Duality and the Decision Maker

Once the decision maker has chosen the ego’s dualistic, dichotomous world of either/or, the ego’s concern, and the only threat to its existence, is that the decision maker might change its mind. To prevent this, the ego works to keep us in the world and unaware of our decision maker’s ability to choose spirit instead of it.

Ego wants to keep us mindless, unaware of the decision maker and unaware of the alternative to its sin, guilt and fear. The ego tells us that because the decision maker choose to live as an individual – the so-called ‘original sin’, it attacked spirit’s perfect oneness and spirit will come roaring back to reclaim what belongs to It and destroy us.

To escape the sin, guilt and fear of attacking spirit and of having spirit attack us in turn, the decision maker flees the mind and projects itself into the world of time and space in which it sees outside the sin, guilt and fear it did not want to see within.

The result of this is that the decision maker seems forever buried, hidden by sin, guilt and fear which are in turn hidden by bodily experiences in the physical world. In order for the decision maker to choose again, this time for spirit, it must first recognize its original choice for the ego. Spirit’s goal is to help us see the ego projections for what they are so we can learn that what we perceive outside, reflects what we first made real inside, then work from the inside out.

In our dualistic ego world, we think all things have an opposite. If heaven is real there must be a hell. Contradiction is the way we make what we perceive and think real. Western biblical religions are classic examples of the ego’s dualistic thought system. There is God and the devil, heaven and earth, spirit and body, good and evil, forgiveness and sin.

However, this is not the metaphysics of a Course in Miracles, which is non-dualistic. The Course teaches that perfect Oneness is all there is. Reality is not found by reconciling opposites – God does not have a shadow side known as the Devil. There is only truth, light, love – the definition of God. In the ego’s dualistic world, the opposite of love is fear, but in the non-dualistic world of our reality as spirit, what is all encompassing can have no opposite.

Since our self is born out of fear of love, and sustained by fear as well, this self becomes a creature of opposites, inevitably giving rise to a world of opposites contradicting our non-dualistic reality, and witnessing non-dualism’s seeming non-existence. But my self is not my Self. My Self is real, while my self is part of the ego’s dualistic illusion.