The Four Questions
Q1. Is it true?
Q2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
Q3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
Q4. Who would you be without that thought?
I am I is the essence of self-acceptance. But it is not passive or selective self-acceptance. It is active, loud, strong, and, if necessary, heroically aggressive. It applies to all aspects of self. It is dictated to only by the highest regard and dedication to individuality, however, that individuality may conform or depart from what are commonly regarded as “cultural norms.” This includes all thoughts, ideas, feelings, desires, decisions, and eventually actions. I includes all that I am. Judgment value, moral equivocation, cultural and conventional values, the ideas of others do not cause me to deaden, reprise, or attempt to cut off parts of myself. I includes all that the culture may see as assets, liabilities, limitations, resources, insensitivities, cruelites, neurotic, good, bad, sensitive, wise, or stupid in me.
— Compassion and Self-Hate, Theodore Issac Rubin
You are so weak. Give up to grace.
The ocean takes care of each wave
till it gets to shore.
You need more help than you know.
You’re trying to live your life in open scaffolding.
Say Bismillah, In the name of God,
as the priest does with a knife when he offers an animal.
Bismillah your old self
to find your real name.
– Jalal Al-Din Rumi
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite. – A Course in Miracles