This morning we will discuss loneliness. There's a line in the text where Jesus says "Alone
we are all lowly" (T-13.X.14:2). The feeling of aloneness, which is an experience almost
no one escapes in this world, even if we are a part of a family, even if we live with people.
It is very hard to go through life without at some point or another, if not extended
periods of time, have had this experience of loneliness, which is an awful, awful experience to have.
It's the experience that not only are we all alone in the universe but we are
all alone in our wretchedness, and behind that is that horrific ego thought that this is
my punishment. And ultimately our feeling of loneliness, which has its basis in the core
of the ego thought system that we have separated from our source, this loneliness goes back
to the original belief that we have separated, and where at one moment we were part of God's
perfect Oneness, an extension of His Love, and the next moment seemingly without our
awareness or seemingly without our having any responsibility for it, we find ourselves
outside of God's Love and we are all alone. This is a devastating, devastating experience.
But the only way out of this...the only way out of this experience is to recognize that
it is a defense, as with any other aspect of the ego thought system. Loneliness is a
consciously chosen experience to prove to us that the separation is real. And as Lesson
136 explains, "Sickness is a defense against the truth," that these defenses are simply...are
consciously made but for an instant and then the ego's plan calls for us to repress it,
namely to forget that we are the ones who caused this. And so loneliness seems to be
almost like an ontological state that has been thrust upon us or loneliness in this
world is seeing my loved ones have left me, abandoned me, died and I am all alone. That
somehow the circumstances of our lives have dictated that such loneliness is our state,
our state of being here. And all this again is a camouflage for the idea that this is
something we have chosen. And as with, again,any other aspect of the ego system, guilt,
depression, anxiety, fear, aloneness, loneliness, a sense of loss, that all of these prove that
the ego thought system is alive and well and true and that the principle of the Atonement
is the lie. The principle of the Atonement, being the Holy Spirit's correction, says the
separation never happened. It's only a dream and dreams are not real, that it's only a
bad dream that never happened in reality. If the Atonement principle is true, then the
separation is not true. The separated world that arose from it is not true and our individual
selves, our identities are not true. All our specialness, uniqueness, autonomy, is all
made up and it is gone, and that means I am gone. That's the fear. That if I accept the
Atonement, if I believe that the Holy Spirit is telling the truth and it's the ego that
is the deceiver, then everything I have believed about myself and the world would vanish. As
the manual says, it would disappear back into nothingness from which it came (M-13.1:2).
So we choose loneliness, as painful as it is, as a way to tell us that the ego is right
and God is wrong. The experience of loneliness tells us that I am all alone and I look around
me which means I look around in the world of form and that proves to me that I am all
alone. When the fact of the matter is that the world is an illusion, the world of bodies
is an illusion, or specialness is an illusion and everything is occurring in the mind. And
I only feel alone because I have banished the presence of Jesus or the Holy Spirit that
are my only companions, my only friends, my only true partners. I have banished them.
That's where the feeling of aloneness comes from.So it's not only ontologically that we
feel alone because we have banished God from our kingdom, our special kingdom, but then
once we are in this kingdom we banish the Holy Spirit or Jesus, those symbols for our
right-minded thinking, those symbols for the principle of the Atonement that once again
says the separation never happened. So early on in the text when Jesus says I am the Atonement,
he means I am that great symbol for you that the separation from love never happened. And
when our decision-making mind joins his love, then we know that we can never be alone. So
in other words, the feeling of aloneness has nothing to do with bodies. It has nothing
to do with one's station in life. It only has to do with a decision the mind has made.
Do I want to spend my time with the ego or with the Holy Spirit? And if I spend it with
my ego, I will feel alone, and the ego will project that loneliness out in the world and
attribute our feelings of loneliness to everything and everyone that is outside of us...convincing
us that this has nothing to do with the decision that the mind has made. In fact, the ego tells
us that we don't even have a mind. So anyone who is confronted by this awful feeling of
aloneness and loneliness simply has to recognize this is a part of the ego defensive system.
It is a ploy to keep us not only mindless but to keep us away from the only presence
that could truly end our feeling of aloneness. So simply stated if I am feeling alone, it
is because I have pushed Jesus or the Holy Spirit away and that is where the aloneness
comes from and the loneliness comes from. That's again what that line means that I began
with, "Alone we are all lowly". I am lowly because I have chosen the lowliness of the
ego as my identity. But when I set that aside and I now choose Jesus as my teacher, it's
his magnitude, it's his great stature of love that now becomes my own. And then I will never
again feel that loneliness or believe that I am alone.