You are enough. You are okay – you are more than okay.
I don’t mean that in an ACIM-theological way – like saying, yeah, the embodied egoic you sucks but the real you is enough.
I mean rather that when you’re out walking and pause beneath a tree, the tree is grateful. I mean that when you walk at night the stars shine brighter. Large bodies of water miss you when you are away from them too long, and the forest paths you walk are grateful for your feet.
You are enough. You are enough.
Nothing is missing in you; nothing is misplaced in you.
Nothing is forgotten in you; nothing is bereft.
Accepting this is the beginning of remembering God-as-Love. It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s an awkward embrace of your own self – exactly as you are this moment. Nothing is missing – not even the nagging sense that something is missing is missing.
I love you – and you are perfect – because that is how you and the love forever extending itself in Creation are remembered in love. Not by finding fault, or repenting, or improving over time. Nothing to learn or acquire. Just a real, honest-to-God moment of self-love.
When we truly realize we are lovable – when we no longer resist love – then we have something to give to our brothers and sisters. Our lives become altars at which love is forever being blessed and offered. Right now this is so. In you, right now, it is so.
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Thank you Sean. This is a lovely reminder of truth. I will remember this today.
🙏🙏
Thank you. Today I am on lesson 93 “Light and joy and peace abide in me.” I am struggling with this lesson, as the body of it states “you think you are the home of evil, darkness and sin. ..You think if anyone could see the truth about you he would be repelled, recoiling from you as if from a poisonous snake. You think if wht is true about you were revealed to you, you would be struck with hooro so intense that you would rush to death by your own hand, living on after seeing this being impossible.”
Um….I dont think that. I like myself. I believe I am a good, if flawed, human. When I sit in meditation, in awareness, I don’t feel loathing as I look within. This (and I think i mentioned this in a comment before on one of your previous posts) is an issue I keep coming up against in the Course. I don’t see myself as fundamentally evil or sinful. And as you wrote here, I believe I am enough, and that nothing is missing in me.
As I read this lesson, I am confused. Am I (living in the egoic body as I still do) supposed to feel terrible about myself?
As an add-on, I dont see anyone else as fundamentally sinful or evil either. I might be naive, but I’ve always presumed that people are good; sometimes tremendously flawed, misled, doing terrible things, but underneath it all, there is good.
I hear this! But the ego’s goal is to see the differences – as long as we’re noticing the differences, then we’re assigning value (this person is flawed, this person is not, that one is misled, that one is not) and that is all ego needs.
Ken Wapnick was beautifully rigorous on this point . . .
Hmmm…I know that the Christian Religion talks of original sin so I could see how Christians can think they need to be saved from their horrid selves. There is a virus of abuse that has run through the history of humanity and this abuse condemns the child and the child thinks it is bad. So it is so refreshing for me to read Sean’s post, his beautiful post that we are enough. This is truth and will set us free to see the beauty in ourselves and each other.
Yes, ACIM undoes – or aims to undo, if we are willing – traditional Christian ideas about sin and suffering. We can be in error – which is to believe in ego, and to perceive its insistence on differences, and to value them accordingly – but in the end, ego is a fever dream from which we are all bound to wake in truth. There is no error, but much less sin or suffering.
Still, the course suggests that ego is a human experience – not restricted to one group of people or another, for any reason. So we are all capable of being confused about what we are in truth, and we all need to be reminded. It is my favorite – if hardest to learn – part of ACIM: we waken each other. Always good to know that we are not alone as we sort through this stuff.
Thanks for reading & sharing, Sydney.
~ Sean
The question is: what is the “you” to which the post refers?
It may not be Sean or Hillary or anybody else 🙂
The ego’s objective is difference; once we accept difference, then judgment is inevitable. Judgment is the active tense of difference. And, once judgment is in play, then valuation arises. This thought is better than that thought; this person than that; this practice than that.
So ego has no problem with our happiness, so long as it rests on separation – on difference, even if those differences are lovingly held. Perhaps especially so as when we’re happy, we’re less likely to go spelunking for problems.
For example, Chrisoula and I (and the kids) grow a lot of our food. In the past year, we have done a lot of thinking and working around reducing our meat consumption. Part of that involved growing our own beans rather than chickens. This fall was havest pinto bean season, not kill chickens season!
Two things to see in this example:
1. Although I am a pretty level-headed guy, I do think that people need to eat more intentionally, with an eye towards sustainability and our collective health. People who have the means to grow their own food and don’t (and LOTS more people have this ability than think they do) or who have the resources to shop more locally and don’t are . . . not pulling their weight in our current ecological crisis.
In my social circles, that’s not a controversial statement. And the way of life we’ve chosen is mostly admired.
But it absolutely unconditionally rests on separation – me, doing good, and you – whoever you are – doing less good.
And once that dynamic is in play, then it’s game over. I have bought a temporary fragile happiness at the price of separation.
2. The other thing is that I am distinguishing between beans and chickens! I drawing yet another distinction and valuing one over the other. I am making the distinction real – better to grow and harvest beans then raise and kill chickens – which is all ego needs to survive.
I am suggesting it’s impossible in the body in the world to NOT indulge the ego – even when it feels like we’re being healthy, helpful, et cetera.
The “cure” for this is simply to notice it and gently remind myself, “there I go again buying into the ego’s framework of separation.” If I can see it, then I can remember that not only IS there a better way but I affirmatively WANT that better way. And in that moment, the little willingness is born.
In my experience of practicing the course, one gets increasingly more willing to look at ego and a lot of what seemed trivial or even positive begins to look monstrous. It goes so deep; it gets so primal; so long as it’s being fed it’s find but if you really get serious about undoing ego . . . look out.
I started to see that not just theoretically but actually all the wars, the disinformation, the unnecessary deaths of people and animals, the destruction of the environment, all reflect a decision of mine to side with ego.
That is VERY difficult space to enter and accept. The tendency is to flee, rationalize, negotiate, deny and project, get drunk, anything rather than stay in the grim and monstrous nihilism of ego which ALWAYS masks itself as something other than death.
I’m not saying you haven’t faced that or lived that. I’m just trying to express some of my experience with the intersection of what the course teaches and how that plays out in this particular experience of living.
A lot of the energy around self-love – and this post in partiular – arise from the recognition that undoing ego is harder, harder than most of us think, and we need a LOT of help and support.
So no, I don’t think we are supposed to feel terrible but I do think we have to face the terrible lie we tell – and face its terrible effects – and face the isolation and horror of facing all that – in order to learn that we are, as we are, perfect.
And if anybody IS feeling terrible about that today, I just wanted them to know: it’s okay. What we are in truth is beyond the distinction of good and bad.
Love,
Sean
This is true and so easy to forget. Grateful for this post.
🙏
hi sean from 1983 thru 2003 i was a strict vegetarian doing multiple cleanses to heal the” body ” from2003 thru 2021 i hardly ate any meat and never cooked it in my house…..all throughout those 40 odd years i rarely, with the occasional antibiotic exception, took any meds…. not even take an aspirin…when i went to physical therapy, or for an examination i would internally reek with pride when asked, ” what meds are you taking ? NOT ME…
then this winter i went mexico on a retreat….some of the shared meals contained meat and i did try some of them….upon returning in late january i was feeling tired and decided to meet with the doctor…she told me i hadn’t had bloodwork in four years….the results were excellent, except for my vitamin b12 ….for which she recommended i start eating meat…then during the throes of covid i began experiencing anxiety for which she recommended some drug which i in my own egoic way refused to take…..on one occasion i saw her and she asked if started taking the meds…to which i replied no.it might be addictive…her reply was “your not sleeping is more addictive than the drugs….so i relented and started taking the meds….and they did help…..MORAL i was more addicted to the lofty image i had of myself and these two events helped me to see that….and to a degree grounded me…..” i do not know what anything is for ”
with love
dennis
Thanks for sharing this, Dennis. I really appreciate the emphasis on how ego can be so powerful and so subtle; the work we are doing with ACIM is very intense and reaches very deep. Hearing the Holy Spirit is hard, especially because it so often urges us in directions that feel counter-intuitive and even wrong and yet therein lies vast healing. I feel like I am always realizing this, and so always beginning again.
But in another sense, it is not beginning again – like starting over – but beginning anew, born again in the familiar, always learning how to do nothing.
Hope all is well . . . glad the meds are helping bring peace . . .
Love,
Sean
hi Sean…just discovered you yesterday! very clear :))….my great forgiveness lesson is the so called ‘ur text’….there was such a lot of sincere and intense editing and forming the aesthetic beauty and language of the course from Ken Helen Bill etc….and then the private and personal notes got apparently stolen in the copywright process …and the beauty of the refinement was lost…it doesn’t matter but my ego is a rebel 😬and doesn’t even exist!!
keep up the good work
Malcolm
Nice to hear from you Malcom . . . yes, the ur-text has been a useful site of forgiveness for me as well, for the reasons you mention, and for others too. Ego is a rebel – a whole army of rebels sometimes. It’s interesting to me the way ACIM has resisted most attempts to restrain and control it; almost as if it has a mind of its own 🙂 Or like the sea or something . . . it just flows along being its very own helpful self. I’m grateful my own wandering brought me into contact with it. Thanks for reading & the kinds words.
~ Sean