You Don’t Have to Establish Your Worth

You think your universe is impressive because it’s all you can remember. You think it’s big, but it’s not. What you’ve done is make yourself look and feel small, like one little piece of the puzzle. You’re like a child with little toys you don’t want to give up. Yet what you really are cannot even be contained by your universe.

The ego says, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” The Holy Spirit knows that God only gives, and never takes away.

The ego reverently proclaims death is real. The Holy Spirit says nobody is dead, and no one can ever really die.

The ego says you’re a body. The Holy Spirit says you are not a body; you are not a person, you are not a human being—you are like Him.

The ego says others are guilty, because it secretly believes you’re guilty. But the Holy Spirit says everyone is completely innocent, because He knows that you’re completely innocent.

If you walk with the Holy Spirit then it means you think like Him. Let’s talk about how He thinks. In order to do so, we’ll compare the Holy Spirit’s attitude to your ego’s frail ideas.

The ego believes in opposites—things like pleasure and pain. The Holy Spirit says there are no opposites, and that your true joy can have no counterpart.

The ego wants and believes in complexity. The truth of the Holy Spirit is simple—not necessarily easy for you to accept, but simple.

The ego would say the angry person you see outside of yourself is a threat that needs to be taken care of in some way. The Holy Spirit sees the angry person as a suffering person who is calling out for help.

The ego assigns specific, different identities. Both its “love” and hate are directed at specific individuals. The Holy Spirit thinks of everyone as being the same and totally abstract. Thus His Love is non-specific and all-encompassing.

The ego says you are different than others. The Holy Spirit says that in reality, everyone is the same—and you must feel that way in order to see like Him.

The ego says your thoughts are quite important. The Holy Spirit knows that only the thoughts you think with God are real, and nothing else matters.

The ego attempts to convince you that you have a personal story that is obviously real. The attitude of the Holy Spirit though, can best be summed up in just three words:  It never happened.

The ego judges something as good or bad; the Holy Spirit says it is neither, because it isn’t true. Thus all things on the level of form are equally untrue because of their illusory nature.

The Holy Spirit knows that the images you see are just that—images and nothing more. By taking Him as your Teacher, you can learn to experience this through the power of His forgiveness, which is your power when you join with Him and think like Him.

The ego devises clever reasons why you should continue to listen to its selfish counsel, but the Holy Spirit is certain that at some point you’ll turn to Him, and ultimately go home with Him—as the law of forgiveness and the laws of the mind dictate. For as the Course teaches, if you really learn how to forgive and actually do it, your return to God must  eventually follow.

The Holy Spirit knows that with the exception of forgiveness, it doesn’t matter what you do. To the ego, this is heresy. But the Holy Spirit wants you to be healed. The ego wants what  you do to be important. As a way of intruding on your spirituality and delaying the truth, it tries to make what you do in that area important and special. Yet to the Holy Spirit, what you do for Him, or for Jesus or for God are not important. How can anything that occurs in an illusion be important if you actually understand it’s not real? 

Only forgiveness and your healing matter. True, that kind of a teaching may not be the basis for a popular religion that takes over the world and tells everybody else how they should be living their lives—but it is definitely the truth.

While the Holy Spirit teaches you of your true strength, the ego tells you and your fellow macho men, and all the liberated women, that they have to be tough and learn how to kick ass in the rat race or someone else will get their cheese. All this does is prove how fearful they are, because if they weren’t afraid then they wouldn’t have to be tough. They’re really calling out for love without knowing it.

It’s not important that you do anything. You don’t have to establish your worth with us or with God. That was done in God’s Mind when He created you. Nothing else that appears to happen in the universe of perception can change that—except in your mistaken dreams.