X. The Confusion of Pain and Joy, Paragraph 5
5 The Holy Spirit always sides with you and with your strength. As long as you avoid His guidance in any way, you want to be weak. Yet weakness is frightening. What else, then, can this decision mean except that you want to be fearful? The Holy Spirit never asks for sacrifice, but the ego always does. When you are confused about this distinction in motivation, it can only be due to projection. Projection is a confusion in motivation, and given this confusion, trust becomes impossible. No one gladly obeys a guide he does not trust, but this does not mean that the guide is untrustworthy. In this case, it always means that the follower is. However, this, too, is merely a matter of his own belief. Believing that he can betray, he believes that everything can betray him. Yet this is only because he has elected to follow false guidance. Unable to follow this guidance without fear, he associates fear with guidance, and refuses to follow any guidance at all. If the result of this decision is confusion, this is hardly surprising.
I can understand why it is that we want to be weak. We used our strength to do the impossible and in doing so we have become convinced that we have attacked God. It seems our strength has betrayed us and left us fearful and guilty. Now we just want to keep our head down. If we think our guilt is noticed, we want to point God toward someone else. Being weak and frightened seems to be a better option than being strong and allowing that strength to lead us into more trouble. It seems that being week is better than being found out by God.
Since we believe that we betrayed God and over and over we betray our brother, we naturally believe everything is betraying us. Certainly when we follow the ego, we are betrayed. The ego, that little chatter box in our head, is constantly guiding us to do things that wind up getting us even deeper into trouble. It constantly warns us of trouble and encourages us to defend ourselves.
Here is an example. I wanted to spend more time with my daughter. The ego advised me to be careful about that. It went something like this: She has her own life, and if you impose too much, she will start to avoid you. She is very kind and will spend time with you but will come to resent you. She already has to give time to her father who is very needy, a good mother wouldn’t add to her burden. If she spends Saturday with her dad and Sunday with you, when will she have any time to herself?
So I seldom called to ask for her company and she stopped calling me. The ego congratulated me on being strong and independent. Then the ego said that she was selfish and thoughtless for not calling me. The ego said that she didn’t love me or respect me, and that must mean I was not a good mother and started reminding me of all the things I did wrong. Then the ego pointed out that she was ungrateful for all I did for her. It was her fault I felt like this.
At this point, realizing that I had been following an insane guide, I shook off the ego and asked Spirit what I should do. I immediately picked up the phone and started a conversation with my daughter. As it turned out, she was feeling abandoned by me, and was hurt by this. When I tried to explain my reasoning, she wasn’t going for it. Since ten we have moved past this and now enjoy each other’s company nearly every week.
Here is the thing, we have been choosing ego as our guide and since ego is an unreliable guide, we have come to distrust all guides. The only reason this whole situation with my daughter did not spin completely out of control is that I have been slowly learning that I can trust the Holy Spirit to be my Guide. When I realized what I was doing and turned to Him for help, He guided me to approach the situation in love rather than from fear. I stopped thinking about how I could defend myself to how I could love my daughter and myself.
Like many other things in life, betrayal is just a thought in the mind. It is a belief and it is a false belief. It started with the belief we betrayed God when we decided to see what separation would feel like. Now that we believed in betrayal, we began to see it everywhere. Betrayal is not real, but we believe it is and what we believe is real to us. Since we made betrayal, we now must allow it to be undone for us, along with the other things we decided to believe, like guilt, fear, suffering and death.
Just as I did with the situation with my daughter, we must step out in faith, going against the ego belief in fear and guilt, and trust the Holy Spirit will not betray us. If we will do that, if we will turn to Him for guidance, He will teach us that He is trustworthy and will not lead us astray. He will lead us to let go of our belief in betrayal, and all the other lies we learned from listening to ego. We only have to take the first tentative step toward Him and He will leap to our assistance! He will prove Himself a good and reliable Guide.
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