ACIM Chapter 8. II.The Difference Between Imprisonment and Freedom, 1, 2. There is a rationale for choice. Only one Teacher knows what your reality is.
ACIM Chapter 8. II.The Difference Between Imprisonment and Freedom, 1, 2
II. The Difference Between Imprisonment and Freedom
1 There is a rationale for choice. Only one Teacher knows what your reality is. If learning to remove the obstacles to that knowledge is the purpose of the curriculum, you must learn it of Him. The ego does not know what it is trying to teach. It is trying to teach you what you are without knowing what you are. It is expert only in confusion. It does not understand anything else. As a teacher, then, the ego is totally confused and totally confusing. Even if you could disregard the Holy Spirit entirely, which is impossible, you could still learn nothing from the ego, because the ego knows nothing.
Every time I think that I know what to do, so I don’t check in with my Inner Guide, I have chosen to ask my ego. It took me a while to figure that out. It was as if there was a third choice, as if there was the Holy Spirit, ego, and me. That was a mistake. There is only ego and Spirit and ego does not actually exist. Before ACIM, I was almost completely identified with ego. I did believe in my soul, but I believed that I (ego/body) had a soul, not that I was my soul. Now, I am more identified with spirit and so listen more to the Holy Spirit than to ego.
The Holy Spirit is the Voice for God, the memory of all that is true.
The ego is confused and confusing and knows nothing. When I ask ego, I become confused as well, and the more I turn to ego, the more I become identified with ego. In my confusion, I think I am ego, or to put it more clearly, I think that I am the one who is this body and this personality and that this is my life. I think I live and move and have my being in this body and this world.
Not only does this take me further away from my true self and my real life in God, it leaves me uncertain of everything and doubtful of my very existence. I cannot be happy if I choose to learn from the ego because the ego doesn’t know anything about happiness. It only knows to offer me endless choices without regard to the actual outcome.
The ego will say that I am unhappy because I am lonely.
I make arrangements to be with people. Then the ego says I am unhappy because these are the wrong people. In the next breath, it says I am unhappy because I am with people, and I prefer to be alone. All its advice is like this. The more attention I pay to the ego chatter in my mind, the more obvious it becomes that there is nothing but contradictory and unhelpful information there.
If I am lonely and I ask the Holy Spirit what He wants me to know about this, I will be given thoughts that are helpful. I will remember, or be directed to something that helps me to remember, that loneliness is impossible because I am part of everything. How could I be lonely? Remembering this, I ask the Holy Spirit to correct my perception because, obviously, I am thinking with the wrong mind.
As my perception is corrected, my mind is healed of the belief in loneliness and the feeling of loneliness is gone. There is no confusion in this, no contradiction. The truth of the matter is revealed and with my acceptance of it, the problem is resolved for me. This is a very different outcome. The ego wants me to try this and try that and it wants the trying to be endless so that I never get around to questioning the legitimacy of the ego as teacher. The Holy Spirit wants only to heal so that I will be happy.
II. The Difference Between Imprisonment and Freedom P 2
2 Is there any possible reason for choosing a teacher such as this? Does the total disregard of anything it teaches make anything but sense? Is this the teacher to whom a Son of God should turn to find himself? The ego has never given you a sensible answer to anything. Simply on the grounds of your own experience with its teaching, should not this alone disqualify it as your future teacher? Yet the ego has done more harm to your learning than this alone. Learning is joyful if it leads you along your natural path, and facilitates the development of what you have. When you are taught against your nature, however, you will lose by your learning because your learning will imprison you. Your will is in your nature, and therefore cannot go against it.
I am absolutely convinced that the ego misleads me. It takes me down the path of confusion, fear, guilt, doubt, pain, and suffering, and finally, it kills me. I know this with a certainty. When I am unhappy, I know where that came from. I must be listening to the ego again. If I feel sad, I am listening to my ego. I may not be able to pick out the exact thought, but I know it is ego.
If I am angry with someone, I don’t look for justification in his behavior.
I simply know I am listening to my ego, and I ask the Holy Spirit to correct my perception. If I am worried about something that might happen, I don’t turn to the ego for a plan. I remember that the peace of God is all I want. The peace of God is mine as long as I don’t have any other goals. I don’t need other goals; I rest in the certainty that all else will be added to me according to my needs.
If the body is sick, I don’t wonder what caused it. I don’t wonder what outside source was the cause because I know that the cause is in my mind. So, I ask the Holy Spirit what He wants me to know about this. I open my mind to Him and accept the Atonement. All that is not joy and peace in my life is the result of listening to the wrong voice, and unhappiness will be the inevitable result. I also know the solution, which is the Holy Spirit.
Now Jesus is telling me that as destructive as it is to listen to ego, as bad as it makes me feel, that is not the worst of it. Believing what I hear from the ego imprisons my will. The ego calls this free will, this ability to choose the voice I will believe, but the choice itself prevents free will. As I follow ego, I imprison my will within its insane objectives, and I need help to free myself. That is the reason the Holy Spirit was placed in my mind, alongside the ego, exactly where I need it, not to change me but to free me to be my Self.
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