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.
Journal
Two things stand out to me as I read this. One is that 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 and so I share that healing as well.
Another way we share here in the world is through true thoughts. Each thought that is love is shared equally with everyone. It might be this simple; someone at work 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.
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 put into place to help us do what he did. In another place in the Course he says that 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 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.
Another thought that occurs to me is that Jesus points out at the end of the paragraph two things. 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 I 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! Sometimes I find that hard to believe, especially when my mind is befuddled by ego thinking. But do you think that Jesus would say that if it were not true? No. Me neither.