V. The Sane Curriculum, P 7
7 I have said that the ego’s rule is, “Seek and do not find.” Translated into curricular terms this means, “Try to learn but do not succeed.” The result of this curriculum goal is obvious. Every legitimate teaching aid, every real instruction, and every sensible guide to learning will be misinterpreted, since they are all for facilitating the learning this strange curriculum is against. If you are trying to learn how not to learn, and the aim of your teaching is to defeat itself, what can you expect but confusion? Such a curriculum does not make sense. This attempt at “learning” has so weakened your mind that you cannot love, for the curriculum you have chosen is against love, and amounts to a course in how to attack yourself. A supplementary goal in this curriculum is learning how not to overcome the split that makes its primary aim believable. And you will not overcome the split in this curriculum, for all your learning will be on its behalf. Yet your mind speaks against your learning as your learning speaks against your mind, and so you fight against all learning and succeed, for that is what you want. But perhaps you do not realize, even yet, that there is something you want to learn, and that you can learn it because it is your choice to do so.
Journal
When I read this I cried in frustration. It sounded like gibberish to me. I cried out to Jesus asking him what it means to me. Yesterday I spent the day going back and forth between my teachers, first feeling frustrated and angry, then asking the Holy Spirit to heal my mind and feeling peaceful, then back again to ego. I felt so discouraged with the whole thing and wondered if I could ever end this war in my mind. It didn’t feel like it could happen. By the end of the day I felt better, but some of that discouragement was left over in my mind this morning.
I don’t know why the ego is so strong in my mind right now. Maybe that part of my mind is afraid of the end. This morning it didn’t want to understand the meaning behind these words. It wanted to think that peace is impossible and that even if I understand the concepts, I can’t put them to work. It wants to believe that I am still the separated self and that isn’t going to change. What is the ego mind working so hard to hide from me? What does it not want me to remember?
Here is what comes into my mind when I ask that question. The ego doesn’t want me to recover the memory of being God, of choosing to have this experience, of everything I experience being something I want to experience, and something I chose. It cannot stop the flow of memories, but it can slow them down as it gets my attention with some drama or the other and I start to feel afraid or guilty because I believe the ego interpretation of it.
But what if everything that happens to me is perfect because it is helping me to wake up? What if all these dramas and fearful thoughts and even the things that I feel guilty about are what I am using to wake myself up. Battling my ego self over and over was frustrating, but in the end I chose God. When I got to the hotel I thought about the day and realized how often Spirit had helped me to see more clearly, how just the right thought entered my mind at just the right moment. At one point I felt such a strong desire to listen to a particular section of the Course while I was driving, and a little later when the ego was trying to bring me back into its story again, the words I had listened to helped me to see through the ego.
All of the things I thought and felt yesterday, while very uncomfortable, were actually helping me. I was given many opportunities to see what I don’t want to experience anymore, and many opportunities to make a different choice and to see that the choice is mine, always. How can I call that a failure? I had a necessary and important experience yesterday and today I go forward with more certainty than before.
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