Sometimes we can feel discouraged because our past efforts have never prevailed over what challenges us, so why try now? Or perhaps we are disheartened because one of our main hopes for happiness suddenly proves itself to be hopeless. Maybe we get downcast in the day because our body, or our mind, is no longer capable of doing what it once could in younger years, and all we see on the horizon are more limitations.

The point is — when it comes to these dispiriting states — it makes no difference what they say is the cause of their punishing presence within us. The truth is that these dark states find the cause they need to inhabit us right from within the content of our own past experience! What does this mean?

Negative states, all dark energies that enervate us, only succeed at draining us because they are capable of making us see — drawn up from the storehouse of our own mental and emotional memories — those psychically loaded images that validate their existence. In other words: The only power these dark states hold over us is that they get us to identify with feeling ourselves as being powerless. And when such strong feelings of futility are accompanied by what is seen (in our own mind’s eye) as being valid — because we are given over to unconsciously recall the considerations that make them so — then boom! The trap is sprung and into the darkness we go!

The reason discouraging states hold us captive is because they have managed to convince us that all there is, is the limited darkness of their reality. And this reality — regardless of how we protest its presence — impresses itself upon us until this unconscious conspiracy is almost complete. No doubt we would be headed for a kind of black hole in our own consciousness were it not for one thing: Discouragement only has the last word with us as long as we give our consent to what it would have us believe is true about ourselves.

Our willingness to bring that dark, discouraged state into our awareness of it, instead of allowing it to define what we are aware of, changes our very relationship with life. Now the path before us, only a moment before impossibly dark and shut off to us, opens up to us because we have opened ourselves to God’s endless resources. No walls exist because the nature now active within us cannot be walled in by negative (life-stealing) thoughts and feelings. We can no longer be dominated because we have chosen the light of Truth as our advocate.

Question: Are you saying that any dark state is a lie and that by simply seeing it (throwing light upon it) that it will lose its power over us?

Answer: I’m saying that the state of captivity that comes over us because we are identified with dark states is an unnecessary condition, i.e., therefore not real, and therefore it may be seen as being a lie because the truth about it dispels it. We must not seek ways to be more powerful than what we feel overpowers us. It is our identification with these states that must be seen and dropped.