IV: The Only Answer 1-6
- Remember that the Holy Spirit is the answer, not the question. The ego always speaks first. It is capricious and does not mean its maker well. It believes, and correctly, that its maker may withdraw his support from it at any moment. If it meant you well it would be glad, as the Holy Spirit will be glad, when He has brought you home and you no longer need His guidance. The ego does not regard itself as part of you. Herein lies its primary error, the foundation of this whole thought system.
- When God created you, He made you part of Him. That is why attack within the Kingdom is impossible. You made the ego without love, and so it does not love you. You could not remain within the Kingdom without love, and since the Kingdom is love, you believe that you are without it. This enables the ego to regard itself as separate and outside its maker, thus speaking for the part of your mind that believes you are separate and outside the Mind of God. The ego, then, raises the first question that was ever asked, but one it can never answer. That question, “What are you?” was the beginning of doubt. The ego has never answered any questions since, although it has raised a great many. The most inventive activities of the ego have never done more than obscure the question, because you have the answer, and the ego is afraid of you.
- You cannot understand the conflict until you fully understand the basic fact that the ego cannot know anything. The Holy Spirit does not speak first, but He always answers. Everyone has called upon Him for help at one time or another and in one way or another and has been answered. Since the Holy Spirit answers truly He answers for all time, which means that everyone has the answer now.
- The ego cannot hear the Holy Spirit, but it does believe that part of the mind that made it is against it. It interprets this as justification for attacking its maker. It believes that the best defense is attack and wants you to believe it. Unless you do believe it you will not side with it, and the ego feels badly in need of allies, though not brothers. Perceiving something alien to itself in your mind, the ego turns to the body as its ally, because the body is not part of you. This makes the body the ego’s friend. It is an alliance frankly based on separation. If you side with this alliance you will be afraid because you are siding with an alliance of fear.
- The ego uses the body to conspire against your mind, and because the ego realizes that its enemy can end them both merely by recognizing they are not part of you, they join in the attack together. This is perhaps the strangest perception of all if you consider what it really involves. The ego, which is not real, attempts to persuade the mind, which is real, that the mind is the ego’s learning device; and further, that the body is more real than the mind is. No one in his right mind could possibly believe this, and no one in his right mind does believe it. Hear, then, the one answer of the Holy Spirit to all the questions the ego raises: You are a child of God, a priceless part of His Kingdom, which He created as part of Him, nothing else exists and only this is real. You have chosen a sleep in which you have had bad dreams, but this sleep is not real, and God calls you to awake. There will be nothing left of your dream when you hear Him because you will awaken. Your dreams contain many of the ego’s symbols and they have confused you. Yet that was only because you were asleep and did not know. When you wake you will see the truth around you and in you, and you will no longer believe in dreams because they will have no reality for you. Yet the Kingdom and all that you have created there will have great reality for you, because they are beautiful and true. [1]
In today’s text reading, Jesus tells us that Holy Spirit is the one answer that resolves all conflict, opposition, and questions about our identity. Holy Spirit remembers and never lets us forget that we are Sons of God. No matter what the perceptual world may throw at us in order to label us otherwise, whether it exalts us or tears us down, as long as we believe we are flesh, as long as we choose to identify with that which is not love, we are destined for dreams of disease, decay, and death. We can look to all sort of avenues for our answers, we can try to find our identity in making the world a better place, we can try to resolve the conflicts in the perceptual world, feed the world’s hungry, provide clean drinking water, teach the illiterate to read and write – but all of our efforts are wasted in time for this is not who we are, and this is not the Creation of God.
There is only one answer. We awaken from the dream and accept the truth of the Voice for God. Our identity is not of this world. We are a priceless part of God’s Kingdom and this is our truth, our reality, and all that is and was and will ever be. As we awaken, the dream and all that it holds out to us goes away. It no longer has any hold upon us. We can no longer get worked up over its issues. We no longer see enemies, we see brothers. We no longer form alliances with flesh and blood, we accept our oneness with the Sonship of God. The world simply has no more reality when we awaken. We can laugh at what once would have mortified us. Only what is beautiful, true, and everlasting will hold our interest, increase our joy, and engage our holy minds.
This is the answer to the conspiracy of the ego/body alliance! For the ego/body can only exist in the nightmare, can only hold us captive in the dream of opposition for as long as we choose to believe in them. The blighted part of our mind tries to persuade us that it has all the power, that our survival depends upon its cunning, that the flesh body defines us for we have been individualized and separated from the Sonship. All alone and defenseless in a world that is out to get us at every turn, the ego badgers us constantly with questions that it can never answer but does manage to keep us in a state of striving, stress, and confusion.
The perceptual world, Jesus says, is the dream of separation. It is our fiction. The alternate we made to Creation. A world of fear, of lies, of opposites. A world of never knowing, always theorizing, guessing, coming up with game plans, devising ways in which to hold the Sons of God in the dark dream. As long as we sleep in the perceptual world, our real identity is kept hidden from us. I see you and you see me not as brothers, not in mutuality, not in completeness, but in splintered, separate parts – always judging, comparing, always with a sense of some are ahead and some are behind, and nothing is completely fair, right, and certain.
We can never really know each other in the dream world. You are over there living in your culture, apart from me, doing things differently, looking different from me, having ideas about me based upon – not my identity in the Sonship of God – but in my flesh body which defines me by the color of my skin, my genitals, my age, my country of origin, my cultural and religious traditions, and a myriad of other fictional facts about me that can never capture the truth about me. Therefore I remain a stranger to you. You will justify forming judgments for or against me depending on the time of day, what you read in the news, what your religious traditions tell you about others, and whatever else the ego uses to keep us from knowing our mutual Sonship in God, our oneness, our joint perfection. This is insanity.
And yet Holy Spirit – awaits our awakening. He does not rudely shake us from our dream. He does not reveal our perfection and our connection to one another before we have come to some very astute conclusions on our own. Residing in our higher minds, Holy Spirit has all the time in the world. He is not impatient. He is not a Teacher who overwhelms us with information that we are not ready to learn. Holy Spirit knows and trusts us to awaken from the dream in our own good time. As Sons of God, we are God’s Will, and it is God’s Will that we awaken. We will choose to come home. We will not be content in a world of chaos, uncertainty, and death cycles forever. Sooner or later we will conclude on our own steam that our flesh bodies have no bearing upon who we really are! Our egos will be put aside and hold no more interest to us. This answer is as sure as God. Holy Spirit, as God’s Voice in our minds, not only has the answer; He is the answer.
Jesus tells us that all of us have called out to Holy Spirit at one time or another throughout our lives. This means everyone no matter how they may have declared atheism, antagonism, and agnosticism toward the idea of God. Holy Spirit responds to every call. And yet we are so mired in our humanity and so skeptical and afraid of our divinity, that to heed the Voice for God fills us with either fear of ridicule, mockery, and insanity or on the other hand a sense of grandiosity and specialness!
We will complete “The Only Answer” in the next post because the first six paragraphs give us enough to contemplate today in our devotional practice. I read over this section several times, asking Holy Spirit to make the message clear to my mind. My ego resisted this teaching and distracted me with a lot of other things that would appear to be more fun, more interesting, even more important! And yet, the title of this section alone informs us that we have the answer to the most basic question that we spend lifetimes in ego-world trying to answer. It is our God-given gift, the Voice for God within our minds, Who leads us to all that is beautiful and true about ourselves, about each other, and reawakens our minds to unity with God.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter Six The lessons of love. IV The only answer. 1-6. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
For daily Workbook lessons visit www.i-choose-love.com courtesy of Linda R.
Audio credit: www.eckiefriar.com
