John Smallman – Jesus – The Vast Majority Of Your “Shoulds” Are Self-Imposed Stressors – 10 June 2012
This waiting period — the calm and seemingly empty space before the grand awakening — can be and is very unsettling for many of you. You are waiting in excited anticipation for an event of enormous significance which could occur at any moment, and yet it seems that nothing is happening to bring it on.
Due to your obsession with time, that aspect of the illusion has intensified over the last few decades to such an extent that patient, relaxed waiting has become very stressful for you. And, of course, stress feeds on itself. It is very important for you to detach regularly each day from these time-stresses that life in the illusion seems to impose on you. It does not. But you do impose them on yourselves by allowing yourselves to be ruled by “shoulds,” and shoulds almost always have an intense time element attached to them.
Look at all those shoulds and determine whether they are truly as important as you think they must be. If you look back over your lives at shoulds that did not get done, you can see quite clearly that life did not stop when they were left undone, but just carried on regardless. And it is very clear that the vast majority of those shoulds were self-imposed stressors of very little importance, whose only achievement was to make you feel guilty – more stress!
By taking time-outs frequently throughout the day for as little as half a minute and then questioning the time pressures that you are imposing on yourselves, or that you are allowing others to impose on you, you permit yourselves to reassess your priorities, thus reducing your stress levels. Reducing stress reduces anxiety and allows you to accept the flow of life as it happens, and then the waiting can become quite pleasurable because deep within yourselves you truly know that you will awaken — and that therefore there is nothing to worry about.
The Love buried deep within each one of you is where you need to focus your attention in your moments of stress. When stress or overwhelm strikes, turn instantly to that divine energy within you. Remind yourselves that you are Love because that is what you were created from, and God’s divine creations are constant, eternal, and unchanging expressions of Himself. You have never been separated from Him and you never will be – that would be annihilation, total destruction, and an impossibility. You were created from Love and in joy to experience the infinite, ecstatic bliss in which that state embraces all of creation eternally.
You chose to imagine a different state and the illusion was born. Its moment has passed, and you are to awaken into your true state. In Reality anything that is not of Love, or that is in opposition to Love, does not and cannot exist because it is unreal. You are still holding on to illusory concepts, attitudes, and behaviors, and while you continue to do so you will remain asleep. It is as simple as that. Only in sleep can your imaginations run riot, causing chaos, confusion, and intense disharmony.
Although for very, very many of you, your apparent reality — the illusion — is indeed a nightmare, you are extremely reluctant to let go of it. It is familiar, and you imagine that if you work hard within it, you can improve it and eventually create some kind of Utopian state where all can reside in peace and prosperity. And, because you have forgotten who you are, you are terrified that if you let go, your existence will be terminated. And that is impossible. Only the illusion can be terminated, and that will happen when you collectively let it go.
So, for now, you soldier on, hoping that science will be able to overcome death, aging, and all disease, while improved education will lead to wiser leadership in all fields of human endeavor so that, eventually, Utopia will be achieved.
Utopia is a delusion! It is a concept dreamt up in the illusion to give you hope. But it is a false hope because it depends on outside rules and regulations that you hope to be able to create and see imposed for the benefit of all. Imposing rules from without is in complete opposition to the gift of free will that God has given you.
Free will is an aspect of Love. It is within each and everyone of you. In the illusory or dream state that you are presently experiencing, you have an ego that constantly opposes it because it sees itself as separated and needy, struggling to survive in an extremely hostile and inhospitable environment. In Reality free will is the way that all constantly interact lovingly with one another as one inseparable, divine Being, at one with God and with each other – the will of One is the will of All!
When you release or untie yourselves from the illusory state in which you seem to be trapped – and this is your task or journey and it will not defeat you – all will become clear as the veil or fog of confusion and ignorance dissolves in the brilliance of Reality that is all that there is. All is divinely taken care of, so don’t fight it, reject it, or dismiss it as irrelevant, because there is nothing else and your inevitable destiny is to awaken from the dream. You can delay it by refusing to become aware, but why would you? It only brings you further unnecessary suffering, and, obviously, you have had far more of that than you ever wanted. Surrender your will (your little imaginary egoic will) to God’s and awaken into joy.
Your loving brother, Jesus.