2-20. No mind can imprison another. All that you do affects only your mind. Give love and kindness, always, so that you might know it for yourself.
The concept of one mind attacking another mind is without meaning. It makes no sense. Minds are not physical. They do not attack. How can that which has no form or substance in any manner whatsoever be an agent of attack or inflict harm against another mind? This proposition presents an idea that blatantly has no justification at all, yet so many of the now incarnate Children of God appear to believe that it is indeed possible for one mind to attack another. This simply does not occur, but if you desire to believe that it is possible, you will become imprisoned in this utterly dereliction of your own duty to yourself, throwing away your own responsibility for your emotional wellbeing and attempting to offer it to another mind in a fashion that cannot possibly result in any benefit for you. That which you think remains forever contained within your own mind. Your thoughts are inviolate and they do not have the ability to travel towards the mind of another and to effect any result within the mind of another Child of God save for what they believe your thoughts are causing. This causative effect is an assumption, not a fact. It does not actually occur. But habits can bind and bind they do, most deeply and with unbreakable chains of slavery to consequences that forever remain fully within the ambit and control of the thinker. There are a great variety of thoughts that you can conceptualize that will engender a negative, painful and difficult set of associated emotional resonances within your mind. But it is you who are causing these reactions – it is not the thoughts of another Child of God that are infecting your mind with anger, regret or hatred. This concept stands in an intractably unresolvable state against the lessons of this world, which consistently emphasize a belief that if others do not do or say as you wish they would, you must suffer at their hands when it is only your own hand that is casting you down into a dungeon of your own making. It is not necessarily easy or simple to untie these Gordian knots of self-justifying relinquishment of your own personal responsibility to release your current attachments to reactive behavior when you are faced with challenges. But no other Child of God can cleave this knot for you. They cannot find the ends of the knot and offer them to you so that you might uncover the way to begin untangling the web of lies that you have allowed your ego to offer to you in a substitution of Truth for illusions that has never had any value to you. It is necessary, first, to accept that no mind can imprison another, and more importantly, to admit to yourself that you have allowed yourself to believe this proposition of insanity instead of simply accepting that it has always been your own choice to react that has caused the pain you have experienced. This may not happen rapidly, as it requires a great release, a sea change that reorients your perspective away from blame and accusation and towards acceptance of your own responsibility. Your ego will fight you in this process, for the ego consistently only looks outwards for answers to its own insane creations. The ego does not want you to discover that you have the ultimate and inalterable responsibility for your own emotional state, at all times and in every situation, for if you were to release what the ego offers and accept Love as your Guide instead, the ego’s utility for you would begin a process of dissolution that would be unstoppable. Certainly there will be times and situations that will test your newly found faith in your own power to choose your reaction to anything that arises, no matter how horrific or difficult it may be. But these times of trial have great and abiding utility for you, because each time you rise above your habituated reactions and you maintain presence of mind within the perfectly serene present moment, you will gain ever greater levels of strength and assurance in your own ability to maintain your composure no matter what another Child of God says or does. Be patient with yourself as you grow stronger through these lessons in the power of choice, for they offer a great bounty of wisdom in their acceptance. This bounty is the knowledge and finally the unshakable certainty that you can remain calm, centered and focused even when presented with the most egregiously erratic and bizarrely unnatural behavior, no matter how incomprehensible it may be to you. Do not offer hatred when these situations arrive in your life, for all that you offer to others you offer to yourself in equal measure. Do not attempt to return the negativity, attack and accusations that another Child of God may hurtle at you when they are in the midst of an attack that their own ego is waging against them and they alone. They may offer to you everything but love, for in their pain they seek to harm others in the assumption that venting some amount of their own personal anguish will somehow serve as a relief valve that will lower the pressure they feel within themselves. It will not. But because this world teaches very little that is actually True, they will likely utilize a wholly backwards and hopelessly reversed presumption that attempting to hurt another will somehow bring joy to them. It will not. Do not offer anger back to them when they are lost in the dark woods of the ego’s twisted teachings, for what they need more than anything else at all during these times is calm, clear Love. Offer this Love to the best of your ability, knowing that while you may not always feel perfect, and while you may not always behave in a manner that accurately reflects the Perfection of your heart, in Truth you are already Perfect. All that you are here, in this world, to learn is that you have forgotten your own Perfection. Once remembered, it is not forgotten again for it was never lost, it was merely obscured by so much illusion that it appeared, for such a very short time indeed, that you never were this Perfection at all. Offer Love in all that you do so that you might remember that you are Love, too. In this simple exchange of that which is forever nothingness and illusion for that which is forever all that will ever be Real in any True sense of the word, the warmth and strength of your own heart will be reflected back to you in all that you offer to others, allowing you to release ever more deeply held layers of illusions until only the Light of Love is left.