This week is the American holiday of the Fourth of July,
which is a time when the colonies who separated from England
declared their independence and, of course, the famous document,
which has become a classic one in American history,
is the Declaration of Independence.
I think a year ago when I made a similar YouTube, I talked about
this is the time when we declare our independence from the ego
and this will be a similar theme today.
For those who are not Americans, again,
I think this is an important holiday for people
who are identified with the United States and its citizens
and for those of our brothers who live in Great Britain,
this is another opportunity for you to forgive us.
So we hope you do so.
If not, you'll get another chance next year.
I think it's helpful...that it's obvious that this is not
this is not a topic that we just talk about one day out of the year.
The whole purpose of the Course
is that not only every day but every moment
of every day be a time when we declare
our independence from the ego.
And, of course, what this means is since the ego
is not anything...it's not a thing.
It's not an entity, it's not a person,
it's certainly not the devil that exists outside of us.
It's really the part of us, part of our separated
or split mind, that likes being separated
or split off from God.
And so that's what the ego is, and so the ego gets its power
not from anything inherent in itself,
the ego is nothing in itself.
It is simply a thought and it's a thought of something
that never happened.
So when the Course talks about an illusion,
that's the primary illusion from which
all the other illusions come
that we actually were able,
we the One Son of God united with our Creator
somehow in our delusional system, our megalomania,
believed we could separate from our Source,
our Source of perfect Love and perfect Oneness.
So that's what the ego is.
So when we declare our independence from the ego,
we are really talking to ourselves,
what I usually refer to as our decision-making self
or the decision-making mind that chose
to believe in the impossible,
namely, that we could be separate from God,
our Creator and our Source.
So the way we live this out on a daily basis
because if we don't live this out on a daily basis,
none of this means anything.
All the words in the text, workbook, and manual
are worth nothing if they are not applied in our everyday life.
So the idea is to be aware each and every time
we have an unkind thought, a thought of specialness,
a thought of exclusivity, a thought of anger,
a thought of depression, a thought of anxiety,
of fear, of guilt. Any thought
that is not coming from a totally loving space
that we understand that at that moment our decision-making mind
has joined with the ego and it has made our self
dependent on its thought system of separation
and specialness. Specialness, as most of you know,
is the Course term for this primary defense
of the ego that says that we have special needs
that only special people can fulfill
or special substances can fulfill,
and that's how our special relationships
are acted out in this world.
That we all believe that we come from the sense of lack
or scarcity and we have to fill up this lack by taking
things from the outside and filling us up.
And, of course, everything we experience here
is simply a fragmentary shadow of the original and,
in truth, only special relationship that our mind has with the ego.
That's what we have to declare our independence from.
But since we don't know we're a mind
and we certainly don't know we're a mind that has chosen
to be allied with the ego and therefore dependent
on its thought system, than we have to deal with where we
think we are which is in this world
as bodies and as persons.
And so the whole thrust of the Course in terms
of its practical application, which is the purpose of
the workbook is to train our minds along these lines,
is to really be able to be vigilant
almost every moment when we have an unkind thought
and realize this is a decision I made
and I now want to declare my independence from that decision,
from that ego thought system that I have identified with.
That's the fundamental need that anyone has
is to reinforce the belief the ego is right,
is true, and that we are children of the ego.
And then what follows from that inevitably
is that, yes, I'm a child of the ego
but somebody else did it to me, I'm innocent.
That's the face of innocence that the Course talks about.
So the whole thrust of this, once again,
is to really see every moment as often as we can
to kind of see when we choose the ego and then say
to ourselves this is not what I want.
I want to be dependent on God.
I want to be dependent on the Love of Jesus
as my oxygen supply, as it were, and not the ego.
I want to live my life so that I feel one with everyone
and everything, not in opposition to everyone and everything.
That I feel that the only way I could feel good about myself
is to put other people down.
So that's what I want to be independent of,
that insane thought system that's fraught with anger
and hate and ends up just as the Course says in one
very dramatic passage that we want to hurl our brother
over the precipice. And that's how we live our lives,
and so our independence, what we are declaring,
I don't want this anymore. I deserve better.
I deserve to be happy and I deserve to walk this earth
in a state not of uncertainty, loneliness, and in constant fear
as the Course says, but just the opposite
with the certainty of knowing that I'm on a journey
that's going to take me home
and that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are my loving guides
and teachers and my everyday life is the classroom.
So another way of saying all this, in summary,
is to say I want to declare my independence from the ego's classroom
of judgment, and hate and specialness
and now align myself with Jesus' classroom,
which will teach me the true meaning of forgiveness.