AMATEUR GODS IN DISGUISE

Limitations fall away

Like flimsy veils

Out of the debris

There steps a god

Joanna Cherry

• I am an infinite spiritual being

• an amateur god

• hidden in a finite human body and personality

• telling myself a victim story of separateness, lack and entrapment
• investigating my suffering and symptoms

• welcoming with understanding and gratitude their true meaning

• so that I may awaken to the full enjoyment of the power of God’s love and peace that is in us all.

He has planted eternity in men's hearts and minds

Ecclesiastes 3:11

Jesus, John 10:34

… that you may become partakers of the divine nature

2 Peter 1:4

…until we all come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of god, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ

Eph 4:13

I John 3:2

Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite.

Psalm 147:5

The eyes of your understanding being enlightened

Ephesians 1:18

John 17:23

In 1981 I was working in a mental hospital in Virginia. I was asked to visit a young Mexican male patient who was in forensic lock-up. I went into the padded cell and sat down on the padded floor and talked with him. After a while he got up, went outside of the cell, and locked me inside, and grinned at me through the glass in the door. Soon he let me out and we walked across the unit talking. He turned to me and said "Are you a human god?" I was quite taken aback, but I looked at him in the eyes and replied "Maybe I am, and so are you." I was quite surprised at what he said and at my reply. After that experience, I began to keep a journal about my visits with patients and I entitled the journal "Dialogues With Amateur Human Gods" I realized that this entire planet is like a giant mental hospital, and that we are all locked up in our little cells by some kind of symptomatic aberration, and that we all have profound cosmic questions waiting to be asked and addressed.

About a year later I was asked to visit a 40 year old female patient named Mary who was withdrawn and claiming to be the Virgin Mary. I visited Mary in her darkened room. I introduced myself and asked her why she was here in the hospital. She said that she is schizophrenic. I asked her how she knew that. She said that the doctors had told her. I asked her if she believes everything she is told. She looked puzzled and said shyly "I am the virgin Mary." I asked her what she likes about the virgin Mary. She looked even more puzzled and said: "No one ever asked me that before." She was quiet for a few minutes, gazing off into space, and then she said "She is beautiful." I said to Mary "Then Mary you must be beautiful also or you could not recognize such beauty." She seemed shocked and said "Oh, no, I am not beautiful. I am ugly. Everyone thinks I am ugly and always have been." I replied to her "Mary, you are a beautiful spiritual being and you know that ugliness is not the truth about you, and that is why you say that you are the virgin Mary." Two weeks later I was again visiting on the ward and I saw Mary out in the day room, dressed quite neatly, playing classical music on the record player. She greeted me with a big smile and we made small talk.

All of our conversations have the potential to be profound and meaningful. Are we not amateur gods in human disguise? Out of the mouths of babes and mental patients comes strange truths. My friend, Paul Fairweather, took his first assignment as a psychologist in a mental hospital. He was sent to interview a 22 year old male patient who had killed his father. Dr. Fairweather asked the young man why he was in the hospital. The young man said "I killed my father." Paul asked him "What do you mean that you killed your father." The young man replied "I was awakened from a deep sleep at about 2.a.m. by yelling and screaming in the next room. Furniture was being knocked around and a raging drunken figure stumbled into my room and as it lunged at me I grabbed my shotgun and pulled the trigger. The figure fell dead at my feet, and it was my father." Dr. Fairweather said "You shot at a drunken raging figure, but you killed your father!" The young man said yes and cried deeply. This experience deeply affected my friend, Paul, for the rest of his counseling career. He had seen that the deep intent of the young man was not to kill his father, but to protect himself against an imagined threat.

At the tender age of twelve years I had an experience of the infinite Christ light and love that left an indelible impression on my psyche. But also in my youth I saw human suffering in my family and neighbors that seemed to be a complete contradiction to this inner experience of light. My talented sister died of peritonitis at 15 years of age and my family sank into grief and despair. I felt a deep unexplainable calling to reconcile my inferiority and loss feelings with the incredible light within. I had no idea what psychotherapy was at that time in 1945 when World War II was ending and I began college. I had friends who were killed in the war and had heard contrasting stories of heroism as well. I began to prepare for a service but I did not really know what it was to be. I studied psychology, sociology, history, theology and later majored in the newly emerging psychology of religion programs born out of the depths of suffering in World War II. I worked in mental hospitals, at a home for delinquent teenagers, jails, and rural churches where I was struggling to find the tools to integrate the conflicts within my soul and my society. It was many years after my master’s and doctoral programs that I began to see the vague meaning of this calling clearly enough to articulate it even to myself.

For the last 45 years I have been engaged in the full time practice of what might be called spiritual psychotherapy, for want of a better word. It was like I was trying to learn what was not even known. The greatest frustrations of my life have been my inadequacy feelings in the practice of therapy. Of course, these inadequacy feelings were not just about psychotherapy, but more basically about myself.

I was really an amateur studying with amateurs. Although my teachers, supervisors and training therapists seemed much more professional and adequate than I was, why couldn’t they teach this process more efficiently? Just as with my younger sister, I had admired something in them, that I didn’t see in myself except as a shadowy possibility. To even think that we are struggling amateur gods at that time would have been impossible. I was too mired down in my own inferiority problems and addictive solutions. The thing that kept me going, however, was the memory and continuing inspiration of that inner light in spite of the darkness of human suffering. This paradoxical puzzle has dominated my entire life experience. I could neither give up the puzzle nor solve it. I kept alive the tension of the opposites through years of relative failures and successes in my own life and in the lives of my patients. While I recognized that other therapists had similar struggles, it did not relieve my own responsibilities nor dampen my determination to find some kind of reconciling answer to my soul’s dilemma.

Little pieces of the understanding of this riddle came here and there to give me inspiration and encouragement, but the final formula presented in Symptoms did not emerge until I was in my 70’s. Neither traditional religion nor traditional psychology satisfied my voracious appetite for a truth deep enough and powerful enough to reconcile the opposites fighting within me. I was pursuing an unspeakable calling to reconcile the opposites by finding a greater unity. I was drawn to Carl Jung and to the mystics of all religions, as well as to the major resources of traditional religion, psychiatry, and science. Any real reconciliation of the opposites would have to satisfy both the demands of spirituality and psychology in the healing of human suffering. If it didn’t work, it wasn’t true.

I worked with every kind of neurosis and human conflict imaginable in myself and others, offering the best understanding and caring that I could muster, but it did not satisfy me. It felt mediocre and it fell short of the infinite possibilities that seemed to be just out of reach. Thank God there were breakthroughs and clearings as I struggled through this forest and moved up the mountain of experience.

In December, 1999, just as we were entering the New Milleneum, I went for broke. I asked for a revelation that would serve the 21^st Century and bring a spiritual renewal for me. I asked for my own personal Pentecost. I was told to wait for ten days and to write what came to me. After the ten days of writing down all that was in my mind, there was nothing for three days. I was told that those three days were added because of self-betrayal. It was not just Jesus that was betrayed, I had betrayed myself, and that was to be the chief preparatory lesson for humanity in the 21^st Century. I had worked with all sorts of betrayals in counseling people for years. Human betrayals were just the symptoms of the deeper spiritual self-betrayal which was being revealed to me. I was shown that Other-betrayal was just a symptom of Self-betrayal. Ego betrays Self. Which Self? We are amateur gods, infinite spiritual beings, who in our stupid ego story, have betrayed and crucified the True Self.

I was shown how we do this. It was not through intentional, conscious, demonic meanness but through an unconscious false belief system. We deceived ourselves unknowingly. "They know not what they are doing," Jesus said. Jesus was the guiding figure in revealing the meaning of my dilemma for our human evolution. He used his own life and my own life in explaining to me where this process is going. He had appeared in person to me in California in a healing group to which I belonged. He had touched each member of the group on the head. I had no idea what this all meant. Later he appeared to me again concerning the role of forgiveness in this "healing of the opposites" process. But in 1999 his "appearance" was in the form of the revelation about the meaning of symptoms for our divinity. He had revealed the light to me at twelve years of age, had called me into this search at age 17 when my sister died, and had led me through all sorts of neuroses and addictions throughout the next 55 years but I didn’t realize it.

It was revealed that in the beginning there was nothing but godness, nothing but one vast omnipotent consciousness, and nothing to be conscious of. There was nothingness, no one to talk to, no one to eat lunch with or play checkers with, and worse yet, it was "impossible." How could God invent and experience a separate world when He was all of everything? God had a problem. So he self-hypnotized himself and thereby invented a time-and-space-world which was made out of himself, since there was nothing else to make a world out of. He contracted himself, reduced himself, divided himself, materialized himself. He had to pull an ingenious sleight-of-hand to fool himself into not recognizing himself. What fun would it be to play chess with someone if it was only yourself and you already knew the next move? He had to forget that it was all himself. He came up with amnesia, with forgetting, with self-hypnosis. He dreamed a dream that there was a world and there was. In this manner he could fellowship with the world of people, animals, nature and objects through a dualistic sense of creation. In this dualistic story, in this dream, God was over there and the rest of creation was over here. Of necessity God created a dualistic story in which he and his creation lived. This creation epic was real in one sense and a dream story in another sense.  What a paradox!

Although duality was a solution for God, it was a problem for man, in that everyone in the story, including God, felt like a victim of the belief system which had been created in order to have relationship experiences. And so the Cosmic Christ incarnated into the story through various avatars including Krishna, Buddha and Jesus, in order to try to solve the victim problem in the drama of life. They had some success but they also met with great resistance and "failure." How incredibly real those experiences seemed, even to God. The belief systems in the story were so embedded and powerful that it was almost impossible to break through them, even if a savior figure died to disprove them.  After all, God did a great job of self-hypnosis! That is why in Isaiah 45 it says that God took the responsibility and the blame for sending both good and evil. God had put himself "under the spell" for the sake of relationship, and that means that we are all under this hypnotic spell as well. In the pre-dawn era of consciousness, we all knew the truth of it and we agreed to play the game of life within those rules and boundaries. We were equally responsible along with the Creator. And then we forgot and have been trying to decide ever since who is responsible for human suffering: God, man, society, our genes, the environment, or the devil?

And so, when a hypnotist puts people "under" , he is temporarily removing them from their already present hypnotic belief system. We are already under a hypnotic spell and the hypnotist actually de-hypnotizes us. Under hypnosis, we move into the area of infinite potential, and we can do or not do many things heretofore unimaginable. We have documented painless surgery, amnesia, and many kinds of marvelous foolishness which demonstrate this de-hypnosis type of hypnosis.

God’s problem now is how to de-hypnotize without losing the benefits of hypnosis. Can we retain the finite world of experience without losing the infinite context in which the limitations of the finite world exist? Jesus and other avatars and enlightened people have accomplished this as a model for all of us, but mankind has not yet moved fully into the Age of Self-Realization. Hawkins says that in 1986 we moved from level 197 to level 206, which got us out of the ego box into a new degree of integrity for the first time in human history. Now it becomes possible to spell out through Infinity Theory how we can have more and more non-dual experiences above 600. Jesus through the Cosmic Christ role is taking the lead in this evolutionary step through A Course in Miracles and with the pioneering efforts of such people as David Hawkins, Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Albert Einstein, Alan Watts, Nicholas Berdyaev, Paul Tillich, William Glasser, Ken Wilber, David Bohm, Wayne Dyer and many other explorers in consciousness research and transpersonal psychology. Infinity Theory is an attempt to pull together some of the contributions to this evolutionary step that we are witnessing at this time in history.

I didn’t realize that Jesus was trying to tell me his part in the Great Cosmic Christ function of healing. In the 1970’s when I first began studying the Course in Miracles I recognized the powerful authenticity of that document, but I had no idea of its meaning for the unfolding revelation about spiritual psychotherapy. I didn’t know that the Cosmic Christ was leading psychotherapy, science and medicine through all of their apparently convoluted twists and turns in the last 100 to 200 years.

I have been trying to detect and evaluate every major development in the science and spirituality of psychotherapy in the last 45 years, but I had no idea where this assessment was to lead. It was like we were on the stage of human history but I thought it was all of reality until I got offstage. It was then that I realized that you can’t get the spiritual perspective while on the stage. God came into our story and experienced everything, including death. Now he is telling us how to come out of the story and get off of the stage of dualism, and into the wholeness of reality as it was described in the Course in Miracles.

The healing process is basically the conscious awareness of how to go into the infinite and back to the finite. Only is this manner can the opposites be understood and "reconciled." That is why Jesus said there is no other way than the way he did it. That is, you transcend the story and re-enter life itself without the baggage of the story, because you are a finite/infinite being.

In other words, in this dualistic story God was disguised as God and we were disguised as humans, which was a necessity. This whole drama has been played out as a rather chaotic scientific/spiritual experiment which has now reached its limits and we have to move on up the ladder of consciousness until we can view our dualistic story from a greater non-dual awareness.

It is the intent of Spiritual Psychotherapy to extend Infinity Theory into the holistic practice of psychotherapy, particularly regarding the purpose of symptoms and the necessity for re-diagnosis. Usually the patient’s self-diagnosis is very similar to that of the professional except that the professional uses a more technical vocabulary about chemical imbalance, genetics, conditioning, family history, defense mechanisms, viral or bacterial infections, toxicity, substance abuse, codependency, repression, anxiety, etc. In spiritual psychotherapy, such descriptions are not considered to be causal but symptomatic of something deeper which is not usually suspected. Shakespeare was more accurate when he posed the question as "to be or not to be." We would revise it read "to be controlled by our story or not to be controlled by our story." Our symptoms take us all the way to the very roots of existence, to our sense of identity, to our lack of spiritual awareness.

The human dilemma was played out in the story of the captivity in Exodus. The Jewish people had been captured by the Egyptians because of their idolatry (sick religion) and taken into exile in a foreign land. For 400 years, they were slaves. No one could even remember being free, although stories about some ancient mythical freedom continued to be told. Moses, however, had been raised in the king’s court and he retained a sense of freedom. He saw a guard beating a Hebrew slave, and instinctively he killed the guard and fled across the desert and out of the country to protect himself. After years of living in the desert, he met God in a burning bush and was told to go back to Egypt to free his people. He went to the Pharoah and told him to let God’s people go. It took many persuasive magical actions to persuade Pharoah, but eventually the slaves were freed. However, Pharoah then changed his mind and sent his soldiers to pursue the fleeing two million slaves. The Red Sea was parted and the Hebrew people crossed over in safety while the pursuing soldiers were drowned. Then it took forty years of living in the poverty of the desert to get the slave mentality out of the people to ready them for the experience of the "promised land."

This is exactly our human dilemma. We have worshipped the false gods in our story and are in exile as slaves. This slave/victim mentality has controlled us for so long that only mythical stories of freedom remain to echo a long-lost divinity. "Let my people go" is the freedom cry of the 21^st century. Even though we have been delivered already from the domination of our enslaving Pharoahic ego, it sometimes takes 40 years to get out of our slave story long enough to enter into the promised land of our divinity.

I was reminded that this non-dualistic awareness, however, does not un-do the finite world itself, but only our attachment to it, when I had the following dream. There was a tree that was supposed to be trimmed, but it was cut down entirely. I felt very badly about this tree in my dream. The message of the dream to me was: don’t cut down the finite, just trim it of its false meaning.

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affection , and the truth of imagination

John Keats

John is 23 years old and complains that he is depressed and may have ADHD. He had a whole case history of analysis and indoctrination by health professionals since he was in kindergarten. He has many interests but is unable to concentrate, follow through, and accomplish what he has begun, he said. His father is a science professor in a university and was socially withdrawn and depressed, although very focussed and obsessive about his studies and achievements. Rather than address further diagnosis and trying to fix his problem, I was able to engage John in a discussion of the cost and benefits of "having" his condition.

After this discussion, I tried to interest John in what was interfering with his concentration and follow through, although he continually returned to his indoctrination that he has a brain condition, a chemical imbalance, a lack of serotonin, and that his dopamine is out of kilter. While it is true on one level that the mind affects the brain chemistry and the brain chemistry affects the mind, we have an interacting cycle here, and this cycle takes over. Up until now, his treatment has been focused on trying to break the cycle by taking drugs to correct the brain chemistry. He says that his current prescription of Prozac has helped some. He spends a lot of his spare time in studying brain chemistry, which I encouraged him to continue to do.

However, I argued that beyond the cognitive/chemistry problem there is a third factor which is being overlooked: the imagination. I told him that we shall introduce the power of the imagination into this story loop which goes round and round and does not bring a breakthrough which is significant enough. I remind John that the imagination is the most powerful force in the world, that everything in this room and in this universe is the result of imagination. I say that this powerful force, imagination, is a shaping force in all of our daily behavior, sometimes "negatively" and sometimes "positively." It is my intention with John to use visualization, imagery, and trance techniques to help John intervene in this cyclical loop and begin to use his imaginative power consciously and positively. I assigned him the homework of selecting three explicit short-term goals that he would like to accomplish, and to observe what happens in himself when he attempts to focus on these tasks and follow through with them. He is to notice what interferes and distracts him: any dreads, fears, beliefs, etc. I commented that it is quite likely that some unconscious belief that he holds is distracting and interfering with his focus, concentration, and follow through. He nodded and said that he had learned something about cognitive distortions, and that he realizes that he has some negative programming. He dreads failure. He dreads being a social failure like his father. I told him that he is only 23 and that he has to have a starting point and that for his own sake for the rest of his life, it had better be imagination, or else he will probably continue to circle in this loop as before. Imagined fearful beliefs can interfere in positive functioning and stimulate chemical imbalance, and chemical imbalance can further seem to cause ADHD. He decided to make a trial commitment to imagination therapy. I asked him to challenge me with brain chemistry information and I would challenge him with imagination experiences, and he thought that would be interesting.

I noted that blaming the brain might temporarily seem to remove some of the self-blame, but that we are not talking about blame, we are talking about the power to change. Many people link blame to responsibility and don’t want to be responsible lest they be blamed and punished. He admitted that he does punish himself for his inadequacies and failure to function properly, just as he blames and excuses his father. A whole system of blaming and excusing has developed but the punishment (the depression component) continues nevertheless. Blame is irrelevant because these beliefs are the unconscious result of mis-used imagination.

Depression is self-punishment. Anxiety is self-doubt. Obsessive-compulsion is self-criticism. Impulsiveness is self-indulgence. Imagination is the unrecognized, unappreciated, and grossly underestimated power behind the mind-body story, which leads to depression, anxiety obsessive-compulsive behavior, impulsive behavior and other symptoms. Imagination is the source of creativity, inspiration, motivation, and transformation. If we are not imagining creatively in a positive direction, we are imagining creatively in a negative direction.

Paul’s mental patient who shot his father, imagined himself into a mental hospital and my friend Paul helped him to re-imagine himself free of his mentally confining and condemning story. Imagination derives from the fact that we are spiritual beings. Imagination has no limits, no confinement, no causation by anything else. The entire finite world comes into being through the power of imagination. When God hypnotized himself he was able to access an imagined world of finite beings and finite things. God is consciousness, and imagination is the way that he created the finite world. God is infinite consciousness who, through imagination, created finite possibilities. Imagination is the last station before consciousness itself.

Hypnosis is a fancy word for a shift in consciousness through imagination. God put himself into a trance and imagined/dreamed a world into existence. Imagination said "Let there be light" and there was light. Let there be water, mountains, and people, and there was water, mountains, and people, even if it took millions of years of evolution. Through this same infinite capability we create our finite experiences, also in a hypnotic unconscious state which is called spirituality.

What is the function of imagination and how do we use it consciously? My assignment to John is designed to help him realize that he is unconsciously creating his ADHD for some "good reason." ADHD is not a curse, but a symptom through which he is to learn who and what he is. Through the conscious use of imagination he can see how he mis-used his attention and mis-created his self-image of himself, just as he did of his father. When he discovers the beliefs that govern his present symptom, he can consciously change those beliefs and begin to use his attention differently and his brain chemistry will change also.

However, I am not saying that he can and should use imagination to re-imagine who he is. That is not necessary. The reverse is true. The purpose of imagination is to create the finite world of experience, not to create the infinite world. The infinite world exists and needs to be discovered, not created.

If we try to imagine what infinity and God is like, that imagination becomes part of our story, just like our imaginations about anything else. Imagination cannot be used to reverse the process of finitizing. De-imagination is more accurate. De-hypnosis is more accurate. Dis-creation is more accurate. It is not the role of imagination to take us back into infinity.

Imagination is the means by which the finite world comes into existence. All of our beliefs, right and wrong, correct and incorrect, true and false, are created through imagination. Beyond the cognitive faculties there is imagination. Cognitive psychology stopped dead in its tracks at the level of cognition. Cognitive psychology said that irrational beliefs cause irrational behavior. What cognitive psychology did not apparently understand is the function of irrational beliefs. So you get rid of irrational beliefs just like you get rid of symptoms, and that approach does have some limited value. Yet crazy beliefs like crazy symptoms point us toward the divine power of imagination. If we have mis-attended, and mis-imagined, we will mis-function.

We must learn to trace all of our beliefs and behaviors back to the cognitive and the cognitive back to the imagination and imagination back to the causative, and then we are only one step from consciousness itself. You cannot take that final step through imagination, however. Imagination gets you to within one step. Imagination is the bridge between the infinite and the finite. Through imagination God poured and created himself into a finite world. Through the power of imagination you begin to suspect that you are a creative spiritual being, but no matter how much you create, you will not yet be at the source.

The source is revealed to you. In any act of imagination and creation you are still in the dualistic world. To reach nondualism, you have to move through the body, the emotions, the intellect, and imagination, and beyond imagination into the nondual world, the world of infinity. A human being is an infinite being, using or misusing imagination in creating his finite experiences. When we use imagination properly, we create finite experiences which benefit everyone; used improperly we become a dysfunctional creator who has symptoms, playing win/lose games. An attention deficit disorder simply means that we have mis-attended, mis-used our attention and intention.

Hypnosis can be used for practically any purpose. It can be used for ego purposes or to transcend ego motivations. Hypnosis means that we have the capability to transcend ego programming for a brief time and free the use of imagination. Imagination seems to be constrained bv the programming of the mind through which it is filtered. Being is nondual awareness; imagining is the bridge between the nondual and the dual; knowing is dualistic awareness, knowing about is a lower level of dualistic awareness; doing is a still lower level and having is the lowest expression of dualism. But all levels are experienced only through consciousness. Having, doing, knowing about, knowing, imagining and being are all expressions of consciousness, and are experienced through consciousness.

We have mis-imagined that we are insecure. So then we try to imagine solutions for such an insecurity. We come up with all kinds of controls and comforts, whether they be relationships, money, lifestyles, habits or substances. When these "solutions" do not work we become anxious, angry, disappointed, and disillusioned. Insecurity is an ego story, and so are all of its solutions. To even imagine that a job, relationship, money or some substance "out there" can remedy our insecurity is a mis-use of imagination and is doomed to fail. We even say that God is our security. The next step up from that belief is to realize that insecurity is itself really a belief and does not exist in our nondual infinity, in our non-story Self. So why would an infinite being try to control something finite in order to solve a non-existent problem called insecurity? The infinite is above, below, around, and within the finite. In fact, the finite is an expression of the infinite. To God, the finite is an altered state. To man, the infinite is an altered state. God had to hypnotize himself to experience the finite and duality; man has to de-hypnotize himself to experience the infinite and non-duality. God imagined the story world to escape infinity, we have to dis-imagine the story world to find the infinite. In the end, in reality, the finite and the infinite are joined with no loss of either.

Imagination then is the most powerful means of experience in the finite world. Imagination is the bridge from the infinite to the finite. Dis-imagination is the route back from the finite to the Infinite. John’s ADHD is a perfect vehicle for his awakening to his conscious spirituality and re-focusing his attention.

How do you re-cross the bridge from our self-created drama to reality? When a negative energy, person or experience is present, you praise God, you love God, and you are grateful to God for having this opportunity to empower yourself. Julie prayed for Jesus to hold her premature 2 pound son because he needed holding. At three years of age her son told her that he was so happy when Jesus came and held him. She thanked God for the hospital, the doctors, her premature son, and for whether he would live or die, for the fears, sadness and dread. When she got to the hospital, all of the tubes had been removed from her son’s mouth, and when the nurses came in, they could see that he was normal, and they fed him.

Negativity can be transmuted by praise, love, appreciation, and gratitude. We bring God into the equation. Rick said that you can be translated now by moving sideways into the oneness of God right now. I am one with the Infinite, the Eternal, right now. He channels this energy outward toward others at any time by moving through the barrier of doubt, unbelief, or wrong belief, into the fullness of the presence, knowledge, love, and health of God. We can at any moment channel that healing power.

There wasan evangelist in the 1900’s in England who was awakened in the middle of the night and saw the devil standing in the corner of the room and he said "Oh, its only you!" and he went back to sleep. When you have a negative experience, you say "Oh, its only that!" and you go back into your peace, power, truth, and infinity. Why give our attention and energy to anything that is negative, false, unreal, a story, a dream. The formula is "Thank God for this problem, Thank God for this loss, Thank God for this rejection, Thank God for this illness, Thank God for this mis-belief or unbelief." All of these are simply opportunities to transform energy from the unreal to the real, from the false to the true, from the mis-imagined to the truly imagined, from separation to oneness, from lack to fullness, from entrapment to freedom. These are gifts for transmutation. You open the door to Infinity, you call down the fire from heaven.. You channel Infinite Spirit, and living Light into the situation. We are conduits of transforming energy. It is not our calling to resist, to oppose, to fear such people and situations. There is literally nothing to fear, nothing to dread., nothing to resist. If Infinity is here, there is no room for anything else. You can say "Oh, its only my insecurity" and return to your peace. It’s only my misbelief. It is my only task to bring the power of God into any sense of powerlessness.

My most humiliating experiences: when a girl broke up with me because I would not have sex with her (I was afraid); when a book that I wrote in 1969 was trashed by my graduate school faculty; when I was fired for being irresponsible at a summer job; when I was called before my licensure board for an ethical violation; when I was forced to break an addiction or lose a relationship; when I was released from a church because of how I voted; when I failed to be admitted to a doctoral program; when I lost money in the stock market due to my greed and overtrust; when a batter knocked one of my best curve balls over the fence for a home run; when I was humiliated by a bully and felt I couldn’t fight back. The worst opinions of myself were formed when such experiences occurred. Such opinions of myself or another were acted out in the arena of humiliating experiences. Whatever good or bad opinion I have of myself or another will be acted out in my story, as a mirror for me to look at my belief system. Therefore, I learned it was important to be able to be thankful to God for any humiliating experience. What would you be ashamed of, if you got caught doing it, thinking it or fearing it? That is your false self image. What are you guilty about, angry about, grieving about, humiliated about, insecure about, stressed about—these are clues to your false self esteem.

Imagination is the faculty of self-awareness. If we do not develop our True Self, but remain in the social story, the mass mind, in the foreign installed mind, in the finite belief system of separateness, lack and entrapment, then we shall have remained attached to the mediocrity of our comfort zone. Gurdgieff said you have to overcome your normal tendencies in order to develop the self.

I asked David if he can imagine being thankful to God that his brother and sister-in-law lied about him and caused him to be charged with a felony and sent to prison? You are not done with your counseling until you can be thankful for that whole humiliating experience, for that betrayal. You can’t be thankful? Then perhaps you can begin by just saying it and pretending it, until you might possibly in the future actually see and feel that it was a gift and a blessing Then like Joseph you can say "What was intended to me for evil, God intended to me for good, and not for me only." Forgiveness is for your benefit. Why should you take the responsibility to turn the worst hurt into the best healing? You must answer that question.

Recall the most humiliating, shameful and dreadful thing you ever experienced. Can you imagine being appreciative, loving and grateful to God for this experience? Can you see it as a gift?

How could an ego-humiliating experience be a gift, something to be thankful for? What is its spiritual purpose? If you can’t imagine doing it, can you imagine thinking it, saying it, or pretending to be thankful until you actually see and feel that is a gift and a blessing?

But why would anyone even want to do that?

1. Because you brought it on yourself, though not necessarily on purpose. 2. Ego-humiliation, ego-hurt, and ego-defeat are the worst hurts, but may become the best healing. 3. The other person’s attack behavior was actually self-defense against some perceived threat to their ego and this therefore should be understandable to you, since you are also caught up in an ego defend\ retaliate position also. 4. All of our anger and grief is self-defense against some imagined fear of loss. 5. Therefore, ego-humiliation should be welcomed and appreciated as an opportunity to be shocked into Self-realization, unconditional love and unlimited freedom. 6. You are one with God and the universe, you are even one with your opponent, in your true being, and any doubts you may have about this oneness must be challenged to the breaking point 7. When you are pushed over the edge into your greatest fear, you then have the gift of learning that fear is unreal and that you are infinite, a victim of nothing. Job said "What I have feared, has come upon me." When it comes upon you, you have the opportunity to discover it isn’t real.

What you like to hear, like to read, and readily accept is not what you need. Such things just fit cozily into your belief system and do not push you over the edge into infinity.  The things that you resist are where the pay dirt is.

Franz Kafka

According to Dr. Hawkins research, one individual functioning at 530 (gratitude) counter-balances a million people below 200. That shows you what a powerful vibration praise, love, appreciation and gratitude is. Do not be afraid or ashamed to sing "Let’s just praise the Lord, praise the Lord, Let’s just lift our hearts toward heaven and praise the Lord."

There are three steps in transmutation: (1) Sing or verbalize your praise until you are sure that you firmly in the 530 vibration. (2) Then recall all of the things you can think of that you are grateful for. Praise god for those things. (3) Then focus on the things that you dislike, that bother you, that offend you, that make you feel guilty, angry or sad, and praise God for those things.

What happens then is that those low vibrations are lifted up into one of the highest known energy dimensions,.that of unconditional love, unconditional praise and gratitude. You have exponentially increased your the energy quotient and something has gotta give in the material world. And more importantly, you have taken a big chunk out of your identification with the fear mind. You have taken another step into the Christ Mind, into your true self, into the unconditional.

A Course in Miracles

Our chief life crisis is our biggest offer for transformation from the conditional to the unconditional. We are stuck in the story of 50/50, of trading , of fairness, or tit for tat, of scorekeeping, but we all secretly want the unconditional. We want the unconditional and the infinite, but we do not feel that we can give it. Thank God for your crisis, your problem, because it is the bridge from the conditional to the unconditional. Your partner cannot give the unconditional, so do not ask, or it will turn into a waiting game on who must do it first or a manipulation game on who owes who what. If you praise and bless the most dreadful and horrible experiences in your life, you will have moved from the conditional to the unconditional.

• from the finite ego to the infinite spirit.
• from who we think we are to who we really are
• from victim to master
• from illusion to truth
• from mortality to immortality
• from logic to paradox
• from visible to invisible
• from entrapment to freedom
• from indulgence to discipline
• from lack to abundance
• from conformity to individuation
• from insecurity to power
• from loneliness to all-one-ness
• from separation to re-union
• from knowledge to wisdom
• from attack and defense to understanding
• from rigidity to spontaneity
• from needs to love
• from shyness to gusto
• from guilt to forgiveness
• from struggle to grace
• from fear to courage
• from arrogance to humility
• from self-centeredness to self-awareness
• from security-seeking to risk-taking
• from blame to responsibility
• from complaining to accepting
• from gossiping to blessing
• from anxiety to peace
• from stuck to flow
• from weakness to empowerment
• from adversary to advocate
• from failure to learning
• from fault-finding to encouraging
• from control to release and surrender
• from gripes to gratitude
• from enchantment to awakening
• from humanity to divinity
• from Adam to Christ
• from symptoms to healing
• from limitations to potentialities
• from finite ego to infinite spirit

Ego de-generates energy; infinite imagination re-generates energy

The ego wastes energy; infinite imagination restores wasted energy

The ego abuses energy; infinite imagination transforms abused energy

The ego divides energy; infinite imagination re-unites divided energy

This journey from the conditional to the unconditional is immediately available to you right now. Just thank God for your current dilemma and all of its insecurity and pain, and the door to the infinite will open to you. The linear psychological model is the way we progress from more conditional to more unconditional, it is a growth model from a lower level of energy to a higher level of energy. The non-linear spiritual model is a radical move into the now from the conditional to the non-conditional, from the finite to the infinite, through thanksgiving for the realization that I have been living in my story world and not in my true spiritual self. We are sinful not merely because we have eaten of the tree of knowledge, but also because we have not eaten of the tree of life.

Franz Kafka

This crisis is the result of our having eaten of the tree of knowledge, and the purpose of this crisis is that we might return to the primeval scene and eat now of the tree of life.

You may slowly struggle up the psychological ladder of personal growth and evolution, step by painful step, through the time and space world of trial and error, or you may take the superjet spiritual path and enter the NOW zone of infinity by thanking God for every aspect of your ego-humiliation. The choice is yours.

Jack Elias addresses the interesting question of what hypnosis is. He concludes that hypnosis is that fixated hardened state of the thinking mind which dominates our living and our experience. Our self-improvement agendas are our efforts to try to improve this fixated state of mind in order to find happiness. Elias contends that happiness already exists in a pure and spontaneous state shining within. We are already hypnotized by our fixating thinking mind. Being fully alive means being free from our cultural trances. People are already in trance. Problems are the fruit born of their trances. Freedom from trances means being present, at ease, free of fear, whole and peaceful, humble and compassionate, recovering the mystery and sacredness of life. The discursive thinking mind with which we identify our normal sense of self is an on-going hypnotic process.

Who you think you are is your deepest trance state.
Jack Elias

If who we think we are is a mistake, then our whole process of strategizing about our lives is a mishap with varying degrees of painful and pleasurable consequences. When you are fully involved in being who you are, you don’t waste time keeping track of who you are; it isn’t necessary if there is no shame or threat to ward off.

Elias describes the need to free ourselves from a

Elias sees this hypnotic trance of the true enemy of mankind. He considers this egoic-minding process

Fear and love are the only emotions of which you are capable

God is not the author of fear, you are.

Do not be afraid to look upon fear, for it cannot be seen

Fear cannot be real without a cause and God is the only cause

The correction of fear is your responsibility

Those you do not forgive you fear

What you see is hell, for fear is hell

Fear is a symptom of your own deep sense of loss

As love must look past fear, so must fear see love not

Fear arises from a lack of love

Fear is a call for love

Perfect love casts out fear

Fear produces a state that does not exist

Fear is not of the present, but only of the past and future, which do not exist.

How weak is fear, how little and how meaningless

You are fearful because you have forgotten

Love contains the end of guilt, as surely as fear depends on it

All fear is implicit in miscreation

Fear is a judgment never justified

No one who lives in fear is really alive

The Holy Spirit cannot teach through fear

Fear is really nothing and love is everything

A Course in Miracles

There is only fear and love. Every psychotherapy client needs to be confronted with this fact in the first session. This is the plumb line by which to measure and re-construct a true view of reality. Fear and love is the cutting edge of awareness. Everything in the ego is fear-based and fear-controlled. The real self is love. Each thought, feeling or action that is fear-motivated needs to be recognized and named as such if it is to be dis-empowered. Fear’s "power" lies in its hiddenness and in its perception as real.

A Course in Miracles

Therapy does not aim at the teaching of love, but at removing the fearful blocks to love’s awareness. Love has no opposite. Love cannot be threatened, and fear does not exist.

The human mind has no idea that fear is unreal. In your disordered state of mind, you are not afraid of fear. Fear rules the mind and therefore seems so natural that we do not even notice it. We have built a whole human system around survival and fear and have tried to make ourselves at home in such an ego world, but it cannot be done. No one can be at home in a fearful world. We are in a continual battle between our ego and our Self, between fear and love. However, we do not recognize this battle for what it is. We believe our battles to be about a thousand other things. Therefore, it is the therapist’s task to persistently point out every instance of fear-motivated and fear-controlled thought and behavior, since fear is mostly unconscious and denied.

If you do not declare fear to be the central issue in every aspect of therapy, then it will go unnoticed and nothing will be accomplished outside of re-arranging the furniture in the story. Symptoms are the result of the unawareness of love’s omni-presence. Symptoms are expressions of our belief in and commitment to fear and separateness. Our lives are run by the belief in fear, except for the presence of symptoms to remind us of our unawareness of love. If you have not seen through the many disguises of fear, you will be symptomatic. You can resist and deny love, but you cannot exist outside of love, because you are love. Fear is all learned and made up. Fear is not what you are. God didn’t make fear and therefore it does not exist.

Insecurity is not what you are. Survival motivations are not what you are. Control mechanisms are not what you are. Avoidance mechanisms are not what you are. Insecurity, survival and control mechanisms, avoidance and aggression reactions –all are fear-based. All forms of selfishness and addiction are fear-based. Everything in our story is fear-based. In his ignorance, the victim does not know this. He does not know that love is his true nature and that all fear is false learning and denied ignorance. There is nothing to fear. Fear is nothing and about nothing.

Even the love we generally talk about is often conditional and fear-based. Generally we "love" whatever seems to support our belief system and seems to guarantee its survival. If someone offends our self-image deeply enough, "love" can turn to hurt and hate in seconds. Such a love is not unconditional and sooner or later betrays its conventionality and sentimentality.

Fear is divisive; love is unifying. Fear is lacking; love is fullness. Fear is entrapping; love is freeing. Fear is false and unreal; love is true and real. Fear is forceful and weak; love is powerful. What we have called love is a bargaining, a deal-making, a swapping, a giving in order to receive, a 50/50 arrangement, a fairness transaction.

Believing ourselves to be merely human, insecurity reigns. Insecurity provokes manipulation and force in varying degrees. No one is allowed to ever entertain the idea that we are infinite beings. Such an idea would automatically mean that someone had succeeded in becoming better than everyone else, and that is not allowed. Such people are considered egomaniacs or blasphemous. Playing god is just another fear-based game of competition and supposed superiority. Self-realization of our infinite nature, however, is where love takes us. Fear cannot enter here. Until fear has been substantially seen through, unconditional love is not possible. Real honesty and humility has to precede the experience of unconditional love. Fear functions at a vibratory level of 100; love functions at 500 and above. This does not mean that love is merely 5 times stronger than fear; it is exponentially stronger in vibrational frequency, perhaps a hundred or a thousand times greater.

Christine said that she feels useless, that she is so sick and so tired of fighting with life that she cannot even take care of her kids, which is all she cares about. I said that only fear and love exist. She said that many other things exist, namely evil. I said that evil is just fear. She said that I am lying or that I have not ever faced evil. I said that fear makes people misperceive things. She said that people have destroyed her. I said that she is not destroyed, just afraid. She said that she is as good as dead. I said that fear can make you seem dead. She cried in anguish.

I said that she wants so much to believe in love. She said that she hates the world. I said that she fears the world. She said that "they" made her sit on a chair and would not let her get up, that she had no choice. I insisted that she did have a choice. She could have defied them, she could have run away, she could have done numerous things, but she chose to obey them. She argued with me that children have no choice. I asked her what she wanted when she obeyed and sat in the chair. Finally between gritted teeth she said "I was going to make them love me." I said yes, you believed you lacked love and that you would go after it no matter what. She cried some more. Then she said that her mother did not love her or she would not have allowed her to be abused. She said that she would never hurt a child, but that now she is too sick to even get up and take care of her children. She hates everything except her children and now she cannot even love them. I said that fear has got her down. I said that she is abusing herself with fearful thoughts, but that she is love. She said she needed to leave. She asked me if she had hurt me and I said not in the slightest.

The conditional, visible, finite world seems to be the real world and the unconditional, invisible, infinite world may seem unreal. We think our story about this world is our own unique individual reality, but it is not. Everyone has basically the same dreary dreadful melodrama, glamorized and rationalized, in myriad languages and forms.

We have more in common than not, especially symptoms, although they vary so widely in form as not to be recognized as similar in essence.

I gave the following talk to my group of sex offenders, who are ordered by court mandate to participate in weekly therapy in an 18 months treatment program.

"We have all been judged and mis-judged, not only by lawyers and judges on the bench, but also in the court of public opinion, as well as by family, peers and even strangers. We have experienced accusations and self-defense. We have been tried and sometimes acquitted and freed, and sometimes convicted and punished. Judgments and mis-judgments, and the punishments therefrom, have been painful and dreadful, and have become part of our way of living in the world. Not only have we been judged and mis-judged, but we have also judged and mis-judged others, as well as ourselves, which is actually the worst of all. We have sometimes blamed others and we have sometimes excused others, and likewise ourselves. We have been concerned with being "right" about ourselves and others, and we have been defensive when someone said that we were "wrong." Defensiveness and retaliation are usually involved with such accusations and judgments.

The whole experience of being here in this group is about judging. You have an opportunity in this 1 ½ to 2 year period to learn about judging. You can learn to recognize the fear element in judging and being judged. You can learn about the possibilities of a non-judgmental way of perceiving the world. Therefore in order to learn about judging, we have to at least entertain the notion that we are glad that we got caught, even if it was a mis-accusation. In one sense all accusations are mis-accusatations. In society you are unlikely to learn consciously and directly about judging because in society judging is considered normal, necessary and inevitable.

The state’s purpose in group treatment is the prevention of relapsing into another sexual offense and perhaps even acting out in a more general sense. But we want you to consider that the more basic purpose here is the prevention of relapsing into judging.

You mis-judge your needs when you act out, do you not? You mis-judge your victim when you act out, do you not? You mis-judge yourself when you act like a victim, do you not?

You will have insured yourself against acting out and relapsing, when you have gone to the root of it in your thinking. If your thinking is judgmental toward yourself or others, you will act it out. Therefore, the biggest step in this treatment program is to explore in depth the positive meaning of your offense. You have to move from shame, guilt, embarrassment, denial, repression, resentment and blame, to acceptance, understanding, forgiveness, and gratitude for this entire experience.

Try saying to yourself:

1. I am grateful that I offended or was accused of offending
2. I am grateful that I was, to some degree, mis-judged and mis-punished about my offending.
3. I am grateful that I experienced ego-humiliation about this offense among my family and peers
4. I am grateful that I spent some time incarcerated
5. I am grateful that I have to come to this group, although at times I hate it because I am reminded of this whole offense and judgment experience
6. I welcome being reminded of ego-humiliation at any time, and I welcome any future ego-humiliations that may give me the opportunity to inquire about who I really am when I am not being judged or judging, or reacting to the same.

Offenders seem to be the most obvious victims of a judgmental society, but no one is immune to it . Offenders carry the shadow of a judgmental society. Therefore, because you have suffered the most directly and openly, you have the greatest opportunity of anyone to be freed from the judging mentality, unless of course you don’t get the point and you sink deeper into resistance to the real meaning of acting out.

If eventually you cannot honestly say these six things, without pretense or outrage, then your therapy is not done and you will relapse into further lessons about judging and acting out at some time in the future. But at least you will be more aware that judging is the cause of all human suffering and acting out. If you do learn the futility of judging, you will truly be a free man and you will help to free many others from their felt necessity to act out."

The Law of creation is the law of production. Everything produces after its own kind. We are seed planters, and those seeds are our thoughts. Every thought produces after its own kind. Weed seeds produce weeds, flower seeds produce flowers. The weeds in life are our symptoms, thoughts that we have sown. The purpose of symptoms is to reveal the Law of creation, and the Law is that our imagination and our thoughts produce each after its own kind. Infinity is the soil and when we cast our seed thoughts into the soil, these seeds produce weeds or flowers. Imagination is the power that energizes each seed to produce after its own kind, but Infinity is the soil. The purpose of weeds, or symptoms then is to direct our attention to the seed-sowing process and to the Infinity into which we are sowing them. We are infinite beings creating weeds or flowers.

A weed is not good or bad, it is just something we don’t want Some weeds have medicinal value, and some weeds are turned into compost. The secret of life is to be thankful for all of the so-called good and bad. Why be thankful for the bad? Only when you praise God for the bad can you see that the fear of the bad is essentially harmless, useless, and nothing. Also when you praise God for it will you see that you carelessly and thoughtlessly planted this so-called bad thing. And you will see that weed thoughts are just negative energy which can be transformed into compost, into new forms of more productive energy.

Symptoms are the weeds in your life. Weeds perform three valuable functions: (1) they serve to remind you of your responsibility and power to create (2) they can be turned into compost and (3 ) they can connect you to the awareness of the infinite soil of imagination and potentiality in which they grew in the first place.

At all times it is either fear talking or love talking. It is either fear-based sight or love-based vision. Man is to take dominion over all finite things and thus become master of himself. When the human race fails to think creatively, it is because fear has control of our thinking. We are in mental bondage to fear. Are other people doing your thinking for you, while someone else is doing their thinking for them? Correct thinking is a manifestation of imagination, of Godhood. Figs do not grow on thistle bushes. Is your life barren or full? It all depends on the quality of your thinking. God does not play favorites, blessing some and depriving others. As a man thinketh, so is he.

Look at Abraham Lincoln’s life: few opportunities and many failures did not stop him from greatness. He changed all of his weeds into compost. Examine your thinking and see if you do not find doubt and fear, the weeds of life. You are capable of original thinking, which brings a great harvest. If we use our thinking for greedy purposes or for retaliation, we will have a poor garden. Dominion and glory will be given to those who use their minds correctly.

When Jesus met the woman at the well who had had five husbands, he had no interest in judging and condemning her but he said instead "You are thirsty."

Today Sam and I discussed the symptom of his compulsive thinking. He thinks about his heart and his chest begins to ache and he thinks that he will die. He fears that this time his compulsive thinking may kill him. I asked when it started this time and he said when his girlfriend broke up with him about a year ago. He thought they were in love. He has had few relationships and he blames himself for the break-up since he took her for granted. Compulsive thinking and his aching heart is the way he punishes himself for fouling up the only love he has known as an adult. He expected to have her forever. It seems that both of them confused security and love. I asked him whether he took her for granted because he sensed the risk in loving. He thought she wanted more security than he could offer and that this caused her to back off, and so he backed off too, and took her for granted. Taking her for granted was his self-defense, just like wanting more financial security was her defense. Finally, we realized that his problems are due to "flawed thinking." He likes to tell himself that his flawed thinking is due to his flawed chemistry. His homework was to track down the flaw in his thinking. My hunch is that his flawed thinking is his belief that he lacks love and that he is to blame for having none. In other words, fear is the flaw in his thinking: the fearful belief in separateness, the fearful belief in lack and the fearful belief in victimization and self-punishment. I tell him that fear is nothing and love is everything. The true meaning of separation is individuality with respect; the true meaning of lack is provision with gratitude, and the true meaning of entrapment is freedom with responsibility.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,

Who is the fairest of them all?

Be careful how you compare and compete. Your mirror is a perfect reflection of your thoughts. If you compare and compete all the time, you will have winners and losers in your life Why not have all winners? If you think win/win, you will see all winners in the mirror of your life.

If you don’t like what you see in your mirror, change what you are thinking.

What you see is what you get.

Is there is anything worthy of your attention? Dwell on those things that are true, those things that are honorable, those things that are right, those things that are lovely, those things that are excellent, those things which are for the highest good of all concerned, and peace shall be yours.

What goes around, come around

Whatever you throw out, comes back to you

What is coming back at you today, is what you threw out yesterday.

Choose carefully the thoughts that you throw out; they are guaranteed to return. Knowing this is the secret of life.

Every thought is a seed, and every seed brings forth weeds or flowers.

Whatever seeds you sow, you reap in like kind

Look in the mirror of your life and you will see the weeds and flowers you have already planted

Weeds can be turned into compost; a lemon into lemonade, bull crap into fertilizer. Use the magic power of your imagination and intention to change the bad into good. Express thanks for each and every good and bad thing that happens in your life. Praise, love, appreciation and gratitude are magical powers for change.

So if you have weeds in your life, transform them. Then select the kind of seed thoughts that you want to grow in your life for tomorrow. Give those thoughts to yourself and to everyone you meet.

Everything in this universe is geared in one direction: self-realization. Every event and every experience, regardless of our intention, perception or judgments, is oriented toward self-realization. Because everything is infinite in its essence, everything is sacred. There is nothing we can do to make it otherwise, except to misperceive it and cause ourselves a lot of grief. Byron Katie says that she loves what is. How can we not love what is when we realize that it is all designed for self-realization? All of our frustrations, angers, griefs, boredoms, hostilities, jealousies, guilts, self-punishments, abuses, addictions, and sufferings have one ultimate purpose: self-realization. It is that purpose which we fail to see when we mis-diagnose our symptoms. We attribute every cause imaginable to our symptoms except the truth. The cause and purpose of every symptom is the possibility of self-realization, spiritual awakening.

They asked Jesus: "Who sinned, this blind man or his parents?" and Jesus said that it was neither, but that God might be glorified. What kind of gruesome god would glorify blindness? Sighted people do not normally see and neither do the blind. Having eyes does not glorify god nor does being blind discredit god. Only spiritual sight glorifies God, only self-realization glorifies God. The Will of God and the will of man are identical but not as we know god and man. The universe is designed in such a way that the only way to know God is to know yourself and others, and the only way to know yourself and others is to know god. The person who has misjudged himself and others will misunderstand God, and the person who is ignorant of God will discredit himself and others.

My latest self-realization is that I am not separated from my Good; I am not lacking my Good; I am not trapped by less than my Good. I am not separated from the Good of my health, my abundance, my happiness, my pleasure, my freedom. I am not lacking in health, wealth, peace, joy and freedom. I am not a victim of poor health, poverty, suffering, lacks and limits. Wherever I Am, there my Good is. Whatever I am doing is toward the goal of my Good. Any judgment that I lack Good is false. I praise God for my ever-present Good, whether I recognize it or not. Anything that I resist is the result of telling myself that my Good is not present. I am pretending that whatever I am resisting is greater than my Good. Anything that I fear or resent, I am empowering, as though it were greater than my Good. You’re in a pickle? Consider it a perfect pickle!

Why do we keep feeding our fears, jealousies and resentments? Because we think we are feeding ourselves and our good. We do not even have our own best interest at heart.

Feeding our fears is not self-realization. Jesus kept saying "Fear not." There is nothing to fear. The only thing we fear is nothing. Fear has no reality except what we give it. Only truth and love exist, and there is nothing to fear about either. Where truth and love are recognized, fear disappears. When Jesus said that snakes will not harm you he didn’t mean to go out and pick them up. He meant that the most dreaded fears have no power to harm.

Whatever we have attracted into our life at any given moment is perfect for self-realization. The law of the universe says that we attract and experience what we think and that is exactly what we need for self-realization, because it will not satisfy. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God, in truth, in love, in self-realization. Basically one programmed human mind is not ultimately better than another, some are just better manipulators than others. Everyone is ruled to a degree by fear, anxiety,and insecurity. People respond to fear differently: some get nasty and some get nice. But the "nice versus nasty" pair of opposites rules human thinking and exists in every human mind. We are more alike than different.

Do I sound severely pessimistic? I am profoundly optimistic when I say that the human mind is ruled by insecurity. It is optimistic to realize that fear-based behavior is unconsciously motivating a lot of human behavior. If you don’t realize it, you become a victim of pessimism. If you realize that most human thinking is anxiety-based, then you can be an optimist. The fear-based mentality can never work and therefore it is an aid to self-realization. We will never find security in the finite viewpoint. And when you reach the infinite, the insecurity problem does not exist, so why would you need security types of manipulative solutions?

Am I self-realized? It is a matter of degree. I recognize some of the signs of the anxiety-based mind, and I am acquainted with some of the powers of self-realization. I am thanking God more and more in everything I experience. I am beginning to recognize the non-dual reality. It is the non-dual which holds together the apparently dualistic world. If the universe were merely dualistic, it would fly into a million pieces.

Love holds everything together. Human cells are designed to work perfectly. When they become dysfunctional and turn against themselves, we have cancer. It is rather amazing how well our cells stand up under the stress we put them under. However, I believe that the memory of the original design is still there and can be restored. "Troy can be un-burned." Forgiveness is possible on every level, including the cellular. All of our judgments and mistakes will all be unwound, unburned, forgiven, restored, rejuvenated, redeemed. Everything will be returned to its original condition because creation has never left the mind of its creator.

There is an invisible veil, an invisible barrier or wall of beliefs between your finite notion of yourself and the infinite truth of self-realization. When you bump into this wall in your search for answers, you may feel you have nowhere to go but to the finite, to the limited. Since you are an infinite being in a finite body, you are anxiously dissatisfied with merely the finite, and you are constantly searching. Unless you realize that there is a barrier of mis-beliefs you will search only in the finite.

The morning paper said that there were 69 police reports of "peeping tom incidents" in town this last year. What is the "peeping tom" trying to see? What is hidden, what is disguised, what is lost, what is missing? The peeping tom is not the only person who is searching in the finite world for his lost self-realization. We are all looking and searching, each in our own frustrated way. When Jesus spoke with the woman at the well, he knew that she had had five husbands, and that now she was looking for a prophet, for another man to fulfill some unknown need. He said to her that she was "thirsty." He said that there is eternal water with which she will never thirst again. Take notice of how and where you are looking and searching. Ask yourself whether you are searching for your own lost self. Ask yourself what your barrier of misbelief is? What do you tell yourself that keeps you locked into the frustrating pursuit in the finite realm?

Spiritual Psychotherapy is strong medicine. Not everyone has suffered enough to be ready for it. Many people still believe they can make the ego system work. A lot of people are still ready to settle for mediocrity. Some people still want to try to beat the system. They had a dream and they want to make it work. Although Infinity Therapy offers the fastest, safest and most efficient use of your time and energy, it is not easy to re-define what the real problem is.

Infinity Therapy doesn’t deal in sympathy. If you want sympathy, you shouldn’t be reading this. Sympathy will not help you, only understanding. Understanding is not sympathy. Sympathy says "poor me" or "poor you." To address anyone as poor me. is degrading, insulting, ineffective and deceptive. You have given yourself sympathy for years and it does no good, does it? If you expect sympathy, criticism and punishment, you came to the wrong place. There are no excuses, no judgments, no criticisms, and no sympathy here. Support is offered so that you can gain understanding and find the truth, but support is not sympathy. Tools for transformation can be added to support, but pity is not transforming.

The key to freedom is taking responsibility for the situation you have created. The answer lies in the creator of the problem. If you do not see and do not know that you created your problem, then all you can ask for is sympathy and advice. Self-justification is not necessary, nor is self-blame and guilt. If you experience such, use them as a springboard to get to the truth of the matter.

Strong medicine is courage mixed with compassion. Compassion is not pity. Compassion is understanding what causes suffering. People tend to deny suffering or wallow in it. Courage and compassion do neither. Interest in the cause of suffering has nothing to do with blame. The purpose of responsibility is not blame, shame, guilt or punishment. Responsibility is the possibility of freedom from such symptoms. If you do not take responsibility for your suffering, you cannot be cleared of its cause. Most people do not understand what responsibility is and therefore do not find their freedom from suffering. Responsibility is looked upon as a burden rather than as a power to relieve burdens. Responsibility is looked upon as a trap, rather than as freedom from a trap. Responsibility is looked upon as a way to blame and be blamed, rather than release from blaming and being blamed.

This strong medicine is guaranteed not to fail if you understand and don’t give up. You can solve a simple problem such as getting a job or fixing a car with information, but to break through the mental habits of a lifetime takes strong medicine. Conventional medicine, conventional psychology, conventional religion, and popular advice will not solve the human dilemma. You can act out your stress, take drugs or medication, get a divorce, or try to manipulate your symptoms, but you will still have to radically change your thinking.

If you do not see how you have created your own problems and miseries, you will continue to do so. If spiritual rebirth were not required, Jesus would not have said so. The only reason you need outside help for spiritual rebirth is so that you may connect with your core. We do not live in our core but on the periphery in the social world. Everyone is an outsider to himself. The message being given here is from the inside core to you as an outsider on the periphery where you live. We live in a false self world which only works enough for survival, but not enough for fulfillment. You may think that you are a failing human, but you are a failing god and a god cannot fail. Your success depends on no one else, except on the infinity of everyone and everything. On this side of the veil, it is impossible to get enough outside help, and on the other side of the veil, you can use anyone’s help or non-help.

The human dilemma requires radical help, radical medicine, from your core. Unfortunately, society is not aware of any such radical medicine. Without spiritual awakening and rebirth, all we have is a psychological, medical, philosophical, religious hodgepodge. The problem is radical and the solution is radical. The conventional diagnoses of society are not radical and do not lead to radical results. Our diagnoses are mediocre and our treatments are conventional. We may cope a little better, but it won’t satisfy. Compromise will never satisfy you. Nothing short of unconditional love, god-realization and self-realization will satisfy you. Outside of spiritual rebirth, sustained unconditional love is a myth. We may long to receive it, but can we give it?

The medicine we use is weak medicine because it is based upon inaccurate diagnosis of symptoms. Infinity therapy does not give up on you or your symptomatic other. Just because someone acts foolishly does not mean they are not a spiritual being. Foolishness, broken dreams and disillusionment are just grist for the mill of self-realization. The more the merrier. The more ego "success" you have the more you cling to it and the harder it is to see its inherent falsity.

William James

What is this "filmiest"of screens which exists in our normal waking reality, parting us from entirely different potential forms of experience? We prematurely close our accounts with reality due to this screen. We miss out on the metaphysical significance of the reconciliation of opposites, the melting of which would dissolve the contradictoriness and conflicts making all of our troubles and difficulties.

This "filmiest of screens" is what we call the "veil", the barrier, the belief system, the story. It cannot be seen specifically and concretely because it is invisible. The only way it can be seen is so obvious that we do not see it at all. The world itself is your belief system. The trick here is to realize that none of us sees the same world. For each of us, the world is our projection.

William James

The paradox here is that although each person lives in his own individual experience of the world, upon deeper analysis it is found that we all live by a story with a common mediocre unconscious belief system. In the bible this story is called the "carnal mind" or "the old man" or "Adam" or "the world". By contrast Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven within you, the "truth that sets you free" and St. Paul spoke of the "spiritual man" or the "new man" or "Christ in you" . Buddha spoke of the Buddha nature in all things.

The :veil" is the invisible barrier of mis-beliefs which keeps us unaware. Justine argued that the world of evil is real. I said to her that evil is like the clouds that appear to block out the sun. Evil is merely clouds in the mind. I asked her if she could imagine rising above the clouds. She said that heat suffocates her. I said that she can just leave her body in the chair and rise in consciousness. She was awe-struck. She said "I have seen this light before, it is so beautiful. My pain is leaving. When I am in this light, there is no pain." I said to her "You are the light of the world." She came out of her vision and returned to her painful body and said "Oh, no. I do not deserve this. I have to live in hell forever."

Justine blames herself for two abortions that she had, feeling she murdered these children. She says that other people talked her into it. but actually she blames herself. I told her that you cannot destroy spirit, that these children have moved on and she can move on also. She clung to her guilt and said that God is punishing her. I said that she is punishing herself out of fear. She had had an awesome vision yesterday of being in huge spacious rooms, which opened into other huge beautiful spacious rooms, but she did not feel at home there and she begged to return to her own familiar awful house. I reminded her of Jesus words that in his father’s house are many mansions for us. She could not accept this for herself. She said that she has to suffer until Judgment Day. I said that God says for us to Come, Now. She was shocked and denied that this is scripture. I said that our story is full of ignorance. She said that she is ignorant. I said that actually she is intelligent, but has been brain-washed by fear into ignorance. She said that when she was young, she took tests which indicated that she was in the upper 5 percentile of the population in intelligence. But she said that her intelligence was stolen. I said that it just went underground due to fear. She argued that the spirits of many people have been stolen. I said that god cannot be defeated by fearful beliefs.

The veil is just that which hides us from awareness of the sun, fearful thought clouds thoughts in our mind. Like Justine, we can rise above the clouds and experience the awesome light of truth and peace, that place where pain disappears. Justine does not yet allow herself to visit that light at any time, but she has already tasted the possibility.

  Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.
  And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent

Matthew 27: 50-52

The "veil" was the curtain in the temple which separated the sacred from the secular.  When Jesus was crucified the "veil" was "rent" or torn from top to bottom.  The entire universe became sacred when victimization ended. The crucifixion means "no more victims!"   The belief in victims is the veil which separates us from our divine identity. 

Back in the tribal days, when there was no television, newspapers or books, the people gathered around campfires in the evenings for singing and story-telling. These songs and stories were passed down from generation to generation, and shaped the lives and cultures of the people. Many of these stories were preserved as fairy tales and others as myths and history.

A couple of years ago, at the turn of the Millenium the media decided to select the 100 most influential persons in the last 1000 years. Do you know who was number one? Was it Elvis Presley, was it Michael Jordan, was it George Washington, was it Abraham Lincoln, was it Bill Gates, was it Albert Einstein? No, it was a man named Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. Without the printing press, we would not have newspapers, books and education as we know it. Then along came television as the new media for music, news, and stories. And now the internet provides the information highway for the most comprehensive source for education ever known to mankind. I believe that we have an unquenchable craving for knowledge. Ever since Adam and Eve we are seeking after the knowledge of good and evil. The only problem is that we think we know the truth and we dull our desire and get stuck with the status quo. The love of learning must be re-kindled if we want to get out of our rut of mediocrity. The problem with television and the internet is that you have to be selective if you are going to be uplifted, or you will just stay with the crowd.

And so, as a part of our group process, I want us to imagine that we are gathered around a crackling campfire listening to a story. We will tell two kinds of stories here, stories about your life and archetypal stories about the cosmos, stories that uplift and inspire, stories that engage us at a deep unconscious level and make a difference. All of us live by the stories that we tell ourselves. We will examine the stories we tell ourselves to see if they are uplifting or not.

I asked Don what story he is telling himself about his life and his crack addiction. He said that he walks out the door and all of his resolves are thrown out the window and he goes for broke into the crack experience. Then he experiences being broke, being ashamed, beating himself up, etc. I asked him if he can remember ever feeling as good as when he takes the first few hits of dope. He said that when he was in love. He said that his innocent being-in-love experience will never return to him. Distrust has ruined that prospect. So he is stuck with mediocrity and distrust and rushes into the drug experience in spite of his resolves and in spite of the destructiveness of it. He would like to be sober, but the pull of habit is too great.

I told Don that this is his story and that he needs to understand it. It is the story of the Garden of Eden, of good and evil. The innocence was part of a story of innocence and guilt, of good and evil. In this story everyone betrays others and themselves because this story is not yet infinite enough to satisfy us. The story we live is really finite, ordinary and mediocre. He can never go back to mere sobriety and ordinary moral goodness. He would miss the drama of his good and evil story. But again, the drama he is experiencing is really mediocre and ordinary. And where can he go, if he can’t go back to the "good" life and he isn’t satisfied with the "bad boy" life of drugs.

There is a third option and it has no ceiling like his drug habit . We try to drag God into our story, but then religion becomes part of our mediocrity. God invites us to join him in the journey into the infinite mystery. Are we too chicken to walk through the Mystery Door into the unknown? The non-drug life and the drug life are no mystery, and do not involve the ultimate risk. They are habitual, barely alive, unsatisfying. An infinite being cannot be satisfied with anything less than the unconditional, the infinite.

Archetypal stories are not like our mediocre ego stories. Archetypal stories involve the ultimate risk and the Mystery. Whether they are about slaying dragons or seeking the Holy Grail, they are self-transcending stories that raise us to a higher synthesis.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

Henry D. Thoreau

Henry D. Thoreau

You are frustrated? You are a godlike being? There is a vast gap between these two incongruences. How do you explain this gap, this dissonance? You cannot. But you must hold these two paradoxes in your mind at all times. Do not deny your frustration; do not deny your spiritual identity. Eventually, the truth will dawn upon you. You will discover that your frustrations are the result of a fearful mis-belief system, a self-created story, and this story begins to disintegrate before the self-evident truth of who you really are. How could a godlike being be fearful and frustrated, except that his frustration is born of a veil of ignorance of the truth that sets you free? Mis-belief is the gap, the veil, the barrier that keeps you trapped in stress, insecurity, frustration, pain, disease, anger, and despair. You can penetrate that veil, those clouds of fear, and experience your own infinite light. "You are the light of the world." It is interesting that Jesus said "I am the light of the world" and "You are the light of the world." Why don’t we ever put that together? How do we keep that truth separate from our story?

Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

John 8

Ye are the light of the world.

Matthew 5

Of course you are! Think about all of the times you got "took." Did you ever pay three times what anything was worth because some sales pitch found your weak spot?

One in five children receive sexual solicitations on the internet. They are told that they are "beautiful, intelligent, and desirable." Many of them "fall" for this line and are abducted. Why are they vulnerable? Why do adults fall for a line? Ask the advertisers! Advertisers have studied the art of seduction and they know the human weak points. And what are those weak points? What makes us an "easy mark?" What makes "scams" work? What makes us compromise and "sell out" or "buy into" tempting things?

What is your weak spot? Each person may have a seemingly different weak spot, but actually we all have the more basic weakness, our mis-belief about who we are. That same weakness makes us vulnerable to seduction, sales pitches, disease, anger, guilt, stress, and addiction. What is that mis-belief, that weakness, that vulnerability, that underlies all "weak points?" If you do not consciously know that you are an infinite spiritual being, you will be seduced and abducted by your own story of separateness, lack and victimization.

Bill Wilson

A Course in Miracles

A Course in Miracles

I have joy now instead of just happiness. BIG DIFFERENCE. Happiness has an opposite. Joy does not!!

Reality is not what it appears to be. All things are in reality the appearance of love in form. However, we judge and interpret form according to our story. Our story is the result of many fear-based life experiences and the collective unconscious, fused together in an ego-motivated survival strategy. This story and its strategies are perfect for self-realization because they do not satisfy.

Alexis de Tocqueville

There is only one lack: the lack of awareness

There is only one separation: the separation from true awareness

There is only one entrapment: entrapment in unawareness.

She lacks trust, he lacks attention. They both believe they lack. They consider this their problem, but if this is their diagnosis, they will be trying to fill up and they will fail, because you cannot fill up the infinite with the finite. The God Space is infinite. Do not try to fill it. Just be aware. Awareness is all it takes.

Some quotes from A Course in Miracles on perfection:

Whatever is true is eternal, and cannot change or be changed. Spirit is therefore unalterable because it is already perfect

Whatever is, is perfect

St. Augustine

The God-Space is not what our finite mind tells us it is. The God-Space is infinite. It does not need to be filled, for out of it comes everything. The first thing that comes out of it is all of the junk we have put in it. Clear means that that space is empty. Pure means that space is empty. Forgiveness means that space is empty. Empty means that space is infinite. Ordinarily our finite mind interprets the God-Space as a void, as emptiness, nothingness, lack, loneliness, need, want, silence or boredom. The only reason that the God-space is dark or cluttered is that we have been trying to fill it up with noise and stuff. Clear means that the darkness and clutter of all of our belief systems is released and light and clarity can come.

The Infinity Space is where we plant our seed thoughts, seed fears, seed wishes; Infinity Space is the ground or field in which all finite things are germinated and grow. This god space is sometimes called hunger or thirst or deficiency. Its true meaning cannot be understood with the finite mind. This space is invisible, intangible, eternal, and invincible. The God Space signifies the interruption of history, of all of the power we give to the past and the future. The God-Space is Now, present. It is heaven, it is the kingdom of God coming on earth.

Every patient has problems with trust, and so does the therapist. You cannot live in this world without experiencing the betrayal of trust. Distrust is a necessary experience for Self-realization. Our implicit trust is in our story and that is why we have to experience distrust before we can awaken. We mouth the phrase that everything happens for a reason, but we don’t know the reason. Distrust is the symptomatic experience necessary for real Trust. So let us examine here some of the things we trust, some of the reasons that trust is necessarily broken, and what real Trust is:

• You can trust that your story is going to be hit-and-miss
• You can trust that you will be betrayed by your story
• You can trust that your story is not really true
• You can trust that your story will lead to dissatisfaction
• You can trust that your story will lead to attempts to control and to failure to control
• You can trust that you will feel anxious and guilty as long as you are unconsciously committed to your story
• You can trust that your disappointments and suffering are due to your belief system
• You can trust that you empowered your belief system and are responsible for its results
• You can trust that you are moving toward an awakening.
• You can trust that nothing will harm you, although many things offend the ego
• You can trust that your significant other will present to you exactly what you need to deal with next
• You can trust that your partner’s story is essentially the same as yours, although it looks quite the contrary.
• You can trust that the universe is designed for your self-realization
• You can trust that your seed thoughts will produce like results
• You can trust that other people are doing the same thing you are
• You can trust that your relationships are mirroring exactly what it takes for your awakening
• You can trust that the needs of an imperfect human will never be met and will always be frustrated to one degree or another.
• You can trust that your perfect spiritual self has no needs and no frustrations
• You can trust that your awareness is all that is lacking
• You can trust that unawareness brings suffering
• You can trust that your ego story is a victim story and that your spiritual self is not a victim in any way.
• You can trust that as long as you are attached to the unholy trinity (the belief in separateness, lack and entrapment) that you will always be searching and not finding.
• You can trust that if you don’t fill up your God-Space with anxiety that God will fill it with himself.
• You can trust that if you keep the God-Space clear that out of it will flow the power of Wisdom, Health, Abundance, Love, Peace, Freedom and Joy.
• You can trust that once the God-space is clear, you can put any seed thought in it and it will manifest
• You can trust that fear will disappear the more love is allowed
• You can trust that you will not lose what you are and that you already are what you want, whether you know it or not.
• You can trust that you are already the perfect spiritual being that God created, and there is nothing you can do about it, except to deny it or accept it

Notice how often you have a critical attitude, whether critical of others or of yourself of something else. Students today are all taught to develop a critical mind, to look at the pros and cons of everything. Not to buy anything just because someone is selling it or making a pitch. Infinity Theory is a questioning of everything, an inquiry into everything.

The problem is that we criticize everything except our own story. Inquiry is not necessarily criticism. Inquiry is a questioning of my own thinking, assumptions, and belief system. Unquestioning acceptance is not real acceptance.

Notice your criticisms. All criticism is essentially self-criticism; whether criticism is projected outwardly onto others or not, it is still self-criticism, and it is still part of the story. If you are criticizing someone for not being appreciative, then give yourself and others appreciation. If you are critical because you want intimacy, then be intimate toward yourself and others. If you are critical because you want respect, then be respectful toward yourself and others. If you feel critical because someone is angry, let go of your anger. If you are critical because you are lonely, then be with yourself.

Criticism is unawareness; gratitude is awareness. Be aware of your self-limiting story and be grateful for it, because that awareness is self-correcting.

Criticism generates conflict. Conflict is between one illusion and another, between one false self and another. There is no conflict between truth and illusion. Truth does not fight with illusions. Illusion resists truth, but there is no conflict, because conflict requires two. Truth does not fight with itself. Truth recognizes itself. Anger, disappointment, sadness, grief, fear, and guilt are all activities of illusion, arising from illusory sense of loss. If we experience any form of conflict, opposition, or resistance, and all of the judgments and effects thereof, we are not in truth and peace, but in illusion.

The Christ in you has no conflict with illusions, which are unreal and amount to nothing. Illusions are things we made up. Anything that creates conflict in yourself or in another is an illusion. When you develop vision, you will see that behind all illusions is untarnished truth. I am as God created me and you are as God created you; everything else is illusion, misperception, misjudgment, a mistake. Even the most extreme forms of violence are illusory because they arise from misjudgment, from the fearful beliefs that love is absent, provision is absent, and freedom is absent. The body identity has created a dream in which it is the cause and not the effect. We allow our body identity to persuade us that we are its victims. We are the dreamer, the cause, and we can change our story, our dream and our mind. Until now we have believed that the world can affect us, that we came from the earth. Everything in the dream is taken to authenticate our belief in some kind of objective reality out there that could control you.

Why wait for heaven? Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all. The light came with you from your native home and stayed with you because it is your own. The light cannot be lost. The peace of God is shining in you now.

A Course In Miracles

Only a person who thinks he is insecure would try to control another.

Sin is the belief I am separated from God ; sins are the mistakes I make to compensate for the misbelief about who I am. Can God be defeated by my misbeliefs and mistakes?

A Course In Miracles

A Course In Miracles

Sickness is a Defense Against the Truth

A Course in Miracles

Today we have the most advanced technology and the largest body of medical knowledge in the history of man. Despite this, very little is understood about the root cause of disease. If you look in the Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR)…many, if not most of the descriptions in the PDR says the same thing, i.e., "the mechanism of action is unknown."

James J. Zubernis

Although modern medicine does regard disease and its symptoms as effects, it was a stretch for Dr. James Zubernis to view the body and sickness as a projection. He notes that heart patients who are depressed and have bypass surgery more often die soon after their surgery than non-depressed patients having the same procedure. Heart patients who were prayed for and had invasive heart procedures have much better outcomes than their non-prayed for counterparts. Women in Korea, who had fertility problems and had failed to become pregnant after all conventional fertility treatments were attempted, entered a study in which they were prayed for. Suddenly not only were they able to become pregnant but also did so at a much higher rate than their non-prayed for counterparts. It has long been known, he adds, that drug and alcohol addicts who participate regularly in a recovery program emphasizing a change in perception and a connection to a higher power tend to stop using drugs and alcohol and remain stopped.

What is going on here? Zubernis notes that all of these observations point to the mind as the underlying cause for the effects they describe. From my own experience with patients, he says, I have come to understand that patients who view themselves as sick are sick. Patients who have an investment in having their bodies be sick, are sick. Angry people have a higher incidence of cancer and heart disease. Women who have issues with their pregnancies (not wanting to be pregnant, angry with their significant others, family issues with their pregnancies) have complicated pregnancies. People who lose "the will to live" often die suddenly or develop life-threatening illnesses. There are now a number of well designed and well documented studies, done in major medical centers (where all the "real" research is done) which prove, beyond the shadow of a reasonable scientific doubt, that state of mind dictates, in large measure, state of health.

Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it…it is the witness to your state of mind, an outside picture of an inward condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive.

A Course in Miracles

Reality behaves the way we expect it to. The mind decides, the body obeys. Zubernis concludes that "the help of the Holy Spirit allowed me to shift my perception to see that I am not a body, nor is anyone else. I still prescribe medications and do surgery, however, I no longer view these things as an end unto themselves but a means of saying ‘My brother choose again.’" "

Everything in the finite world of opposites, including our symptoms, has an upside and a downside, a plus and a minus, a benefit and a cost, an advantage and a disadvantage, a gain and a loss. If you are here, you can’t be there; if you buy this, you can’t spend that same money on something else; if you have more time for this, you have less time for that.

As much as we complain about our problems and symptoms, let us inquire about some of the possible payoffs (beliefs) about them:

• I get to be righteously angry and justifiably rebellious or violent
• I get to feel self-pity
• I get to justify my failures
• I get to retaliate against injustices
• I get to punish the guilty
• I get to pretend to prove that my entire finite belief system is true
• I get to remain unconscious
• I get to argue that God created a defective world
• I get to tell myself that my addictions are necessary for survival
• I get to protest against the belief that I am responsible
• I justify my addictions and feel entitled to that which no one gives me
• I get to feel that I am right whether I am happy or not
• I try to prove to myself that my suffering is not my fault
• I get to manipulate, lie, pretend, cheat, exaggerate, abuse, use, deny, minimize, steal and judge others with justification, because I have been deprived, used and abused

The whole idea of payoffs and rewards is a misunderstanding. The ego is, in itself, never enough and so there have to be payoffs to make the ego story seem worthwhile. However, the payoffs keep falling apart and you have to keep reminding yourself that you are getting these "benefits."

Self-realization, on the other hand, is its own reward and needs no payoff per se. After all, what can you add to infinity? Although the ego produces weeds and the Self produces fruit, such is not a necessary proof of the value of self-awareness.

The truth is:

• I create all of my own experiences
• There are no accidents
• There is no justification for attack-and-defense
• There are no villains or victims
• Love is the only reality
• I have created all of my own suffering and symptoms, knowingly or unknowingly
• I am not satisfied with my payoffs
• I have ignored God and denied that I am as he created me
• Fear has ruled my mind
• I have judged every human being I have ever met according to my own story
• Forgiveness is my chief function in life
• There are no failures, only opportunities to learn
• I am an infinite spiritual being and there is nothing I can do about it, except to see it or ignore it
• There is a beautiful perfect world I could see if I were awake
• In all of my addictions and symptoms I am actually seeking for the truth of who I am

A Course in Miracles

My self-rescue plan is based upon the assumed payoffs listed above. The Course has boiled this self-rescue plan down to one simple thing: holding on to grievances. That there is any justifiable basis for any grievance or any symptom is challenged here. In my human perception, I believe that "this" thought, idea, wish, or action is going to rescue me, protect me, satisfy me, or free me, but any such "this" and any such "me" is only a finite effect of my story. My story has set up the belief that there are victims, villains and rescuers. In my story I tell myself that I have been deprived and used, and therefore I am suffering and have to be rescued, and since no one else will do it, I will do it myself. And I will do it by holding on to my grievance story. In this story I have been judge, jury and punisher/rewarder.

This self-rescue plan will not work, it never has. God’s plan of rescue or salvation is through forgiveness, through which awareness is restored and the truth is known. I am still as God created me. I am not damaged, I am not victimized. I am not guilty of damaging or victimizing others. They too are still as God created them. It is time to wake up from this grievance nightmare. What better news could you imagine, especially if it is true! Who decides if it is true or false? You do. You decide if your grievance story is true or false. You also decide if your symptoms are a curse or a blessing.

What is your self-rescue plan? Has it worked so far? Are there symptoms telling you that something is awry? Are there symptoms telling you that you have overlooked something about your spiritual reality? Are you sure that you need rescuing? Can you deny that 24/7you are into self-rescue, self-protection, self-enhancement and self-validation?. Can you deny that you have been less than effective at this game? Even if you have played god, has it been effective? Infinity theory is not even discussing "playing god". "Playing god" is an ego game based upon fear and the desire to control. Self-realization is the unconditional loving awareness that I am an infinite spiritual being, a son of God.

My new client feels that her entire 25 year life is a mess. She would like to believe that she is okay and she pretends to be on top of things to other people, but inside she is hiding her shame, guilt, fear and sense of weakness. I remind her that there are three circles of human experience: the outer circle is C, the next inner circle is B and the core circle is A. We know about C and B, but we do not know A. C is what we pretend to be; B is what we fear we are, and C is the core truth. B is so painful that we want to deny it and repress it and avoid it. The more we avoid it the more we think it must be true. However, we need to go through the pain of B and discover A, the core self that God has created and can never be defeated. Psychotherapy is the journey from C to B to A.

We are always trying to rescue ourselves from B by improving C, but we keep failing to sustain this improvement. If B and C are illusions about our selves that we have created in our story, then self-rescue is an energy-waster. Our symptoms are a reminder that illusions do not satisfy. God’s plan of salvation, self-realization through forgiveness of grievances, is the only truth and the only thing that can work. Since my only true function is forgiveness and the extension of peace, then I have a purpose which fully expresses my infinite spiritual oneness with God and my brothers.

Jane has a multiple personality disorder symptom. There are many "parts" of her acting out inner dramas that make television look tame. I challenge her to tell them all to cooperate with her or to go in peace. In this drama she has no power whatsoever. I tell her that she has given away her rightful power and that she can take it back. She said that one of these parts is a dangerous crazy lunatic who is tied to the bed, and no one had better untie him. I tell her that she can bring Jesus in and let him handle this guy. She seems relieved and more relaxed.

In this instance she does not have to rescue and protect herself. I can see now how she can get her group together and let some of them go in peace, but she will be in charge. She came out of her paralyzing fear and left in an upbeat mood. We also talked in this session about her tiredness. She drinks two liters a day of soda and smokes five packs of cigarettes. When I suggested that her diet is tiring her, she said that she could never change that. I asked her if she was feeding some beast. She said that this hunger could never be quenched. I said that she is hungry for peace, love and light, and that she can gradually substitute what she wants into her diet. She said that I know nothing about reality. I said that fear is not reality.

What are some of our self-rescue plans? They are so numerous that it would take an entire book to list and describe them? Just look at everyone you know and you will see beautiful examples of self-rescue plans. Every symptom you can name is the result of a defective self-rescue plan. Self-rescue cannot possibly work because you do not need rescuing. You are still just as god created you. But let us look at some of the major self-rescue plans just for the fun of it:

• Control, manipulation, and domination
• Appeasement, conformity, passivity
• Aggression, rebellion, defiance
• Avoidance, withdrawal, self-defense, non-communication
• Fronting, pretense, hiding, masking, hypocrisy
• Conditional taking
• Conditional giving
• Guilt-arousing tactics
• Fear arousing tactics
• Attention-getting, fame, notoriety
• Self-improvement
• Obsessively collecting things, money, memorobelia, etc
• Addictive substances, obsessive perfectionism, compulsive sexuality

A quick review of these self-rescue plans reveals that they are also symptoms. For every human dilemma, we have contrived various psychological, emotional, and material solutions which we call here self-rescue plans. When these plans do not deliver enough, we must look deeper. If you are seeking therapy, you must admit and analyze your self-rescue plan, and its limitations.

The Spiritual Meaning of Symptoms is based upon the interface of two scriptures with psychotherapy. The Holy Bible and the Course in Miracles were both inspired by the same Spirit, which also guides the healing process in psychotherapy. Earlier scriptures were penned by prophets and sages on various continents and in scattered time periods. The Course in Miracles is a 20^th century scripture dictated by Jesus and penned by a female Jewish psychologist in New York City in the 1960’s. Although the truth behind all scriptures is one, our understanding of truth varies with our level of awareness and revelation. The Holy Bible and The Course in Miracles may seem contradictory to some who have not studied both in the light of psychotherapy issues. I grew up with the Christian scriptures and studied them in their original languages. I deepened my appreciation and understanding of the Christian scriptures when I studied the scriptures of other religions, and particularly the universal scripture, A Course in Miracles, along with trying to decipher the cause of human suffering with my patients and myself as human documents. I am and can be my only patient. Tara Singh emphasizes that the Course in Miracles is our own personal scripture, written just for the modern individual who is willing to question his own judgments and forgive. A 478 page Workbook for Students gently takes apart the human programming which keeps us locked into a self-defeating pattern of illusion. There is also a Text and a Manuel for Teachers, as well as a Psychotherapy primer. Neither the Bible nor the Course have much to say directly about imagination or about symptoms, but implicitly and indirectly they have worlds to say.

As True Religion Heals, So Must True Psychotherapy Be Religious.

For the first time in the history of scriptures, psychotherapy is discussed by the author of A Course in Miracles. I have summarized the basic ideas of this discussion below:

The patient need not think of truth as God in order to make progress in salvation. But he must begin to separate truth from illusion, recognizing that they are not the same, and becoming increasingly willing to see illusions as false and to accept the truth as true. His Teacher will take him on from there, as far as he is ready to go. Psychotherapy can only save him time. The Holy Spirit uses time as He thinks best, and He is never wrong. All psychotherapy leads to God in the end. But that is up to Him. We are all His psychotherapists, for He would have us all be healed in Him. 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. Religion is experience; psychotherapy is experience.

As all therapy is psychotherapy, so all illness is mental illness. Once God's Son is seen as guilty, illness becomes inevitable. Sickness is insanity because all sickness is mental illness, and in it there are no degrees. One of the illusions by which sickness is perceived as real is the belief that illness varies in intensity; that the degree of threat differs according to the form it takes. Herein lies the basis of all errors, for all of them are but attempts to compromise by seeing just a little bit of hell. This is a mockery so alien to God that it must be forever inconceivable. But the insane believe it because they are insane.

It is in the instant that the therapist forgets to judge the patient that healing occurs. The healed healer. can hardly be called a professional therapist. They are the Saints of God. They are the Saviors of the world. Once the professional therapist has realized that minds are joined, he can also recognize that order of difficulty in healing is meaningless. He must also recognize the equality of himself and the patient. There is no halfway point in this. Either they are equal or not.

The relevance of this discussion for Infinity Therapy is obvious: all therapy is psychotherapy, all illness is mental illness, the only thing to be cured is the patients most prized possession: his picture of himself. Psychotherapy is a joining of minds in a relationship into which Christ can enter. God has only one Son. Seeing god’s Son as guilty creates illness. Psychotherapy is forgiveness.

What then does the Course say about symptoms? I have spoken of different symptoms, and at that level there is almost endless variation. There is, however, only one cause for all of them: the authority problem. . This is ‘the root of all evil’ Every symptom the ego makes involves a contradiction in terms, because the mind is split between the ego and the Holy Spirit, so that whatever the ego makes is incomplete and contradictory.

So the Course says that the cause of symptoms is the authority problem, the authorship issue. Symptoms are created by the ego and involve a contradiction in terms, an incompleteness. The ego believes that it created you, that the ego is the author of you. The ego "made" its own picture of itself, but God created you. "You did not create yourself." You cannot have peace or freedom until this illusion of self-creation is undone. The belief in separation from God and our brothers is the cornerstone of the ego’s illusory belief system and all of its symptoms.

You are afraid to know God's Will, because you believe it is not yours. This belief is your whole sickness and your whole fear. Every symptom of sickness and fear arises here, because this is the belief that makes you want not to know. Believing this you hide in darkness, denying that the light is in you.

One of the most difficult temptations to recognize is that to doubt a healing because of the appearance of continuing symptoms is a mistake in the form of lack of trust. As such it is an attack. Usually it seems to be just the opposite. It does appear unreasonable at first to be told that continued concern is attack. It has all the appearances of love. Yet love without trust is impossible, and doubt and trust cannot coexist. And hate must be the opposite of love, regardless of the form it takes. Doubt not the gift and it is impossible to doubt its result. This is the certainty that gives God's teachers the power to be miracle workers, for they have put their trust in Him

Thus what the Course is saying is that the therapist must not assume that if a symptom continues that his trust in truth is in doubt. When the therapist sees the patient as God created him, the patient is free from the fear which is the basis of all symptoms. "Fear is the veil that has been drawn across the face of love." The job of psychotherapy is to part that veil.

1. Nicholas Berdyaev prophesied that we would come into an age of freedom and creativity in the latter part of the 20^th century ; that time has arrived.

2.William Blake recognized that the spiritual essence of man is imagination   

3.  Jung, Hilton and Assiagoli, along with Ken Wilber, laid the foundations for a transpersonal psychology focused upon imagination.

4.  Imagination is the missing piece in our understanding of the whole person

5.   Psychology, theology, and psychotherapy as a whole have not adequately recognized the centrality of imagination in holistic treatment, and that is why we do not yet have a mature spiritual psychotherapy.

6.   What we have so far is a psychological, social and medical model of psychotherapy based upon various emotions, behaviors, and cognitive distortions

7.   These various faculties of man are addressed through a diagnosis of somatic, emotional, and cognitive distortions called symptoms.

8.   We do not yet have a depth approach to symptom diagnosis and this limits our treatment potential

9. Without an understanding of how imagination is the key factor in diagnosis, we shall not enter the stage of freedom and creativity of which Berdyaev prophesied.

10. We need an infinity model of man, but so far we only have a finite psychological/social/medical model of man

11. Many great teachers and therapists have contributed pieces of this spiritual understanding about man

12. I believe it is possible to re-interpret the scriptures , principally the Bible and A Course in Miracles, in a way that guides us through the pitfalls of mis-imagination.

13.Spiritual Psychotherapy: The Infinite Meaning of Symptoms is an in-depth exploration of imagination and the Christ or Self archetype as a basis for an emerging spiritual psychotherapy.

14. Infinity Theory is an attempt to pull together the most relevant strands of psychology, theology, philosophy and science as they contribute to a spiritual understanding of the divinity of man in both diagnosis and treatment. Building on the work of Jung, Hilton, Assiagoli, Wilber, and the scriptures, this author extends the forefront of spiritual psychology well into the 21^st century.

A Course In Miracles is the only major scripture originally written in English in modern times for the western psychological mind.

Let us consider some of the possible criteria for the validation of the authenticity of scriptures.

1. Divine inspiration and revelation
2. A universal message, transcending time, place and personality
3. Given through a human vehicle or agent
4. Internal consistency
5. Critiques man’s condition and offers a solution or plan for release
6. Defines the role of a savior figure or method of salvation
7. Recognition by a body of believers
8. Enduring influence
9. Tested and authenticated as transformative by students and followers
10. Creates controversy over its meaning and is often used by the ego for self-defense
11. Is in tune with the Perennial Philosophy

A Course In Miracles seems to meet most of these criteria except that it is only about 30 years old. Of all of the known scriptures, A Course in Miracles is the least apt to be used in power politics because it has no organized church, no hierarchy, no official doctrinal or theological interpreters, no priesthood or clergy, no professional board of directors or licensure laws. ACIM has been translated into many languages. It supports, challenges and integrates all of the world’s scriptures. It teaches that the Christ is the universal self within all persons. It teaches that God only had One Son, and that is all of us. It teaches that we never were nor will be separated from God and each other, except in our illusions. ACIM re-frames and integrates all earlier religions into a metaphysical language designed to carry our psychological age into a truly spiritual awareness and experience. The work that the Christ exemplified in Jesus is fully explained and corrected, where necessary, in ACIM. The Course does not violate the essential meaning of any religion, it only corrects our limited understanding. ACIM provides us the tools to resolve the ego/Self dilemma which philosophy, psychology and theology have stumbled over for centuries. ACIM directly and relentlessly challenges our entire ego belief system with grace and precision.

A Course in Miracles

As a student of the Bible for a lifetime and of the Course since 1975, I have written Symptoms as an extension of the essential meaning of the Bible and A Course In Miracles into the inner workings of the human mind and the psychotherapy process. Although Symptoms was revealed to me primarily in front on my computer, it was refined and tested out in the therapy process and reflections thereupon, some of the major breakthroughs occurred while I was shaving. When I asked why, I realized it was because what I see in the mirror is not me. I am not this body or this self-image that I see with my physical sight. Inner vision is occurring at the same moment as mirror sight, helping me to realize that I am re-joining the mind of God as I release my own ego insanity and illusions.

Does A Course in Miracles or the Holy Bible need a book like Symptoms? I doubt it, but Symptoms was written for me and my enlightenment process. Symptoms is open to correction if it is to be useful to anyone else.

Before any scriptures were ever written, God left the reality of His love and truth deeply implanted in the human document we call the soul, and this image cannot be erased, burned or degraded. To be sure, we have misinterpreted who and what we are, but it remains shining brightly beneath the clouds of our human belief system.

PAIN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

PAIN is what prevents action.
PAIN is what prevents honesty.
PAIN is what prevents accomplishment.
PAIN is what ruins relationships.
PAIN is what causes a person to veer from their dreams, aspirations, and VISIONS and do something else less meaningful.
PAIN causes poverty.
PAIN stops learning.
PAIN causes reluctances.
PAIN oppresses awareness.
PAIN oppresses abilities.
PAIN oppresses skills.
PAIN oppresses intelligence.
PAIN oppresses powers.
PAIN oppresses strengths.
PAIN oppresses clevernesses.
PAIN oppresses knowledge.
PAIN oppresses truth.
PAIN oppresses love.
PAIN oppresses freedom.
PAIN oppresses mastery.
PAIN oppresses creativity.
PAIN oppresses causativeness.
PAIN oppresses bravery.
PAIN causes cowardice.

Sickness is mind sickness. Talking to Jane today, I told her that she is in charge of all of the parts in her mind. She has it all. She needs to ask them to cooperate or leave. She said there is one part that is tied up on the bed, and is too dangerous to release. I told her to bring Jesus in and let him handle this one.

What does your crisis offer you? Salvation. The signal is a symbol of your potential salvation. It is a twin witness to your major life dilemma. As long as anyone believes he is not an infinite spiritual being, he will attract victim experiences. We must seek to detect the human story. It is such a complete system that it is almost indetectible. If we do not detect it, you will be its victim. You will be trying to figure out who is right and who is wrong and you will not win.

In the midst of this imperfect world, there is a perfect world. In the midst of our imperfect thoughts, there is the perfect will of God. In the midst of all the weeds, there is a perfect dandelion. St Paul said it perfectly "Now we see is a mirror darkly, but then we shall see face to face. When that which is perfect has come, that which is imperfect will pass away." But the perfect has come and is. When you realize the perfect, the imperfect passes away. There is a perfect world in the midst of what appears to be imperfection. There is a perfect self hidden behind the finite personality and body. The Christ is that perfect self. The kingdom of heaven is that perfect world.

Should and shouldn’t are the language of unawareness. Attachment and resistance are indicators that we are in the finite world and the finite mind. Attachment and resistance constitute the inner battle between guilt and fear. Every "bottom line" is just another judgment, another evaluation, another opinion. Whenever someone makes a judgment as to what caused something, I wonder what caused that judgment. Inquiry is the only creative response to a judgment, because if you make a counter-judgment, you are stuck in the imperfect world of the finite mind. The world of opposites and the oppositional mind is best transcended by inquiry.

"I wonder where the perfect is" is my constant inner query. What are we searching for?

Today I asked Chris why he hates school. He is bored. I asked him what school is for and he said education. I asked him what education is. He said it is getting information so as to get a job. I asked him how you get information. He compared it to a computer. I asked him what is the difference in a computer and himself. This he could not really answer. This is his route to education.

Are you in control of self? What is in control of you? There are two worlds, the perfect and the imperfect. The imperfect or finite world is the world in which we are indoctrinated and brainwashed, the world of limitation and evaluation. The imperfect world has a counterpart. The perfect world is that which we seek. Plato, Jung and other philosophers spoke of the type, the prototype or the archetype, the universal, from which the finite world is a copy.

Ignorance of self is ignorance of God

William Hamilton

"I wonder where the perfect is" has become my constant query. Is it possible that it is right here in the midst of all of our so-called imperfect experiences. Are we just not able to see it? Are we so blinded by the finite world, by the trance, by the story that we are telling ourselves, that we cannot see it? In this dark mirror of human perception, in our inner world of finite judgments, are we just ignorant of the truth?

Just suppose that the perfect is here? Have you ever seen it, tasted it, felt it, heard it, intuited it? And then it flew away and you were let down and secretly sad? You could not perceive it any more? You thought you might never get to visit that place and time again? And then you built defenses against any such idealistic and unrealistic hopes and dreams. You became a doubter, a cynic, a realist? Losing that perfection was just too painful? Yes, you have been there, and you know what I am talking about. And you thought you gave up, but you couldn’t. It is impossible. Harry Potter, Spiderman, and Star Wars sell the most tickets of any movies. Why? We want to believe in the impossible. We can’t give up. We are impossible dreamers. Our cynicism will never be strong enough, deep enough, wide enough, or persistent enough to destroy the memory of perfection. It is that dream that drives us crazy. That dream for the infinite, the perfect, the oneness. Why do we fight against it?

The imperfect is the shadow that occludes the light within. Clouds and shadows and darkness would make no sense without light. Light is the basic factor in the universe. Light is perfect and imperishable, no matter how much darkness we have thrown up in our minds. The clouds, the shadows and the darkness are necessary for contrast so that we can appreciate the light. No matter how cloudy, occluded, and dark it may seem, light is the basic factor. Imperfection is just our notion about how the world should be, but it is perfect. My question is "Where is that perfection?" If I do not ask, I will not see it, except occasionally when I am off guard and too relaxed to miss it. It is not a question of control. The perfect does not need controlling. We have become fearful controllers, thinking that this is an imperfect world that needs controlling. What we need is vision, not control.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
Romans 12:1-3)

The one thing that no one is allowed to think, feel or to say is that this is a perfect world. This is the most taboo thought that a human could possibly have. Just think about it: what a radical, irrational, stupid, impossible, insane thought! There are mountains of evidence pointing to imperfection and only a speck to perfection. But if the infinite exists, the finite has to be a part of it, and if the perfect exists, then the imperfect has to be a part of it. Is pain perfect, is starvation perfect, is death perfect? If we pursue the question of "where is the perfect?" we may arrive at the stranger question "Where is the imperfect?"

If there is a perfect will and my true will is part of that perfect will, then we ask "Where is my perfect will?" There are not two wills. Jesus kept saying that the problem is our hardness, our stubbornness, our rigidity of the heart and mind. Eccliastes says there is a time for all things, and how that looks in the end, is perfection or completeness. The perfect appears every moment, but our vision is so distorted that we may only get a glimpse of it and then the form changes, and we fail to see the perfection of the changes. It is perfect that form changes. It is born, develops, dies, decays. It is perfect in every state. We only see an apple as perfect when it is big, red and ripe, without a flaw, but it is perfect in all stages because it is manifesting the changeless apple.

In Romans 12: 1-2, we read about that "good, acceptable and perfect will of God." And then we read in the Course that the will of god and the true will of man are one and the same. That would explain a lot of our debates about will power. When we are in our false will, our finite will, our conflicted will, our split-mind will, we become violent or impotent, which is the same thing. We create things which are impotent and which self-destruct, such as illusions of evil, fear, loss, separateness, and death. What is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God? The perfect will of god is almost unimaginable about anything in this world. Can you imagine any one thing that is both good, acceptable and perfect? If its good, its not fun. If its fun, its wrong, immoral, fattening or illegal. The ego cannot conceive of a perfect world because the ego has created the apparent imperfections of this world, and then we project those imperfections onto God. If we have a chaotic world, it was created by a chaotic mind. If we have a sadistic or impotent God, it was created by a finite mind.. Outside of our story, there is only the good, acceptable and perfect will of God.

John Dorsey, M.D.

Whatever is, is perfect. Every appearance of evil, weakness, wrong, sin, badness, untruth, or of any other apparent negation of good, is simply a perfect, desirable, helpful sign of an individual’s life-saving limits of momentary self-consciousness.

John Dorsey

Education is nothing but one’s own contrived help to discover his own existing but still unrecognized divine selfhood.

John Dorsey

My agony is perfect, even as I am perfectly unaware that it is.

John Dorsey

The self-analyst needs above all to renounce his (illusional) imperfection, traceable to his resorting to his objectivity (that is, his ignored subjectivity).

John Dorsey

Whatever is is perfect. Awareness of perfection is for the most part perfectly ignored

John Dorsey

Man is the dwarf of himself

Emerson

Out there is a dislocation of in here

John Dorsey

My mind experiences only itself, its every adventure is within it.

John Dorsey

Truth is subjectivity

Soren Kierkegaard

Shakespeare

What we wish, we believe

Demosthenes

Become what you are

Pindar

Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason

Leucippus

Mind is infinite and self-powerful and mixed with nothing, but it exists aloneitself by itself

Anaxagorus

Heraclitus

That which benefits human life is God

Hippocrates

Hippocrates

The nature, even of the body, can only beunderstood as a whole

Plato

Tennyson

Every question is a disguised answer, quite as every problem is an unrecognized solution.

John Dorsey

We cannot separate being and thought, for they are one and the same

Parminedes

Whatever is, is real

John Dorsey

John Dorsey

John Dorsey

Whatever is is perfect. Every appearance of evil,weakness, wrong, sin, badness, untruth, or of any other apparent negation of good, is simply a perfect, desirable, helpful sign of an individual’s life-saving limits of momentary self-consciousness.

John Dorsey

Education is nothing but one’s own contrived help to discover his own existing but still unrecognized divine selfhood.

John Dorsey

My agony is perfect, even as I am perfectly unaware that it is.

John Dorsey

Self-reverence is the power that discloses all as perfect

John Dorsey

Whatever is, is divinely perfect, or perfectly divine. Why is there so much written about utopia when this is it?

John Dorsey

Self-rejection allows its creator to escape overwhelming himself with responsibility.

John Dorsey

John Dorsey.

My discovery of my nature is my discovery of God.

John Dorsey

God is All.

John Dorsey.

A thief is a divine thief; a cheat is a divine cheat; a drunkard is a divine drunkard; a liar is a divine liar.

John Dorsey

Blasphemy can be no more than a prayer, a blessing, that has hidden itself.

John Dorsey

My every symptom announces the consequences of my efforts to curb my mental freedom

John Dorsey.

John Dorsey

All loss is illusional.

John Dorsey

John Dorsey

Denial of one’s divinity is the irreligion of the religious

John Dorsey

My own divinity is the only possible basis for my belief in God, for I am all of all I can conceive.

John Dorsey

Your scripture reveals that your unerring way of ‘clearing’ up anything in your mind consists specifically in your loving it

John Dorsey

I try to say yes to whatever I live. Without that first appreciation, my no can only mean repression.

John Dorsey

John Dorsey

When I say that the material universe exists only in the mind, I mean that it is absolutely dependent on the conception of the mind for its existence. The human body and the brain itself exist only mentally, in the same sense that other things do.

Johnathon Edwards

Godliness is allness and therefore cannot be exalted at the expense of manliness or anything else.

John Dorsey

Therapy which overlooks the perfection of what is, and denies helpfulness to any existing condition, is assuming that one existent can influence another, and ignoring the allness of individuality and is claiming superiority for Whatever is not.

John Dorsey

Whatever is , is perfect—blame is perfect fault-finding based upon, and compensatory for, insufficient fact-finding.

John Dorsey

Against boredom even the gods themselves struggle in vain.

Neitzsche

I contain multitudes

Whitman

If we cannot conceive of the Good and the Perfect, it is because we are afraid of overwhelming our sense of identity, in our story about who we are. We have populated our world with beliefs about good and evil and upon this imaginative landscape we have based our identity, and so we find it more helpful to resist the idea of perfection in order to maintain our sanity. But from Augustine it had been written that whatever is, is good. John Dorsey picked up this theme in modern times and connected the pieces of the puzzle into a therapeutic understanding of self-awareness. Whatever is, is divinely perfect, or perfectly divine, Dorsey said.  In Symptoms I am picking up this theme again, 40 years later, to re-connect ourselves to the notion of Jesus "Be ye perfect" to the understanding of St. Augustine;s "Whatever is, is good" to psychoanalyst, John Dorsey’s "Whatever is, is perfect" to A Course in Miracles "I am as perfect as God created me."

If whatever is, is good, that includes our symptoms. If we cannot envision our symptoms as valuable information about our short-sighted story, then we will continue to suffer distorted self-esteem. You cannot ignore your perfection without distorting your self-esteem. You cannot ignore your divinity without distorting your humanity. A Course In Miracles picks up the archetypal theme that you are the perfect son of God as God created you. We have chosen to ignore our divinity, although Jesus did not ignore his perfection and divinity nor ours.

Almost no one in modern times speaks of perfection. I have searched the literature high and low and there is almost nothing in mainstream western philosophical and western literature on the subject. Why has John Dorsey’s contribution been ignored? Perfection is considered to be pure ignorance. Sounding insane, perfection is a threat to our present sense of identity with guilt and punishment. Psychologists see perfection as a brand of compulsivity. For the most part it is a forbidden word, although we may hear words like wholeness or holistic. In order to use the word "perfect" you have to be able to use the word in a spiritual/metaphysical sense. Some, such as Jung, have turned to eastern thought and speak of the Self.

There is surely a piece of Divinity in us…He that understands not this much hath not his instruction or first lesson, is yet to begin the alphabet of man

Thomas Brown, Religio Medici

The question is whether have we started on our conscious spiritual path, or are we still on our unconscious spiritual path. We are either conscious or unconscious spiritual beings in a human body. Loving whatever I experience, painful or not, is essential for the activation of my self-healing power. (John Dorsey) To the degree that we are conscious spiritual beings, we begin to see our view of the world changing. As long as we hold any grievance, we will not see perfection. Grievances are created by a chaotic impotent mind. If we have a sadistic or impotent god, such a god was created by our finite mind.

John Dorsey

John M. Dorsey, M.D.

I would not trade the reality of perfection for the illusion of progress.

John M. Dorsey, M.D.

John M. Dorsey, M.D.

John M. Dorsey

Marvelous advance in self-appreciation can result by my growing from ‘What is there in it for me’ to ‘What is there of me in it?’

John Dorsey

John M. Dorsey

John M. Dorsey, M.D.

John Dorsey

Gospel of St. Thomas

Heaven is not usually a psychological topic. But if heaven is a state of mind, even an altered state of mind, it would be a very pertinent psychological subject, would it not?  And what if heaven (paradise) is what everyone is seeking? What if "high" is what every alcoholic, drug addict and addict of any kind is unconsciously looking for? And what if hell is what each person is trying to avoid, but unconsciously re-creating?

A Course in Miracles contains more about heaven than any other psychological document I have read.

Heaven is infinite. Heaven is you. Heaven and earth are in you. Your function in heaven is to create, your function on earth is to heal. Heaven is your relationship to the Sonship, to creation and to God. Heaven is easy to find because the Holy Spirit gives it to you. It is near enough to reach. It is our home. All else is illusion. The kingdom of heaven is everywhere. In the midst of earth, heaven exists. Heaven is completion, the awareness of oneness. See heaven in everyone and you are there. Exclude anyone and you exclude your awareness of heaven.

Jane was having what we would call a psychotic break, screaming because someone was torturing her in her mind. By the time she got to my office, she was outside of her nightmare, and able to talk about the torture scene in the third person. She saw the family members as the bad guys also because they would put her in the hospital, which wouldn’t help her, she said. She talked about how much she had tried to rescue this child from the bad guys and couldn’t. Finally I said that she has been looking at a bad movie that has been playing and re-playing since she was five years old. She kept saying that it really happened. I said that it was really something that she experienced, but that it was bad movie playing in their head and in hers. She said that the child had been pleading to God for years and years and nothing had changed. I said that was part of the movie too.

Finally I asked her what would be peaceful for her and she said "the ocean" So I said let’s go to the ocean, and listen to the waves. Her face lighted up with a smile. She said this is very peaceful. I asked her if I could give her a mantra sound to go with that scene and I did. She said the sound was very peaceful. She remarked how powerful and peaceful the ocean is. I said that she is the ocean as well. She said she could never be that powerful. I remarked that she had been giving her power away to other things, such as to the bad guys in the movie. We are taking back her power. She said there are sharks in the ocean. I said they are just looking for food, to send them on their way. She could hardly believe that she had connected with that much power and peace. She looked up and said that she wished she could connect with God, but she isn’t sure there is a god. I said God is peace and that peace has been outside of her bad movie. She said that she wanted to leave the frightened wounded little girl here with me and I said that I would take care of her. She said she would also like to leave the bad guys here also. I said that would be fine also. She tore up a piece of tissue into a hundred pieces and left the bad guys here.

I walked out to her car and explained to her mother and husband what we are trying to do. I said we had broken out of the fear cycle and contacted something deeper than fear, which we call peace. And they agreed that this is what they want. I said they must also find that peace in themselves so that they can be there when Jane gets anxious. The mother began to cry and said "You mean she can get well?" I said "Yes." Fear is just a bad movie. You can’t fight fear with fear, I reminded them. I told them that we will all work together to establish a house of peace in their home. They seem very interested and relieved. I told them that the realization of total peace will come as each little piece of fear falls away.

I went back to the office to Jane and she was standing on my porch, overlooking a beautiful scene of large pines and green acreage. She could hear the birds singing and could see the rabbits hopping around. She said this is the most peaceful place I have every been. I offered to her that she could come here and sit on this porch any time she wishes. Really, she said. I won’t be put in jail? No, this is private property and you can come here and sit on this porch any time you want and re-connect with your peace. As she walked out to the car she yelled to her family: "Guess what, I can come here any time I want to find peace!"

Our basic fear is that we won’t be able to validate our story, but we need to be glad that we can’t. When Jane walked out of the room, she queried "But who am I? And what will I do?" I said "You are peace, and you will know what to do." As long as there remains anything in your story, from the beginning until now, that you consider to be dangerous or painful, anything about which you have a grievance, you will remain in a victim posture. This victimizing can be about you or anyone.

Dorsey has reduced all inquiries and questions to one " Is it I?" Our most prized possession is our picture of ourselves, our story about our identity. Psychotherapy is the expanding process of our all-encompassing individuality. I can speak only of myself, of my experience of my world, and so I speak as kindly and helpfully as possible. All so-called disadvantages are really a disguised benefit. Every seeming ill is really a helpful self-created entity.

1 Corinthians 3

All consciousness is self-consciousness; self-unconsciousness is the mainspring of every evil of humanity.

Freud

John Dorsey

Einstein

Psychotherapy is the realm of meaning, for everything has meaning to the self or to self-ignoration. Every medical and psychological problem has meaning, and will either be used to expand self-awareness or to stymie self-awareness. Psychotherapy is the challenge to expand self-awareness to every experience we have. We have denied and repressed so much of ourselves that we are subject to almost any form of disturbance. We consciously live only a very small part of our consciousness because if consciousness is everything, then it is easy to see what a small part of consciousness we actually own and live. What a small fragment of consciousness we live and own out of which arises the sense of an alien world which makes us a victim. If we do not accept or expand toward our allness and toward our infinity, then we will somatize and symptomatize.

John Dorsey

John Dorsey

Be kind to every disguised being that you meet, especially to yourself when you forget.

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