4-43. As your faith in Love grows, you will occasionally appear to step backwards. In truth you do not, as all Paths back to God are only progressed upon in one direction.
Ah, failure. What greater obfuscation of the Truth of Love could possibly be ascribed to the ego and its desire to convince you that God’s Love for you must be conditional, and more importantly, that there could be some manner within which you could “fail”, and thusly be cast out of the Sight of God and banished to “hell”, or some other form of punishment, when it has always been but the ego’s desire to denigrate your innate worthiness that has been one of the most desperate cornerstones of its entire and utterly backwards worldview. There is no failure. There is only error. Error naturally implies the possibility of correction and learning. Failure contains no such a proposition, for if you have failed, you have not succeeded, and that is that - it’s over, you lose, end of story, better luck next time. What a ridiculous proposition - that all of the time, space, and nearly infinite variety of lessons that are available to all of the Children of God for learning and growth could have been Created by God for the purposes of leaving you in a state of dejected apathy, no longer willing to progress forward, for you believe you have “failed” and so you no longer deserve Love. What could this possibly imply? As always, it is the conjunction of the ego and its fruitless attempts to convince you that you should accord yourself with its proposals, and the Perfection of Creation, a Truth and a Light that cannot be diminished by any error at all. There is no error in Creation. As a blessed and beloved Child of God, there is no error in you. Your soul is not a mistake. Your presence in this world, at this time, with these conjunctions of opportunities to learn ever more of your True Nature, is not some accident of fate or result of the randomness of the material universe. That would be an interesting situation, if it were true, for it would imply that all that occurs when a soul pours down into a body is just happenstance and misdirected appropriation of the mechanisms of learning that are the most important - but certainly not the only - reason for the act of Creation that gave rise to a world of form that could be explored, seemingly testifying to a separation from Love and an isolation from Truth that is irredeemable and uncorrectable. This world of form is not as this - it is neutral indeed, as is so obvious when all of the emotional import of tragedy and apparently needless suffering is removed from the evaluative matrix that is used to regard the chaos of the material world. Yet he alignments that arise and the lessons they can impart are far from random. That is not to imply that all that occurs is deliberate, or that the fates conspire to direct you thusly, as a puppet upon their three strings of life, continuance and death, determining what it is that shall occur so that you can safely set aside your own responsibility for the elections you make and the errors you commit. Yet it is within the commission of error that is often contained the greatest and most potent lessons, even if they are frequently incessantly painful and seemingly irrecoverable. Nothing can occur within the world of form that will alter who you are, and nothing will transpire that will alter the Judgment of God. All of that is but a misappropriation by the ego of the Truth of Love, now forced to stand on its head and become engorged with the blood that cascades downwards, confusing the issue endlessly when there is no genuine mistake that need be corrected. If you had no use for learning, you would not be present within the world of form, for your next series of progression through the layers of Creation would unfold within higher dimensional spaces than the density and languishment of this world of form, and that would be exactly appropriate for you. But that step in your journey back to God has yet to arrive, and so you are here, and you are Safe within the Love of God, no matter how “badly” you believe you have errored. The only distinction that must be accepted is simply this - to commit an error is not to be an error. So simple it is to say, so terrifically difficult it is to accept, thoroughly and completely. This is one of the most important undoings of the stranglehold that the ego claims against your fervent breath and newly Awakening sight, for the conflation of the mistakes that are inherent to a process of learning with the core functionality and being-ness of your True Nature is a deeply confusing and lugubrious impediment to be overcome. Yet it is not conquered - it is forgotten as the misperception of the ego, now left behind as you look ever more clearly upon a world that is not at odds with your desire or best interests - it is working in a great conspiracy to provide to you all of the available lessons in what you actually Are, rather than the great falsehoods of the ego that it has attempted to sell to you in exchange for your rapt and unwavering attention. Forget all that is not Love. It is not Real. Allow yourself to be forgiving with all that has transpired that you regret, wish to alter or desire to have never occurred at all. You are not granted the ability to reach back in time - not directly, at least, and not in a manner that is readily accessible to the untrained mind - and alter what has already passed. Allow it to be as it is. It is past now because there are lessons that stand in front of you, great learnings in the Grace of God and the Infinity of Love that is your Home within the Heart of God. Stop wishing for that which was not, for time unfolds in front of you in a manner that can allow for the arising of and orientation with that which you desired or have need to learn, and that is a great blessing indeed. Failure is an interesting concept when it is applied in the interests of asserting that it is possible to regress upon your journey back to God, for no such diminishment of your Light can occur. You can certainly encounter yet another challenge, one great and mighty indeed, and one that may seem able to slay all of your intention and determination, rendering you mute and still, no longer able to continue any longer for the path is too steep and the monsters you believe you face much to fierce to battle any longer. That is not a regression. That is merely a pause while you contemplate what it is that you have ascribed to your difficulties or challenges that you believe you do not already possess. But you do not fall down and become smaller when you elect to take a moment’s pause upon a journey that is not just lifelong - it is many, many lifetimes long indeed. You are allowed to consider which step is best. You are allowed to reflect on how far you’ve come and all that has been cast off of fear and doubt as you have stepped ever closer to the Peace that surpasses all understanding. But to assert that you have become diminished by your pause, or that your past errors have represented backwards steps that have placed you ever further away from God - that is the ego, and it is to be ignored, not venerated as an oracle of veracity or upheld as an entity that is possessed of any form of perception that is accurate at all. Consult with your heart when times such as these arrive, and you will be able to access all of the certainty and the stature of greatness that is appropriate for an Awakening Child of God. It is not possible to regress when it is God that you seek. It is only possible to remain just as you are now, which is wholly and eternally acceptable, or to grow once again in Love and in Truth, releasing another layer of illusions which have never served you in any manner at all and becoming ever lighter and freer, more willing to accept that the Light of Love is equally for you as it is for all of the other Children of God. There is only one direction to all of Creation - towards God, eternally and perfectly. It has only been your seemingly necessary forgetting of the Love of God that has generated the necessity for the Creation of a world of form that would be a suitable place for you to occupy, if only for a nearly infinitesimally short period of time, when regarded from the Eternity that is the Kingdom of Heaven, while you have dwelled in a state of abject disconnection from Truth, believing yourself to be unworthy and then seeing a world that seems to confirm that, even when the Promise of God has never been broken. You were Promised eternal Life, and so you have it. You were Promised eternal Love, and so you are it. You were Promised eternal Safety, and so you live within it, always and forever. No error can counter the Will of God. No blemish exists upon the Perfection of Creation. All that has transpired were but necessary lessons in what was Real, and all that was not. Once learned, they are never to be repeated. In that, you can rest, for once you have Remembered God, all that was error will be undone, instantaneously and completely.