2-47. If you feel you must do, you need not. If you feel you must change, you must not. There is nowhere to go. You are already perfectly Complete.
The desire to do is deeply and intractably rooted in the ego and its wish to keep you forever distracted so that you will not have the presence of mind and peaceful awareness to see that the ego is absolutely nothing at all. When you are rushing headlong into the future, constantly distracting yourself from the peace of the present moment, it is very difficult to see through the lies of the ego. Instead of dwelling in peace and present moment awareness, you are driving ever forward, blindingly charting a course towards a future that exists solely in your own mind. Tomorrow is not given to anyone with any degree of assurance or certainty. You may never experience tomorrow. You may simply perish, for a multitude of reasons or even for no reason at all, in which case all of your plans for the future will be absolutely meaningless. Thoughts of the past also function in a similar manner, but with a different aspect of distraction. Rather than being thoughts of what may be, contemplating the past serves only to distract you from the present by offering you the illusion that your beliefs about the past can in any way alter the course that you have already progressed upon. This cannot be. The past is done and buried - leave it where it is and allow it to rest, for to dredge the past into the present has no more value for you than to attempt to discern in any meaningful manner what may transpire in the future. Neither the future nor the past are Real, for one is a collection of what has already occurred and the other represents a vast field of possibilities, none of which can be accurately predicted with anything other than the most fleeting level of accuracy. You do not need to do to be who you already are. No action is necessary to purify your soul or to rid your mind of doubt, fear, loss, pain or regret. Actions do not define you. They do not offer a salvation that you do actually need, for you are already Perfect. But the ego will have none of this. The ego will rail against this simple Truth endlessly, seeking only to blind you from the purity of your current condition, trying in vain but perhaps succeeding, at least momentarily, in distracting you from the stillness and peace that is present in each of the perfectly quiet present moments that cascade through your consciousness. To do is not to be. To be is to be, actionless and motionless, accepting all that occurs just as it unfolds without the unnecessary burdens of judgment and evaluation. Action serves to distract you from the perfection of the present moment. As such, do not allow your ego to convince you that you need to undertake any action to become more than you are already. You are already Complete. This Completion is total and incorruptible. The ego is anything but total and it is absolutely corruptible. The ego is corruption incarnate, a meaningless attempt to justify an existence that it does not enjoy and a pointless exercise in self-delusion, layer after layer of falsities now rendered whole and complete purely through your desire to make them so. The ego is not your friend. It offers nothing that you actually want. All that you desire has already been Given to you by God and all of the Gifts of God are ever-present, forever available to you but seemingly inaccessible for as long as you wish to remain centered within the ego’s blind perspective. The desire to change functions as a close cousin of the desire for action. It too speaks to an incompleteness that is not at all Real. The ego is not just incomplete, it is incapable of completion in any form. The ego is nothing because Love is Everything. But the ego cannot accept this, for its own undoing is found at the center of this realization. The ego will forever tell you that you must change in some fundamental way if you are to have peace. This is not correct. Peace is not to be obtained after some long and arduous journey. Peace is not a destination, it is already present and accessible to you whenever you should wish to enjoy it. But the ego cannot understand or accept this idea in any form, so the ego rejects it utterly, instead whispering to you constantly that who you are now, at this exact present moment, must be in some way flawed. You are not. Do not accept this lie. It is a meaningless perversion of the Truth of your own Purity and Completeness. The ego depends on your struggle with yourself, feeding endlessly on the internal conflict that you generate when you attempt to imagine that you might be in any way unworthy of the Love of God. You are not unworthy, Child of God. You have never been and you will never be. But to accept your Worth and Value to God may appear to be difficult. This is not actually true, but the ego will insist that it is and the ego will throw up any and all barricades possible in your mind, fighting against the Return of the Light that will Free you from the ego’s darkness. Both the desire for action and the apparent but illusionary necessity for change serve to imply that there must be somewhere for you to go, some other state of mind to obtain or some other version of present moment awareness that will serve to free you, allowing you to alight from this mortal existence and to be free once again in a manner that the ego cannot imagine. This is not at all correct. There is nowhere to go, for you are already Home. You have not left Heaven, you have not been forgotten by God and you have not lost the eternal Love of God for any reason whatsoever. All of these lies are of the ego - they are not present in the center of your heart. To imagine that there is somewhere else that might in some way be better, more complete or more profoundly perfect than the present moment that you are occupying right now serves only to justify the ego’s lies, deluding you into believing that you must move from beyond the present into some imaginary glorious future in which your fears and insecurities will drop away, rendering you Whole in a way that you are not already. This is a lie, Child of God. There is no moment in the future that will be so much better or so much brighter than what can be found and recognized in this, the eternally perfect present moment. You do not need to go anywhere or be anything other than what you are, in Truth, for what you already are and will always be is perfectly Complete in a manner that the ego can never understand. The ego stands between you and the center of your heart, a place of such purity that it is possessed of sufficient Clarity to play host to the Heart of God, ensuring that you are forever connected to and eternally joined with the Peace and Joy that you so fervently desire, even if you do not yet recognize that you want this Peace above all else that this world might offer. Release the ego, allowing it to gently fall behind you as a garment now no longer needed or a skin now far too small to ever contain the summary whole of what and who you are, Child of God. Your Perfection and Completion is already present. Nothing withholds the Light of Love that you will find at the center of your heart save for your own choice to believe that there is anything at all that you must do, become, travel towards or transcend to become worthy of the Love of God, for you already are and you always will be.