The Answer to Life

Something you should always try to remember is that by keeping you looking outside of yourself, the ego prevents you from really looking at its thought system. The ego doesn’t want you to look at it. The ego is afraid of your power to choose against it. If you’re looking at it, then you’re no longer in your wrong mind, but looking at things with your right mind. You’re no longer an effect instead of a cause.

Look at the ego without judgment or fear. If it’s not real, then it’s not something to fear. So what is the nature of the ego that you carry in your unconscious, and that it doesn’t want you to look at?

Its nature is hatred. Even if you see the hatred, which most people rationalize or gloss over, you still don’t realize that it’s really self hatred. So you see people in the world who hate, attack, and even kill each other, and who would hurt or even kill you if they got the chance. The variations of this are endless. It can be as simple as being made uncomfortable by people you disagree with, personally or politically. It can show up in the form of people at work who try to make your life difficult, or relatives who don’t encourage you. Or there can be situations that are more physically threatening.

But always it’s a case where you took the hatred you have for yourself—for throwing away Heaven—and made up a world where the reasons for this hatred, your guilt and lack of peace could now be seen outside yourself, almost always connected in some way to other beings.

The universe you see is symbolic of the one thought that you have separated yourself from God—presented in many forms—and that you feel secretly terrified and enormously guilty over the separation. On the level of the world of bodies, the thought of separation has been projected, seemingly outside yourself. Now the substitute causes of sin, the projected responsibility for guilt and the many imagined reasons for fear of any kind can be found somewhere outside of you—and of course, people see everything as being outside of them.

Now the guilt is not in you. It’s not you who took the peace of God away from you, it’s them. Of course nobody can really take the peace of God away from you except by your own decision.

The people who give you trouble—you want them to be there, without exception. They’re your scapegoats. Always. You need it. That’s how you trick yourself into thinking you’re not guilty, or at least not terribly guilty, so you can cope most of the time—for the guilt is somewhere else. As long as you’re stuck in the maze, you can’t see that the whole thing is unnecessary, because you were never really guilty in the first place. The whole maze is an illusion to defend yourself against an illusion.

You have to learn how to turn the table on the ego. The only way to forgive what is within is to forgive what seems to be without. You will never be able to find your way out and experience your own innocence and Divinity until you learn how to forgive everything you see around you. Until then, real escape is impossible. You think people who want to escape the world are weak; actually, they have the right idea. They just don’t know how to do it right.

Yes, you have some seemingly good experiences mixed in that are designed to mask things, but that’s just duality. On this level, the duality that is perceived in the universe simply reflects the duality of your own split mind, symbolized as opposites and counterparts. So you have good and bad, life and death, hot and cold, north and south, east and west, inward and outward, up and down, dark and light, left and right, sickness and health, rich and poor, yin and yang, love and hate, wet and dry, male and female, hard and soft, near and far, and a thousand other polarities and dual forces—all of which have nothing to do with God, Who is perfectly whole and complete and would never create anything that isn’t. 

All splits are merely symbolic of division and separation, and are designed to keep you chasing after the supposedly good things, so you won’t ever find out that the good and the bad are equally untrue. That way your attention is continuously fixed on the ego’s tricks instead of the Holy Spirit’s answer.

The ego has tricked you into fighting a battle that is continuously seen outside yourself, where the thought system of sin, guilt, and fear is projected in a way that is certain to make sure this battle is always fought where the answer isn’t. Your job now is to stop fighting the battle where you can’t win, and turn to the decision-making power of your mind, where the Holy Spirit is. Remember, the Holy Spirit is not in the world. He is in your mind. That’s where both the problem and the answer are. 

Right now, when things go bad instead of good, that’s when you really experience your unconscious guilt. You experience it as actual physical pain, or psychological suffering, or both. This makes the separation seem real to you. What you have appropriately dubbed the kingdom of suckdom is merely your own unconscious guilt coming to the surface, causing you to suffer. Yet, as we have already said, the Course teaches that the guiltless mind cannot  suffer. What remains for you then is to let the Holy Spirit teach you of your absolute guiltlessness.

Indeed, if it weren’t for the Holy Spirit, your situation would be hopeless. Your hatred and guilt would remain forever trapped in the depths of your unconscious. Happily for you, the Holy Spirit is no fool—and the ego is no match for Him. When you join with the Holy Spirit’s forgiveness, the ego is no match for you either. On some level, the ego knows this—and is always in fear for its purported existence. So are you, but only when you identify with your ego instead of the Holy Spirit.