II. SECTION 12. What is the Ego?
Lesson 337 My sinlessness protects me from all harm.
- My sinlessness ensures me perfect peace, eternal safety, everlasting love, freedom forever from all thought of loss, complete deliverance from suffering. And only happiness can be my state, for only happiness is given me. What must I do to know all this is mine? I must accept Atonement for myself, and nothing more. God has already done all things that need be done. And I must learn I need do nothing of myself, for I need but accept my Self, my sinlessness, created for me, now already mine, to feel God’s Love protecting me from harm, to understand my Father loves His Son; to know I am the Son my Father loves.
- You Who created me in sinlessness are not mistaken about what I am. I was mistaken when I thought I sinned, but I accept Atonement for myself. Father, my dream is ended now. Amen.[1]
When we come into the world, we come in as symbols of the ego – a body separated from all other bodies, a fragile, vulnerable fragment which cannot survive without the help of caregivers. If we find ourselves born into this world, we have entered into a shadowland of separation which, even under the best of circumstances, disturbs our peace, offers uncertainty, insecurity, fearfulness, hate, and bondage. All the gifts that we receive in the body are eventually worn away or snatched away; sooner or later we lose all we come to love and count upon. That is the shadowland of ego, that is what we call life in this world, that is the best we can hope for in a world of separateness, opposites, and conflict. In this world, some of us seem to thrive and find a good place while others fail to thrive and never find a nest to call home. We call some people smart and other people “challenged.” We call some creatures more than and other creatures less than. Some beings we love as pets, some beings we love for dinner! Some creatures deserve affection; other creatures deserve fear and loathing. We can only hope and work and strive to be the deserving ones, to prove ourselves worthy of favoritism, to learn how to kiss up to the right people, to earn our place on the top of heap. We heap praises upon false idols and when they inevitably fail us, we turn on them with vengeance and spite and violence. This is ego world. This is separation. This is the bits and scattered pieces of Creation identifying with the mad idea of leaving the Source and doing it alone.
What must I do, what must you do to return to our innocence, our sinlessness, our purity? How can we be as we were created? Where is that place of endless love, perfect peace, tranquility, security, and certainty and how can we get there? Must we beg God for it? Must we go without food and give vast sums of money to the church or tabernacle? Must we wash ourselves in certain ways and clean up our mouths and attend mass several times a week? What must we do to be free of the maddening, meaningless world which gives us nothing no matter how hard we work, how much we sacrifice, or how many asses we kiss to rise to the top?
Jesus tells us to accept Atonement. Accepting our Sonship is the portal that leaves the simulated miscreation behind. In this shadowland of ego, the Sons of Gods became caricatures of themselves, characters doomed for ongoing drama, division, and death. A silly soap opera of a multitude of different forms with the same chaotic, insane, depraved theme repeated as many times as we need to learn it goes nowhere. We can escape its crazy go-round forever when we accept God’s verdict of us rather than the ego’s verdict. Our thoughts of separation, of littleness, of nothingness are simply washed away when we accept the identity of Christ, the Son of God. We step out of the shadowlands that would tell us otherwise, we look upon our separateness as a dream from the long-distant past and in this holy, present moment we leave it all behind and take nothing but our divinity into our future.
There are no prayers that we could pray; no sacrifices that we could make; no offerings that we could present that would make us worthy of our salvation, for we were created worthy and are forever worthy. The Son of God did not die upon the cross for our sins for Christ is not a body, but an everlasting Spirit. The death and resurrection of the body of Christ symbolizes who and what we are in God – His Son, never separated from God’s love, life, and everlasting peace.
It is not until this truth sinks into our awareness that we are freed from the ego’s characterization of Creation. We begin to see past the flesh that withers on the bone, the organs, limbs, and brains that cannot be maintained, the relationships based upon expectation and demands. We are no longer gratified by creation preying upon its separate parts. The petty and puerile can no longer entrap us, arrogance and grandiosity a boring, goofy, fiction.
When we accept the Atonement ours minds step out of the flesh and into the Sonship. We can dilly-dally all we want, put it off, take baby steps, refuse to advance, but the outcome is as certain as God. We are as God created us. Eventually we will accept our rightful place in Creation because it is there and only there that the desires of our heart and mind and soul can be had forever. Once we experience the Atonement, ego’s offerings, substitutions, and nothingness can never tempt us again. The dangers, threats, and persecutions of this world all fade away and disappear, for only God is forever, and we are His Sons.
As we embrace our true identity in Christ, as we envision ourselves as unblemished Sons of God with boundless freedom, unlimited power, untethered creativity each of us can say with certainty based upon remembered experience, upon awakened perception, upon a sure knowledge that “my sinlessness protects me from all harm.”
[1]A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 337. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992). p. 471.
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