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Chapter 4: Discerning the Ego’s Terrain

8. The Rewards of Becoming Mentally Healthy and Fit

It bears emphasizing that correcting perception is merely a temporary expedient. It is necessary only because misperception is a block to Knowledge, while accurate perception is a stepping-stone toward It. The whole value of right perception rests in the inevitable assessment that it necessarily entails that it is ultimately unnecessary. This removes the block to Knowledge entirely.

You may ask how perception being unnecessary is possible as long as you appear to be living in this world. This is a sensible question, and has a sensible answer. But care must be taken that the question is really understood. To do so, consider who or what is the you who appears to be living in this world. While this counterquestion may be challenging, if you will keep an open mind you may decide that considering who or what the you is who appears to be living in this world is not engaging in a wrong use of denial. To assist with the question it might help some to bring to mind a few loosely-related concepts people contemplate at times that do not appear to be challenging, such as the idea of invisibility, the concept of different levels or orders of reality, and the notion of varying densities or intensities of energy. While it may be agreed that these ideas are usually used merely as teaching aids, they may be worth employing in a discussion of living in a perceptible world.

Immortality is a constant State. It is as true now as It ever was or will be, because It implies no change at all. It is not a continuum, and cannot really be understood by comparing It with any opposite, even if It is often brought up as a counterpoint to the idea of mortality. Knowledge in Itself never involves comparisons. That is Its essential difference from everything else the mind can grasp.

While Knowledge is always potent, It is never dangerous. However, even the idea of “a little knowledge” is perceived as a dangerous thing to the ego. The ego vaguely senses threat from Knowledge, since Knowledge is forever inaccessible to it. Being unable to realize that “a little knowledge” is a meaningless phrase because “all” and “a little” in the Realm of Knowledge are the same, the ego decides that since “all” of anything is impossible, which is true for the ego, the fear does not lie in this idea. “A little,” on the other hand, is a scarcity concept, and this the ego understands well. Regarding “all” as impossible, “a little” knowledge is perceived as the real threat.

The essential thing to remember always is that the ego does not recognize the real source of its perceived threats. And if you associate yourself with the ego, you will not perceive the entire situation concerning perception being unnecessary as it really is. Only your allegiance to the ego gives it any power over you. We have considered the ego as if it were a separate thing, acting on its own. This was necessary to persuade you that you cannot dismiss it lightly, and must come to realize how much of your thinking is ego-directed. But we cannot safely leave it at that, or you will regard yourself as necessarily conflicted as long as you are here in the perceptible world, or, more properly, believe that you are here.

The ego is nothing more than a part of your belief about yourself. Your Life in the Realm of Heaven has continued without interruption, and has been and always will be totally unaffected by any attempts to dissociate from It, and therefore from the Truth. The correspondence of repression and dissociation of Truth varies with the individual ego-illusion, but dissociation is always involved in a person believing that they are here in this world of illusions. When I suggested a prayer with the phrase “Here I am, Creator,” the word “here” did not mean “in this perceptible world.” The intention with this phrase is to allow you to consider yourself as a unique Consciousness, capable of direct Communication with the Creator of that Consciousness. It would be well to begin to think of yourself as a very powerful receiving and sending channel for consciousness and creativity, and as such that you are in service to yourself and others.

The great responsibility all Children of the Divine have to each other is something you should always keep in consciousness. It is exactly the same responsibility that you have to me, as I do to you. Whenever you react egotistically toward another, you are throwing away the graciousness of your responsibility and the holy perception it would produce. The reason why the term “holy” can be used here is that as you learn how much you are able to respond and be truly grateful to the whole Divine Family, which includes me, you come as close to Knowledge as perception ever can. The gap then between perception and Knowledge is so small that Knowledge can easily flow across it and dissolve it forever.

You likely have very little real trust in me as yet, as you would, for instance, a dear friend with whom you could trust your life, but it will increase as you turn more and more often to me, and to Spirit, instead of to your ego for guidance. The results will convince you increasingly that your choice in turning to Spirit and to me in your journey of awakening is the only sane one you can make. No one who has learned from experience that one choice brings Peace and Joy while another brings chaos and disaster needs much “conditioning” or training to become healthy and fit. The ego cannot withstand the process of the mind becoming healthy and fit, because the process itself demonstrates that there is another way. Becoming fit through experiencing the rewards it brings has always been the most effective approach to health conditioning. The real reason becoming fit through pain is not the most efficient method is because pain itself is an ego-illusion, and can never induce more than a temporary effect.

The rewards of your mind becoming healthy and fit enough to attune with the Divine are immediately recognized by your mind as eternal. Since this recognition is made by your right mind and not your ego, the recognition itself establishes that you and your ego cannot be the same, just as the right mind and the wrong mind or the mind astray must be different. You may believe that you have already accepted the difference, but it is likely that you are by no means convinced as yet on the deeper level of consciousness – the unconscious – where miracles become reflexive responses. Any preoccupation with the idea of escaping from the ego demonstrates that the ego is still equated with.

You cannot resolve the issue of the ego by humiliating it, or controlling it, or punishing it, or engaging it in any way. The ego and the spirit do not and cannot know each other. The separated or split mind cannot maintain the separation except by dissociating from the spirit, from Knowledge, and Truth. Having done this, it utilizes repression against all truly natural impulses, not because the ego is a separate thing, but because your split mind wants to believe that you are. The ego is a device for maintaining this belief, but it is still only your willingness to use the device that enables it to endure. In this sense the ego can become an excuse for experiencing yourself separated and living in a perceptible world, when the ego is really only the effect of that choice the split mind made and continues to make, rather than the cause of it. To then become preoccupied with escaping the ego when it is merely a reflection of a decision is another ploy not to awaken. The solution is to heal the mind through allowing it to become healthy and fit, at which point the ego, and the perceptible world, will dissolve.

My trust in you is greater than yours in me at the moment, but at some point our trust in each other will be equal. Your Mission is very simple. You have chosen and been chosen to live so as to demonstrate that you are not an ego, not to strive to escape from the ego. I repeat that I always choose the Divine’s Channels rightly. The Holy One shares my trust and always approves my Atonement decisions, because my will is always in accord with Its. I have mentioned that I am in charge of the whole Atonement. This is only because I completed my part in It as a human being, and can now complete It with and through other human beings. My chosen receiving and sending Channels ultimately cannot fail because I will lend them my strength as long as theirs is wanting. I will go with you to the Holy One, and through our shared will the Holy One will bridge the little gap between Knowledge and perception, Eternity and the Real World. Your gratitude to each other is the only gift I ask. I will bring this to the Divine for you, knowing that to know your sisters and brothers is to know the Divine.

A little Knowledge is an all-encompassing thing. If you are grateful to each other then you are grateful to the Divine for what It created. Through your gratitude you can come to know each other, and one moment of real Recognition makes everyone your sisters and brothers because they are all of the same Creator. Love does not conquer all things, but it does set all things right. Because together we are the Realm of Heaven, I can lead you to your own creations, which you do not yet remember and therefore do not know. Spirit has kept them safe in Its Knowing while your attention has wandered. What has been dissociated from is still there, for which we can be truly grateful.

Wisdom always dictates that effective therapy, another word for the mind becoming healthy and fit, works through weaker defenses first. Because the correspondence of repression – the ego’s attempt to shut down in your mind anything it regards as a threat – and the false use of dissociation – your ceasing to associate with the things your ego has shut down awareness of, particularly memory of your Self – varies with the individual ego-illusion, for some it may be best to address their repression tendencies first. Others may do well to concentrate more on their dissociative tendencies and not try to deal with repression to begin. Recall that disengagement and distantiation are both weaker forms of dissociation. To work through these first where present, a person should train themself to be alert to any tendency to withdraw from others. Withdrawal is frightening because it is an expression of trauma, and few recognize all the forms it can take. It may help to remember that as you come closer to another, especially to one you would prefer to withdraw from, you do approach me, and as you withdraw from them I become distant to you in your experience.

As has been discussed before, a giant step forward for some will be to engage in a collaborative venture in which the strengths of the collaborators become complementary and their individual challenges are overcome through drawing on their shared strengths. This does not go against the true spirit of meditation at all, but is inherent in it. Meditation is a collaborative venture with the Divine, and an essential part of attunement. It cannot be undertaken successfully by those who disengage themselves from the Divine Family, because in doing so they are disengaging themselves from me and from themselves. The Divine will come to you only as you will share It with your sisters and brothers. Learn first of them, and you will be ready to hear the Divine as you hear them. That is because the Function of Love is One.

How can you teach someone the value of something they have deliberately thrown away? They must have thrown it away because they did not value it. You can only show them how miserable they are without it, and bring it near to them very slowly so they can learn how their misery decreases as they come nearer to it. This conditions them, or makes their minds fit enough, to associate their misery with the thing’s absence, and to associate the opposite of misery with its presence. The thing gradually becomes desirable as they change their mind about its worth.

This Course is training you to associate misery with the ego and Joy with your spirit. You have conditioned yourself the other way around. But a far greater reward will break through any conditioning in the wrong direction, if it is repeatedly offered when the old habit is broken. You are still free to choose. The choice is inevitable when you realize that you can never really want the “rewards” of the ego in the presence of the Rewards of the Divine.