This morning we're going to talk about a passage that I frequently refer to when I teach.
It's actually two sections in Chapter 2: "Fear and Conflict" and "Cause and Effect," which
really had to do with Helen and Helen's complaining to Jesusabout something, which I don't really know what it was or,
if I did, I forgot; something she was concerned about, or anxious about,
that made her fearful and Jesus responds, which actually is certainly very important
for all of us but was originally earmarked just for Helen, was that he could not take
her fear away from her because her mind made the fear, but he could help her by removing,
helping to remove the conditions that led to the fear, which always entails, he said,
a willingness to be separate and that always meant, when Jesus spoke to Helen that way
that she chose to be separate from him. And when she chose to be separate from Jesus and
his love then she became afraid and then the ego's ball just started gaining steam. And
in that same passage in "Fear and Conflict, " I think it is, Jesus says to Helen that
she's far too tolerant of her mind wanderings and she's condoning her...passively condoning
her mind's miscreations. Both of these basically refer to projection, and that's the mind wandering,
that Helen and all of us choose to listen to the ego's advice, that the means to escape
from our guilt over separating from Love, betraying Love-not only in the ontological
instant when we all as one Son chose to believe that God's Love was not enough, and we could
better-and then we all reenact that instant, as a later passage in the text says, when
terror took the place of Love. And since there is no linear time this is an instant-an unholy
instant-that we all relive over and over and over again, and so the ego tells us the way
to escape from this heavy burden of guilt that comes from our belief that we have sinned
against our Creator and Source is to take this sin in our mind and get rid of it through
projection. So the sin is no longer in my mind. Actually, I'm pointing to my chest but
obviously it's not in our body; from our mind and we project it out and put it onto someone
else's body. That's the mind wandering, where our attention wanders from our mind-our decision-making
mind-that made the wrong choice (choosing the ego to listen to instead of the Holy Spirit)
and now we wander out into the world-what in that famous gospel passage the parable
that we wander in the far country of the ego's world-where we find sinners all around us
and we then seek to judge them and blame them or attribute to them or external forces why
we are upset, why we are angry, why we are hurt, why we are depressed, why we're anxious,
why we are fearful, and that's what Jesus was telling Helen, that "you're far too tolerant
of believing that for causes of your distress, regardless of the form, that these causes
lie in something external to you." There's a later passage in the text that says, "Of
all the many causes of your suffering, you never thought your guilt was among them."
And basically it's our mind's decision for guilt that is the cause for all of our experience
of our suffering, because since the body is literally nothing, which is a fundamental
principle of the Course. Simply being a projection of the mind and has never left its source
in the mind, the body doesn't feel, so we experience suffering and pain and fear but
that's because we are far too tolerant of our projections, believing that what we are
projecting is real (i.e. our guilt) and what we project onto is real, namely the sinful
world that is hurting us, whether it's people, so-called natural causes or whatever. And
this would also involve our mind's miscreations. "Miscreation" is a word that only appears
early on in the text juxtaposed with our true creations, which are the extensions of our
spirit. What the ego makes is miscreating; that's what the term means. And ultimately
we miscreated the world, we made up the entire physical universe, and then we make up all
the little things that go on in our personal world, once again, that we attribute causation
to and we say, "The reason I'm upset is because..." and we all have a long list of "becauses."
And so what Jesus was telling Helen very early on in the scribing of the Course, and telling
all of us as his students-basically this idea appears on every page, whether its explicitly
so or implicitly so-is that the cause of our distress only lies in our mind's misguided
decision, that our decision maker chose the ego as our teacher rather than the Holy Spirit
or Jesus. And so that's what Jesus was telling Helen, "You're far too tolerant of your mind
wandering, that you have chosen not to pay attention to the fact that you have chosen
to be separate from me and my love, and your guilt over that has caused you to project
that onto other people, blaming them for your fear." All fear comes from the mind's decision
to be guilty, and guilt demands punishment, and then we become afraid of the punishment
that our ego tells us we deserve because of how sinful we are. So what Jesus does is take
the cause that is outside and, by virtue of the miracle, brings it inside and we say,
"The reason I'm upset is not because of what the world has done or might do, or has done
in the past, but I'm upset because my mind has simply chosen the wrong teacher," and
now that I know the cause of my distress and I know how simple the solution is, it's now
my full responsibility and I'm now aware of that responsibility to choose differently.
And, in fact, the whole meaning of the Course is to help us do just that. So these early
messages to Helen were really designed to help her shift her attention from the world
back to her mind and use the power of her mind to choose differently. That's what Jesus
means at the very end when he says, "Choose once again," and so that's his call to us
always, is not to attribute cause-the cause of our distress-to anything outside of our
decision-making mind.