VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 4
4 The ego cannot afford to know anything. Knowledge is total, and the ego does not believe in totality. This unbelief is its origin, and while the ego does not love you it is faithful to its own antecedents, begetting as it was begotten. Mind always reproduces as it was produced. Produced by fear, the ego reproduces fear. This is its allegiance, and this allegiance makes it treacherous to love because you are love. Love is your power, which the ego must deny. It must also deny everything this power gives you because it gives you everything. No one who has everything wants the ego. Its own maker, then, does not want it. Rejection is therefore the only decision the ego could possibly encounter, if the mind that made it knew itself. And if it recognized any part of the Sonship, it would know itself.
Some paragraphs have several ideas that I can look at with Holy Spirit. This is one of them. It begins by telling me that the ego cannot afford to know anything. This is because Knowledge is total and the ego doesn’t believe in totality. I suppose this should not be news to me, but I hadn’t thought of it that way. The whole point for the ego is to allow the idea of separation to be experienced, so if it cannot know wholeness or totality, or it could not be ego. The bottom line is, ego is not where I would want to go to for knowledge because it does not know anything.
The ego begets as it was begotten is another idea that I am seeing more clearly this morning. The ego was produced by fear so it reproduces fear. If I am feeling fearful about something, it will do me no good to check in with ego for a solution even though I do this sometimes, at least briefly until I catch myself. The ego will not give me comfort or a real solution because it was not created in love. It will only give me fearful thoughts and solutions that lead to more fear.
All of my life I have been a problem-solver. If something is going wrong, I look at the options and choose the one most likely to fix the problem, then I get busy. This process always made me feel like I was in control. I still solve my problems in the same way, but there is a difference now. Here is an example. If I am concerned about income, in the past I would look for ways to decrease expenses or increase income, or perhaps the problem calls for a defensive strategy. Then I would get busy making it happen.
Now if I am concerned about finances, I look at my thoughts about lack and loss and I ask Holy Spirit to heal my mind and show me how to see this problem differently. The difference is that I no longer ask the ego for help. First, it doesn’t know anything, and second, it only begets fear because that is how it was begotten. None of its solutions will fix the problem. Using the ego will sometimes change the form of the problem, but no healing has transpired so the problem will reoccur and I will be left with more fear than ever.
Another idea from this paragraph is that the ego is against me always because it cannot afford to be for me. The ego is made from fear and I am created in Love. There is no common ground between the two. Fear cannot act in love and love has no use for fear. As my Self, as Love, I have no use for the ego. Love is whole and complete and safe. What use would I have for ego if I remembered who I was? My very being is a threat to ego’s existence. For its own preservation it must always strive to keep me from knowing my Self.
The last sentence is the one that grabs my attention the most. Jesus is telling us that we would reject the ego if we knew who we are. Then he says this: “And if it recognized any part of the Sonship, it would know itself.” The mind that made the ego will know itself as soon as it recognizes any part of the Sonship. I don’t know what to say about that.
I understand it intellectually, of course, but I don’t know how that feels. I have no experience of it, so I don’t really understand it. It is my goal to recognize some part of the Sonship for what it is. I don’t care where that happens. I don’t care if I see Christ in my mirror or in my precious child, or in the homeless person on the street. I just want to know my self and I understand that my self can be known through knowing any part of it.
PS: It is hard to understand and I probably didn’t do a good job explaining it. More simply; through the power that is ours as extensions of God, we made an ego. (Think of the ego manifesting itself as a body, a personality, the world you see around you.) Then the ego, in order to insure its existence, to hide the idea that it has no power, and to protect itself from our rejection, tried to turn the tables on us. It said that it made us and that we are the ones who are bodies, weak and vulnerable, and, by the way, guilty and sinful.
But the truth is, we are part of God, powerful beyond measure, brilliant and gorgeous. We light up the universe. We are so vast that everything is in us. One of those things is a little mad idea that is the ego. It is like a splinter it is so small, but it cannot stand that thought so it has convinced us that it made us up and we are the splinter.
In reality it has no power over us and no power at all. All its power comes from us and when we stop desiring the ego it will simply cease to exist. I think of it like this. I can be having a very vivid and interesting day dream, but when I get tired of it I stop thinking it and it disappears as if it had never been there and really, it had not. This is what is going to happen to the ego. We are learning that it is just a dream, imagination run wild, and when we get tired of it we will stop thinking it. Poof. Its gone.
A Course in Miracles is helping us realize we are dreaming and helping us see that we don’t want to dream anymore.
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