Monday, January 28, 2013

Are You Sure? 3


“We cannot really make a definition for what the ego is,” The Course says, “but we can say what it is not. And this is shown with perfect clarity. Look at its opposite [the miracle] and see the only answer that is meaningful.” As the ego is the heart of the decision maker’s mistaken choice to believe that it is a self separated from spirit, so the miracle is the heart of the choice to be mySelf and identify with spirit. As the ego’s thought system of separation, division, and exclusion takes me from the mind—the place where the original choice was made and the only place it can be unmade, the miracle returns me to the mind where my correct choice allows everything to be different, and lets the truth set me free!

 

The world we seem to live in is the effect, the ego thought system the cause: ideas leave not their source. The belief in my identity as a separated self, remains in my mind where it first arose. So the physical world has never left its source—the decision maker’s choice for separation, though it seems to have. Cause and effect are one, as are source and idea. The content of hate and separation is one with the form of hate and separation. The miracle—the experience of returning to the mind, choosing again and experiencing the happy dream, helps me understand this causal connection.

 

“Where there was darkness,” The Course says, “now we see the light. What is the ego? What the darkness was. Where is the ego? Where the darkness was. What is it now and where can it be found? Nothing and nowhere.” Ken Wapnick says, “These words make perfect sense when read with the heart and not the brain, where they infuriate because they seem not to say anything. Yet they are not supposed to, because there is nothing meaningful to say about the ego itself. Once you have an experience of truth, you will understand the ego’s nothingness.”

 

It is the contrast between my experience of the ego and the miracle that reveals the ego’s true nature, not studying, analyzing or explaining it. Understanding and change come only when I let the ego go and step beyond it. So the miracle leads me back to the decision maker in my mind who can observe the results of its mistaken choice and gently without blame, guilt or shame, not take that original choice so seriously, not make a sin out of it but simply choose again and gently smile the darkness away.

 

Dreams remain - both the ego’s nightmare and spirit’s happy dream, because I alternate between a sense of myself and mySelf. The more I choose mySelf, the more I will experience that and the less I will experience myself. With practice and help from spirit my decision maker can be aware of the contrast, and choose spirit more often than ego.

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