ACIM Chapter 4, VI.The Rewards of God, P 3,4,5

ACIM VI. P The Rewards of God, P 3, 4, 5. You have very little trust in me as yet, but it will increase as you turn more and more often to me instead of to your ego for guidance.

VI. The Rewards of God, P 3

3 You have very little trust in me as yet, but it will increase as you turn more and more often to me instead of to your ego for guidance. The results will convince you increasingly that this choice is the only sane one you can make. No one who learns from experience that one choice brings peace and joy while another brings chaos and disaster needs additional convincing. Learning through rewards is more effective than learning through pain, because pain is an ego illusion, and can never induce more than a temporary effect. The rewards of God, however, are immediately recognized as eternal. Since this recognition is made by you and not the ego, the recognition itself establishes that you and your ego cannot be identical. You may believe that you have already accepted this difference, but you are by no means convinced as yet. The fact that you believe you must escape from the ego shows this; but you cannot escape from the ego by humbling it or controlling it or punishing it.

Who Am I?

Who am I? I have words to answer that. I am God’s holy Son, His only creation. And I have concepts I learned from A Course in Miracles, ideas that I can relate to. But that does not mean I really know who I am. The more I learn, the more I realize that the truth is beyond my understanding while my mind is split. What I can do is form the habit of turning to the Holy Spirit for answers. I choose Him instead of the ego mind. In this way, I will systematically undo my belief in the ego and what I am will be revealed to me.

For the most part, I do this now. I place my awareness on the Holy Spirit often during the day. And sometimes I remember doing it even in my sleep. When I am afraid, guilty, unhappy, or in pain, I know I have given my attention to the ego. I don’t fight the ego anymore, nor try to control it. I just ask the Holy Spirit how He wants me to see this.

For instance, sometimes I think about my son being in pain, and fear for him will flood my mind. I don’t try to stop thinking about it. I don’t try to beat the thought back with positive affirmations. In fact, I don’t try to control those thoughts at all. I just look, without guilt, at my fear thoughts and ask the Holy Spirit to heal my mind.

I Still Have Moments

There are still moments when I get confused and live for a bit in the ego mind. But even then, I remember to ask for help. And I continue to do so until I have looked away from the ego and to Spirit. Those moments show me where I still hold onto an ego belief such as guilt or fear. When I get caught up in one, like fear for my child’s safety, it can be like watching a train wreck. It’s awful, and I know I should look away, but my mind is just mesmerized. But as Jesus says here, choosing the Holy Spirit often makes it easier to choose His guidance again.

Guilt can still hook me, but that one is easier now for me to release. I used to remember something I did in the past and feel my gut clench in regret. Now I truly understand that guilt is never helpful. It only mires me more deeply into the ego, so I learned to ask for help when that happened. Eventually, I realized that guilt itself must not be real.

Logic Assures Me I Cannot Be Guilty

If guilt were real, it could not so easily be undone. Or undone at all, even when it seemed hard to let it go. It is just another idea that is part of the separation thought. If it is not real, I can’t be guilty no matter what I seemed to do. I am grateful to myself for allowing this mind healing, and I am so grateful for the Holy Spirit’s guidance.

VI. The Rewards of God, P 4

4 The ego and the spirit do not know each other. The separated mind cannot maintain the separation except by dissociating. Having done this, it denies all truly natural impulses, not because the ego is a separate thing, but because you want to believe that you are. The ego is a device for maintaining this belief, but it is still only your decision to use the device that enables it to endure.

I didn’t realize that the ego and the spirit do not know each other. But now I see that this must be true. The ego is the device we use to convince ourselves that we are not spirit. So of course, the two selves cannot meet. As I write this, I wonder how I am supposed to get out of this. If ego and spirit do not know each other, how does this work? But then Jesus also said that I am not the ego, that the ego is just something I use. So I can choose not to use the ego device anymore. If I stop using the ego, it will disappear.

I am going to think about how this works. First, I am spirit. Then, I wanted to experience myself as if I were something else. So I made a device that would allow this. It would represent that other thing. But for it to work, I must completely immerse myself in the other and forgot what I am. I would have to dissociate completely from my true self to have the experience of not being spirit. And so here I am.

I Thought I Wanted This Experience

Through the ego, I can feel as if I am separate. And with separation comes all the drama I thought I wanted. I have the experience I thought I wanted to have. And I will continue to have it as long as I want it. Because the ego is something I made, it is not something I must keep. I can choose to stop using it anytime I want to. I let myself notice that the ego experience is not making me happy. So I begin to desire something else, and the memory of that something comes back to me.

I never planned to stay in this experience forever, so a failsafe is built into it. There is the Memory of God, Who will guide me out of the ego when I am ready. He will help me undo the ego when I am through with it. My experience has been that I want to wake up, and then I want to stay in the story, then I want to wake up, then I go back to the story. But each time I undo a bit of the ego, my memory of spirit gets stronger in my mind. As this happens, the belief in the ego gets weaker since the ego depends on dissociation to exist.

It Was a Choice, but Not a Sin

The ego is not a bad thing that I did. It was not a sin, and I am not guilty of it. Those feelings are just part of the separation thought. And guilt for having done it keeps me mired in the ego. This is because if I feel guilty, I cannot know my Innocence. As I choose against the ego, the feelings of guilt and fear disappear with it. I am having this experience of my own will. I am not being punished, even though it sometimes feels like I am. Because this experience is my own choice, I must choose differently if I want to stop having it. The truth will not be forced on me. But I choose to remember the truth. I am learning to value the joy and the peace that occurs naturally when I turn from ego to God.

VI. The Rewards of God, P 5

5 How can you teach someone the value of something he has deliberately thrown away? He must have thrown it away because he did not value it. You can only show him how miserable he is without it, and slowly bring it nearer so he can learn how his misery lessens as he approaches it. This teaches him to associate his misery with its absence, and the opposite of misery with its presence. It gradually becomes desirable as he changes his mind about its worth. I am teaching you to associate misery with the ego and joy with the spirit. You have taught yourself the opposite. You are still free to choose, but can you really want the rewards of the ego in the presence of the rewards of God?

I Got It All Backwards

I had taught myself to value what the ego offers. To believe that the ego brings me happiness. At the same time, I associated misery with spirit. It was as if letting go of ego was dangerous and accepting spirit required sacrifice. How could this be true? So, I considered some specific instances and looked at them to see if Jesus was right. For instance, I thought about something I had said recently that I later came to regret. When I thought about my words, I felt foolish and wished I could take them back. It wasn’t really a big deal, but I was concerned about how others would see me.

As I thought about this, I realized that I was being foolish. And it was causing me to lose my peace. I asked the Holy Spirit to heal my mind of that unhelpful belief. Only I noticed that my heart wasn’t in it. As I wondered about this, I realized that I was afraid to give up that belief.

Here is how my thinking went . What if I let my mind be healed of the belief that it matters what others think about me? If so, I might say and do inappropriate things that make me look bad to other people. It is very circular thinking and typical of the ego.

Circular Thinking

It reminds me of my fear of heights. I had a very scary experience of being up high. When I wanted to ask that my fear be healed, I had this same problem. I was afraid not to be afraid of heights. I believed that without fear to protect me, I would do something foolish. What if I wound up right back in that same situation? This possibility scared me. Isn’t the ego crazy in its logic? So, in both instances, I was looking to the ego to protect me. I saw the ego as making me happy and spirit, with its healed mind as a source of potential misery. Good grief!

There is a reason I am not totally buying into this circular reasoning. It is that I have asked in faith for healing. I couldn’t imagine and let go of my defenses long enough to accept it. In so doing, I have learned to trust spirit and to value what spirit offers. And I have learned to distrust ego and to see that what ego offers is not of value to me. I still fall for the ego insanity sometimes, but I don’t cling to it anymore. It is a thought I believe until I notice that I am no longer interested. Then I let it go.

Peace of God

I have done this long enough to discover that the peace of God is the only thing worth having. So, now when I lose that peace, I immediately choose again. I see that peace is what I want, and anything that interferes with peace is something to be let go. The time between lack of peace and peace has gotten shorter and shorter. I can go a long time without losing my peace now. And rarely do I take any time at all to regain it when I do lose it.

Here is a favorite quote from Chapter 8 of the Text, it says:

Yet you are not asked to dispel your hallucinations alone. You are merely asked to evaluate them in terms of their results to you. If you do not want them on the basis of loss of peace, they will be removed from your mind for you.

Sometimes when I read this, I feel such a sense of relief and gratitude that I cry. I am not alone. I am not asked to do what I clearly cannot do. To be free, I only need to want freedom. I don’t have to untangle my mind or stop behaving in a certain way. I didn’t have to figure out how to want to be healed while I still believed healing would hurt me. In fact, I only have to see that my thoughts have cost me my peace of mind. I know I want peace more than I want the thoughts. They will then be removed for me. A little willingness and a little trust is all that is required of me. Thank You, God.  

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