Your embarrassment, which is your consciousness of error in yourself, has always motivated your ego defensively; that is, you either concealed the fault or made it acceptable.

But look at what happened! When you made a “virtue” out of a fault you became easily led and emotionally dependent on beauties and beasts who “loved” and accepted you for those failings. You were forced to act more and more like an animal for the daily bread of reassurance.

When your faults—which you did not see as faults, thanks to your “friends”—became the means of glorious popularity, how much more did you delight and feel secure in them!

Can’t you see how the emotion of “love” you craved for the sake of ego security only favored the growth of the physical error inside you? To the children of disobedience sin is a virtue and virtue is sin!

Look at the beastly, perverted things you were required to do to maintain the illusion. And every time you consciously put aside the truth for feelings of security, you became guilty. Later you could see the evidence left behind by the emotion you needed.

Look what a slave you are of whatever supports your ego. Understand, then: what gives you security and illusion makes a beast of you.

If we entered the world just as God intended us to be, we could never have noticed anything out of the ordinary.

Like the animals, we could entertain no uncertainty about our identity and therefore would have no need to be accepted. The rituals of obtaining that relief are basically religious in nature and revolve around removing the guilt of being “god.” So life is reversed; everything is back to front.

"the emotion of 'love' you craved for the sake of ego security only favored the growth of the physical error inside you"

Our bodies become objects for worship. As we idolize each other our feeling of guilt decreases but our actual guilt grows. As we become slaves to each other’s needs and as we become more degenerate to keep the guilt away, we make greater demands on one another.

That is because we grow guiltier instead of more innocent. Later, that very “love” forms the basis of hate because of what that “love”-respect-­attention-worship-affection—does to us.

Love makes a beast or a monkey out of you, and proves your fallibility and guilt. Hate is obviously the other side of the coin: a more beastly emotion.

Unable to tolerate the knowledge of his imperfections, every egocentric person sets about the loathsome task of enjoying them, aided by an ancient accomplice. Temptation, lurking in another person whom it has entered, appears on the scene as that friend or relative who is sympathetic to and compatible with the fault that is to become the “virtue.”

And you are led from earth to hell, as formerly Adam was led from Paradise to earth, full of thistles and thorns..