ACIM 5. IV. Teaching and Healing, P 2, 3. What the ego makes it keeps to itself, and so it is without strength. Its existence is unshared.
ACIM Chapter 5. IV. Teaching and Healing, P 2, 3
IV. Teaching and Healing, P 2
2 What the ego makes it keeps to itself, and so it is without strength. Its existence is unshared. It does not die; it was merely never born. Physical birth is not a beginning; it is a continuing. Everything that continues has already been born. It will increase as you are willing to return the unhealed part of your mind to the higher part, returning it undivided to creation. I have come to give you the foundation, so your own thoughts can make you really free. You have carried the burden of unshared ideas that are too weak to increase, but having made them you did not realize how to undo them. You cannot cancel out your past errors alone. They will not disappear from your mind without the Atonement, a remedy not of your making. The Atonement must be understood as a pure act of sharing. That is what I meant when I said it is possible even in this world to listen to one Voice. If you are part of God and the Sonship is one, you cannot be limited to the self the ego sees.
Birth
Jesus tells us that physical birth is not a beginning but a continuing. We have already been born. Birth into the world as physical form is an act of separation and therefore weakens us since it is not shared. We strengthen as we rejoin the Whole. All that I do here is for the purpose of returning my whole mind to God. This is what A Course in Miracles is helping me to do. It is my purpose.
Ego Is Unshared
The ego’s existence is not shared, so it is without strength. What does this mean? We all have an ego, so the ego is shared, right? That was my first thought, but then, I realized that we each have our own version of ego. How I express my ego is different than how others do so. Yes, some things are similar but never exactly the same. And there is a strong tendency to be secretive with our ego thoughts.
I share more freely than some people do, but not completely. After all, I have the face I show others and the face I believe about myself. There is even the face that I hide even from myself. It shows itself sometimes, and I am surprised and often dismayed by what I discover. So, Ok, I get it. Our secrets are not shared. And Jesus says this robs the ego of its strength. Suddenly I understand something. The strength of God is in Its Totality. God shares all of Itself with All. In so doing, God is increased, not decreased.
Sharing is what we fail to do in ego thinking and what we must do in Reality. The Holy Spirit uses what we made to undo what we made, so I use my life to practice sharing. For instance, right now, I am asking the Holy Spirit what it is that I should know about this and how I should share it. Then I share what I am given. I share it in words, but as I receive and give what I receive, my mind is healed, so I share that healing as well.
Ego Doesn’t Understand Sharing
This happens as an effect of my healing. It is not a choice as the ego sees choice. Left to the ego, it might not want to share. The ego believes to share is to lose. At the least, it would want to decide who to share with. But what is of the Holy Spirit is shared. ¹⁰The Holy Spirit communicates only what each one can give to all. (ACIM, T-6.V-A.5:10) The higher mind thinks according to the laws spirit obeys, and therefore honors only the laws of God. ⁷To spirit getting is meaningless and giving is all. (ACIM, T-5.I.1:6-7)
Each thought that is love is shared equally with everyone. It might be this simple; someone I know is behaving selfishly, and I know that this behavior is meaningless. I just know this one for who she is. That is a loving thought that is shared by the entire mind. There are times when, in the same situation, I see the person behaving selfishly, and I judge her. This is not a loving thought; it is a meaningless thought. It is not shared.
We Need the Atonement
Though untrue (unloving) thoughts are meaningless, they do keep us in the ego world. The way we wake up from our dream of separation is to undo these errors. This is the second thing I found especially helpful in this paragraph. We cannot cancel out these errors on our own. We need the Atonement for that. The Atonement is the undoing of the ego. It is the plan that Jesus used to awaken and is how he helps us do what he did. In another place in the Course, he says he is the Atonement.
So here is what seems very clear to me. What the ego makes, it does not share, and so, being divided, it is weak. I am not sharing all the time now because my meaningless thoughts are too weak to be shared. I can share, though, because I do not have only meaningless thoughts; I also have loving, true thoughts. The error thoughts can be undone for me through the Atonement, and this returns my unhealed mind to the higher part of the mind, and creation is undivided. To accept the Atonement for my error thoughts, I only need to recognize them as errors and desire that they be undone. I remember that I cannot undo them on my own; that is what the Atonement is for.
The Sonship Is One
Another thought that occurs to me is that Jesus points out two things at the end of the paragraph. I am part of God. And the Sonship is one. I know this is not the first time he has told us this, but now he also explains that this means I cannot be limited to the self the ego sees. Of course, I cannot be only the little personal self the ego knows as me. I am part of God and share the Sonship with my brothers, so I also know myself as That.
Right now, I hear the ego voice and the Voice for God, but because I am part of God and the Sonship, I can learn to hear only the Voice for God. I can do that even here! It might seem hard to believe at times, especially when our minds are befuddled by ego thinking. But do you think that Jesus would say that if it were not true? No. Me neither.
IV. Teaching and Healing, P 3
3 Every loving thought held in any part of the Sonship belongs to every part. It is shared because it is loving. Sharing is God’s way of creating, and also yours. The ego can keep you in exile from the Kingdom, but in the Kingdom itself it has no power. Ideas of the spirit do not leave the mind that thinks them, nor can they conflict with each other. However, ideas of the ego can conflict because they occur at different levels and also include opposite thoughts at the same level. It is impossible to share opposing thoughts. You can share only the thoughts that are of God and that He keeps for you. And of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The rest remains with you until the Holy Spirit has reinterpreted them in the light of the Kingdom, making them, too, worthy of being shared. When they have been sufficiently purified He lets you give them away. The decision to share them is their purification.
Sharing
Sharing is creating. This is an idea so different than anything we understand of creation here that it is hard to hold onto. Well, it is not just creation that we misunderstand, but sharing as well. And our misunderstanding of sharing and creating makes it impossible to see the connection between the two.
Here, sharing is a sacrifice. I share my dessert with you, and I have less dessert for me. But if I like you enough, I make that sacrifice. And nothing is created in that scenario. In fact, there is loss. In sharing, I lost some of my dessert and the end result is that in eating and enjoying it, the dessert is lost altogether. Where is the creation?
In reality, sharing is creating. In the real world, everything is a symbol of an idea. Ideas leave not their source, so sharing them does not diminish them. I can give a thought away, and it is still in my mind. In fact, if it is accepted when I give it away, it becomes stronger in my mind. So, if I understand and accept that desserts are symbols of an idea in my mind, I could never believe that sharing them would cause loss. The idea would simply renew itself, and I would have another dessert.
Creating as God Creates
God created me by sharing Himself. He did not diminish Himself in the process. I share myself with others. Thinking from my right mind, I feel renewed and elevated through this sharing. I only gain from the experience. But when I am thinking with my wrong mind, I feel tired and imposed upon. I feel that I have lost my time and energy in this sharing.
When I see the effects of this false sharing, I know that I am trying to share through ego, and this is not real sharing. I give my thoughts to the Holy Spirit, and I ask Him to purify them because I have become confused. Because I want to share my thoughts, really share, not this egocentric “giving,” my desire allows the Holy Spirit to purify my thoughts, and I return to true sharing/creating.
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