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.