VII. The Needless Sacrifice, P 12
12 The illusion of the autonomy of the body and its ability to overcome loneliness is but the working of the ego’s plan to establish its own autonomy. As long as you believe that to be with a body is companionship, you will be compelled to attempt to keep your brother in his body, held there by guilt. And you will see safety in guilt and danger in communication. For the ego will always teach that loneliness is solved by guilt, and that communication is the cause of loneliness. And despite the evident insanity of this lesson, many have learned it.
Journal
The ego wants to be autonomous. It wants to be self-directed, to be its own God. It uses the body for this purpose. One way it tries to establish its own autonomy is to use the body to overcome loneliness. I have gone along with this plan more than once. I would feel lonely and start calling people to see whom I could use to soothe this feeling.
I stopped doing that for two reasons. One is that I began to see that using people was not something I wanted to do anymore. I began to desire only to share, not to use. The second reason is because of what Jesus is telling us here.
Going along with the belief that loneliness is undone by being in the presence of other bodies is just strengthening the ego’s autonomy in my mind.
Anytime the ego is involved, there you will find guilt, and this effort to relieve loneliness through being with bodies is no different. Jesus says that as long as we believe that to be with a body is companionship, we will be compelled to attempt to keep our brother in his body, held there by guilt. I was thinking about this, wondering how that worked.
The thought that came to my mind was of being married. I remember feeling lonely when my husband was off with his friends instead of being with me. I thought the solution was to keep him at home in some way and would use guilt to do that, intimating that if he loved me he would be here with me.
I see how it is that I used to believe that my safety was dependent on guilt as I tried to use guilt to solve my loneliness problem. Looking at the next thing Jesus tells us in this paragraph, that we believe communication is the cause of loneliness, I wonder about that. The ego thinks that speaking a lot of meaningless words is to communication. It thinks that telling someone they are guilty in order to control their behavior is communication.
I redefine communication in the way Jesus does, and communication becomes the sharing of love. I communicate love to the other and there is no need for bodies to be together to do that. I love each of my children very much and that love flows from me whether these bodies are in proximity or not. Just thinking of them fills me with love and makes me happy.
This is real communication and as far as I can tell, the only kind of communication. I might express that communication with my body when appropriate. Yesterday, my daughter asked me to babysit while she was at the doctor and I did that, not out of a need to be with her body or the baby’s body, but just because it felt like love to do it.
The ego must hate this because it undoes its effort to establish autonomy through loneliness. So to the ego, communication is dangerous to its plans. If I am identifying with the ego as myself, then this will be my belief as well. As I let go of the ego (personal self) identity, I become more identified with spirit and so more open to true communication.
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