This morning's topic will be Lesson 49 in the workbook, "God's Voice speaks to me all
through the day." This is one of those lessons which can easily be misunderstood and unfortunately
has been misunderstood. While the lesson says, and obviously it's the fact that God's Voice
(the Holy Spirit) does speak to me all through the day, it never says that we hear the Voice
all through the day, and herein lies the tale. The problem is never what's in our right mind,
which is where God's Voice is; the problem is the static that's created or made by the
ego by the wrong mind. And so the whole purpose of this course is basically not to help us
hear the Holy Spirit as such, as a goal; rather the focus of this course is to have us remove
the static that interferes with our hearing God's Voice. In the past I frequently used
to say in workshops and classes that the right question to ask of the Holy Spirit is not,
"What should I do or where should I go," etcetera. The right question to ask is, "Why don't I
do what You tell me to do so that I can hear Your Voice speak to me all through the day?"
And of course what He tells us to do that kind of clears away the static of the wrong
mind is to forgive, to give up judgments, to monitor our mind throughout the day for
all the unkind thoughts, all the critical, judgmental thoughts, all the attack thoughts,
all the ways of justifying these attack thoughts and our angry feelings. And as long as we...as
we look at these and don't do something about them, which means look at them without feeling
guilty; look at them with the purpose of bringing the darkness of these thoughts to light of
Holy Spirit's forgiveness, these thoughts will remain and if they remain they serve
as static. In Chapter 24 there's a passage where Jesus talks about how the voice of specialness
drowns out the Holy Spirit's Voice, and that's the whole point. That's why we are so attracted
to our special relationships and our special addictions and our special loves and our special
hates; why we're so attracted to being dependent on other people to make us feel good or we're
so dependent on other people to make us feel good by virtue of their attacks on us, because
if they attack us then they're the ones God will punish and we'll be off the hook. This
explains why all that is true. If I allow myself to hear the Holy Spirit's Voice of
forgiveness, which is the Voice of Atonement (the Atonement being the Course term for the
true principle of salvation that says the separation from God never happened, the separation
from who I truly am has never happened, the separation I perceive between myself and all
the other people in my life; that has never happened (it's only part of an idle dream
that has had no effect)...if that is true then there is no separation, there is no sin,
there is no experience of guilt over what I believe I have done, there is no fear of
punishment that leads me and all of us as one Son to flee the mind and make up a world,
fragment ourselves into billions and billions of pieces (each little piece is housed in
a body), and the culmination of all that is that there is no "me." There is no person,
a physical and psychological person; has a past, has a present, has an anticipated future;
all of that is part of the dream and does not exist. Well, I like who I am, and even
if I don't like who I am, I like the fact that I exist and don't like what I am. But
by the same token, one of the reasons that the Bible has become so incredibly popular
is that the god in the Bible knows us. He may not like us; he may even try to punish
us and, on his worst days, kill us but at least he notices us and it's that noticing
that is so important. When Jesus tells us that we ask special favor of God and He did
not grant it because that grant was alien to Him...the request was alien to Him...that
is telling us that we wanted God to pay special attention to our individuality, to our differentiated
self, and when God did not do that because He could not do that, we basically fired Him
and made of Him an unloving god; i.e. the god of the Bible, the god who notices us,
who created us as individuals, who counts the hairs on our head, etcetera. That god
we like, even on his bad days when he's very unforgiving and judgmental. So the problem
is that we cherish the ego's voice and we cherish the ego's thought system, and we need
to have this thought system as a defense because God's Voice indeed does speak to us all through
the day. The problem is we don't hear it because we don't want to hear it, and so one of the
major emphases of A Course in Miracles and probably the most important thing of all Jesus
wants us to understand because that's the way we undo the ego is to recognize our investment
in hearing the ego's voice over His Voice. That is the motivation, number one, for our
being born into this world, again, as individual, physical, psychological entities, but it's
the motivation behind every unkind thought, every special thought, whether its special
love or special hate; thoughts and experiences of people giving us pleasure or people and
circumstances bringing us pain. All of these reenact the original moment when we in effect
told God to get lost, that His love was not enough, and each and every moment we have
an unkind, judgmental thought about anyone or anything we are telling the ego...we
are telling Jesus and the Holy Spirit, "Get lost. I'm not interested in Your message of
forgiveness. I'm not interested in hearing Your Voice. I want this voice instead. I want
the voice that keeps me special, keeps me unique, and keeps me an individual." And it's
in recognizing that motivation to hear the ego's voice that allows us finally to let
it go because we recognize how very painful that choice is, and why would I choose pain
when I could have the joy of God instead?