Beloveds, as best you can, stay away from assumptions. Assumptions are really hasty judgments. You make hasty assumptions all too often. Someone makes a remark, and you feel the remark means that the person doesn't like you. You make assumptions that something is the matter when nothing is the matter except your perception.

Hello, beloveds. How do you think you are today?

You may not know this, yet you are better than you have ever been. You may think you are in a slump, and yet I tell you that you are rising day by day. Your perception is often incorrect. This is because you listen to old programming. Because of old programming, My children have a tendency to think that they are lagging in life. There is a carrot you have put in front of you that you haven't caught up to, so you tend to see yourself falling behind.

There are many excuses in the world for not being happy, and yet the alternative exists for you to be happy. If you are not feeling happy or content or useful or whatever you want to call the essence of feeling okay and good with life, you have chosen what you are feeling.

What is most the matter with you is that you think something is the matter with you. That is a trap you build, and you fall into it. Take a look at what is good with you, and see how you feel. When you feel discouraged, you have encouraged discouragement. You are the instigator of it. You may give testimony to the value of positive thinking, yet you throw punches at yourself. Do not even throw one punch. Be your own spokesperson to yourself. You are the one you have to dissuade from negative thinking, for you have excelled at it when it comes to you yourself.

Let not your mind be like shoes you are delighted to take off at night. When shoes fit you well, they don't hurt and you can wear them a long time without much thought about them. When your thoughts fit you well, they too will not hurt. They will not be burdens. Wear comfortable thoughts to begin with.

This holding on to old paths in life holds you back. When you hang on, how far can you fly? Even when you hold on to a ribbon of nothing, you are still holding on. You have wound ribbon around your fingers, and you hold tight to the ribbon. You hold tight the way a baby's hand holds on to whatever comes in its reach. You hold on to ideas. You hold on to the past. You hold on to ribbons of the past and flapping ribbons of the future, and you let this precise moment go, perhaps only to hold on to it later in retrospect. Let go to the winds that which belongs to the winds.

The cure for all that ails you is to move your thoughts over. Some thoughts belong with My divine sons and daughters, and some thoughts do not. Accept this modality ahead of time, and you will be steering your thoughts. You will round them up almost automatically. Your distraught thoughts will go into a truck, and your uplifting thoughts will go out into the green pastures where they can chew their cud.

Into what terrain of life do you enter? What setting do you give yourself today? What freedom do you give yourself, and what freedom do you take away?

If you must see your life and the world in a prescribed way, then you have withdrawn your freedom. If you insist on seeing and interpreting and valuing as you are accustomed to, you may well be accepting dried flowers instead of fresh ones. I would like you to hold freshly picked flowers. If you cannot accept fresh thoughts, take another look at your old ones. The recipes handed down in your family are not necessarily the loving kind.

All of your life on the Earth plane is a mirage, yet how real-seeming are mirages! The difference between your mirage and a mirage in the desert is that you are not in a desert. You are in the Garden of Eden. Part of your mirage is that you seemingly think you live in a desert, and then you go about proving that you do. You say, "That's how it is."

All the whys and wherefores put you on a treadmill from which you can never get off. So long as you look for reasons or THE reason, you go around in circles. You race nowhere. All you know is what appears to be. There is the sense in which you need to accept that there is no cause. B does not always follow A or lead to C. This acceptance can free you to move on in a new direction of thought and life. Reason lies on the surface and does not go beneath.