 We continue on today with Chapter 4, The Illusions of the Ego, Introduction. The Bible says that you should go with the brother twice as far as he asks. It certainly does not suggest that you set him back on his journey. Devotion to a brother cannot set you back either. It can lead only to mutual progress. The result of genuine devotion is inspiration, a word which properly understood is the opposite of fatigue. To be fatigued is to be dispirited, but to be inspired is to be in the spirit. To be egocentric is to be dispirited, but to be self-centered in the right sense is to be inspired or in spirit. The truly inspired are enlightened and cannot abide in darkness. You can speak from the spirit or from the ego as you choose. If you speak from spirit, you have chosen to be still and know that I am God. These words are inspired because they reflect knowledge. If you speak from the ego, you are disclaiming knowledge instead of affirming it and are thus dispiriting yourself. Do not embark on useless journeys because they are indeed in vain. The ego may desire them, but spirit cannot embark on them because it is forever unwilling to depart from its foundation. The journey to the cross should be the last, quote, useless journey. Do not dwell upon it, but dismiss it as accomplished. If you can accept it as your own last useless journey, you are also free to join my resurrection. Until you do, so your life is indeed wasted. It merely re-enacts the separation, the loss of power, the futile attempts of the ego at reparation, and finally the crucifixion of the body or death. Such repetitions are endless until they are voluntarily given up. Do not make the pathetic air of, quote, clinging to the old rugged cross. The only message of the crucifixion is that you can overcome the cross. Until then, you are free to crucify yourself as often as you choose. This is not the gospel I intended to offer you. We have another journey to undertake, and if you will read these lessons carefully, they will help prepare you to undertake it. Right teaching and right learning. A good teacher clarifies his own ideas and strengthens them by teaching them. Teacher and pupil are alike in the learning process. They are in the same order of learning, and unless they share their lessons, conviction will be lacking. A good teacher must believe in the ideas he teaches, but he must meet another condition. He must believe in the students to whom he offers the ideas. Many stand guard over their ideas because they want to protect their thought systems as they are, and learning means change. Change is always fearful to the separated because they cannot conceive of it as a move towards healing the separation. They always perceive it as a move toward further separation because the separation was their first experience of change. You believe that if you allow no change to enter into your ego, you will find peace. This profound confusion is possible only if you maintain the same thought system can stand on two foundations. Nothing can reach spirit from the ego, and nothing can reach the ego from spirit. Spirit can neither strengthen the ego nor reduce the conflict within it. The ego is a contradiction. Yourself and God's self are in opposition. They are opposed in source, in direction, and in outcome. They are fundamentally irreconcilable because spirit cannot perceive and the ego cannot know. They are therefore not in communication and can never be in communication. Nevertheless, the ego can learn even though its maker can be misguided. He cannot, however, make the totality, the totally lifeless, out of the life given. Spirit need not be taught, but the ego must be. Learning is ultimately perceived as frightening because it leads to the relinquishment, not the destruction of the ego to the light of spirit. This is the change the ego must fear because it does not share my charity. My lesson was like yours, and because I learned it, I can teach it. I will never attack your ego, but I am trying to teach you how its thought system arose. When I remind you of your true creation, your ego cannot but respond with fear. Teaching and learning are your greatest strengths now because they enable you to change your mind and help others to change theirs. Refusing to change your mind will not prove that the separation has not occurred. The dreamer who doubts the reality of his dream while he is still dreaming is not really healing his split mind. You dream of a separated ego and believe in a world that rests upon it. This is very real to you. You cannot undo it by not changing your mind about it. If you are willing to renounce the role of guardian of your thought system and open it to me, I will correct it very gently and lead you back to God. Every good teacher hopes to give his students so much of his own learning that they will one day no longer need him. This is the one true goal of the teacher. It is impossible to convince the ego of this because it goes against all of its own laws. But remember that laws are set up to protect the continuity of the system in which the lawmaker relieves. It is natural for the ego to try to protect itself once you have made it. But it is not natural for you to want to obey its laws unless you believe them. You cannot make this choice because of the nature of its origin. You can because of the nature of yours. Egos can clash in any situation but spirit cannot clash at all. If you perceive a teacher as merely a larger ego, you will be afraid because to enlarge an ego would be to increase anxiety about separation. I will teach with you and live with you if you will think with me. But my goal will always be to absolve you finally from the need for a teacher. This is the opposite of the ego-oriented teacher's goal. He is concerned with the effect of his ego on other egos and therefore interprets their interaction as a means of ego preservation. I would not be able to devote myself to teaching if I believe this and you will not be a devoted teacher as long as you believe it. I am constantly being perceived as a teacher either to be exalted or rejected but I do not accept either perception for myself. Your worth is not established by teaching or learning. Your worth is established by God. As long as you dispute this, everything you do will be fearful. Particularly any situation that lends itself to the belief in superiority and inferiority. Teachers must be patient and repeat their lessons until they are learned. I am willing to do this because I have no right to set your learning limits for you. Again, nothing you do or think or wish or make is necessary to establish your worth. This point is not debatable except in delusions. Your ego is never at stake because God did not create it. Your spirit is never at stake because he did. Any confusion on this point is delusional and no form of devotion is possible as long as this delusion lasts. The ego tries to exploit all situations into forms of praise for itself in order to overcome its doubts. It will remain doubtful as long as you believe in its existence. You who made it cannot trust it because in your right mind you realize it is not real. The only sane solution is not to try to change reality, which is indeed a fearful attempt, but to accept it as it is. You are a part of reality which stands unchanged beyond the reach of your ego, but within easy reach of spirit. When you are afraid, be still and know that God is real and you are his beloved son in whom he is well pleased. Do not let your ego dispute this because the ego cannot know what it is as far beyond its reach as you are. God is not the author of fear. You are. You have chosen to create unlike him and have therefore made fear for yourself. You are not at peace because you are not fulfilling your function. God gave you a very lofty function that you are not meeting. Your ego has chosen to be afraid instead of meeting it. When you awaken, you will not be able to understand this because it is literally incredible. Do not believe the incredible now. Any attempt to increase its believableness is merely to postpone the inevitable. The word inevitable is fearful to the ego, but joyous to the spirit. God is inevitable and you cannot avoid him anymore than he can avoid you. The ego is afraid of the spirit's joy because once you have experienced it, you will withdraw all protection from the ego and become totally without investment in fear. Your investment is great now because fear is a witness to the separation and your ego rejoices when you witness to it. Leave it behind. Do not listen to it and do not preserve it. Listen only to God who is as incapable of deception as is the spirit he created. Release yourself and release others. Do not present a false and unworthy picture of yourself to others and do not accept such a picture of them yourself. The ego has built a shabby and unsheltering home for you because it cannot build otherwise. Do not try to make this impoverished house stand. Its weakness is your strength. If only God could make a home that is worthy of his creations who have chosen to leave it empty by their own dispossession, yet his home will stand forever and is ready for you when you choose to enter it. Of this you can be wholly certain God is as incapable of creating the perishable as the ego is of making the eternal. Of your ego you can do nothing to save yourself or others, but of your spirit you can do everything for the salvation of both. Humility is a lesson for the ego, not for the spirit. Spirit is beyond humility because it recognizes its radiance and gladly sheds its light everywhere. The meek shall inherit the earth because their egos are humble and this gives them truer perception. The kingdom of heaven is the spirit's right whose beauty and dignity are far beyond doubt, beyond perception and stand forever as the mark of the love of God for his creations who are wholly worthy of him and only of him. Nothing else is sufficiently worthy to be a gift for a creation of God himself. I will substitute for your ego if you wish, but never for your spirit. A father can safely leave a child with an elder brother who has shown himself responsible, but this involves no confusion about the child's origin. The brother can protect the child's body and his ego, but he does not confuse himself with the father because he does this. I can be entrusted with your body and your ego only because this enables you not to be concerned with them and lets me teach you their unimportance. I could not understand their importance to you if I had not once been tempted to believe in them myself. Let us undertake to learn this lesson together so we can be free of them together. I need devoted teachers who share my aim of healing the mind. Spirit is far beyond the need of your protection or mine. Remember this. In this world, you need not have tribulation because I have overcome the world. That is why you should be of good cheer. And from the workbook, lesson 23, I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts. The idea for today contains the only way out of fear that will ever succeed. Nothing else will work. Everything else is meaningless. But this way cannot fail. Every thought you have makes some part, some segment of the world you see. It is with your thoughts then that we must work. If your perception of the world is to be changed. If the cause of the world you see is attack thoughts, you must learn that it is these thoughts which you do not want. There is no point in lamenting the world. There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause. The effect will change automatically. The world you see is a vengeful world and everything in it is a symbol of vengeance. Each of your perceptions of, quote, external reality is a pictorial representation of your own attack thoughts. One can well ask if this can be called seeing. Is not fantasy a better word for such a process and hallucination a more appropriate term for the result? You see the world that you have made but you do not see yourself as the image maker. You cannot be saved from the world but you can escape from its cause. This is what salvation means. Where is the world you see when its cause is gone? Vision already holds a replacement for everything you think you see now. Loveliness can light your images and so transform them that you will love them even though they were made of hate. For you will not be making them alone. The idea for today introduces the thought that you are not trapped in the world you see because its cause can be changed. This change requires first that the cause be identified and then let go so that it can be replaced. The first two steps in this process require your cooperation. The final one does not. The images have already been replaced. By taking the first two steps you will see that this is so. Besides using it throughout the day as the need arises five practice periods are required in implying today's idea. As you look about you repeat the idea slowly to yourself first and then close your eyes and devote about a minute to searching your mind for as many attack thoughts as occur to you. As each one crosses your mind say, I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts about blank. Hold each attack thought in mind as you say this and then dismiss that thought and go on to the next. In the practice periods be sure to include both your thoughts of attacking and of being attacked. Their effects are exactly the same because they are exactly the same. You do not recognize this as yet and you are asked at this time only to treat them as the same in today's practice periods. We are still at the stage of identifying the cause of the world you see. When you finally learn that thoughts of attack and of being attacked are not different you will be ready to let the cause go. So today's reading from the text chapter 4 in this beautiful lesson number 23. I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts. Gives us a new context for teaching and learning. If the text was telling us the teaching and learning is one of the greatest attributes that we have at this point. The teacher and the learner are equal. What you teach is what you are learning. Equal in the same order of thought and the teacher teaches to teach himself out of a position so to speak. The teaching is not to maintain a concept or role. Just as student is not a concept or role to be maintained forever. These are mechanisms that the spirit is using for extending, for clarifying, for purifying. And then as we move into the workbook we see that we are reminded once again that the cause of the world we seem to see, the cause of the world that is perceived is attack thoughts. So we are given the first very, very direct escape hatch from the sleeping mind. After lessons in perception and thought, now we are directly given the escape hatch from the world of separation to eternity. I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts. This is a form of what Jesus taught in the Beatitudes. Judge not less to be judged. By harboring and holding on to attack thoughts, we bring the experience of attack into awareness. Although attack is not possible in reality and we are told that there is no point in trying to change the world because it is capable of change being in effect. But there is indeed a point in changing thoughts about the world because you are changing the cause. So today's lesson focuses on two aspects. Focuses on attack thoughts and not making them different. Seeing the sameness of attack thoughts, that thoughts of attacking and thoughts of being attacked are the same and are not different. And you get a hint of why it's impossible to be a victim or a victimizer. If thoughts of being attacked and thoughts of attacking are the same, there can be no victims and no victimizers. And then the second aspect of the lesson is actually giving up attack thoughts. Of seeing that if you value peace, if you value happiness and joy, you must be willing to let attack thoughts go. You must be willing to release them. There will be no peace of mind if attack thoughts are held dear and clung to and protected and justified. Attack thoughts are held onto, then there will be a vengeful world perceived with everything in it with a symbol of vengeance. If attack thoughts are protected and held dear, then there will seem to be an external reality. Even though this is quite impossible, there is nothing outside of mind. And yet with the trick of attack thoughts, which are reflections of the belief in the mind of separation from God, from Source, then this seeming pictorial representation of attack thoughts will seem to continue. And we are reminded that this whole process of attack thoughts and pictorial representations is really just a fantasy. It's just a hallucination. We are dropping inward in the mind today, beyond the attack thoughts, beyond the image maker, to stillness, to Christ's vision, to love and light and joy and happiness, to the first and experience of the real world or the happy dream in which no faith is given to the images, just watch them, watch them come and watch them go, watch the parade, and strengthen this watching, this observing with today's lesson. I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.