John’s audio reading is available here.
All are One. You know that, all our readers and listeners know that, and yet doubt arises!
As humans, embodied, it certainly appears that each individual human is completely separated from all others because bodies cannot merge into each other. But you are not your bodies. You have chosen to experience the intense sense of limitation and aloneness that bodies provide in order to learn that separation is unreal, impossible.
You search for love outside yourselves because you feel so alone and separated. Your natural state is at One with God, Source, Love, and when you cannot experience that you become fearful and seek love from anyone who will accept you. Many relationships collapse because each party to it is looking to the other for what can only be found within themselves. When you find Love within yourselves, and there is no one who is without Love within themselves, then you can share and extend It, whereupon It returns to you because, all being One, It has never left you.
When you know yourselves as Love you can then enter into a truly loving relationship with another, but until you know yourselves in that way you are only offering an empty vessel to any other with whom you attempt to establish a relationship. And that other most likely has only an empty vessel to offer to you in return.
Love is all-encompassing! But you can refuse to be aware of this truth and in that refusal find yourselves as empty vessels desperately needing to be filled by the love that you hope someone else will offer you, thus dissolving your sense of separation. But the sense of separation is there from the beginning because you are each withholding, out of fear, what you so desperately want to receive from that other.
Initially you refuse to believe or acknowledge this, but as time passes the lack of love willingly shared in every moment causes the relationship to founder and crumble, with each blaming the other for the failure, as your worst fears are proved valid.
As I and many others have told you again and again, there is only Love! You think you know better because your trust has at some stage – maybe many stages – been betrayed and you are determined never again to suffer the pain it brought you. But trust can only appear to be betrayed. Love is eternally present, honest, open, extending, sharing, compassionate, forgiving, and healing. It never betrays because to do so would be completely contrary to Its nature.
In fear you offer only your bodies to one another – keeping yourselves hidden behind the “masks of acceptability” you have constructed to put on display – but bodies are unreal and cannot be relied upon, ever! You, you with a capital or upper case Y, are Love, and You are not your bodies, You are infinitely more than bodies. Bodies are limiting vehicles or vessels that you have chosen to inhabit, temporarily, in order to experience the unreal state of separation from God, from Source, where you have your endless and eternal existence constantly and without interruption, because what God creates is by its very nature eternal.
Bodies are of the illusion, and within the illusion are an essential aspect of the game you are playing there. But, nevertheless, they are unreal, and to use their judgment to guide you always leads to disappointment and suffering. They can and do suffer pain and enjoy pleasure, but both pain and pleasure occur as a result of choices you make as you direct them along your human life paths. They do not cause anything, they just respond to your will, and you are frequently unaware of what you will for them.
To you it seems that things just happen to you, but every situation you encounter was set up in advance for the lesson you wished to learn. The fact that you do not recognize this does not change it, but it does make it difficult for you to learn your lessons because in order to learn you need to recognize that a lesson is being offered.
So we return to the subject we keep on addressing, namely, going within. There no answers outside you! The games in which you are involved as humans appear to be situations occurring outside you in which you become involved, sometimes by choice and sometimes by chance. But it is your beliefs and attitudes that bring to you the situations in which you find yourselves involved.
If you cling to judgment, the need to be right and see others as wrong, you will attract to yourselves situations that appear to demand your righteous judgment. But you do not have to judge! To judge or to not judge is a choice you make in every moment. Your true nature is Love, and Love never judges. When you operate from your true nature you will see nothing to judge, and without judgment there can be no conflict.
Going within daily is essential, because when you go within to your holy inner sanctuary and open your hearts Love fills them. And then the felt need to judge falls away. There are none among you who have not at times responded lovingly instead of judgmentally in a difficult situation, maybe unthinkingly, and the result has been resolution instead of conflict. Sometimes that has surprised you, but the less you judge the fewer times you will find yourselves engaged in conflict.
However, your egos want conflict, they live for conflict, because separation is conflict! You may claim that you seek peace, and perhaps you do, but only on your terms! Which means that you have chosen to let your ego direct your thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors, whereupon other egos happily respond and conflict ensues. You each – each ego – eventually retire hurt and offended, blaming each other for the suffering that you are undergoing, as it seems that the other was the undeserving winner.
Suffering is a direct result of egoic choices, and it seems that the illusion, the state of existence humans experience, demands conflict. And, in a way, it does, because to be human is to have chosen to experience separation. And many humans see human existence as real and the spiritual realms as unreal, mythical realms that the weak choose to believe in because they are not strong enough to cope with reality.
Your egos have done a very good job of turning things upside down by making the unreal real, and by rejecting Reality. Within the worldly illusion, where humanity appears to dwell, anything that is not physical, that does not have form, is judged as non-existent, illusory, unreal. Then you attempt to resolve issues with egoic reason and logic, judging what disagrees with your belief systems, your cultural and religious persuasions as wrong and in need of correction, by force if necessary.
Judgment can never lead to peace, because judgment is non-acceptance of another, whose views and opinions are not really so different from your own, because they, like you, have an egoic need to make others wrong and prove themselves right. But all are One! And this human way of dealing with issues is, without doubt, utterly insane. There is no right and wrong, there is just difference.
To awaken, as humanity is doing, is to recognize that the differences between families, tribes, nations, cultures, and political or religious beliefs are not reasons to make others wrong, but, instead, are opportunities to honor the differences between the various members of God’s Holy Family. God’s beloved children were created perfect, because God is infinite perfection, and therefore they remain perfect because what God creates is eternally unchanging.
Acceptance is an essential aspect of humanity’s awakening process, but it has to be unconditional, and because so many of you struggle with your own self-acceptance it is very difficult for you to even think of accepting others unconditionally. You are forever noting to yourselves the aspects of others that you find most unacceptable, and those aspects are the ones that you deny most ferociously in yourselves.
You are all mirrors to one another, and what you see and is reflected back most strongly by another is what you most admire or what you most despise in yourselves. When you fall in love, the other is reflecting back to you your most admirable traits, and when you strongly dislike someone they are frequently reflecting back what you judge to be your most unacceptable traits which you have buried far beneath your level of conscious awareness.
Many are now finding that all this buried “stuff” is arising seemingly unbidden into their conscious awareness – what psychology refers to as the shadow side of a person. For those who have constructed for themselves a very strong and effective mask to present to themselves, and to the world, it can be very shocking to have such unacceptable thoughts and desires arising, thoughts and desires that they judge as totally unacceptable.
Relax, you are not alone, everyone has a shadow side. Just acknowledge those horrific ideas and desires and allow them to flow through you without engaging with them. Part of your fear about them is because you think that if they are there you might act on them. Acting on them only occurs when they are totally repressed by someone who has been terribly abused. They are generally just emotional defensive responses provided by your egos as a result of perceived unfair treatment or attacks. They are truly quite a normal aspect of being human, but, as children, you found that to express such ideas was totally forbidden and resulted in you being shamed or silenced. Consequently, needing a safe environment in order to survive, you buried them.
As you move through the awakening process all this hidden “stuff” has to be acknowledged and released. As you do this it becomes apparent that this “stuff” is not you. You are each a holy and unchanging child of God, One with Him eternally since the moment of your creation, and this “stuff” is just unreal dream-stuff passing through and dissolving, unless you choose to hold on to it.
Just let it go and also any thoughts, worries, or anxieties that are attached to it. This clears your mind, making space for your true nature, Love, to blossom, as it most surely will.
Your loving brother, Jesus.