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Chapter 4 - The Root of All Evil Love Without Conflict
The reason you have not understood it is because it is not understandable to the ego, which interprets it as if something outside is inside, which does not mean anything.
This is the whole message of the Atonement, a message, which, in its totality, transcends the sum of its parts. Christmas is not a time; it is a state of mind. The Christ Mind wills from the Soul, not from the ego, and the Christ Mind is yours. You, too, have a kingdom which your Soul created. It has not ceased to create because your ego has set you on the road of perception. Your Soul’s creations are no more fatherless than you are. Your ego and your Soul will never be co-creators, but your Soul and your Creator will always be. Be confident that your creations are as safe as you are.
That was written in that form because it is a good thing to use as a kind of prayer in moments of temptation. It is a Declaration of Independence. You will find it very helpful if you understand it fully. In its characteristically upside-down way, the ego has taken the impulses from the superconscious (Holy Spirit) and perceives them as if they arise in the unconscious. The ego judges what is to be accepted, and the impulses from the superconscious are unacceptable to it, because they clearly point to the nonexistence of the ego itself. The ego therefore experiences threat, and not only censors but also reinterprets the data. However, as Freud correctly pointed out, what you you do not perceive you still know, and it can retain a very active life beyond your awareness. Repression thus operates to conceal not only the baser impulses, but also the most lofty ones from awareness, because both are threatening to the ego—and being concerned primarily with its own preservation in the face of threat—the ego perceives them as the same.
By perceiving them as the same, the ego attempts to save itself from being swept away, as it would surely be in the presence of knowledge (of what we really are).
That is why the basic conflict between love and fear is unconscious. The ego cannot tolerate either and represses both by resorting to inhibition. Society depends on inhibiting the latter (call of the body), but salvation depends on disinhibiting the former (Call of God).
My role is to separate the true from the false in your unconscious, so it can break through the barriers the ego has set up, and shine into your minds. Against our united strength the ego cannot prevail. Ego Regards The Soul As Its Enemy It should be apparent to you by now why the ego regards the Soul as its “enemy.” The ego arose from the separation, and its continued existence depends on your continuing belief in the separation. Having reduced the Soul impulses to the unconscious, the ego has to offer you some sort of reward for maintaining this belief. All it can offer is a sense of temporary existence, which begins with its own beginning and ends with its own ending. It tells you this life is your existence because it is its own. Against this sense of temporary existence the Soul offers you the knowledge of permanence and unshakable BEING. No one who has experienced the revelation of this can ever fully believe in the ego again.
God Loves You You who identify with your egos cannot believe that God loves you. You do not love what you have made, and what you made does not love you. Being made out of the denial of the Father, the ego has no allegiance to its own maker. You cannot conceive of the real relationship which exists between God and His Souls because of the hatred you have for the self you have made. You project onto your own idea of yourself the will to separate, which conflicts with the love you feel for what you made, because you made it.
Eternal Love Love will enter immediately into any mind which truly wants it, but it must want it truly. This means that it wants it without ambivalence, and this kind of wanting is wholly without the ego’s “drive to get.” There is a kind of experience which is so different from anything the ego can offer that you will never recover. The word “recover” is used quite literally here—you will never be able to cover or hide again.It is necessary to repeat here that your belief in darkness, and in hiding, is why the Light cannot enter. The Bible gives many references to the immeasurable gifts which are for you, but for which you must ask. This is not a condition as the ego sets conditions. It is the glorious condition of what you are. No force except your own will is strong enough or worthy enough to guide you. In this you are as free as God, and must remain so forever. You can never be bound except in honor, and that is always voluntary.
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A Course in Miracles is a self-study curriculum that guides students toward a spiritual way of life by restoring their contact with the Holy Spirit within them. |
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Watch Your Mind It has never really entered your mind to give up every idea you ever had that opposes knowledge. You retain thousands of little scraps of meanness which prevent the Holy One from entering. Light cannot penetrate through the walls you make to block it, and it is forever unwilling to destroy what you have made. No one can see through a wall, but I can step around it. Watch your minds for the scraps of meanness, or you will be unable to ask me to do so. I can help you only as our Father created us. I will love you and honor you and maintain complete respect for what you have made, but I will neither honor it nor love it unless it is true. I will never forsake you, any more than God will, but I must wait as long as you choose to forsake yourself. Because I wait in love, and not in impatience, you will surely ask me truly. I will come in response to a single unequivocal call. Watch carefully and see what it is you are really asking for. Be very honest with yourself about this, for we must hide nothing from each other. If you will really try to do this, you have taken the first step toward preparing your mind for the Holy One to enter. We will prepare for this together, for once He has come you will be ready to help me make other minds ready for Him. How long will you deny Him His Kingdom? In your own unconscious, deeply repressed by the ego, is the declaration of your release—GOD HAS GIVEN YOU EVERYTHING. This is the one fact that means the ego does not exist, and which therefore makes it profoundly afraid. In the ego’s language, remember, “to have” and “to be” are different, but they are identical to the Soul. The Soul knows that you both have everything and are everything. Any distinction in this respect is meaningful only when the idea of “getting,” which implies a lack, has already been accepted. That is why we made no distinction before between having the Kingdom of God and being the Kingdom of God. The calm being of God’s Kingdom, which in your sane mind is perfectly conscious, is ruthlessly banished from the part of the mind which the ego rules. The ego is desperate because it opposes literally invincible odds, whether you are asleep or awake. Consider how much vigilance you have been willing to exert to protect your ego, and how little you have been willing to expend to protect your higher mind. Who but the insane would undertake to believe what is not true, and then protect this belief at the cost of truth? |
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The Escape From Fear If you cannot hear the Voice of God, it is because you do not choose to listen. The fact that you do listen to the voice of your ego is demonstrated by
Your attitudes are obviously conflicted, your feelings have a narrow range on the negative side but are never purely joyous, and your behavior is either strained or unpredictable. Yet this is what you want.
Your minds are filled with schemes to save the face of your egos, and you do not seek the Face of God. The glass in which the ego seeks to see its face is dark indeed.
But where you look to find yourself is up to you. Change Your Mind We have said that you cannot change your mind by changing your behavior, but we have also said, and many times before, that you can change your mind. When your mood tells you that you have chosen wrongly—and this is so whenever you are not joyous—then know this need not be. In every case you have thought wrongly about some Soul that God created, and are perceiving images your ego makes in a darkened glass.
then change your minds to think with God's. This may seem hard to you, but it is much easier than trying to think against It. Your mind is one with God’s. Denying this, and thinking otherwise, has held your ego together, but has literally split your mind.
When you are sad, know that this need not be.
When you are anxious, know that all anxiety comes from the capriciousness of the ego, and need not be.
When you feel guilty, know that the ego has indeed violated the laws of God, but you have not.
Watch your mind for the temptations of the ego, and do not be deceived by it. Know it offers you nothing. When you have given up this voluntary dispiriting, you will see how your mind can focus and rise above fatigue and heal. Yet you are not sufficiently vigilant against the demands of the ego to disengage yourself. This need not be. Habit of Engaging With God The habit of engaging with God, and His creations, is easily made if you actively refuse to let your minds slip away. The problem is not one of concentration;
Side with me consistently against this deception, and do not permit this shabby belief to pull you back. The disheartened are useless to themselves and to me, but only the ego can be disheartened. Have you really considered how many opportunities you have to gladden yourselves, and how many of them you have refused? There is no limit to the power of a Son of God, but he himself can limit the expression of his power as much as he chooses. Your mind and mine can unite in shining your ego away, and releasing the strength of God into everything you
Do not settle for anything less than this, and refuse to accept anything but this as your goal.
Judgment, like any other defense, can be used to attack or protect, to hurt or to heal. The ego should be brought to your judgment and found wanting there. Without your own allegiance, protection and love, it cannot exist. Judge your ego truly and you must withdraw allegiance, protection and love from it. |
Second Coming of Christ You are mirrors of truth in which God Himself shines in perfect Light. To the ego’s dark glass 1 Corinthians 13:12 you need but say, "I will not look there because I know these images are not true.” Then let the Holy One shine on you in peace, knowing that this, and only this, must be. His Mind shone on you in your creation and brought your mind into being. His Mind still shines on you, and must shine through you. Your ego cannot prevent Him from shining on you, but it can prevent you from letting Him shine through you. The first coming of Christ is just another name for the creation, for Christ is the Son of God. The
second coming of Christ means nothing more than the end of
the ego’s rule over part of the minds of men, and the healing
of the mind.
I was created like you in the first, and I have called you to join with me in the second. If you will think over your lives, you will see how carefully the preparations were made. I am in charge of the Second Coming, and my judgment, which is used only for protection, cannot be wrong because it never attacks. Yours is so distorted that you believe I was mistaken in choosing you. I assure you this is a mistake of your egos. Do not mistake it for humility. Your egos are trying to convince you that they are real and I am not, because if I am real, I am no more real thanyou are. That knowledge, and I assure you that it is knowledge, means that Christ must come into your minds and heal them. Although I am not attacking your egos, I am working with your higher mind, whether you are asleep or awake, just as your ego does with your lower mind. I am your vigilance in this because you are too confused to recognize your own hope. I was not mistaken. Your minds will elect to join with mine, and together we are invincible. You will yet come together in my name and your sanity will be restored. I raised the dead by knowing that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God created. Why do you believe it is harder for me to inspire the dispirited, or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles; you do. I have called, and you will answer. I know that miracles are natural because they are expressions of love. My
calling you is as natural as your answer, and as inevitable. |
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The
Ego-Body Illusion
Control is a central factor in what the ego permits into consciousness, and one to which it devotes its maximum vigilance. This is not the way a balanced mind holds together. Its control is unconscious. Ego's Off-Balanced State The ego is further off balance by keeping its primary motivation unconscious, and raising control rather than sensible judgment to predominance. The ego has every reason to do this, according to the thought system which gave rise to it, and which it serves. Sane judgment would inevitably judge againt the ego, and must be obliterated by the ego in the interest of its self-preservation. A crucial source of the ego’s off-balanced state is its lack of discrimination between impulses from God and from the body. Any thought system which makes this confusion must be insane. Yet this demented state is essential to the ego, which judges only in terms of threat or non-threat to itself.
This is the belief that the ego sponsors eagerly. Yet the ego hates the body because it does not accept the idea that the body is good enough to be its home. Here is where the mind becomes actually dazed. Being told, by the ego, that it is really part of the body, and that the body is its protector, the mind is also constantly informed that the body can not protect it. This, of course, is not only accurate but perfectly obvious. Therefore the mind asks,
The mind, and not without cause, reminds the ego that it has itself insisted that it is identified with the body, so there is no point in turning to it for protection. The ego has no real answer to this because there is none, but it does have a typical solution.
Once unconscious, the question can and does produce uneasiness, but it cannot be answered because it cannot be asked.
Even the insane ask it unconsciously, but it requires real sanity to ask it consciously. When the Bible says, “Seek and ye shall find,” Matthew 7:7 it does not mean that you should seek blindly and desperately for something you would not recognize.
The goal must be formulated clearly and kept in mind.
All learners learn best when they believe that what they are trying to learn is of value to them. However, values in this world are hierarchical, and not everything you may want to learn has lasting value. Indeed, many of the things you want to learn are chosen because their value will not last. The ego thinks it is an advantage not to commit itself to anything that is eternal, because the eternal must come from God. Eternalness Eternalness is the one function which the ego has tried to develop, but has systematically failed. It may surprise you to learn, that had the ego wished to do so, it could have made the eternal because, as a product of the mind, it is endowed with the power of its own creator.
That is because the decision, from which the ability would naturally develop, would necessarily involve accurate perception, a state of clarity which the ego, fearful of being judged truly, must avoid. The results of this dilemma are peculiar, but no more so than the dilemma itself. The ego has reacted characteristically here as elsewhere, because mental illness, which is always a form of ego involvement, is not a matter of reliability as much as of validity. |
The ego compromises with the issue of the eternal, just as it does with all issues that touch on the real question in any way. By compromising in connection with all tangential questions, it hopes to hide the real question and keep it out of mind. The ego’s characteristic busyness with non-essentials is for precisely that purpose. Consider the alchemist’s age-old attempts to turn base metal into gold. The one question which the alchemist did not permit himself to ask was, “What for?” He could not ask this, because it would immediately become apparent that there was no sense in his efforts even if he succeeded. If gold became more plentiful its value would decrease, and his own purpose would be defeated. The ego has countenanced some strange compromises with the idea of the eternal, making many odd attempts to relate the concept to the unimportant, in an effort to satisfy the mind without jeopardizing itself. Thus, it has permitted minds to devote themselves to the possibility of perpetual motion, but not to perpetual thoughts. Ideational preoccupations with problems set up to be incapable of solution are also favorite ego devices for impeding the strong-willed from making real learning progress. The problems of squaring the circle and carrying pi to infinity are good examples. A more recent ego attempt is particularly noteworthy. The idea of preserving the body by suspension, thus giving it the kind of limited immortality which the ego can tolerate, is among its more recent appeals to the mind. It is noticeable, however, that in all these diversionary tactics, the one question which is never asked by those who pursue them is, “What for?” This is the question which you must learn to ask, in connection with everything your mind wishes to undertake. What is the purpose? Whatever it is, you cannot doubt that it will channelize your efforts automatically. When you make a decision of purpose, then, you have made a decision about your future effort, a decision which will remain in effect unless you change the decision. |
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