loved. So we're also talking about your "rights", or what you are entitled to. Which also relates to what you are allowed, or what is yours, or what belongs to you inherently.
When we form any idea of having sinned, believing in separation, we are actually saying that we no longer qualify. If we have become sinful or guilty, instead of innocent, we have kind of "dropped out" of the running. We've positioned ourselves as not worthy or not capable or not of a quality sufficiently high or appropriate enough to meet the "requirements". By changing the premise to "I'm sinful", the logical conclusion is that you are no longer worthy. And the only sense of unworthiness is a sense of sinfulness against God.
Those who are innocent do meet the requirements of heaven, and so are entitled to heaven. They are entitled to the inheritance of God, and everything belongs to them. But when they attack themselves, they undermine their authority or "permission to access" the benefits which correlate to innocence. By stepping out of innocence we step out of deserving the love of God. At least, we believe this is the case.
If you believe you have sinned, are criminal, are evil or guilty, have done something wrong, messed up, or failed in some way, you will regard yourself as a failure. This is a view of yourself as weak and frail, powerless, hopeless, lost, alone, valueless, incapable, ineffective, not deserving freedom or love, and generally feeling horrible about yourself.
Feeling "unworthy" is kind of a logical conclusion based on the supposed evidence of what you think you did, or what you failed to do. If you see yourself as innocent you see yourself as deserving all of heaven. If you see yourself as guilty you see yourself as deserving all of hell.
This ties in very strongly to the victim role. If you feel unworthy, you will feel deflated, defective, lacking, having nothing much to offer, having very low "value", having no rights and no freedoms. You will feel like a prisoner, as though everyone else gets to decide your fate, as if you have no say in your own life. You'll feel like a kind of slave, undeserving of having any of your needs met, yet feeling very much in need.
Impoverished and empty, you'll regard yourself as not worth being given any attention, or anything. You'll also be afraid all the time because you'll see the whole world as defining your fate on a whim. Secretly this is an attempt to project self-blame onto the world, believing it is blaming you. The world will now seem like it's taking everything away from you and having power over you, because that's what YOU are doing to yourself.
If your value is so low, you will regard yourself as having failed, and therefore as being a failure. If you are a failure, you will feel like there is no point in trying to do anything, because not only do you see yourself as very likely to fail, you'll believe you have already failed before you even begin. This will stop you from doing many things on the basis that you "can't", rooted in some belief that "no-one wants me." Secretly this is your belief that YOU don't want you, projected and reflected back at you.
Of course, being unworthy, you have to believe no-one loves you. That everyone is against you and can "use you" for whatever purposes they see fit, for their own gains, with no regard for yours. This of course is a state that also results from such things as abuse, violence, attack, sexual assault, trauma and so on.
It can leave you feeling helpless and powerless and very "low", like you don't mean anything and have no value. That, even in your own eyes, you don't deserve anything because you aren't worth anything. Like something to be discarded and thrown away which no-one wants. Of course this is how YOU feel about yourself, because it's really you who has decided you are worthless. But by asserting "you're not worth anything" to the world, it reflects back to you from the outside in. A projection of self-hate.
Clearly when you're in such a state, although it feels unfair, and imposed from outside of you, much more likely you are actually the one who has decided that you are unworthy. You have in some way depleted your own idea of your own value. And we're not so much talking here about self-esteem as we are about God-esteem.
The only real value is the value God has of you, regarding your true nature. And so really the only thing in your mind that you care about is whether or not you qualify or meet God's "standards". Whether you are worthy of his love. Whether you deserve forgiveness or punishment. If you believe you are a weak and miseable valueless sinner who isn't worth anything and should be punished and hurt, then you are trying to decide for God what God thinks of you.
You'll do this on the basis of what you think you did. ie, which sins you think you committed, the reasons why you are guilty, the faults and lacks and insufficiencies of your personality or body or mind. The various value systems you yourself have invented and then judged yourself harshly by. Systems which God doesn't even use, because he simply ALWAYS finds you worthy of him.
If you are feeling unworthy, it's really kind of a severe case of a pity party. It's self-inflicted, just as the secret of salvation says. It might seem like it was induced or enforced by someone outside of you but really you went along with it and believed it. You allowed it to affect you and decided to comply with it, because deep down something far worse than other people condemning you is YOU condemning yourself. Only you can hurt yourself so deeply. And it's really just a matter of a lack of self-love.
We have to own up to this because really it's not God who is thinking of you as a miserable sinner or a worthless piece of shit. It's you. It's your self-talk and your self-attack. It's your self-destructiveness. Which when you think about it is quite weird because there you are, feeling utterly shit about yourself, while simultaneously having the total freedom and power to choose to feel that way. And you must've made a wrong decision because you're not at peace.
Taking ownership of your decision to reject God's evaluation of you, and your attempt to overthrow his will, and to ignore his unconditional love, is the only way out of it. You have to be willing to see that you are the one who has decided that your value is extremely low. That you're so worthless you pretty much just deserve to die, because no-one would want you. But hey, even if it seems true that no-one DOES want you, that's their problem and not yours. And it has nothing to do with whether YOU want you.
While you may think well, I can't do this or that because I am a failure and no-one would want me or anything I do, it's really you telling yourself this. It's you not wanting what you do. It's you being hard on yourself. And you shouldn't even be giving other people power over you to decide for you whether you are worthy or not. It's none of their business. God is the only one in the privileged position to determine your real value, and he finds you to be permanently worthy forever. It's not even really up to you.
You can't therefore really obliterate your value or worth, or decide that you deserve to die against God's will. You can pretend to do this, and you can believe in it, but even underneath your utter self-hate there is total self-love. You can't change what is really true of you, no matter how hard you try to destroy yourself. God has guaranteed your sinlessness forever. Your value is inestimable and infinite. And you are worthy and qualify for everything he has to offer. You qualified in your creation!
So if you're feeling low, down, bad about yourself, unworthy, not good enough, undeserving, a failure, weak, powerless, barely worth wiping a shoe on, recognize that this can't be true of you. It's absolutely not true in God's eyes. And it doesn't even matter what other people think of you or how they fail to properly value you. Everyone should be loving you, unless they themselves have failed to love themselves. It says nothing about your worth.
You have to decide to accept your perfection, your innocence, your value, your worth to God, your infinite credibility, your integrity, your divine honor, your holiness and your entitlement to the Kingdom of God. And that means you have to put aside all of the abuse and hurt and pain and misery and reasons "why" you deserve suffering. God does not will that you suffer, and nor should you.
"I who am host to God AM worthy of Him. He Who ESTABLISHED His dwelling-place in me created it as He would have it be."
"The truth about YOU is so lofty that nothing that is unworthy of God is worthy of you."
"But you COULD not make YOURSELF unworthy because YOU ARE THE TREASURE OF GOD. What HE values IS valuable. There CAN be no question of its worth, because its value lies in God's sharing Himself with it and ESTABLISHING ITS VALUE FOREVER."
"EVERY mind that God created is equally worthy of being healed because GOD CREATED IT WHOLE."
"You should know that all God's children are fully worthy of COMPLETE courtesy."
"He always teaches you the inestimable worth of EVERY Son of God, teaching it with infinite patience born of the Love of Him for whom He speaks."
"The Atonement is the only gift which is worthy of being offered to the Altar of God. This is because of the inestimable value of the Altar itself. It was created perfect, and is entirely worthy of receiving perfection. God IS lonely without His SOULS, and THEY are lonely without Him."
"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."
In this passage from "creation and communication", Jesus talks about how God created us as individual beings and minds. There are more than *35* references to multiple sons/minds/creations/individuals in this section alone. These mentions are not metaphors or concepts. Heaven actually DOES contain multiple minds, and each mind is responsible for choosing freely to do God’s will. This is why heave and "non-duality" or "oneness" concepts are a poor fit for the Reality of Creation.
"This communication IS the will of God. Creation and communication are synonymous. God CREATED EVERY MIND by communicating His Mind to it, thus establishing it forever as a channel for the reception of His Mind and Will. Since only BEINGS of a like order can truly communicate. His CREATIONS naturally communicate with Him and communicate like Him. This communication is perfectly abstract, in that its quality is universal in application, and not subject to ANY judgment, ANY exception, or ANY alteration. God made YOU BY this and FOR this. The mind (of a soul) can distort its functions, but it cannot endow itself with those it was not given. That is why the mind cannot totally lose the ability to communicate, even though it may refuse to utilize it on behalf of being. Existence as well as being rests on communication."
"Existence is SPECIFIC in how, what, and with whom communication is worth undertaking. Being is completely without these distinctions. It is a state in which the mind IS in communication with everything that is real, including its OWN SOUL. To whatever extent YOU permit this state to be curtailed, YOU are limiting YOUR sense of your OWN reality, which becomes total only by recognizing ALL reality in the glorious context of its real relationship to YOU. This IS YOUR reality. Do no desecrate it or recoil from it. It is YOUR real home, YOUR real temple, and YOUR REAL SELF."
"God, who encompasses ALL Being, NEVERTHELESS CREATED SEPARATE BEINGS WHO HAVE EVERYTHING INDIVIDUALLY, but who want to share it to increase THEIR joy. Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it. That is why God Himself created YOU. Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and that is what creation MEANS. How, what, and to whom are irrelevant, because real creation gives everything since it can only create like itself. Remember that in being, there is no difference between having and being, as there is in existence. In the state of being, the mind gives everything always."
"The Bible repeatedly states that you should praise God. This hardly means that you should tell Him how wonderful He is. He has no ego with which to accept thanks, and no perceptions with which to judge your offerings. But unless you take your part in the creation, His joy is not complete because YOURS is incomplete. And THIS He does know. He knows it in his own Being and ITS EXPERIENCE OF HS SON’S EXPERIENCE. The constant GOING OUT of His love is blocked when HIS CHANNELS are closed, and He IS lonely when the MINDS HE CREATED do not communicate fully with Him."
"God HAS kept your kingdom for you, but He cannot share His joy with you until you know it with your whole mind. Even revelation is not enough, because it is communication FROM God. But it is not enough until it is shared. God does not need revelation returned to Him, which would clearly be impossible, but He DOES want revelation brought to OTHERS. This cannot be done with the actual revelation, because its content cannot be expressed, and it is INTENSELY PERSONAL TO THE MIND WHICH RECEIVES IT. But it can still be returned BY THAT MIND through its attitudes TO OTHER MINDS which the knowledge from the revelation brings.
God is praised whenever ANY MIND learns to be wholly helpful. This is impossible without being wholly harmless, because the two beliefs cannot coexist. The truly helpful (many) are invulnerable, because THEY are NOT protecting THEIR EGOS (individual egos), so that nothing CAN hurt THEM. Their helpfulness IS their praise of God, and He will return their praise of Him, because they are like Him and can rejoice TOGETHER. God goes out to THEM and through THEM, and there is great joy throughout the Kingdom. EVERY MIND THAT IS CHANGED adds to this joy with ITS OWN INDIVIDUAL WILLINGNESS to share in it.
The truly helpful are God’s MIRACLE WORKERS (many), whom I direct until we are ALL UNITED in the joy of the kingdom. I will direct YOU to wherever YOU can be truly helpful, and to WHOEVER can follow my guidance through YOU.
"That is why the healer's prayer is, "let me know this brother as I know myself."
In truth we are all part of a collective family. It's like a kind of collective consciousness or hive mind. We each have full access to everyone and our minds are joined. Our identity is shared as the one Christ, the "one Son" of God. We share everything and are everything and have everything all at once.
This means your brother is a part of yourself. A part of your actual being and soul, a part of your identity. Not that when the two of you meet you annihilate the fact that you have your own soul and they theirs, but your souls join and merge into a oneness so deep there is no exclusion between you.
ACIM is literally trying to get us to remember that WE are shared beings. Our minds overlap. Our identity isn't supposed to be exclusive, special, isolated or different to others. There aren't supposed to be special rules that apply only to myself, or special truths that apply only to you.
We are asked to remember and re-access a shared state, a truly shared open intimate state, in which we literally experience each other as a part of ourselves. That we actually recognize and see "what I am" within other people. There is something in you and something in me which is the same one thing. And this is reflected in the Holy Spirit, who is in both our minds, keeping them joined as one.
You have to learn to recognize that other people are part of yourself. Your neighbor is you. Your friends and relatives are you. Your family and loved ones are you. Even strangers and people in far off lands are you.
In order to tap into this unity and reunite with yourself and with others, with whom you have been estranged and at war, it requires you to become more inclusive. It also requires you to expand your sense of identity - the sense of who you are, what you are, what is included in yourself, and where the boundaries of your identity are. In fact, ultimately you are the whole universe.
When the boundaries of your identity stop at the body, or the identity of others is confined to a physical form, you are in separation. If mind believes and perceives itself to be excluded from other minds by a body separation-device, it does not know itself. To regard others as "not me" is to regard yourself as "not you". You do not know yourself in truth when you do not know your brother IS yourself.
We have to expand our minds, expand our sense of self, expand our idea of what is included within ourselves. Only if your brother's interests become part of your own can you have shared interests. And only when they are part of you will you value them as much as yourself.
Miracles require a joining of minds, a reuniting with a brother, a shared identity, an openness and intimacy of relationship. If you think that two bodies being together is intimate, you have not seen anything yet. To transcend bodies and join in mind in total absorption and merging and oneness is an intimacy beyond any physical contact you can ever imagine. And that is a holy relationship and the way to work miracles.
Jesus is asking us to love ALL BEINGS. The only way to love all beings truly is to include and welcome them into yourself, to recognize and actually experience that they are a part of yourself, and know them as part of you. It is not merely a matter of trying to love some strange person that you don't really know. It is more a matter of merging with them so fully that they are literally a part of you and you love them because they are in no way rejected from your own being.
Total union is the way to know who they really are. Total union is the only way to know who you really are. There is a part of you in them. If you do not love that part of you that is in them, you do not love all of yourself. Loving everyone as a part of yourself incorporates and integrates them into yourself, and you then love them as you love yourself. And you love yourself because you love everyone who is one with you. This is the only path to resurrection, to atonement, to miracles, and to ascension.
"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself."
"You accept forgiveness as accomplished in yourself when you forgive. You recognize your brother as yourself, and thus do you perceive that you are whole."
"The law of Creation is that you love your creations as yourself, BECAUSE THEY ARE PART OF YOU."
"The message and the messenger ARE one. And you MUST see your brother as yourself."
"It is no dream to love your brother as yourself. Nor is your holy relationship a dream."
"When you have seen your brothers as yourself, you will be RELEASED to knowledge, having learned to FREE yourself, of Him who knows of freedom."
"And would He give a Brother unto you except he be as perfect as yourself, and just as like to Him in holiness as YOU must be?"
"But love EVERYTHING He created, of which YOU are part, or you cannot learn of His peace and accept His gift FOR yourself and AS yourself. You CANNOT know your own perfection until you have honored all those who were created LIKE you."
"Look at your holy brother, sinless as yourself, and let him LEAD you there."
"It is the gracious acknowledgment of everyone as a Son of your most loving Father, loved by Him like you, and therefore loved by you as yourself. It is HIS Love that joins you, and FOR His Love, you would keep no-one separate from YOURS."
"For sin would keep you separate, but your Redeemer would have you look upon each other as yourself."
"For your Father wills you to know your brother AS yourself. Answer HIS call for love, and YOURS is answered. Healing is the love of Christ for His Father, and for HIMSELF."
"So would I look on everyone today. My brothers are Your Sons. Your Fatherhood created them, and gave them all to me as part of You and my own Self as well. Today I honor You through them, and thus I hope this day to recognize my Self."
"For he is part of me and I of him, and we are part of You Who are our Source, eternally united in Your Love; eternally the holy Son of God."
"Fail not your brothers, or you fail yourself. Look lovingly on them that they may know that they are part of you and you of them."
"If your brothers ARE part of you, will you ACCEPT them?"
"If what you do to my brother you do to me, and if you do everything for yourself because we are PART of you, everything WE do belongs to you as well. Every Soul God created is part of you, and shares His glory WITH you."
"If you unite with anyone in prayer, you make him part of you."
"Every altar to God is part of your Soul, because the Light He created is One with Him. Would you cut a brother off from the Light that is yours?"
"If your brothers are part of YOU, and you blame THEM for your deprivation, you ARE blaming yourself. And you cannot blame yourself WITHOUT blaming them."
"The beautiful relationship you have with all your brothers is a part of you BECAUSE it is a part of God Himself."
"A holy relationship is one in which you join with what IS part of you in TRUTH."
(rejection of) ... "This is your brother, focus of your hate, unworthy to be part of you, and thus OUTSIDE your self, the other half, which is denied."
"By accepting the Atonement for YOURSELF, you are deciding AGAINST the belief that you can BE alone, thus dispelling the idea of separation and affirming your true identification with the whole Kingdom as literally PART OF YOU."
"And thus IS every living thing a part of you as of Himself."
"Your teaching has already DONE this, for the Holy Spirit is PART OF YOU."
"But see the love of God in you, and you will see it everywhere because it IS everywhere. See His abundance in everyone, and you will know that you are in Him WITH them. They are part of you as you are part of God. YOU are as lonely without understanding this as God Himself is lonely when His Sons do not know Him."
"He is in need of your acceptance of himself as part of you, as you for his."
"you will realize that it is a sudden UNawareness of the body, and a joining of your self and SOMETHING ELSE, in which your mind ENLARGES to encompass it. It becomes PART of you, as you UNITE with it. And BOTH become whole, as NEITHER is perceived as separate."
"Brother, we heal together as we live together, and love together. Be not deceived in God's Son, for he is one with himself, and One with his Father."
Independence can seem like a good thing. It seems to in some way be better than dependency on others, or codependency. It seems to represent being responsible for ones own life, and having the freedom to choose anything.
The ego has an idea about independence. To the ego mind, independence from God is highly sought after. If you can exist and be autonomous without Him, that's your goal. And you can be relatively successful at this, albeit that usually the success will be punctuated with failures and is short lived.
You can, if you want, have your life all to yourself and do whatever you want to do. But at some point it will become obvious that something is missing. There is an emptiness, and your heart yearns for meaning. And that's because your independence is an attempt to be separate from meaning.
Separation from God, in which God's love is heartfelt and meaningful, must lead to a meaningless life in which the ego has taken over control of your life and is running the show on its own. This autonomy is artificial and pretends to be freedom. But it leads to death.
Without God, alone and incapacitated, there is only so much you can do. You cannot move the planets or heal the sick. You cannot raise the dead or bring miracles to those in need. And you cannot experience true peace.
Your independence from God is at a price. You may not realize it at first, but the cost is great. To be separate is to have nothing. And yet independence from God is an attempt to have everything for yourself. This grasping and holding-on to everything cannot accomplish what it aspires to do. Instead, everything is lost and you have nothing of value.
Your very existence, your being, cannot last while it is disconnected from the Source of Life. Cut off from supply, you will become sick and die. Disconnecting from your Real Self and from God is a lonely path of weakness, vulnerability, suffering and death.
If you want to eat real food at the table of God, then it comes with requirements. The Kingdom has some conditions you must meet. It is not that the Kingdom is conditional, but it does not include the ego. The idea of independence from God must be recognized as an ego attempt to be separate from God, to have a will of your own, to overthrow the Authority of God and to play at being God of your own world.
This you must be willing to let go if you are to reconnect and reunite with the only source of True Strength. This you must surrender if you want the benefit of Eternal Life. You must give up your desire for separate control over your life, and allow yourself to receive God again. Together you can share everything, but alone you have nothing but scraps.
The world is a dry and dusty desert where starved and thirsty creatures come to die. Without God, it has no life, and there is no hope of forever. Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven, come to rejuvenate, resurrect and bring life back to the living. Only when you allow God to nourish you in this way might you enjoy the fruits of Heaven.
You can have it your way, exercising all the rights and freedoms to the full extent that individuality and separation allows, yielding every possible result that can come from an single separate self. But you will grow tired and be thirsty for more. And true meaning will not be found in a separate life.
God is your home. The Father shares everything worth having. True Peace can be yours again if you will open your heart and mind and let Him help you with living. Plug yourself back into His Power Source and return to Life. You have been dead without Him. Now is your time of resurrection. It's time for the prodigal son to come home.
Oneness does NOT mean you do not have a self or free will.
ACIM quotes:
God, Who encompasses all being, created beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. (T-4.VII.5:1)
God created His Sons by extending His Thought, and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. All His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other. (T-6.II.8:1-2)
Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite. (W-pII.11.1:1)
God knows His children with perfect certainty. He created them by knowing them. (T-3.III.7:9-10)
In the creation, God extended Himself to His creations and imbued them with the same loving Will to create. (T-2.I.1:2)
The constant going out of His Love is blocked when His channels are closed, and He is lonely when the minds He created do not communicate fully with Him. (T-4.VII.6:7)
What God does know is that His communication channels are not open to Him, so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His children are wholly joyous….God's extending outward, though not His completeness, is blocked when the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one. So He thought, "My children sleep and must be awakened." (T-6.V.1:5,7,8)
When the Atonement has been completed [and we are back in Heaven], all talents will be shared by all the Sons of God. (T-1.V.3:1)
When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed…the Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless their creations and keep them in the light of joy. (T-5.I.5:5,7)
The Holy Spirit promotes healing by looking beyond it to what the children of God were before healing was needed, and will be when they have been healed. (T-5.II.1:2)
God has but one Son, knowing them all as one. (T-9.VI.3:5)
It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts. However, this is obscured as long as any of its parts is missing. That is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all the parts of the Sonship have returned. (T-2.VII.6:1-5)
It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness does transcend the sum of its parts. However, it loses this special state as long as any of its parts are missing. This is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all of the individual parts of the Sonship have returned. Only then, in the true sense, can the meaning of wholeness be understood.
One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth. Yet do these thoughts make clear the meaning of creation? Do these words bring perfect clarity with them to you? What can they seem to be but empty sounds; pretty, perhaps, correct in sentiment, yet fundamentally not understood nor understandable. The mind that taught itself to think specifically can no longer grasp abstraction in the sense that it is all encompassing. We need to see a little, that we learn a lot. (W-pI.161.4:1 8)
When you are told what is natural, you cannot understand it. The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you. (T-16.II.3:2-3)
Effectively the "sonship" or Kingdom God created, is really a kind of "collective consciousness". Yes it's not what ACIM would officially refer to as consciousness, having nothing to do with perception etc, but we do SHARE mind. There is this one mind which houses many minds. It's similar to the Borg on Star Trek in that sense. Everyone is plugged into everyone, and indeed also acts "as one" in a giant collaborative way.
This also means that you are not just some separate chunk of the collective. Whereby other people are separate chunks, as if there are then wires connecting you together. But moreso you actually are everywhere and in everyone. And your brother IS part of you literally. You share your actual self with their self so fully they are basically one, yet two. You really are the whole collective, and are also part of it. The whole, and the part, as in a hologram.
What we call ego or separation, is what you get when you take someone who is part of AND all of this collective, and you try to "fence them off". To isolate them in a little prison with a wall around it, so that you can sort of say, this collective unit is now divorced from the collective, disconnected from the "hive mind", isn't sharing anything, can't "hear" the thoughts of the other brothers any more, and has now become "alone" or orphaned.
This self which was, and still is, part of the whole, sees itself as lacking the sense of relationship and sharing that unites it with the "rest" of the collective, which is also the rest of itself. And so it is kind of like a split off part of the whole, which was part of the whole, but has forgotten that it was whole. So now it sees itself as only a part, and only partial. Such a sense of identity is alone and lonely, isolated and like on a desert island, cut off and unable to relate or share.
To "undo the ego" is really a matter of reintegrating the rest of yourself, which means plugging yourself back into the whole sonship, to share everything with everyone, to have real relationship with all equally. That is really just a matter of taking away the separations - the walls - that seemed to imprison that part of the mind, so that that part of the mind is able to reconnect and integrate with the whole again.
We're not here in the business of exterminating parts of mind, we're actually in the business of setting them free from imprisonment. An imprisoned mind acts like an ego because it has limited itself. But when that same mind lets go its sense of selfishness, specialness, or exclusivity, it expands to return to the whole mind. This isn't really a destruction of your self, it's just a removal of the sense of separation which gave you a false sense of being small and limited.
In that sense, the part of your mind that believes it is an ego, lifts itself away from the "egotism" that imprisons it, the walls are transcended, the sense of self expands to be more inclusive, you become more than "just yourself", and all of this sense of isolation, loneliness, abandonment, fear, hiding, darkness, being trapped, being lost, etc, all that stuff goes, because the mind opens up to freedom and joining again.
You are returning to the family of God. The chains that bind you and keep you in a hellish prison are what need to be undone, not your "self". But while you live in the chains, you will see yourself as small and selfish because of what the chains imply about you. If you identify with the prison you become the prisoner. But you are more than the prison, you are only imprisoned by it if you give it the power to do so. The ego is a prison cell, not a self. It's like a trap that you've become stuck in, and all you need is to be set free.