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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: II. The Difference Between Imprisonment, P 5. 7-28-14

II. The Difference Between Imprisonment and Freedom P5
5 We have said that the Holy Spirit teaches you the difference between pain and joy. That is the same as saying He teaches you the difference between imprisonment and freedom. You cannot make this distinction without Him because you have taught yourself that imprisonment is freedom. Believing them to be the same, how can you tell them apart? Can you ask the part of your mind that taught you to believe they are the same, to teach you how they are different?

Ego taught me that winning is joy. I learned the lesson well. I was very competitive and I worked hard at winning. I didn’t think about how I made the other person feel as I crowed over my victory. It just seemed perfectly normal to be this way. I justified my behavior as I reasoned that I deserved my win because I worked hard for it.

I reasoned that someone had to win and someone had to lose. Better it was me that won. I believed that if I didn’t win I was not as worthy as the winner. I believed I achieved worthiness according to how well I did in comparison to how poorly others did. When I won, I would feel that adrenalin rush and this is what I called joy. The rush would fade all too quickly and then I would feel let down and so I would go looking for the next victory.

I saw the victories as freedom. If I won often enough and if the stakes were high enough I would be free of this unsettling feeling that I was missing something important. I tried for more money to buy more and better things than my neighbor. I tried for being the best at my job so I looked better than other employees. I tried for the better husband; I took credit when my children won, proving I must be the better parent. I thought that these wins freed me from the nagging feeling that I was unworthy.

Actually, what I discovered is that I can’t win enough, or be better than others often enough, or make enough money or buy enough stuff, to prove my worthiness. I wound up making my own prison of frantic striving and never arriving. I made the prison, stepped into it, and pretended it was my grand achievement. I had to work constantly to keep the whole thing in place, but all that work kept me from questioning my choices, and questioning my plan for happiness and freedom.

Once questioned though, it became apparent that I was failing to accomplish my goals. Yes I won often, but it never made me happy and it never convinced me of my worthiness. All the time, the joke was on me. I was already worthy and joy is my natural state. I don’t have to do anything to acquire freedom and joy, because it was given to me in my creation, never to be lost no matter how confused I became about it.

In fact, all that striving just convinced me I was unworthy. Why would I need to try so hard if I was already worthy? All that winning actually made me feel more separate and alone than ever. And of course, if I think that I must prove my worthiness and strive for my freedom in every moment, I exhaust myself. I am the hamster running on the wheel and getting nowhere, because there is nowhere to go.

Here is what I have discovered about being free and being joyful. I have remembered the truth as I have joined with my brother rather than competing against him. I am free of the constant struggle and the inevitable let-down. I am free of the belief that I need to earn what was given me by my creator. I am free of the crash that comes after the adrenal wears off. I am free of the suffering that is inevitable as I further separate myself from my brother and so separate myself from God.

I have discovered that I am joyful as I take my brother’s hand in mine and share in each victory over ego. I am joyful in each moment, actually, as I accept the truth that we are all innocent and brilliant and perfect, and because this is how we are created, nothing can change this. I am free from change and I am free in my joy. This is true until I slip back into ego again, but now I can’t stand to be there for long, and I know the way out. Oh, freedom! Oh, joy!

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: II. The Difference Between Imprisonment, P 4. 7-25-14

II. The Difference Between Imprisonment and Freedom P4
4 The ego tries to teach that you want to oppose God’s Will. This unnatural lesson cannot be learned, and the attempt to learn it is a violation of your own freedom, making you afraid of your will because it is free. The Holy Spirit opposes any imprisoning of the will of a Son of God, knowing that the will of the Son is the Father’s. The Holy Spirit leads you steadily along the path of freedom, teaching you how to disregard or look beyond everything that would hold you back.

I don’t want a personal will anymore. I recognize it is not my true desire and I accept that my past desire to have a will separate from God is imprisoning my true will. Because it seems to pit me against God, a separate will makes me feel deeply guilty and guilt causes fear, which is not a happy state nor is it my natural state.

I long for the freedom that is my natural state. For this reason I am vigilant for the ego thoughts I am tempted to believe, and I ask for the Atonement for my wrong minded beliefs. I notice the effects of those thoughts and I ask the Holy Spirit to correct my perception. He is teaching me that what I see in the world is meaningless no matter how tempted I am to believe it.

I am learning to look past or beyond everything that would keep me in the world. I am learning to do this with the ego-thinking and with the effects of those thoughts. I see what is before the body’s eyes, but I disregard the meaning of anything that is not an effect of the thoughts I think with God. I am not guilty for what I see, nor is what I see real.

Here is an example. I woke up many times during the night and finally gave up trying to sleep around 4:00 this morning. The ego interprets this to mean that I am going to be tired long before my day is over. It offers me the thought that my mind is not going to be sharp. If I pay attention to the ego, this is what will happen. My mind is very powerful and will faithfully reflect back to me whatever it is that I believe.

I don’t want that kind of day so I am not listening to the ego. There is only one true thought in this scenario; I didn’t get as much sleep as usual and it was not entirely restful. I get to add the meaning this holds. I do so from my right-mind or from my wrong-mind. Out of habit I might fall back on my past choices which were habitual.

I might start to think I am tired and then I will feel this way and act on the feeling. If I do, I will also remember the truth. I give the world all the meaning it has for me, including this, and I can disregard appearances and change my mind about the meaning I give it. My experience has been that as I change my mind, the effects change as well, sometimes in startling ways.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: II. The Difference Between Imprisonment, P 3. 7-18-14

II. The Difference Between Imprisonment and Freedom P 3
3 The ego cannot teach you anything as long as your will is free, because you will not listen to it. It is not your will to be imprisoned because your will is free. That is why the ego is the denial of free will. It is never God Who coerces you, because He shares His Will with you. His Voice teaches only in accordance with His Will, but that is not the Holy Spirit’s lesson because that is what you are. The lesson is that your will and God’s cannot be out of accord because they are one. This is the undoing of everything the ego tries to teach. It is not, then, only the direction of the curriculum that must be unconflicted, but also the content.

We have imprisoned our will through our desire for self-will, and that was a misconceived plan on our part. I doubt we meant to be imprisoned, but however it occurred we are not trapped. We have a way out. As long as we continue to listen to the ego thoughts in the mind and to believe these thoughts we will remain imprisoned. However, we also have the thoughts we think with God in our mind and we can choose to give our attention to those thoughts instead. This is the key to the prison we built and it is in our own hands.

The thoughts we think with God are the only true thoughts in our mind. When we give them our attention we are letting go of the idea of a personal will and embracing our true will which is the will we share with God. We are returning our mind to Reality and thus to sanity, and with sanity, to peace and joy. This decision to be the Divine Beings that we are is up to us. We will not be coerced.

In one of my favorite passages in the Course (Chapter 8, Section IV) Jesus says this: “If you want to be like me I will help you, knowing that we are alike. If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind.” In this passage I see both the gentleness of Spirit and the inevitability of my return. I decide how long I want to remain the little self I have made and I decide when I want to wake up and remember what I am.

The Voice for God is in my mind to help me wake up when I am ready, and until then it speaks softly to me of Love. It never coerces, it never forces. As Jesus goes on to say in that section of the Course, God’s Kingdom is freedom and freedom cannot be learned by tyranny of any kind.

Like most students of the Course, I have experienced the frustration of wanting freedom, but being unwilling and even afraid, to accept it. I have wished that Jesus would just yank me out of my story and be done with it. This will never happen, of course, because we are equal in will, being the Will of God. Jesus says that this is the only lesson he came to teach. Could it be so easy? Could we simply wake up because we want to?

The only thing that stands in our way is our own willfulness and the guilt and fear that this willfulness engenders. I seemed to have needed to approach God very cautiously. I did so with a lot of Heavenly support and reassurance. I have looked at and chosen against many forms of guilt and fear. In doing so I have come to realize that all of it is unreal. Every form of guilt and fear I have looked at with the Holy Spirit has been of my own making. The world I see has been smoke and mirrors every time I have looked without the filter of my desire for a personal will.

I have mostly stopped wanting the process to go faster. I have stopped trying to use the ego to wake up. Now I am simply doing what the Holy Spirit puts before me. I see fear or guilt in any of the ego guises and I ask Spirit to correct my perception. I listen to His Voice. I write what I hear. I share. I forgive. I love. I wait for the moment of readiness knowing it is inevitable. I can’t make myself wake up; that kind of effort is just another expression of self will. I allow my Self to be revealed to me. Then I will know my true will, the will I share with God.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: II. The Difference Between Imprisonment, P 2. 7-14-14

II. The Difference Between Imprisonment and Freedom P 2
2 Is there any possible reason for choosing a teacher such as this? Does the total disregard of anything it teaches make anything but sense? Is this the teacher to whom a Son of God should turn to find himself? The ego has never given you a sensible answer to anything. Simply on the grounds of your own experience with its teaching, should not this alone disqualify it as your future teacher? Yet the ego has done more harm to your learning than this alone. Learning is joyful if it leads you along your natural path, and facilitates the development of what you have. When you are taught against your nature, however, you will lose by your learning because your learning will imprison you. Your will is in your nature, and therefore cannot go against it.

I am absolutely convinced that the ego misleads me. It takes me down the path of confusion, fear, guilt, doubt, pain, suffering and finally it kills me. I know this with a certainty. When I am unhappy I know where that came from. I must be listening to the ego again. If I feel sad, I am listening to ego. I may not be able to pick out the exact thought, but I know it is ego.

If I am angry with someone, I don’t look for justification in his behavior, I simply know I am listening to ego and I ask Holy Spirit to correct my perception. If I am worried about something that might happen, I don’t turn to the ego for a plan. I remember that the peace of God is all I want. The peace of God is mine as long as I don’t have any other goals. I don’t need other goals; I rest in the certainty that all else will be added to me according to my needs.

If the body is sick, I don’t wonder what caused it. I don’t wonder what outside source was the cause. I know that the cause is in my mind. I ask the Holy Spirit what He wants me to know about this. I open my mind to Him and accept the Atonement. All that is not joy and peace in my life is the result of listening to the wrong voice and unhappiness will be the inevitable result. I also know the solution, which is the Holy Spirit.

Now Jesus is telling me that as destructive as it is to listen to ego, as bad as it makes me feel, that is not the worst of it. Believing what I hear from the ego imprisons my will. The ego calls this free will, this ability to choose the voice I will believe, but the choice itself prevents free will. As I follow ego I imprison my will within its insane objectives, and I need help to free myself. That is the reason the Holy Spirit was placed in my mind, alongside the ego exactly where I need it, not to change me but to free me to be my Self.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: II. The Difference Between Imprisonment, P 1. 7-11-14

II. The Difference Between Imprisonment and Freedom
1 There is a rationale for choice. Only one Teacher knows what your reality is. If learning to remove the obstacles to that knowledge is the purpose of the curriculum, you must learn it of Him. The ego does not know what it is trying to teach. It is trying to teach you what you are without knowing what you are. It is expert only in confusion. It does not understand anything else. As a teacher, then, the ego is totally confused and totally confusing. Even if you could disregard the Holy Spirit entirely, which is impossible, you could still learn nothing from the ego, because the ego knows nothing.

Every time I think that I know what to do and so don’t check in with my Inner Guide, I have chosen to ask ego. It took me awhile to figure that out. It was as if there was a third choice, as if there was the Holy Spirit, ego and me. That was a mistake. There is only ego and Spirit. Before ACIM, I was almost completely identified with ego. I did believe in my soul, but I believed that I (ego/body) had a soul, not that I was my soul. Now I am more identified with spirit and so listen more to Holy Spirit than to ego.

Holy Spirit is the Voice for God, the memory of all that is true. The ego is confused and confusing and knows nothing. When I ask ego I become confused as well, and the more I turn to ego the more I become identified with ego. In my confusion I think I am ego, or to put it more clearly, I think that I am the one who is this body and this personality, and that this is my life. I think I live and move and have my being in this body and this world.

Not only does this take me further away from my true self and my real life in God, it leaves me uncertain of everything and doubtful of my very existence. I cannot be happy if I choose to learn from the ego because the ego doesn’t know anything about happiness. It only knows to offer me endless choices without regard to the actual outcome.

The ego will say that I am unhappy because I am lonely. I make arrangements to be with people. Then the ego says I am unhappy because these are the wrong people. In the next breath it says I am unhappy because I am with people and I prefer to be alone. All its advice is like this. The more attention I pay to the ego chatter in my mind, the more obvious it becomes that there is nothing but contradictory and unhelpful information there.

If I am lonely and I ask Holy Spirit what He wants me to know about this, I will be given thoughts that are helpful. I will remember, or be directed to something that helps me to remember, that loneliness is impossible because I am part of everything. How could I be lonely? Remembering this, I ask Holy Spirit to correct my perception, because obviously I am thinking with the wrong mind.

As my perception is corrected, my mind is healed of the belief in loneliness and the feeling of loneliness is gone. There is no confusion in this, no contradiction. The truth of the matter is revealed and with my acceptance of it, the problem is resolved for me. This is a very different outcome. The ego wants me to try this and try that and it wants the trying to be endless so that I never get around to questioning the legitimacy of the ego as teacher. The Holy Spirit wants only to heal so that I will be happy.

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Study of the Text, Revisiting: Chapter 5: IV. Teaching and Healing, P 7, 7-10-14

Revisiting a previous chapter:
IV. Teaching and Healing, Paragraph 7
7 The Atonement gives you the power of a healed mind, but the power to create is of God. Therefore, those who have been forgiven must devote themselves first to healing because, having received the idea of healing, they must give it to hold it. The full power of creation cannot be expressed as long as any of God’s ideas is withheld from the Kingdom. The joint will of the Sonship is the only creator that can create like the Father, because only the complete can think completely, and the thinking of God lacks nothing. Everything you think that is not through the Holy Spirit is lacking.

As one, we, the Son of God create as God creates. While we are choosing separation, we do not create, but we can heal. That is the closest we can be to our true nature. And in healing, we again become one. As we forgive we accept the Atonement and now we have received the idea of healing. We then give healing in order to hold onto the idea of healing, because as Jesus tells us as we give we receive.

In order to return the mind to its natural state of oneness, there can be no one left out. We must be complete to be what we are. That is an idea that I live by. I still casually separate myself from another through some careless attack thought, but as soon as I notice I have done it, I retract that thought. I usually say to myself, “I cannot enter God’s Presence if I attack his son.” I make no exceptions to this.

At a work conference this week, I would see people that I have had a grievance with in the past, sometimes a competitor, or a customer I lost, or one I just can’t seem to sell. Sometimes it would just be someone I don’t enjoy talking to. Then I would remember that I cannot enter God’s presence if I attack this person. My choice to attack, and anything that separates me from my brother is an attack, now seems very unimportant. I quickly and sincerely choose healing.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: I.The Direction of the Curriculum, Paragraph 6. 7-9-14

I. The Direction of the Curriculum, Paragraph 6
6 The total senselessness of such a curriculum must be fully recognized before a real change in direction becomes possible. You cannot learn simultaneously from two teachers who are in total disagreement about everything. Their joint curriculum presents an impossible learning task. They are teaching you entirely different things in entirely different ways, which might be possible except that both are teaching you about yourself. Your reality is unaffected by both, but if you listen to both, your mind will be split about what your reality is.

I have times when I am clear that I am not really this body, and this story of Myron is not my life. I know that I am here to heal the mind and save the world. When I think of this it doesn’t give my ego a thrill of specialness. Actually it is very humbling to realize that I am waking up and that I am learning to allow myself to be lived by something greater than my ego. As I listen to my Teacher, I realize that for the first time in my present memory, I am free. I became free through my full surrender to Spirit.

At other times I am so embroiled in my story that my mind clouds over in confusion. It is at these times that I am listening to ego instead of Spirit. Ego has an entirely different curriculum. Spirit leads me to joy and peace and fulfillment. Ego, on the other hand, leads me to drama, strong emotion, willfulness and loss. Ego teaches me that guilt and fear are my saviors. The outcome when learning from ego will be pain and suffering. Its final destination will always be death.

In any day, I will be led by Spirit to overlook the ego actions and words of others and to overlook my own as well. Spirit leads me to see only the truth in every circumstance and every person. This is very peaceful and the effect is a happy life. In contrast, ego says that everyone is an enemy at times, even the ones I love the most. Ego says that I must defend myself, and when not defending I must prepare for defense. It says I must listen closely to what others say, carefully looking in case offense was offered. It is a harsh and exhausting job following ego.

Holy Spirit has been very patient with me, allowing me to see the contrast between curriculums. No matter how many times I choose ego, Holy Spirit remains steadfastly certain of me, and so I am learning to trust myself, too. As I use Holy Spirit as my model, I am learning to extend this trust to my brothers, and in doing so my lesson in self-trust is reinforced.

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