Chapter 14: TEACHING FOR TRUTH
Introduction
1 Yes, you are blessed indeed. Yet in this world you do not know it. But you have the means for learning it and seeing it quite clearly. The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily and as well as does the ego, except that His conclusions are not insane. They take a direction exactly opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death. We have followed much of the ego’s logic, and have seen its logical conclusions. And having seen them, we have realized that they cannot be seen except in illusions, for there alone their seeming clearness seems to be clearly seen. Let us now turn away from them, and follow the simple logic by which the Holy Spirit teaches the simple conclusions that speak for truth, and only truth.
Journal
I laugh every time I read this sentence. “The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily and as well as does the ego, except that His conclusions are not insane.” Did he mean it to be kind of funny? Anyway, Jesus talks about the ego’s insanity often. It is insane thinking because it is opposite to reality. The definition for insane is, “lacking reasonable thought,” or “exhibiting a severely disordered state of mind.”
I know someone who is considered to have a mental disorder, so you can say he is insane. He hears voices that are not there. He sees things that are not there. He imagines that he is threatened by different conspiracies. He absolutely believes these things and to him they are as apparent as the sun coming up in the morning. He thinks that those of us who doubt him must be insane or at the very least conspiring to make him doubt the obvious.
This is what is happening to us all. We are hearing voices, too. I can be doing anything and there is a voice in my head that tells me stories or gives me meanings to what is going on around me. The stories are rehashes of the past, often changed a bit so that I feel better about the past. Or they are stories projected into the future based on the stories from the past.
Sometimes it just narrates my life, as if I would not be aware that the sky is a pretty shade of blue unless the voices in my head told me so.
This voice will judge everything going on around me, deciding what it means, based on… well, that’s hard to say. One moment it is based on something from the past or something read in a book, or heard on TV. Or, who knows. It offers one meaning and then in the next moment, offers another. Its ideas are disordered, and if I listen and believe them, and, Heaven forbid, act on them, I will often find myself in trouble. And the chatter never stops.
I followed these ideas in my mind for a long time. Once I began to understand the insanity of doing this, I started questioning that voice. The book by Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul, helped me to notice the insanity of listening to these voices, and now I have a quieter mind than I used to. The chatter isn’t quite as insistent as it used to be and often when I notice some particularly insane idea I am able to laugh at it, rather than believe it.
As I question the voice of the ego and with the Holy Spirit’s help, I let many of the crazy thoughts go. I am becoming aware of not just moments of blessed silence, but also thoughts I think with God. The ego thoughts were always about a personal self and defending that self from other personal selves. Now, much of the time, I am aware of a sense of union with others, and of love without cause, simply there, and of peace.
God created us like Him, in His Image and with all the power and the glory that is God. He gave all of Himself to us in our creation. To believe that the world is out to get us, and that we are endangered to the point that our life is spent making up of defense and attack strategies, this is surely insane.
The ego uses its twisted logic to make all this seem reasonable but it cannot make it sane. I have a choice. I can continue to follow the insane logic of the ego, or I can choose to see the clarity of the logic of the Holy Spirit. The ego uses logic to bring us through suffering to death. The Holy Spirit uses logic to bring us to union, to love and peace, to Heaven. I am learning to choose the Voice for God, the Holy Spirit to untangle the mess the ego left behind in my mind. Yes, it is another voice, but it is a sane Voice and it is my chosen Voice.
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