III. The Correction of Error, P 4
4 When you react at all to errors, you are not listening to the Holy Spirit. He has merely disregarded them, and if you attend to them you are not hearing Him. If you do not hear Him, you are listening to your ego and making as little sense as the brother whose errors you perceive. This cannot be correction. Yet it is more than merely a lack of correction for him. It is the giving up of correction in yourself.
Journal
First I notice that Jesus is telling me that if I react to my brothers errors I am not listening to Holy Spirit. Sometimes my brother is speaking from the ego and I am aware of that, but if I react to it, it means that I am giving it credence. I believe his words have meaning, and they do not. If I were listening to Holy Spirit, I would disregard the ego words of my brother, because that is what the Holy Spirit does. He doesn’t believe my wrong minded words and then forgive them. The Holy Spirit sees them as meaningless and simply disregards them.
I love that this is true. I never have to apologize to God for my errors. He doesn’t give them any meaning and so they have none. He disregards my errors as if they didn’t exist. This is what I want to do, too. I want to learn through the Holy Spirit’s instruction, to disregard my own errors as if they did not exist. This is what it means to be guiltless. I haven’t achieved this yet. I sometimes still experience guilt when I am in error and even when I remember a past error. I do recognize when I do it, and I ask for correction, so I know that I am learning to disregard error.
The other thing Jesus is telling us in this paragraph is that I must disregard my brother’s errors as well, and not just for his sake. I do this because if I correct my brother, I am making as little sense as he is. In my correction I am in error, too, and this is setting up one of those endless cycles that the ego depends on to keep us engaged in the illusion. If I correct my brother I teach myself to believe in error, and so I will believe in my own error as well.
Yes, my ego can be in error, and probably is, but I am not my ego. My brother is not his ego. There is a vast difference between recognizing that I have spoken in error and believing I am guilty of speaking in error. A friend sent me a message recently, and in her words I heard where she got off course. I saw the error in her thinking. My first (ego) response was to point this out to her.
Then sanity prevailed and I heard the Holy Spirit gently remind me that I am the messenger, not the writer of the message. So I waited for instructions and when none came, I did nothing. Later, she saw her own error and wrote about that. It was a more powerful lesson for her to receive instruction from within than it would have been to receive it from me.
I was happy to see that I did not have to argue with myself to resist correcting her. I was simply grateful to have heard the Holy Spirit in my mind. That was not always true, so I see I have grown. There was not the belief in my mind that her error was important or that it in any way defined her. That was growth for me also, because I used to think errors were meaningful, and I might have thought that knowing what she didn’t know meant I was better than or higher than her. It’s a relief to not be burdened with that mistaken thought. I hope it is completely healed and gone forever.
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