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Study of Text, Chapter 11, V.The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 14. 10-21-15

V. The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 14
14 The ego’s interpretation of the laws of perception are, and would have to be, the exact opposite of the Holy Spirit’s. The ego focuses on error and overlooks truth. It makes real every mistake it perceives, and with characteristically circular reasoning concludes that because of the mistake consistent truth must be meaningless. The next step, then, is obvious. If consistent truth is meaningless, inconsistency must be true. Holding error clearly in mind, and protecting what it has made real, the ego proceeds to the next step in its thought system: Error is real and truth is error.

Journal
The ego focuses on error and overlooks truth. As soon as I read this sentence I saw how true this is and I saw that the ego then makes the error real. I got a call from an angry customer this morning. He had asked for a repair, and the repair didn’t work. In fact, this is his third time to call about the same repair. What I did was call the repairman and tell him what happened. I told him it must be done and done right, and everything cleaned up. I was very firm about this.

I did what I needed to do to get the problem solved. It should have been over at that point, but what happened is that the ego mind felt aggrieved and felt like anger was called for. It had stories to justify its position on this. The ego overlooked the truth that everyone involved is innocent and that there was a mistake to be corrected and that was all. Instead, it made the error real, insisting that it should never have happened and that the repairman was guilty for doing a shoddy job, and therefore, that my anger was justifiable.
Immediately, I turned to the Holy Spirit for His interpretation of the situation. I saw a problem, I took care of the problem, it’s over. There is no need for guilt or anger. Everyone is innocent and this is true in every case no matter what happened. In the world mistakes are made, but in reality nothing has happened and God’s creation remains as it was created.

Even so, I notice how intent the ego mind is on finding the guilty party and how it loves its righteous anger. But this time, I am not going to join the ego. I see the temptation, I understand it, but I am not interested. I see that the urge to be angry is just a reaction to fear. There is fear of losing a customer and fear of not making the right choice, of having to take on the role of “boss” as I speak to the repairman and not feeling qualified for that role. There is the fear of being judged harshly by the repairman. The fear he and others will see in me the same error I see in them. I give all this to Spirit and let it stay there.

It is not my goal to be the best sales person, or to keep customers. It is not my goal to look good in someone’s eyes, to earn their respect, or their acceptance. It is not my goal to be the boss or to avoid that responsibility. It is my goal to watch my mind, to ask for and accept healing, and to see the face of Christ in everyone including me. I need only open to that, to want it. I am doing that to the best of my ability and the Holy Spirit is doing His part, so it is done.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of Text, Chapter 11: V: The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 13. 10-20-15

V. The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 13
13 The ego analyzes; the Holy Spirit accepts. The appreciation of wholeness comes only through acceptance, for to analyze means to break down or to separate out. The attempt to understand totality by breaking it down is clearly the characteristically contradictory approach of the ego to everything. The ego believes that power, understanding and truth lie in separation, and to establish this belief it must attack. Unaware that the belief cannot be established, and obsessed with the conviction that separation is salvation, the ego attacks everything it perceives by breaking it into small, disconnected parts, without meaningful relationships and therefore without meaning. The ego will always substitute chaos for meaning, for if separation is salvation, harmony is threat.

Journal
So how is it that I analyze instead of accept? What does Jesus mean by this? I was sick yesterday and I don’t feel really good today. The ego mind thinks about what this means. How did I get sick? What caused it? What would fix it? What medicine or action would make me feel better? This, I think, is analyzing the sickness, breaking it down into what feels like more manageable parts and then dealing with each one.

How would acceptance look? I am thinking about a video of John Mark Stroud that I watched yesterday. It was part of the MiracleShare Conference. In his talk, John Mark said that the body is a communication device that tells us where we are mistaken in our thinking. In this way it is very valuable. I agree with this and this morning, instead of analyzing the sickness, I accept it as a message that my mind is sick and needs healing.

There is only one problem and one solution. The problem is separation and analyzing the sickness just increased the separation beliefs in my mind. This sickness is different than other sicknesses I have had before and it is not as serious as some, but because of the symptoms there are certain things I will not be able to do. Maybe I got this stomach upset from eating too much rich food or maybe I caught it from someone. Maybe I need some medicine or just some time and rest, or maybe I need to see a doctor. So many parts to the problem and so many possible solutions if I keep listening to the ego.

If, on the other hand, I accept that I am listening to the wrong voice and that is the only problem I have, then the solution is simple. I stop listening to the ego interpretation of the problem and the ego solutions, and listen instead to the Holy Spirit. Problem solved. If there is anything that needs to be done in the world, I will know what it is, but the problem itself was wrong minded thinking, and the Holy Spirit is the Answer. I accept the Holy Spirit’s answer and quickly or eventually, the body catches up and communicates to me that the mind has been healed.

Jesus says that the ego believes that power, understanding and truth lie in separation, and from looking at the way the ego tried to solve this problem, I see how true that is. If the ego could not categorize the problem, it would not know how to find an answer. It needs to know symptoms of various diseases and the medicine appropriate for each. It needs to know what sickness is serious enough for medical intervention and which just needs time. The ego believes that power and defense lies in how it separates things out and how much information it has at hand for each separate part.

Holy Spirit doesn’t separate at all. It sees only one problem and that is a confused mind. It sees only one solution and that is a clear mind. This is true if I have a headache, a virus, a cold, cancer or if I am dying. It’s all the same to the Holy Spirit, and so the answer is obvious and simple. The ego needs to attack the problem by dividing and separating and the result is chaos. The Holy Spirit accepts that the problem is one and the answer is one, and so the result is peace.

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Study of Text, Chapter 11: V: The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 12. 10-19-15

V. The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 12

12 God is as dependent on you as you are on Him, because His Autonomy encompasses yours, and is therefore incomplete without it. You can only establish your autonomy by identifying with Him, and fulfilling your function as it exists in truth. The ego believes that to accomplish its goal is happiness. But it is given you to know that God’s function is yours, and happiness cannot be found apart from Your joint Will. Recognize only that the ego’s goal, which you have pursued so diligently, has merely brought you fear, and it becomes difficult to maintain that fear is happiness. Upheld by fear, this is what the ego would have you believe. Yet God’s Son is not insane, and cannot believe it. Let him but recognize it and he will not accept it. For only the insane would choose fear in place of love, and only the insane could believe that love can be gained by attack. But the sane realize that only attack could produce fear, from which the Love of God completely protects them.

Journal
When I read something like that first sentence which tells me that God is as dependent on me as I am on Him, it makes me cry. He cannot want anything but love and peace, joy, perfection, all good things for me, because I am of Him, in Him, part of Him. When Jesus says that God is incomplete without me, I am truly humbled, and I cry again from happiness, and I notice that I also cry in relief. I guess that I still fear God, though I tell myself otherwise. Well, something else to give the Holy Spirit and to accept the Atonement for.

Here is what really caught my attention this morning. “Recognize only that the ego’s goal, which you have pursued so diligently, has merely brought you fear, and it becomes difficult to maintain that fear is happiness.” I started thinking about how ego goals bring fear. When I think about the ego goal to retire, I am excited as I realize it could happen within two years.

But I am also afraid because all sorts of things could interfere, and prevent that goal from being fulfilled. This is true of all ego driven goals. Even fulfilled they are fearful. What if I retire and the financial change is too much and I regret the decision to retire. What if I retire and I hate retirement. That last one was purely hypothetical. Ha ha. But you get the picture.

The ultimate goal and the goal all the others stand for, is to be successfully independent of God. That is what the ego wants. I appears in many different ways, that is, it takes many different forms, but they are all just symbolic of the one desire. That desire to believe in separation and to experience the different forms separation can take is the source of all the problems in the world, and the world itself.

Thank God … really … thank you, God, that I can choose to return to my real self. I can choose the goal that is mine as God’s Son. I begin to realize that this small individual will is nothing, and nothing to pursue. I begin to realize that my will is God’s Will and all that means, all that offers me.

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Study of Text, Chapter 11, V.The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 9. 10-14-15

V. The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 11

11 If the ego’s goal of autonomy could be accomplished God’s purpose could be defeated, and this is impossible. Only by learning what fear is can you finally learn to distinguish the possible from the impossible and the false from the true. According to the ego’s teaching, its goal can be accomplished and God’s purpose can not. According to the Holy Spirit’s teaching, only God’s purpose can be accomplished, and it is accomplished already.

Journal
It can be hard to accept that we have not accomplished autonomy because we seem to think for ourselves thoughts that God would not think and we seem to do things that are out of accord with Love. This world does not seem to be an illusion, but seems to be very real. We identify our selves as bodies and these bodies seem to feel things. These eyes seem to see things. And yet, Jesus tells us that all this is only an illusion.

We made the body and the eyes to do exactly this for us, to give us something to identify with other than our reality, to give us something to convince us that we are separate from God now. And it is this very thing which made fear, the idea that we had succeeded in gaining autonomy from God was the genesis of fear. That fear is the only fear there is. All other fears are simply forms of that one fear.

My fear of heights is really the fear I have successfully separated from God. It is that fear taking on a form that I think I can tolerate, and control. No matter how frightened I am of being in high places it is preferable to thinking that I have made myself separate from God, and that there must surely be consequences for this sin. The fear of sickness and the fear of loneliness, of poverty, these are all forms of the fear of God that we have chosen because they are not as fearsome as that one great fear.

It does no good to try to overcome our various forms of fear. What good would it do me to overcome my fear of heights? I would simply find another form of fear to take its place. Here in A Course in Miracles, Jesus is offering us a way out of fear, the only way out. He does not tell us how to overcome our fear of poverty or sickness.

He tells us that fear is not real and that God loves us and longs for our return, not to punish us but to welcome us and to celebrate us. We have not sinned and we will not be punished. Like a child afraid of the dark, imagining monsters under the bed, we made up that which is scaring us. We don’t have to make fear go away, we only have to call on our Father and His Voice will direct our thoughts and heal our mind of these strange beliefs.

I woke up in the early hours this morning and lay tossing and turning in the bed. Finally, I asked Spirit what He would have me do and so here I am letting Him talk to me about the impossibility of fear. One of the thoughts that came to me while I lay there trying to go back to sleep, was the sudden memory that I have to take part in the question and answer section of the MiracleShare Conference Saturday morning.

This thought startled me fully awake because I had been so focused on remembering all I have to do to prepare for Saturday’s wedding that I had not been thinking about the conference at all. I thought how bad it would be if I forgot to call in, and then I started to worry about that, which of course got me to making plans and deciding what to do to insure everything got done.

When I felt my body start to tense up, I stopped myself by remembering my purpose. The peace of God is everything I want. I began to relax and the fear of failure, of forgetting, of not meeting all my obligations, began to fade away as I remembered that when I don’t take on the burden of directing my own life, the Holy Spirit does it for me. Just like that, fear lost its grip on my mind. It just wasn’t there. It can disappear that quickly because it isn’t real.

I could have lain in bed and worried about not getting enough sleep, or about not getting all my work done tomorrow. I could worry about some repairs for my house or any other of so many things the ego would use to distract me from remembering who I am. But all of these are just different forms of the one fear, that I made an ego and it has replaced God. It is laughable, this fear. God’s purpose cannot be undone by my imaginings.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of Text, Chapter 11, V.The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 9. 10-1-15

V. The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 10
10 Your recognition that whatever seems to separate you from God is only fear, regardless of the form it takes and quite apart from how the ego wants you to experience it, is therefore the basic ego threat. Its dream of autonomy is shaken to its foundation by this awareness. For though you may countenance a false idea of independence, you will not accept the cost of fear if you recognize it. Yet this is the cost, and the ego cannot minimize it. If you overlook love you are overlooking yourself, and you must fear unreality because you have denied yourself. By believing that you have successfully attacked truth, you are believing that attack has power. Very simply, then, you have become afraid of yourself. And no one wants to find what he believes would destroy him.

Journal
Whatever seems to separate me from God is only fear and fear is not real, so nothing real separates me from God. My work right now is to let go of the persistent belief that fear is real and meaningful. I practiced last night. I was driving late to get to a hotel and crossed the Mississippi via an unfamiliar bridge. I don’t see all that well in the dark, and the Mississippi is very wide and the bridge seemed to go on forever. I felt a stab of fear as I peered into the darkness to see the stripe dividing my lane from the other. Then I remembered my purpose and I surrendered the fear and drove the rest of the way in peace.

As soon as I let the fear thought go, the fear was gone. The fear was just a false thought in my mind and had no power and no reality other than what I gave it. This is how I am allowing my mind to be healed of the belief in fear. In my fear, I had seen myself separate from God. In releasing that thought, I felt closer to God. I felt happy and I laughed at myself for my fear thoughts. This happy and peaceful person is much closer to my real self. This is the reason it matters that I chose not to be afraid last night. The fear made me forget who I am. Letting it go reminded me of the truth.

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Study of Text, Chapter 11, V.The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 9. 10-14-15

V. The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 8
9 The ego can and does allow you to regard yourself as supercilious, unbelieving, “light-hearted,” distant, emotionally shallow, callous, uninvolved and even desperate, but not really afraid. Minimizing fear, but not its undoing, is the ego’s constant effort, and is indeed a skill at which it is very ingenious. How can it preach separation without upholding it through fear, and would you listen to it if you recognized this is what it is doing?

Journal
I see that the ego never alleviates fear, but only minimizes it. The ego solution will make me less fearful. That is the best I can hope for with ego as my guide through life. I have a problem with the floor in my sanctuary and it needs to be fixed. The problem is that it is going to cost more money than I have. Even when I have the money, it will require that I find someone capable and willing to do the job.

When I thought about it with ego, the solutions I got were helpful in reducing my fear about this, but not in getting rid of the fear. The ego keeps me on edge; just when I think I have it under control, the ego brings up another problem, possible problem, some imagined future problem. Anything to keep the story going, but not enough to overwhelm me to the point that I seek a better way, that I turn to a true Answer.

This ego tactic used to work on me. I have, after a long time of vigilant practice, discovered that I don’t have to settle for this kind of half-hearted, misleading “help.” I got really worried when I was told how extensive the damage was and how much it was going to cost. I got more worried when I had trouble finding someone to do the work. But I have fallen out of the habit of consulting the ego mind for answers, so I asked Holy Spirit to guide me.

The Holy Spirit didn’t advise me on home repairs. He reminded me of my purpose, and I remembered that the peace of God is everything I want. He reminded me that I am surrendered to God and I let the fears and uncertainties go to Him. From this calm, peaceful state of mind, I had the thought to tell my brother what was going on. He said if I could be patient until he has time, he will come by and see what he can do.

He hasn’t had time yet, but I haven’t received any nudges from Spirit to do anything about it, so I wait. When I miss my sanctuary, and when I think it should be finished, I remember that I must be wrong. If it was supposed to be finished now, it would be finished now. I remember that if I keep looking into the future for the day I can be happy, then I will miss out on the present now, which is the only time I have. I remember that I don’t need anything in the world to be happy, that happiness is the result of a healed mind, not a repaired floor.

When I brought my floor problem to the ego, it advised me to find a specialist but to be careful or I would get cheated. It advised me to borrow money, but warned me that it would delay my retirement to take on another debt. It told me that if I could get this done and quickly, I would be so happy. Some of the advice might work, but all it was tinged with fear.

The Holy Spirit only sought to heal my mind, knowing it was my thoughts that were making me suffer. There is no fear in a healed mind, no impatience, no belief that if only the world were different happiness would be possible. The Holy Spirit never mentioned my floor, but gave me peace the moment I opened to it. I will enjoy my new floor when it is done, and I will enjoy this anxiety-free moment as well.

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Study of Text, Chapter 11: V: The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 8. 10-13-15

V. The “Dynamics” of the Ego, P 8
8 You must recognize that the last thing the ego wishes you to realize is that you are afraid of it. For if the ego could give rise to fear, it would diminish your independence and weaken your power. Yet its one claim to your allegiance is that it can give power to you. Without this belief you would not listen to it at all. How, then, can its existence continue if you realize that, by accepting it, you are belittling yourself and depriving yourself of power?

Journal
The way I have learned that the ego’s claim that it empowers me is false is to look at my life with the Holy Spirit, and see for myself how empty its promises. If I look with eyes open to the truth, I see that when something goes wrong, the ego offers solutions that never work. Its solutions will always be either projection or denial, and neither solution will be helpful.

If I deny the problem it sits in my mind slowly building momentum and then one day when I least expect it, it explodes out of me, often at the worst possible time. If I project the problem onto someone else and see them as guilty, I only increase guilt in myself because on some level I know this is not right, and I know that it is separation. Separation is not natural and so when I engage in separation thinking it causes anxiety. Projection teaches guilt, both to me and to others.

The reason the ego has fooled me in the past with its false promises of power is that both projection and denial are an attempt to distance myself from the problem. At first there is a sense of relief, and that makes me feel powerful. But the relief never lasts, because I have healed nothing, and when it fades I feel worse because I have added to my already burdened heart with more guilt.

A co-worker failed to follow up on a project I had turned in. I felt anger rising in me as I realized the repercussions of her carelessness. This is the ego idea of power. Now that I made her guilty, I can see myself as blameless and as a victim. I feel smarter than, more capable than. This is the ego power I have been given. Only it feels good for just a bit, and the problem remains, and I feel guilty for my attack on her. Thank goodness I did not verbalize the attack or I would have felt even worse.

Given to the Holy Spirit instead, my true power is revealed to me. I remember that the peace of God is everything I want, and my mind is soothed. I remember that I asked the Holy Spirit to be my memory, to make my plans and my decisions. The sudden and unbidden question, “What ever happened to that quote?” showed up because it needed to be asked.

I asked it and now the situation is corrected. I am at peace and the work is being done. It took no effort on my part. That is the power I want, not the ego sad excuse for power. Complete surrender is true power. Listening for the Voice that guides and comforts and heals is true power. Accepting the Atonement is true power. Forgiveness is true power. True power leads to one solution because there is one problem. For just a moment there I thought that my sister was my enemy. My choice for God reminded me that she is my self.

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