Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 5: Understanding the Holy Spirit’s Purpose

 

8. The Set or Fixation Point of Creation

The concept of mental “set,” or its more recent form, “mindset,” is among the better psychological percepts. Actually the idea is used quite frequently in sacred texts and also in this Course, under many different terms. One, for instance, is the ancient Promise that, “The Divine will keep them in perfect Peace whose minds are stayed (or set) on It, because they trust in It.” This statement means that the Divine’s Peace is set in the Holy Spirit, because Spirit is set on, or has Its Source in, the Divine. Spirit is also set in you. You, then, are set in the Peace of the Divine.

The concept of “fixation” is also a very helpful one, which Freud understood perfectly. Unfortunately, he lost this understanding as a result of fear. As we know, fear is incompatible with sound assessment. Fear distorts thinking and therefore disorders thought. Freud’s system of thought was extremely ingenious, a reflection of his own ingenuity. A mind must endow its thoughts with its own attributes. This is its inherent strength, even though it may misuse this strength. Freud lost much of the potential value of his own thought system because, much like Cayce, he did not include himself in it. This led to a dissociated state, because both thinkers cut themselves off from their own ingenious thoughts. Freud’s thought became so conflicted that he could not have retained his sanity, as he understood it, without dissociating. This is why the many contradictions that are quite apparent in his thinking became increasingly less apparent to him.

True fixation is simply the Pull or Call of the Divine, on Whom your right mind is fixed because of the Holy Spirit’s irrevocable Set. (“Irrevocable” as used here meaning “cannot be called back or redirected.”) A person who knows what true fixation really means and does not yield to it has to be terribly afraid.

The irrevocable Nature of the Holy Spirit’s Set is the basis for Its unambiguous Voice. The Holy Spirit never changes Its Mind. Clarity of thought cannot occur under conditions of vacillation. Unless a mind is fixed in its Purpose, it is not clear. “Clear” literally means luminous or giving light. The State of Light, or Enlightenment, is true Understanding. However, Understanding as Enlightenment currently “stands under” or beneath perception, because It has temporarily been denied as the real foundation of thought. This denial is the basis for all delusional systems.

The concept of fixation, as Freud understood it at the time that he did, has a number of real learning advantages.

First, it recognizes that a person can be set or fixated at a point in development that does not accord with a point in time. This clearly could have been a means toward real release from the time belief had Freud pursued it with an open mind. But Freud suffered all his life from refusal to allow Eternity to dawn upon his mind, and enlighten it truly. As a result, he overlooked the Holy Instant of now entirely, and merely saw the continuity of the future from the past.

Second, although Freud misinterpreted what the Holy Spirit reminded him of, i.e., the potential of fixation as a means toward real release from the time belief, he was too honest to deny more than he had to in order to keep his fear in tolerable bounds, as he perceived the situation. Therefore, he emphasized that the point in development at which the mind becomes fixated is more real to itself than the external reality with which the mind disagrees. This again could have been a powerful release mechanism, had Freud not decided to incorporate it into a strong defense system because he perceived fixation only as an attack against reality.

Third, although Freud interpreted fixations as irrevocable danger points to which the mind can always regress, the concept can also be interpreted as an irrevocable call or pull to Sanity that the mind cannot lose. Freud saw return to a fixation point as a threat to maturity because he did not understand prodigality, or lavishness, which has come to mean the careless outlay of resources without restraint. He therefore merely interpreted fixation as squandering. Actually, the outlay of resources without restraint can also be done with great care, as in the acts of parenting and philanthropy. This confusion between careful and careless lavishness led Freud to confuse the escape from care, as in care-less lavishness, with something that individuals strongly desire. In fact, he even went so far as to equate it quite literally with desire, namely, in his mind, the desire to remain fixated in childhood, and thus escape from the cares of adulthood. Therefore throughout his thought system the “threat” of fixation as regression remained, and could never be completely eliminated by any living human being anywhere in his world. Essentially this was the basis of his pessimism, personally as well as theoretically.

Freud tried every means his very inventive mind could devise to set up a form of therapy that could enable the mind to escape from fixation forever, even though he knew this was impossible. The knowing plagued his belief in his own thought system at every turn, because he was both an honest person and a healer. He was therefore only partially insane at the perceptual level, and was unable to relinquish the hope of release even though he could not cope with it.

The reason for this amount of detail on Freud’s process is because each person’s mind is in a similar dilemma. Each person in their creation by the Divine became eternally fixated on, or set in, the Divine, and the Pull of this Fixation is so strong that It can never be overcome. The reason is perfectly clear. The Fixation is on a level that is so “high,” to use symbolic spatial language, that it cannot be surmounted. You are always being pulled to your original Fixation Point in your Creator because you belong in the Divine, in your Home in the Realm of Heaven.

Do you really believe you can make a voice that can drown out the Voice of the Divine? Do you really believe you can devise a thought system that can separate you from the Divine more than temporarily? Do you really believe you can plan for your Safety and Joy better than your Creator?

You need be neither careful nor careless. You need only to cast all your cares upon the Divine because It cares for you. You are Its Care because It loves you. Its Voice reminds you always that all Hope is yours because of Its Care. You cannot choose to be without or outside of Its Care, because that is not Its Will. But you can choose to accept this Care, and use Its infinite Power for all those created by It.

There have been many healers who have sought to do this but did not first allow themselves to be healed. They thus became unhealed healers, a contradiction in their function. They have not moved mountains by their faith because their faith was not yet whole. Some of them have healed the sick at times, but they have not raised the dead. Unless the healer is themself healed, they cannot wholly believe that miracles transcend every law of time and space and are therefore free of all levels and orders of magnitude of difficulty. They have not yet learned that every mind that the Divine created is equally worthy of being healed because the Divine created it whole.

You are asked merely to return to the Divine the mind as it was created, i.e., to its true Set or Fixation Point, knowing that this lavish giving will heal you. True Sanity is Wholeness. And the Sanity of your sisters and brothers is your Sanity. Why should you listen to the endless senseless calls or pulls that you think are made upon you, when you know the Voice of the Divine Itself is in you? The Divine commended Its Spirit to you, and asks that you commend your spirit to It. Spirit wills to keep you in perfect Peace because you are of one mind and spirit with It. Seeking to exclude you from the Atonement, an impossibility, is the ego’s last-ditch defense of its own existence. It reflects both the ego’s need to divide and separate, and your willingness to side with its separateness. This willingness means that you do not yet wholly want to be healed.

But the time is now. You have not been asked to work out the Plan of Awakening yourself, because, as was stated before, the Remedy is not of you and could not be of you. The Divine Itself gave you the perfect Correction for everything you have brought forth that is not in accord with Its Holy Will. I am making Its Plan perfectly clear and perfectly explicit to you, and am also telling you of your part in It and how urgent it is that you fulfill it. Time can always be used for delay as well as release, but delay need not be.

The Divine experiences at a depth unfathomable to the separated ones the “sacrifice” of Its Children who believe they are lost to their Creator. While it may seem that there will always be “one more thing” for you to learn to fulfill your part in Atonement, the one thing you must learn in this regard is merely that there is not one more thing, and that you are not the “one thing” that isn’t included in Atonement or in the Divine Family. Such a one doesn’t exist. You and your sisters and brothers are both One and at One (atoned), and that is set forever. If you will learn this now, you will be willing or deciding in accord with your own final Evaluation, or Last Judgment, which is really only the sacred Reminder of the Inevitability of you being included in Atonement. This is what “healer, heal thyself” really means.

You have frequently observed for yourself that allowing yourself to be healed instead of focusing on the healing you believe others need can be hard to do. However, in shifting your focus away from your own need for healing you dissociate yourself from your own awareness, being so clear about the remedy for others. And because you and your sisters and brothers are One, dissociating from yourself means dissociating from others. I remind you again that to whatever extent you separate yourself from others, even if this is through separating from yourself and your own healing, you are separating yourself from me.

The Plan of Atonement is a collaborative venture. That is why I return your own ideas to you, cleared of distortion, so that you can share them with your sisters and brothers and thus help each other to help me. In this collaboration another idea bears reminding. Whenever you are not wholly joyous, it is because you have reacted with a lack of Love to some mind, some brother or sister, that the Divine created. Unconsciously believing this reaction as sin, you become defensive because you expect attack. The decision to react in that way, however, is yours, and can therefore be undone. It cannot be undone by “repentance” because that implies guilt. If you allow yourself to feel guilty, you will reinforce the error rather than allowing it to be undone for you.

Decisions, including the decision to allow mistakes to be undone for you, cannot be difficult. This is obvious if you realize that you must already have decided not to be wholly joyous if that is what you are feeling. Therefore, the first true step in the undoing is to recognize that you actively decided wrongly, but can just as actively decide otherwise. Be very firm with yourself in keeping focused on this without guilt, and keep yourself fully aware of the fact that the undoing process, which does not come from you, is nevertheless within you because the Divine placed it there. Your part is merely to return your thinking to the point at which the original error was made, and give it over to the Atonement in Peace. This returning point is the true Set or Fixation Point. At this point say to yourself the following, as sincerely as you can, remembering that the Holy Spirit will respond fully to your slightest invitation:

I must have decided wrongly because I feel other than wholly joyful and at peace.

I made this decision myself, and I can also decide otherwise.

I will to decide otherwise, because I want to be wholly joyful and at peace.

I have no call or pull to feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo all the consequences of my wrong decision if I will allow this.

I will to allow this by letting Holy Spirit decide for the Divine for me.