The September newsletter discussed the first of the three principles of the ego, and its answer by the first lesson of the Holy Spirit. This article continues the discussion with the second and third of these. We begin by restating the three principles of the ego thought system, and their corresponding answers by the Holy Spirit (see the end of Chapter 6 in the text).

The Ego

1. To have, take all from all.
2. To have separation, teach attack to learn it.
3. Be vigilant only for the ego and its kingdom of guilt.

The Holy Spirit

1. To have, give all to all.
2. To have peace, teach peace to learn it.
3. Be vigilant only for God and His Kingdom.

In considering the ego's thought system, it is helpful to remember that the ego's bottom line is to preserve its individual existence at all costs. Indeed, the very origin of the ego reflects this ultimate purpose, since the ego could only have come into existence by separating from God, an act that within its own thought system meant the annihilation of the Creator. The ego's first principle, To have, take all from all, is essentially a statement of this basic ego goal, which can be restated as one or the other, or as it is more graphically presented in the manual for teachers: kill or be killed (M-17.7:11). Since all of time is but fragmentary shadows of that ontological instant when we chose the separation of the ego over the oneness of Christ, God's one creation, we but relive this original and terrifying decision each and every moment that we choose individuality and specialness to be our reality. As Jesus states in the text:

Each day, and every minute in each day, and every instant that each minute holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror took the place of love (T-26.V.13:1).

Therefore, in order to keep our individual existence alive and well, we must always maintain our separation, and this we do through attack, the ego's second principle: To have separation, teach attack to learn it. And attack, the ego's final defense against the Love of God, is the fulfillment of its primary goal: to keep the separation but not to be responsible for it, as Jesus explains in the introduction to his discussion of the crucifixion:

Anger always involves projection of separation, which must ultimately be accepted as one's own responsibility, rather than being blamed on others (T-6.in.1:2).

Part I of this article discussed the tiny mad idea and some of the repercussions of the Son's having taken this thought seriously. We shall revisit this ontological instant now, looking at some additional aspects of the separation's beginnings, with special emphasis on their implications for the second and third ego principles to be considered in this article.

We have already seen that when the separation thought appeared to rise in the mind of God's Son, he was attracted to the specialness of his newly found individuality. Therefore, he chose the ego's interpretation of this tiny, mad idea instead of the Holy Spirit's Atonement principle that the separation never truly happened. This allowed him to believe in the reality of what he experienced to be his newly won freedom from the imagined tyranny of God. But as soon as the Son chose the ego and became identified with its thought system of a separated and individualized self, the ego threw him a curve ball, as it were. It told the Son that although it was indeed true that he was now on his own, autonomous and free, his freedom had come at a great price. We have touched on this idea above, but now we can appreciate its full implications.

The ego continues to explain to the Son that the only way he could have achieved his freedom and individual existence was to destroy the God of perfect Oneness. It is clear to any logical mind that separation and oneness, individuality and totality cannot coexist in the same place, any more than darkness and light, or fear and love can both be present at the same time. One automatically abolishes the other. And so, the ego concludes in its argument to the Son, the separation was bought at the cost of annihilating God so that individuality might exist, and this act is called sin. Thus, in the Son's mind, separation is now forever equated with sinfulness, of which he is continually reminded by his very existence as a separate individual. The seeming blessing of individuality was short-lived, to say the very least, and has now become a curse, for sin can have only one result -- punishment, and at the hands of a vengeful God no less, Who, so it seems, will rise from the grave to pursue his sinful Son:

Sin calls for punishment as error for correction, and the belief that punishment is correction is clearly insane.

Sin is not an error, for sin entails an arrogance which the idea of error lacks. To sin would be to violate reality, and to succeed. Sin is the proclamation that attack is real and guilt is justified. It assumes the Son of God is guilty, and has thus succeeded in losing his innocence and making himself what God created not. Thus is creation seen as not eternal, and the Will of God open to opposition and defeat. Sin is the grand illusion underlying all the ego's grandiosity. For by it God Himself is changed, and rendered incomplete.… For the ego brings sin to fear, demanding punishment. Yet punishment is but another form of guilt's protection, for what is deserving punishment must have been really done. Punishment is always the great preserver of sin, treating it with respect and honoring its enormity. What must be punished [i.e., sin], must be true. And what is true must be eternal, and will be repeated endlessly. For what you think is real you want, and will not let it go (T-19.II.1:6;2; T-19.III.2:2-7).

Thus, the very fear of God's punishment continually reinforces the belief that something terrible has been done -- the sin of separation and individuality -- that necessitates such punishment and justifies the Son's state of ongoing fear. And he is trapped within this vicious vise of separation because he does not want to let go his belief in the reality of his individual existence: " But you have made of your reality an idol, which you must protect against the light of truth. And all the world becomes the means by which this idol can be saved" (T-29.VII.9:8-9). Of necessity then, there is no possible outcome for him other than a life of specialness and sin that perpetually condemns him to a prison of guilt and fear, suffering and death.

But the ego once again comes to the Son's " rescue," this time by employing the dynamic of projection. Its rescue strategy works in this way: The ego tells the Son that since the separation from God is real and has actually happened, there is unfortunately nothing that can deny the reality of sin. But, there is a way that the sin could be gotten rid of, so that all that would remain would be the individuality that was won when the separation from God was accomplished. In other words, the ego's plan is to keep the separation but not the sin.

The ego thus counsels the Son to split off part of his self -- the thought of sin -- and project it outside his mind, beyond himself. This seemingly gives rise to another person, who now will become the repository of the Son's sin. In " The Dreamer of the Dream" in Chapter 27 of the text, Jesus refers to this as the world of dreams, consisting of the mind's secret dream of sin, and the projected dream of the world in which are found the specific figures who represent the sinful self we seek to keep hidden. This psychological " trick" allows the Son to retain his individuality, but now the sin has been given to " someone else." Someone else is put in quotation marks because in fact there is no one out there, the world being nothing more than an hallucination in the disturbed mind of God's Son (T-20.VIII.7-9). Only in the Son's dream of separation do specific people exist outside his mind as sinners. Nonetheless, within the dream this strategy is, in the Course's words, fool-proof. Indeed, the entire physical universe was devised by the ego with just this purpose in mind: to make up a world of specifics so that there could be someone out there onto whom we could project our hidden hatred of ourselves. That is the meaning of Jesus' teaching in workbook lesson 161:

Complete abstraction is the natural condition of the mind. But part of it is now unnatural. It does not look on everything as one. It sees instead but fragments of the whole, for only thus could it invent the partial world you see. The purpose of all seeing is to show you what you wish to see. All hearing but brings to your mind the sounds it wants to hear.

Thus were specifics made.… Hate is specific. There must be a thing to be attacked. An enemy must be perceived in such a form he can be touched and seen and heard, and ultimately killed. When hatred rests upon a thing, it calls for death as surely as God's Voice proclaims there is no death. Fear is insatiable, consuming everything its eyes behold, seeing itself in everything, compelled to turn upon itself and to destroy (W-pI.161.2:1–3:1; 7; italics mine).

And so we continually use our perception to see the sin and guilt that we " wish to see," the sounds our ego " wants to hear." This necessitates our constant vigilance to be on the lookout for these objects of hate, and gives rise to the ego's third principle: Be vigilant only for the ego and its kingdom of guilt.

Understanding this ego dynamic of how the splitting off of our sin leads to the making up of a world of sin, enables us to have a deeper appreciation of the power of these two ego principles of

1. continually teaching and learning attack in order to sustain the separation, and
2. maintaining an ongoing vigilance to find the sin and guilt in others that our ego minds have already established to be reality.

It is this vigilance for the guilt perceived in another that characterizes our experience within the world in which we believe we live, and which is captured so graphically in the section from the Obstacles to Peace on the " Attraction of Guilt." In a passage parallel to what was quoted above from Lesson 161, Jesus uses the image of " hungry dogs of fear" to describe the ego's insatiable need to find and then attack the guilt it perceives in others (T-19.IV-A.12,13).

In summary, then, the ego's strategy is first to establish sin as real, as the means of demonstrating to the Son that his individuality truly exists and that the separation from God actually occurred. Once this has been accepted as truth, the ego has us split off our belief in sin and project it outside ourselves. This results in the mind's inner world of sin, guilt, and fear being perceived outside in a physical world, replete with sinful victimizers ready to attack us, unless we are able -- with full justification -- to attack them first. Attack is therefore the means whereby we believe we can be saved from our guilt, wherein we have traded our internal terror of God's wrath for the daily fears everyone in our world experiences as part of what we consider to be normal existence.

Because of the ego's use of denial, it never occurs to us that there is something very wrong with the ego's plan of salvation; namely -- it does not work. Designed to protect us from fear, the ego's plan merely reinforces it. This miserable state of affairs of not being able to confront the ego with its insane thought system and question its logic is summarized in the following passage:

The ego has no real answer to this because there is none, but it does have a typical solution. It obliterates the question from the mind's awareness. Once out of awareness the question can and does produce uneasiness, but it cannot be answered because it cannot be asked (T-4.V.4:9-11).

Denial thus serves to obliterate from our awareness

1. the Holy Spirit's Love,
2. the ego's thoughts of sin and hatred, and finally
3. the decision maker in our minds that can choose again.

Until this decision-making part can be restored to our awareness there is no hope, a state which the ego wishes always to maintain. Paradoxically, it is the very pain that the ego's thought system induces in us that becomes the cause of its ultimate undoing:

Tolerance for pain may be high, but is not without limit. Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way (T-2.III.3:5-6).

Unable to justify a life of misery and suffering by blaming others, we are finally ready to ask for help from Someone other than our egos. As Jesus exhorts: " Resign now as your own teacher … for you were badly taught" (T-12.V.8:3; T-28.I.7:1). Inherent in this decision is our recognition that we want joy instead of pain, happiness instead of misery, and peace instead of war. And so because it is this peace that we want, it is this peace we wish to learn, the second lesson of the Holy Spirit: To have peace, teach peace to learn it. We have come to realize, finally, that Jesus was right and we were wrong. Moreover, we can gladly accept that we are far better off and happier when we choose his thought system of forgiveness and peace, rather than the ego's insane system of specialness and attack. As Jesus instructs us in this second lesson: " There can be no conflict between sanity and insanity. Only one is true, and therefore only one is real" (T-6.V-B.6:1-2). Therefore:

The way out of conflict between two opposing thought systems is clearly to choose one and relinquish the other. If you identify with your thought system, and you cannot escape this, and if you accept two thought systems which are in complete disagreement, peace of mind is impossible. If you teach both, which you will surely do as long as you accept both, you are teaching conflict and learning it. Yet you do want peace, or you would not have called upon the Voice for peace to help you. Its lesson is not insane; the conflict is (T-6.V-B.5).

What is required of us now is the vigilance that undoes the ego's vigilance, the meaning of the Holy Spirit's third lesson: Be vigilant only for God and His Kingdom. This vigilance translates into becoming aware of the ego's underlying purpose in maintaining an ongoing attitude of judgment and attack. In other words, through A Course in Miracles Jesus is asking us to invite his help in becoming aware of our ego's need to perpetuate and preserve its individuality by making someone else responsible for it. Looking at the ego's darkness with Jesus' light beside us is what allows us to see through -- literally -- the ego's smokescreen of sin, guilt, and fear to the truth of the Holy Spirit's Atonement, which undoes the thought of separation at its source. In an important passage from the text, Jesus explains this crucial principle:

No one can escape from illusions unless he looks at them, for not looking is the way they are protected. There is no need to shrink from illusions, for they cannot be dangerous. We are ready to look more closely at the ego's thought system because together we have the lamp that will dispel it, and since you realize you do not want it, you must be ready. Let us be very calm in doing this, for we are merely looking honestly for truth. The " dynamics" of the ego will be our lesson for a while, for we must look first at this to see beyond it, since you have made it real. We will undo this error quietly together, and then look beyond it to truth.

What is healing but the removal of all that stands in the way of knowledge? And how else can one dispel illusions except by looking at them directly, without protecting them? Be not afraid, therefore, for what you will be looking at is the source of fear, and you are beginning to learn that fear is not real (T-11.V.1:1–2:3; italics mine).

The word together is emphasized because the crucial variable here is our joining with Jesus in this process of vigilance. To look without him is to replicate the original " looking" at the tiny, mad idea with our egos, without the Holy Spirit, therefore remembering " not to laugh" (T-27.VIII.6:2). This point of doing things on our own without the Holy Spirit is highlighted in the concluding section of the manual for teachers:

There is another advantage, -- and a very important one, -- in referring decisions to the Holy Spirit with increasing frequency. Perhaps you have not thought of this aspect, but its centrality is obvious. To follow the Holy Spirit's guidance is to let yourself be absolved of guilt. It is the essence of the Atonement. It is the core of the curriculum. The imagined usurping of functions not your own is the basis of fear. The whole world you see reflects the illusion that you have done so, making fear inevitable. To return the function to the One to Whom it belongs is thus the escape from fear. And it is this that lets the memory of love return to you. Do not, then, think that following the Holy Spirit's guidance is necessary merely because of your own inadequacies. It is the way out of hell for you (M-29.3).

The need for our vigilance, and the enormous effort required for the undoing of the ego's thought system is summarized in the following passage from Jesus' discussion of the the Holy Spirit's third lesson:

The third step, then, is a statement of what you want to believe, and entails a willingness to relinquish everything else. The Holy Spirit will enable you to take this step, if you follow Him. Your vigilance is the sign that you want Him to guide you. Vigilance does require effort, but only until you learn that effort itself is unnecessary. You have exerted great effort to preserve what you made because it was not true. Therefore, you must now turn your effort against it. Only this can cancel out the need for effort, and call upon the being which you both have and are. This recognition is wholly without effort since it is already true and needs no protection. It is in the perfect safety of God. Therefore, inclusion is total and creation is without limit (T-6.V-C.10).

The good news about A Course in Miracles is that we no longer have to pretend that we are nice and loving people, who wish only to return with Jesus to our home in Heaven. If we were, then we never would have wished to leave God in the first place, and we certainly would not still be choosing to remain within our separated and individualized state. Quite to the contrary, Jesus' purpose in his Course is to help us to understand that we do indeed cherish our individuality, and are even willing to pay the heavy price of sin and murder in order to sustain it. By looking with him, however -- without judgment or guilt -- we realize that there is nothing in others or ourselves to forgive, for there is nothing there even to perceive, let alone condemn. As we continue now with the passage quoted from above:

You are also learning that its [fear's] effects can be dispelled merely by denying their reality. The next step is obviously to recognize that what has no effects does not exist. Laws do not operate in a vacuum, and what leads to nothing has not happened. If reality is recognized by its extension, what leads to nothing could not be real. Do not be afraid, then, to look upon fear, for it cannot be seen. Clarity undoes confusion by definition, and to look upon darkness through light must dispel it (T-11.V.2:4-9).

And so, when we look at our investment in maintaining the three ego principles, which support our specialness and individuality, we realize, as did the little boy in the fairy tale, that the ego-emperor truly has no clothes on. Its thought system of sin, guilt, and fear, suffering, hate, and death -- all with seeming power over God -- is nothing. Moreover, we realize that not only does the ego thought system have no power, but that there is, in fact, no ego at all. Only the Love of God is true, and therefore only the Love of God remains within our minds. Thus is the dream of a mad journey away from Heaven into the ego's world of individuality undone through this gentle vigilance, born of our joining with Jesus or the Holy Spirit. With Their Love beside us, we are brought back, safe and sound, to the home of Christ we never truly left. Paraphrasing the inspiring words of the text, we exclaim with great joy:

Now is the Holy Spirit's purpose done. For we have come! For we have come at last! (T-26.IX.8:7-9).