III. Love Without Conflict, Paragraph 9
7-29-13
9 In your own mind, though denied by the ego, is the declaration of your release. God has given you everything. This one fact means the ego does not exist, and this makes it profoundly afraid. In the ego’s language, “to have” and “to be” are different, but they are identical to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit knows that you both have everything and are everything. Any distinction in this respect is meaningful only when the idea of “getting,” which implies a lack, has already been accepted. That is why we make no distinction between having the Kingdom of God and being the Kingdom of God.
It is hard for me to grasp that I have everything because I am everything. First, I believe that I lack some things. In this story of Myron I lack the ability to carry a tune. I lack physical beauty. I lack the ability to remember things even as well as I used to and my memory was never all that good even when I was young. Speaking of youth, I lack that, too. I lack the ability to comprehend math easily. I’m not as smart as some people and not as rich. I am not even as good of a Course student as some others.
This list seems to prove that I have not been given everything and that I lack many things. What I am learning to accept is that none of the above is true. That person is an illusion, just a projection of a cluster of beliefs, none of which is true. Myron is just a picture of what I believe about myself, not the truth of it. In actuality I am everything. I am all there is. There is nothing for me to gain because I am that. I am abundance and beauty and perfection. I will not go to Heaven, or gain Heaven; I am Heaven.
Because the ego mind does not want to cease to exist it seeks desperately to convince me that it is preposterous to believe I am as God created me, and that I am like God, in God, a part of God. It tries to convince me that it created me and so I am like ego, when actually I made the ego. I want to believe the ego because I just don’t feel worthy of God and I fear Him. So instead of identifying with God, I identify with ego and believe in lack and loss.
The ego’s fear of not existing is the reason it has so many laws. It says that the body needs a certain amount of sleep and if it doesn’t get it then I will be tired and listless and if it this goes on too long, there will be dire consequences. Studies have been done and articles written. Sleep deficit, the researchers say is a real thing and dangerous to the health. Sleep deprivation is used as torture.
I bought it, because I believed in every law we made up to defend against the truth and establish the ego as real. My whole life revolved around the conflict of getting enough sleep and still having time to commune with the Holy Spirit before work. But finally I questioned that law. In the Course Jesus says that time is not real and so I decided that his word was more likely to be true than the ego’s law. I began to sleep as much as I slept and to trust that it was enough and to give time to the Holy Spirit and trust that it was adequate.
Guess what! So far so good! I am fine with however much sleep I get. Eight hours is fine. Six hours is equally fine. I forget all day long that I should be tired when I don’t have enough sleep and so I am not tired. I watch in amazement as time stretches like an elastic band to accommodate my writing. I will write and write and then look at the clock and only a couple of minutes have passed. I laugh out loud at the miracle.
This has happened so often that you would think I never worry about sleep or time anymore, but it is an old and long honored law of the ego and I seem reluctant to release it completely from my mind. Now, however, I see the thought in my mind and dismiss it most of the time, or at least, eventually.
It is very important, these little morning miracles, because they are teaching me that I made up the laws and I can dismiss them because they are not real laws like the laws of God. As I learn not to believe in and live by the ego’s laws, I become willing to believe in the Laws of God. For instance, I start to believe that He created me like Himself and that cannot change.
Another thing that has changed is the way I pray. I don’t pray for specifics. When my bank account started going down at an alarming rate this month, I didn’t pray for more money. Instead I prayed for my mind to be healed of a belief in lack and loss. Praying for more money would have implied that I am less than whole and this is not what I want to teach myself anymore. I am ready to know that I have everything, and accepting this as true will reveal that there is no such thing as lack and loss. I have everything. I am everything. Where is there room for the concept of lack and loss in that picture?
I can hide from my reality but I can’t change it, and pretending to be ego, while painful, is not a permanent condition. Ego is not real and I am. Ego will disappear when I no longer believe in it and I am eternal. Right now, I am slowly letting go of the idea of ego and learning to accept my reality. I could just change my mind and be done with the ego, but there is still fear in my mind, so I take it a step at a time.
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