I’ve read Jamps before, but I didn’t appreciate him. I thought that Spiritual Meaning was the same as involved theory, so gradually I drifted away. Of course, love is abstract, in a way…. But it’s not just theory and words, either, so the words of love and spirit are often somewhat better when they’re not…. 🧐🥸 …. Pretentious, I guess.

It’s funny that Jamps, like Bilbo Baggins, began his adventure at fifty, having achieved empty success in the world before then, but not relationships, happiness, love. I took the other route. In young-youth (I was dancing like I was 22, because I was), I was sorta wanting to find the theory of everything, the “meaning of life” stuff, albeit in immature, codependent/para-alcoholic ways. In my late 20s I started to find things having to do with expanded consciousness—meditation, non-immature thoughts—made me happy, and now in my early 30s I’m actually starting to look into ‘success’ and the value of the relative (ie non-ultimate) world, you know…. Not everybody is Mozart!

…. Life is funny, you know. The passing of ages and times.

Me (22 yrs): I can see clearly that it’s going to end, but I’m telling you now; I won’t ever let go—at least! Not in my mind! Not in, (tortured face), Pretend!
Me (34 yrs): Huh…. (trying to sidestep the idiocy of this statement) You know, Baba Muktananda once said—
Me (22 yrs): Shit! Someone dark-faced! And, male! Ah! Ahhh! Love! Looooveeee!
Me (34 yrs): …. Yes, ah…. “Love”.
Me (22 yrs): Love!
Me (34 yrs): Love never dies.
Me (22 yrs): Love is always, always dying—ah! Ahhh!! Ahhhnnnnhhhh!!!!
Me (34 yrs): (Should I go for the white writer reference, or would it better to just walk away: right now. Right, now…..)
Me (22 yrs): (dissolving into a puddle of shame)….
Me (34 yrs): (There must be some time travel law that gets me out of this….)

…. “There are others I have known who have faced their human feelings without getting stuck in them and have forgiven the world and themselves.”

…. The odd thing is, although I didn’t really have someone when I was a child or young-young adult to tell me the right way to go—they tended to give me good information hollowed-out and packed with lies, which was worse than bad—and so I made errors, some of them real whoppers, but in an odd way some of my untrained impulses were good. I was suspicious of the mind and its ability to hollow out reality and pack it with lies, you know. Of course, being untrained I became overwhelmed with this paranoia—even though this fear was only an exaggeration of the fear I was taught was normal and good as a child, and which I had when I was a model child or whatever—and when I started to recover I discovered that wholesome ideas are good, and don’t have to be reality hollowed out with lies like I thought when I was a young-young adult or a sort of deified fear and unconscious labeling process like I thought when I was a model child.

But ultimately we are here to live—which is primarily to do and to feel—and not just to think, which can be good if it is kept wholesome, but toxic thought can also get in the way in a huge way. Toxic thought is a thing. Some people think that the way out of toxic thought is ultimate wisdom or knowing, which is not primarily thinking, or easily defined, but I’m starting to think, with Jamps and some others, that the best way is love, which is primarily feeling, and that feeling has to take precedence over thinking. You still have all sorts of thoughts, of course; you don’t have to stop, it’s just that the thought is not the primary thing. The love is the primary thing. Feeling good matters more, and understanding has to be disciplined so that it remains an aid to feeling good.

…. Sometimes seeing your brother as innocent instead of guilty isn’t as easy as it sounds, but it can be done, even if it isn’t always an easy, neat, straightforward process. To be honest, one has to deal with a certain messiness inside, but you can still make progress. Reading about the military, for example, can make you feel very…. 😝…. almost kinda disgusted, really—bad taste!—with the military intelligence technocrats, but then you kinda start to understand the stance of the ordinary ex-Marine/grunt sorts who present themselves as living in an unsafe world where they are not cared for or perceived as valuable, right. Despite the messiness of the process, that person starts to make sense. Which still leaves the out-of-touch military technocrat who understands machines better than people, but then, most people in modern civilization, and especially the elite and the “good” people, have this attitude where you don’t connect the dots between hyper-intellectualism and callousness, just because nobody else does, high or low, usually, at least—so I guess that that person “makes sense”, too. They just think that callousness is the way to earn love! 🤪

…. I think a lot of it is an applied take on the present moment/enlightenment philosophy foundation of ACIM; I found it to be more into that philosophical foundation (even though there are cartoons!) than the Marianne and Gabby that I’ve read, so even though they’re both ACIM people, I decided to classify them slightly divergently. One’s not better or worse.

Also I have to say, I’ve dealt with psychiatrists, and a psychiatrist showing vulnerability while on the job—or really, almost any doctor or almost any intellectual; you’d think a ‘soul doctor’ would be different, but really that’s supposed to just mean, ‘I know things in Greek and you don’t, right’—to step away from that macho doctor thing, or at the very least semi-robotic, semi-human doctor thing—is a big step forward, even if it’s not a step that the profession as a whole has taken yet. Most psychiatrists would probably rather wait until they’re done with work and then either get drunk or slit their wrists, than say, you know—like make an I-statement, right. ‘I feel vulnerable when you don’t go to group, and I bet you probably feel a lack of hope that group is going to help you.’ (That’s the irony of the ‘objective’ stance: it’s supposed to be ‘humble’, since you’re taking yourself out of the equation, which is what a civilization that grew out of Christian Europe desires, that you think you’re bad and out yourself as such; but in practice people who are compulsively objective are incredible neurotic and egotistical, because their own private opinion is now ‘all true people’s’ opinion, and anyway—it’s dishonest to say that you’re not a part of the equation, because here you are, taking part in the discussion. You’re one of us, not an invisible robot breathing quietly, you know.) The problem with stuffing your feelings is that you never really get rid of them; you just abolish the ‘moderate’ ways of dealing with them, and are left with very extreme ways of dealing with emotion that you can only put off so long until you crack, you know. You’d think that a doctor would practice good health himself, but it’s probably a little unusual, right.

But, anyway: any normie-dysfunctional (redundant, lol) people I’ve attracted into my life are what I’ve consented to and even asked for on some level…. And in the material world, there’s that, inertia, you know: but eventually you can ease out of it, and into something far more infinite.

inspiring :) ( )

This is an important and inspiring book with the message – let go of fear and love everyone.

The titles of the 12 lessons are from The Course in Miracles

They are:

1) All that I give is given to myself.
2) Forgiveness is the key to happiness.
3) I am never upset for the reason I think.
4) I am determined to see things differently.
5) I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.
6) I am not the victim of the world I see.
7) Today I will judge nothing that occurs.
8) This instant is the only time there is.
9) The past is over – it can touch me not.
10) I could see peace instead of this.
11) I can elect to change all thoughts that hurt.
12) I am responsible for what I see.

Jerry Jampolsky writes in a personal style and presents inspiring stories of people who have transformed their life for the better by reading the book.

Jerry is involved with Attitudinal Healing, which is self-healing based on the principle that it is not other people or situations that cause us to be upset but our own thoughts and attitudes concerning those things. At the core of these principles is forgiveness. Forgiveness is a decision to no longer attack oneself and not to suffer, but be happy, let go of judgments, stop hurting others and ourselves and stop “recycling anger and fear”.

“Forgiveness is the bridge to compassion, to inner peace, and to a peaceful world.”

The author wrote the book because he wanted to learn inner peace.

He quotes the Course in Miracles:

“Teach only love for that is what you are.”

The book was published in 1979 and has sold millions of copies since then. It deals with inner healing and spiritual transformation.

The main principles of the book are “having a willingness to see the world differently; seeing the value in letting go of our control issues, judgments and grievances; and making forgiveness as important as breathing”.

By practising the lessons in a Course in Miracles, Jerry began to experience a sense of inner peace and to see how everyone he met was his teacher.

We learn about forgiveness, getting and giving and retraining the mind.

We learn that all minds are joined and are one. We cannot change other people but we can change how we perceive the world, others and ourselves.

There are only two emotions, love and fear. Love is our true reality. Fear is something our mind has made up and is therefore unreal.

What we experience is our state of mind projected outward. If our state of mind is well-being, love and peace, that is what we will project and thus experience.

There are 12 lessons and we should do one each day.

“The law of love is that you are love, and that as you give love to others you teach yourself what you are.”

We learn about letting go of “attack thoughts” and choosing peace instead.

We learn that we are not victims and that only our loving thoughts are real. We learn not to judge others and this is another way of letting go of fear and experiencing love.

“See everyone you meet or think about as either extending love or as being fearful and sending out a call for help, which is a request for love.”

The book is filled with entertaining cartoons.

To sum up, this is an original, enlightening book which I would highly recommend. It pushes one to take a decisive step forward in one’s spiritual development. If everyone were to read this book and transform fear to love, then there would be no more wars. ( )

This book is not the usual type of selection for a religion blog, is it? I’m not sure God is even mentioned in the book. But Love is, and God is Love, right? For all you Bible scholars out there, we shouldn’t get so wrapped up in our fascinating scholarly pursuits that we forget the reason for our religion in the first place.

At the risk of over-analyzing a simple book with a simple message, I confess it struck a chord with me partly because of my recent studies in the Gospel of John. Here’s why: like many scriptures, this book pits good against evil as clearly as God versus Satan, only this time it’s love versus fear. If, at the moment, one of the two (love or fear) is guiding your actions and thoughts, the other is not. Why? Well, according to Jerry, it’s because love lives in the present, and fear lives in a reflection of the past into the future. This is a lesson taught over and over. Let go of the past and future, and live in the present.

As Jerry says in the book, “Wouldn’t our lives be more meaningful if we looked to what has no beginning and no ending as our reality? Only Love fits this definition of the eternal. Everything else is transitory and therefore meaningless.”

Now, doesn’t that sound an awful lot like John, the Gospel of Love? Eternal life is ours for the grasping, by living in the eternal now. I’m reminded of another book review I just completed: My Stroke of Insight.

This is a short little book with cute illustrations that you can read in a couple hours. It’s a 25th anniversary reprint of a book that made a big splash in 1974, and it’s worth the two-hour investment. ( )

Dr. Jampolsky has applied the principles of 'A Course in Miracles' to "lessons for personal transformation." He suggests a daily practice of relaxation, active imagination, application, and review of each lesson, repeating the program until the lessons are part of your life. These are powerful practices that can rid us of wasting energy on fears, judgments, and grievances; freeing us to live in the present with joy, openness, and wholeness. When we hold onto grievances we tend to use the past to predict a future in which we must be cautious and avoid being hurt. In contrast, giving love to others unconditionally will bring us the love that we all need. Forgiveness in this light does not mean that we tolerate behavior we don't like; it means correcting a misperception that we have been harmed; it means noticing our thoughts that create a fearful external world, choosing instead to see love in the world and to appreciate our common bond with others. "The world we see that seems so insane may be the result of a belief system that isn't working," Jampolsky writes. "Our old belief system assumes that anger occurs because we have been attacked. It also assumes that counterattack is justified... If we are willing, it is possible to change our belief system. However, to do so... means letting go of any investment in holding on to fear, anger, guilt or pain."