To gain the most from A Course in Miracles Text Made Simple, we recommend that
you read the corresponding chapter and section in the Text of the Second or
Third Edition of A Course in Miracles published by the Foundation for Inner Peace.
Read A Course in Miracles, Chapter 27, Section I. (pages 565-568)
The ego’s goal is to make you think you are an innocent victim in a guilty world that you perceive as outside of you. The ego’s stories focus on the ideas that you have been unfairly treated by ‘others’ and are a victim of the guilty world you see. To see examples of victimhood stories, just put on the news. The ‘news’ the ego is interested in hearing is all the victim and guilt stories it sees are going on in this world of separated bodies.
In this section we learn that when we join with the ego’s insane reasoning, we unconsciously crucify ourselves (attack our body) in order to make ourselves innocent victims of the guilty ones we see as ‘outside’ ourselves. Jesus explains how the ego’s insane thinking works: “But every pain you suffer do you see as proof that he is guilty of attack. Thus would you make yourself to be the sign that he has lost his innocence, and need but look on you to realize that he has been condemned. And what to you has been unfair will come to him in righteousness. The unjust vengeance that you suffer now belongs to him, and when it rests on him are you set free.” (2:2-5)
In this section, the Course helps us understand just how insane the ego thought system of separation really is. Here we see that when we join with the ego thought system, we crucify ourselves in order to make it look like the guilt lies somewhere else instead of in our own minds.
Jesus tells us, “Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated or in need of anything, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God’s Son. You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate and damning him to hell.” (3:1-2)
Within the ego thought system, sickness is cherished and loved for the guilt that it justifiably hurls on those in the guilty world it sees as outside of its own mind. Jesus tells us, “A sick and suffering you but represents your brother’s guilt; the witness that you send lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture you accept, if only it can serve to punish him.” (4:3-4)
The ego is always looking to hurl guilt. Guilt is the ego’s savior because it keeps the ego intact. The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, always brings us the picture of innocence. The following explains the healing motivation behind what the Holy Spirit brings to us:
“The Holy Spirit offers you, to give to him, a picture of yourself in which there is no pain and no reproach at all. And what was martyred to his guilt becomes the perfect witness to his innocence.” (3:5-6) “It witnesses to the eternal truth that you cannot be hurt, and points beyond itself to both your innocence and his. …Here is the proof that he has never sinned; that nothing which his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind.” (5:4,7)
Jesus helps us understand in paragraph 6 that to the ego, the purpose of the world of bodies is to prove that guilt is real. Making the body real in our mind becomes a witness that we succeeded in separating from formless Love and therefore we are guilty. To reverse this thinking, Jesus tells us, “Your healing is [your brothers’] comfort and his health because it proves illusions are not true.” (6:2)
“Your function is to show your brother [that] sin can have no cause. How futile must it be to see yourself a picture of the proof that what your function is can never be! The Holy Spirit’s picture changes not the body into something it is not. It only takes away from it all signs of accusation and of blamefulness. Pictured without a purpose, [the body] is seen as neither sick nor well, nor bad nor good. No grounds are offered that [the body] may be judged in any way at all.” (9:1-6)
The ego’s stories of sickness, frailty and death are the ego’s chosen friends to prove that separation and death are real. Jesus explains the train of thought that motivates these stories of the body’s guilt, and therefore deserving of vulnerability, weakness, sickness and eventually even death:
“The sick have reason for each one of their unnatural desires and strange needs. For who could live a life so soon cut short and not esteem the worth of passing joys? What pleasures could there be that will endure? Are not the frail entitled to believe that every stolen scrap of pleasure is their righteous payment for their little lives? Their death will pay the price for all of them, if they enjoy their benefits or not. The end of life must come, whatever way that life be spent. And so take pleasure in the quickly passing and ephemeral.” (7:2-8)
As we let go of the ego’s purpose for the body, an opening is made for the Holy Spirit’s purpose of fostering the return of seeing only innocence. Jesus tells us in paragraph 10: “Let [the body] have healing as its purpose. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, “Behold me, brother, at your hand I live.” (10:4-7)
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