Quote: “"What is the agenda of the author"? And this is where ACIM raises red flags at least to me.

Namely, if my objectives were to convince people that worship of God is unnecessary, and that there is no such thing as sin, and that people can behave pretty much as they want to without any fear of punishment......then I would tell them essentially what ACIM tells us.

You think that serial murderer is evil and should be punished when he dies? Heck no, not to worry because he didn't really commit those sins. Why? Well, because sin doesn't really exist. It's just an illusion. And do you feel guilty because you cheated that old man out of his life savings? Gee don't feel guilty, because guilt doesn't exist either. It too is an illusion. In fact, every bad and awful thing you ever heard about or saw or did is just an illusion. And of course there can be no punishment for illusory things, right?

So what we essentially have is zero accountability. No one is guilty of anything because no one really did anything.”

_________

yes, but Lucy this kind of thinking only goes so far and dead-ends.
if you read Kurt Leland in "Otherwhere" it sheds some light on what happens after you die. Serial killers and the like, need to transform their thoughts here or they are at risk of what we used to call in the olden days "losing your soul." Leland explains this process as being burned in a transmutional fire (symbol)  anything evil then becomes exstinguished and the way he describes it according to his personal symbols and interpretation which resonates with my own thoughts, they become oblivious as this process finds them, they don't know what "hit" them. but all the allusions they lived by are no more, because allusions have no substantiality in the other dimensions.

in that sense, our bodies are not our true selves either, as you can see we return them to playground Earth to be a part of the Earth, and the allusion for many is that the body is the only reality for our being.  from the Earth properties we arose to make our bodies, and these minerals and fluid of which the body is (worth about 27cents) are gathered back into the Earth. So this is why the body is considered an illusion as it is not of eternal value.
PUl is the only eternal value.


so it's easy to see for me that by perpetrating acts of malice against another can cause you to become separated from the very source of nurturing, life itself, the whole, the source of our being, as we created the separation and we can return to source through each other. in other words we don't go home alone, but with each other.
the serial killer and the like is subservient to the greater illumination of the forces that be.

this is elemental. we shouldn't get distracted from what sounds logical but is incomplete thought.

love, alysia

This thread so far, sounds like utter nonsense.
It is so nonsensical that it should cause me to turn and run,
and tell people to stay away from this kind of screwy thinking.

I stay because of a curiosity about all the processes involved in
pursuing higher learning. Somewhere along the line something is
happening to mystics so that they lose all reasonable framework in
which to put things together into a meaningful pattern. They seem
to have abandoned all the normal anchors to ordinary reality.

Both the physical world and the higher world have their respective
realities. They are not illusions. When you come to earth, the
surroundings of earth become your realities. Good and evil as
defined on Earth are real while you are here. The usual definitions
of what is good and evil arise from the necessities of civilized
life here, and these definitions must be made. Without these
definitions, life would be chaos.

I admit that exposure to higher vibrational experiences can be very
confusing. The moralities are different there. But a person must be
able to put his surroundings together in a reasonable and rational
manner, in order to be mentally functional in an unfamiliar
environment.

Understanding what is real and what is not must be part of your
cognizance. For instance the image on your computer screen is real
to you. But it does not exist in the computer. The computer
contains only the information to make that image. In the computer
it is a long list of characters. It only exists as an image on the
screen, nowhere else in the computer. Nevertheless, it has reality.
In a TV camera, the image does exist on the image sensor chip, but
nowhere else. Each thing has its appropriate reality wherever and
however it exists.

When I talk to you, my words don't exist in the room as they come
to you. In the room there are only sequential vibrations of air
pressure which I as an engineer can describe to you in great
detail. But when these vibrations are understood in your brain,
they exist as words. The point I am making here is that reality is
definable and understandable. But you must be cognizant of all the
surrounding circumstances.

A dream is real to you because you had that dream. But it is not
real in physical reality. You are cognizant of the extent to which
it is real, and also unreal. You have the picture and the
definitions, we hope.

I can go along somewhat with what is being said here, to this
extent: I see the physical universe as being undefined in terms of
good and evil, in this way: a natural disaster happening on an
uninhabited planet is not yet evil, because there is no life there
to define it. The word disaster only has meaning when it is
disastrous for a particular species. That is, the definition of
evil requires a group of intelligences to define it. Prior to
that, it is only an undefined event.

But what has happened here is this: some writers have taken this
piece of understanding, and made it inappropriately into some kind
of statement of philosophy, as if we could think this way.
This is not suitable to our life at all. This attitude of good and
evil being undefined yet, is only good as a way to be initially
philosophically objective about events. In our life, good and evil
are already defined in a functional way from thousands of years of
human experience. You cannot suddenly divorce yourself from this
and say there is no such thing, this is an illusion. We live in a
framework that has these things defined, and we must live this way.
You don't suddenly throw the whole framework away, just because you
have finally come to the understanding that it is a framework that
we impose on reality.

What seems to have happened here is that some mystics have completely
lost it, and are adrift without anchors. They no longer know what
is real is what is not, what is evil and what is not, and can't
define anything.

(I am going to have to study this some more)

Evil is more than appearance .Ask anyone from a concentration camp . "Man hands on inhumanity to man "

Do demons exist ? Yes.

Should we ignore them ? When they enter a room or a body that is no longer an option .

I work as an exorcist in a team . We never charge . We have seen many forms of negs .The darkest evil comes from within by our freewill , we decide to manifest our angel within or our demon. The guardian angel unites with the higher self to inspire and lead us . The unleashed guardian demon causes anxiety , depression & self destruction .

I found this comment at the Abraham-Hicks discussion site:

Q: Person wants to know if the “Light” of beings like Saddam Hussein or Hitler are “dimmer” than the “lights” of the rest of humanity. Surely they did NOT re-emerge into Pure Positive Energy when they left Physical, after all the terrible things they did….??????

A:  Basically, what Abraham told her was that just as ALL come from Pure Positive Energy, ALL return to Pure Positive Energy, no matter how “disconnected” they were. 

http://forums.abraham-hicks.com/forum2/601-2.html

________

We don't ever seem to come up with a model that can explain both worldly happenings and account for our connection with whatever our source is and our connection ( or dis-connection)to it.

In my own opinion it is a matter of awareness.

Suppose one person has a particular way of unclothing themselves.  First, they ALWAYS take off their shoes. They place them in a certain place every time. Then the shirt comes off, button by careful button and hung carefully in place. Then....well, you get the picture.  Very methodical.

Another person has different ways of unclothing themselves every single time. One shoe may be thrown off. The shirt pulled off and landing on the floor somewhere inside out. ZING goes the bra over to the other side of the room...............well, you get the picture.  Just get me out of these things, says she!

So perhaps the afterlife is like this. Some people shed what is unreal about themselves very quickly and come to full understanding of where they came from with little prodding and even a lack of elegance which is annoying to some others.

Others feel they must make their way to the Source step by step.  It is their Way.

Both people may seem amazingly similar in characteristics aside from those observed here. Both may be equally intelligent, equally well versed in spiritual knowledge.

Or they may be equally "evil" according to our standards here in our societies.

In other societies in different times, however, such characteristics which they possessed, the inner characteristics by which we judge them, may have caused them to be considered heroes, almost god-like in their abilities.

So, it is difficult for me to come to terms with broad statements about what is "evil" because so many people are influenced by the circumstances in which they develop.  For instance, it is proven that in an experimental situation, people will continue to give a person whom they do not know greater and greater electric shocks, to the point of dire pain. Although they do not know the shocks are NOT real, they believe them to be real in the experiment.

It takes little encouragement for them to do so, and it is, sadly, a common characteristic of the people involved in such an experiment.

So, I am trying to take a more distant view of these situations, to try to imagine what could have cause these situations to occur.

It is doubtless important that as a world community we establish new standards for what is humane, for what human beings deserve and we are sadly contradictory in all that we teach and do.

Why would it be any different in the afterlife, in those places which may be further from the Source from which we all came......

I think that it is not a matter of belief as DaBears fears, not always, but simply a matter of how one sheds one's clothes....

this "reality" we experience here, and the "reality" that we perceive there.

love, blink  

Alysia said:
'I also believe mankind creates Saddam's and Hitlers
and calls them into the Earth plane, has a need  for
this kind of death and mayhem. in that sense, we are
the ones responsible for the evil we see.'

When you think of the most vile historical persons that we can think of, weren't they all satisfying the wishes of some group/nation? As sad as that is!
Each vile one took the wishes of a group and manifested those wishes.

Since today is Easter we could use Judas as our example of vile:  By acting on others' wishes he relieved many many people of the suffering their dangerous wishes were causing them and others. He helped restore many people to a more balanced viewpoint, from which later many were able to reconsider their wishes and the horrendous outcome. Without the 'relief' Judas' act gave them, their hatred would have continued to grow, perhaps causing more harm to their souls and to those they perceived to be their enemies.
I am not saying what the vile ones do is good; good does not exist in a scheme of things where evil does not exist. All is just necessary.
I don't like it but the thought just came to me.
It sounds callous, but how do you deal with an abstraction like 'evil is not evil' ?
I was trying to understand it by looking at smaller inter-actions of people--say, like kids riling up a bully at a playground, then disavowing his actions as wrong.
But the outcome of true evil is too hideous to be comparable. My apologies for such an attempt. but there should be some model somewhere for what we're trying to say when evil is not evil. Otherwise it has to remain what it is--evil.
Bets

thank you Kathy, I agree.

Bets said : I was trying to understand it by looking at smaller inter-actions of people--say, like kids riling up a bully at a playground, then disavowing his actions as wrong.
__

I'm not sure of the meaning of the word disavowing..you mean to pick on a bully and then defend the bully afterwards?
_____

that brings up a childhood memory..I was ten and watching a large kid picking on a small kid. the small kid was crying and kept pestering the larger one, whose anger was shaking the ground. I charged across the street without thinking to come between them, although I didn't know them or the cirmcumstance. i put myself in harms way to stop the fight. I took her anger in the face..what happened was it discharged her anger because she was so surprised that a person would just step in like that. I didn't say anything and she thought I was crazy. I didn't have to explain..just my interference unplugged some of the negativity.
I felt like I was helping her, not just the little kid who took off running. I wasn't afraid, so it was kind of inner knowledge I carried even then that I could discharge negativity if I needed to. I sort of used my eyes to communicate with. I think we all have our ways of discharging a build of negativity. thank god she didn't hit me, but I was going to let her.
_________
one way to deal with these thoughts of evil versus non-evil, is selfish versus non-selfish, or light versus darkness, or my favorite of all time as Kathy mentions is fear versus love.

I started noticing my thoughts that come. every thought that comes has a feeling attached to it. Maybe an uneasy feeling. maybe a nervous thought. if you are having a thought that makes you nervous, there is something you are afraid of. so it's a fear thought.

so what is fear, an absense of love.  next you keep wondering why you are afraid and you sniff down the reason. but sniffing out the fear and the reason, the belief system can take awhile. it all depends on how determined you are to get to the core of the fear thought. Once you do, you experience an aha moment. discovering the core belief system tends to dissolve the fear so that your thoughts begin to be more positive as each fear examined leaves your house of conscious awareness.
what I'm trying to express is why you can come up to a person that others would say is evil and yet you yourself would see no evil because you don't believe in evil.
for one thing, life won't put an evil person in front of you unless...
1) you believe you are a victim and you set yourself up to outpicture the belief on an unconscious level, or even before you were born here possibly. becoming a victim can also be turned around, a circumstance where you become a great light, for instance, showing others the way. in the meantime, on another level, the perpetrator has already met you and knows what his job will be and has agreed.

2) if evil is placed in front of you in another type of situation, it is because you will discharge it because the other needs you help. You are the light, the light makes the darkness disappear because you do not see that it has power over you, and so you can also just see it not there and do your job that way, seeing it not there, is from Bruce's books. what it means is, to me, that you simply don't have the belief system in evil, for it to be able to overpower you.
anybody watch Freddie Kruger? Great Flick! Freddie needed someone to believe in him or he started to disappear and whine to the heroine, she had pulled his con.  very metaphysical movie that was.

Fear is a very strong motivator in our world, but you can track it down and when we get beyond fear as a people, slowly, one by one, love begins to supplant the fears and less crime to worry about as time goes on, and less hells to retrieve people out of.

love, alysia

Claire said: Perhaps ,  evil is capable in any of us by circumstance too .
____

from a spiritual psychology work I have learned the above statement is true of the human, although we have the divine spark within us to concentrate on.

from this work I was led into my own inner world and found disturbing images I worked through. but it takes awhile to face off with them. what the material said that I found true is our passions..we need to control our passions with working with logic and higher truths.
It said that we may be entertaining a small impatience towards another..we may spend time justifying this small impatience...when if we could see that the impatience but covers up a vast ocean of pure rage which in the end but promotes a warring world. if we would make a world without war, we would need to be examining each little judgment, each feeling of impatience or negativity, root it out, replace it with either a prayer for the truth to be known, or opening our mind to another possibility rather than projecting blame upon our brothers and sisters for our own perceptions.

so the answer to the question falls squarely in each person's lap. which I can't see how it would do other than that, as then we experience a freedom that nobody has done anything against you but your own self.

love, alysia