Encroachment as Illusion: Spiritual Causes for Our Suffering
Today I received an insight that solves a problem I've been seeking after the solution for for years, regarding encroachment. Yeshua said in A Course in Miracles that the ego seeks our allegience through fear, and that every witness it offers in favor of its case for fear is essentially a fraudulent witness. He mentioned that sickness of the body is a witness the ego uses to bolster its case for our frailty. He said that our sicknesses are actually the result of our loveless choices. We make loveless choices, those choices limit us by blocking our love (which is our nature) from extending outward, and the effect is that we experience sickness and frailty. As I am seldom sick, this information didn't seem to be immediately and especially useful to me.
I have, however, been encountering encroachment from others. I encounter a lot of supposed victimization in my life from time to time, wherein the loveless choices of others appeared to cause me to suffer. In a perfect system, encroachment is impossible, and yet I continue to encounter this. Today I realized what was going on there. The apparent victimization I experience, and the suffering on my part that results, is simply loveless choices on the part of others. The suffering on my part is not, as it seemed, the result of the choices of others. It is an illusion resulting from my imperfect choice to abide totally in Divine love.
When I'm doing extremely well at aligning with the Will of the Divine Creator, loveless choices on the part of others still occur but I find myself immune from suffering. Suffering on my part only occurs to the extent that I am not choosing to align myself perfectly with the Will of the Divine, and abiding in perfect love. The scenario of repeated encroachment was something that the ego used often to make a case for fear in my life. The evidence making a strong case for the belief that I could be made to suffer at any time for loveless choices made against me on the part of others was particularly troublesome and was very fearful indeed. But that evidence was fraudulent; the ego was again stacking the deck in an attempt to foster fear on my part and cause my allegience to it. It lost my allegience on that count a while back, and today this insight dispells my belief in encroachment. I am so grateful to our Divine Maker, the Holy Spirit, and to Yeshua for this insight! "Encroachment" is merely suffering on my part that comes, not from the whimsy of an external source as it seemed, but from my own incomplete alignment with love! When I'm aligned less than totally with the Divine Light of Love (which, as ever, is a fictitious state to encounter, as per my own choices), I find myself in an artificial state in which I'm not putting out enough Light to dispell shadowy fictions on the part of others. It's that lack of total alignment with the fact that my own existence is the Divine Light of Love that produces the suffering; not the immediate circumstance of interaction with others that does it. Praise be to our Maker! We are never at the mercy of the choices of others for our happiness or our suffering! It is completely within our control whether we experience suffering or joy! The illusion of encroachment is dispelled, and it becomes more obvious than ever that we must choose to align with and abide in the Will of our Divine Maker, or experience illusiory states of suffering! This realization dispels fear, puts us completely in control of our experience, allows us to withdraw our interest in the loveless choices of others, prevents us from projecting the results of our own choices onto the external world, and frees us from a primary tool of the ego which promotes so much fear and attack. It also obviates the need to redouble our efforts to invest ourselves entirely in loving choices. To make loveless choices and then whine about the lovelessness and suffering we encounter is about as useless as supporting politicians whose choices we disagree, and then complaining about those choices. Our joy is completely accessible and available to us; we need only choose it! What a blessed insight. Our burden is lifted; we must only accept that fact by choosing to align with love (which is one and the same with our Divine Maker). While my life experience suggests that few will do so immediately, my focussed and directed choice for love and joy should allow me to be an extremely patient, and joyous, man indeed.
Comments
I love reading real life's experiences and insights and this is one of the perfect piece.
Just a small draw back, perhaps you could format it a more readable, not the whole chunk of words together especially the final paragraph. It affects the psyhology of the person who reads it, they tend to stay longer and finish it.
Well, I love this subject and I definitely finish no matter how it is ;-)
- AUTHOR
Awesome feedback, thanky!
It seems to me like your regular job involves a lot of the same underlying dynamics as the abusive relationships you've sworn off in your life. I think it's wonderful that you're determined to get out of that situation by doing something different, and I thoroughly support that healthy choice on your part.
Have you considered learning coding for free at w3schools.com, and taking freelance coding jobs online? There are so many of them out there, and they certainly pay. Along with writing, that's a large part of where I'd like to go - particularly as I could then use my programming skills on my own time to implement some new takes I've got on how people do things, and get them out there in successful ways because they just work better.
It also gets interesting when we look at the stuff in this Hub non-causally. When you're less-aligned with the Divine, you get into a lower-consciousness headspace that has you feeling more icky and irritable - even when it's not your nature or temprament. On "off" days like that, everything hits your Achille's heel. On more "on" days, everything goes right for you and when it doesn't, it's not a big thing. Since we stay in alignment with the Divine by making Choices that are in accordance with Divine Will (thereby investing ourself in spiritual fact instead of fiction) it's the people who are doing what's right, rather than trying to take advantage of others, who end up feeling better and having a more awesome life... particularly in unforseen ways with noncausal variables and nonlinear dynamics at work in their lives. Good people do come out ahead, in all the ways that matter/ As Terry Pratchett once wrote, "Chaos always defeats order, because it's better-organized." Thanks again for your wonderful comments.
I think that yes, you are right on with this insight. In my part time job in the "real" world" (I was full time but cut back a couple of months ago to write more), the mail part of what I do is talk to enraged out-of-control people who call into a corporate call center. I can do almost nothing to help them. I am empowered by the corporation to sell them things, period. But I've found that by remaining calm and having some compassion for their state of mind, I usually can calm them down by the end of the call. Not always, but usually. I still can't stand the job, but I know you are right on this one.
The other similar experience comes from my personal life, whre I had a string of bad relationships that left me feeling quite vicitimized until I got some counseling and realized that these people were absolutely miserable and I didn't have to take their abuse personally--they would be abusive to anyone who would take it. So I quit including abusive people in my life as close friends and partners, and now when I do receive abusive treatment I know it is the misery of the other person causing it, not my lack of worth as a human being. Great hub. Thanks.
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