Entry 2,325 - Entry 2,327
Entry 2,325 - October 3, 2024
This is how to tell if people are playing the victim mindset within systems, frameworks, and concepts. They'll blame patriarchy, they'll blame men, they'll blame women, they'll blame systems that already exist—anything they can blame in order to avoid taking accountability for their own actions.
No one is holding a gun to your head, saying you have to act this way. No one is holding a gun to your head, saying you need to act like this in order to be where you need to be. If an organization does not provide you with what you need in order to be promoted or to be where you want to be, then you can quit. You don’t need the organization.
If the organization has a racist, misogynistic, or transphobic person in it, why would you even want to work there in the first place? You can easily leave and join another system. There are thousands of jobs—jobs started by women, jobs started by trans people. It is only the belief in our limitations that creates those limitations.
The belief that I have to act a certain way or I can’t have a certain tone is still your own insecurity, your own personal limitation. Blaming it on external factors is avoiding your own issue. I think at first, people might be offended because they want to stay in the victim mindset, but actually, you’re doing the best thing possible for them by letting them know: The only limitations they have in life are the limitations they set for themselves.
How empowering is it to know that nothing outside of you can stop you from being who you are, doing what you love, and getting what you want in a way that benefits both yourself and others in service to humanity?
If you want to be the victim, explore that victimhood, experience that suffering, and allow yourself to feel like you need to fight forces, rise up, rebel, and destroy, then that leans much more toward the service-to-self group—where everyone is against you, you are against them, and you have to tear people down to get what you want.
In my opinion, there is much more suffering in that route, along with a lot of manipulation, evil, and unnecessary pain. But the service-to-others path is recognizing that everyone is for you and with you. We all strive for the same things, even if we don’t truly believe it because we are connected to or identified with the ego.
We want joy. We want unconditional love. We want happiness. Even those misguided by the service-to-self path may not realize it, but that’s actually what they want, even though they are chasing after unnecessary things.
So, in reality, we should stop relying on excuses about other people limiting us, accept our power, allow ourselves to be empowered, and realize that since we were the ones who set the limits on ourselves, we can also remove those limits.
No more blaming it on the patriarchy. No more blaming it on some man. No more blaming it on something outside of us. Instead, we must realize our true power—understanding that love is what unites us and allows us to experience life to its fullest. Love is unconditional and limitless.
Entry 2,326 - October 7, 2024
"If your brothers are part of you and you blame them for your deprivation, you are blaming yourself. And you cannot blame yourself without blaming them. That is why blame must be undone, not seen elsewhere. Lay it to yourself and you cannot know yourself, for only the ego blames at all. Self-blame is therefore ego identification, and as much an ego defense as blaming others...."
"It is impossible not to believe what you see, but it is equally impossible to see what you do not believe. Perceptions are built up on the basis of experience, and experience leads to beliefs. It is not until beliefs are fixed that perceptions stabilize. In effect, then, what you believe you do see.
That is what I meant when I said, 'Blessed are ye who have not seen and still believe,' for those who believe in the resurrection will see it. The resurrection is the complete triumph of Christ over the ego, not by attack but by transcendence. For Christ does rise above the ego and all its works, and ascends to the Father and His Kingdom."
(A Course in Miracles, T-11.VI.1:1-7)
Prayer:
Father, Your Son is perfect. When I think that I am hurt in any way, it is because I have forgotten who I am, and that I am as You created me. Your Thoughts can only bring me happiness. If ever I am sad or hurt or ill, I have forgotten what You think, and put my little meaningless ideas in place of where Your Thoughts belong, and where they are. I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts. The Thoughts I think with You can only bless. The Thoughts I think with You alone are true.
Entry 2,327 - October 14, 2024
ACIM Chapter 12
In Chapter 12, A Course in Miracles says:
"The analysis of ego motivation is very complicated, very obscuring, and never without your own ego involvement."
In my personal opinion, I think that from looking outward to the inside, it looks complicated, but in reality, it really isn’t if one sees the truth that every person desires to love and be loved. The ego is merely a device that allows us to experience that love or to experience the illusion of fear. Every emotion seems to stem from either love or fear, but even in the depths of fear, love still exists in its own special way.
This reminds me of an exercise that I learned a few years ago, where you question your fears as far back as you can to uncover their root cause. This was termed "the masculine approach" to healing because it used reason as a way to demystify our fears and show that they are not real—through questioning and investigating why we feel these emotions that cause unnecessary suffering.
If you were to apply this to any situation that causes suffering, it would look like this:
"I am afraid of not getting promoted."
Then, you would ask yourself:
"Why am I afraid of not getting promoted?"
You would sit in that stillness until another emotion surfaces with an explanation:
"I’m afraid that if I don’t have enough money, I won’t be able to pay my bills or take my future significant other out because of my current paycheck."
Then, you ask why you’re afraid of that:
"Because I’m afraid that I won’t be fit for love."
Interestingly enough, in some way, shape, or form, even our deepest egoic needs are masquerading the reality that we all desire to love and be loved.
Trace any emotion that causes suffering back with questioning, and you will eventually reach a point where it has something to do with a belief in a lack of love. When you realize that, then the ego’s motivations aren’t that complicated.
Perhaps the many reasonings it uses to veil that could potentially be complicated, but not the source of the why itself. Fear eventually dissolves into love because love truly is all there is.
The ego is an instrument used. It is neither good nor bad.
At best, it mirrors back the love that you are. At what seems to be the worst, it mirrors back all the lack of love you seem to have in your life. The good news is that it is all self-created—through thoughts, beliefs, ideas, and words we accept as who we are—so we have complete autonomy to change those thoughts, beliefs, and ideas whenever we decide to.
To merely cease identification with symbols of ideas rooted in fear and uncover what we truly are, everything will become much clearer.
Second by second, we must choose to accept ourselves as we really are—unconditional love—never truly lacking love, because that would be actually impossible.
We would accept that any perceived lack of love in our lives is simply a representation of dreams we’ve created—to explore a realm that allows us to see the potent power of love itself, even in the face of the illusion of no love.
That is it. That is all.
A dream to show us our splendidness.
A dream to appreciate who we truly are.
Entry 2,327 - October 17, 2024
Re-Personalization of the Ego
Many people may be aware of change, but they may not be aware of what exactly is changing. The evolution of consciousness, in layman’s terms, is the upgrading of your ego—how you want your instrument to behave, act, think, believe, and so forth. It is the re-contextualization of content in order to garner change in the universe perceived outward from the egoic self.
In reality, every single ego undergoes change to some degree. How fast or slow it happens is a journey one chooses to experience. At lower levels of egoic consciousness, change is often slow, full of dread, and difficult. One finds themselves often a victim of their past, unable to escape old programming they adopted to keep themselves safe—often stemming from childhood.
These programs change only in small degrees and may not be fully shaken off for years, decades, or even longer. Some people still carry defensive childhood programming well into their senior years—back in diapers, under the care of new adults who re-activate their childhood traumas—continuing the cycle of suffering.
Then, there are others who experience the re-personalization of the ego at a very rapid rate. They constantly bring up their beliefs, ideas, thoughts, attachments, desires, and more—challenging where they came from, why they were adopted, and whether they are necessary to hold onto or if they should be released.
These people often reach a moment in their lives when their desire for peace surpasses their desire to suffer, and they are willing to do literally anything for this peace—even if it means giving up parts of their ego that believe suffering is necessary for self-existence. Though it may be scary because the ego convinces us that if we let go, we will cease to exist, this is a delusion the ego uses to avoid change.
The ego likes sameness. It doesn’t want to change. It wants to stay as it is because sameness gives it more validity than if it were to shift into a new ego with different ideas, beliefs, and behaviors.
I would say I didn’t reach a very rapid pace of re-personalization until recently, but that’s also me being hard on myself. Now, I have become aware that the ego is a conglomeration of temporal things that don’t truly exist. If they don’t truly exist in terms of true reality, then I can change them whenever I wish, for whatever purpose I choose. This malleability of personality opens doors to new experiences that allow me to understand my Self from multiple vantage points.
For example, for a very long time, I was stuck in a people-pleasing program that stemmed from childhood. If I didn’t please my parents, I would get physically abused. I equated pleasing with safety, and through that safety, I believed I could avoid suffering.
I also learned that when I told the truth, I would receive reactions of screaming, yelling, punishments, and more physical abuse. So, I was conditioned to lie to keep the peace. I wasn’t aware of this intense people-pleasing behavior until an even more traumatic experience happened—one that threatened my feelings of being liked at school.
In 5th grade, I made up a lie that my dad took me to Hawaii for the weekend and that I rode on the back of my grandpa’s motorcycle. Even though it seemed harmless and wasn’t an attempt to evade physical abuse, my ego had been programmed to lie for approval.
My teacher called my mother and asked about the events, to which she responded that they never happened. Eventually, everyone in my grade found out I had lied, and I felt guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, and talked about. I felt like I had lost the trust of many over a stupid lie meant to gain admiration that ultimately didn’t matter.
The negative feelings were strong enough for me to question why I did that and to redirect my ego into something new. I changed my ego to value truth over lying. Even if it meant more suffering at home, I lived by the honor of telling the truth.
Now, in my adult years, I am fascinated by how quickly I can re-personalize my ego by shedding old programming for new ones. If I want to react in an entirely new way, I allow myself the space to explore that.
I am also much more open and understanding when I make mistakes in my exploration of the ego, having forgiveness for myself as I chart new territory with the programming I adopt on the spot. To be free to act in the present moment, however I choose, without defaulting to old, outdated habitual responses, is extremely liberating.
There is a deep sense of freedom in the ability to choose, rooted in the Now moment.
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