VII. The Two Evaluations, P 5.
5 If you choose to see yourself as unloving you will not be happy. You are condemning yourself and must therefore regard yourself as inadequate. Would you look to the ego to help you escape from a sense of inadequacy it has produced, and must maintain for its existence? Can you escape from its evaluation of you by using its methods for keeping this picture intact?
Journal
One of the favorite ego strategies to keep me in the illusion is to bring up the past. I remember particularly bad choices I made at different times of my life and I feel shame or regret. I feel like a bad person and I definitely do not love the person I was, and by extension, I do not love the self I am now. Holding these judgements in my mind they are as valid now as when the incidents occurred. I keep them alive through my continued judgement of them.
Another way the ego works is to see others as their past actions, or to judge them now. When I judge anyone, I judge myself. I judge them according to what I believe about myself and they are one with me so what I do to them I do to me. As well, when I don’t act lovingly to someone else, I don’t feel loving.
The ego has a lot of strange and ineffective strategies to convince me and (I hope others) that I am loveable. Get a doting husband. Guilt the kids into being around more, or alternatively, buy their affection which will make it seem I am loveable to them. Do nice things for people. Be agreeable. Be a people pleaser. Get rid of people who see me as unlovable, discount their opinions, especially in front of someone who might believe them. None of this works.
The only way to know I am Love is to let go of grievances and to see what lies behind them. I am loveable because I am as God created me. Knowing that as a concept is just not the same as feeling it, knowing it because I have seen behind the veil of grievances to what lives as Self. I cannot use grievances to protect myself. There is no reason to keep them, and every reason to release them.
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