Any questions or comments anyone has? I did a lot of talking in the first part so...
Let me see if I've got this process right. If I look at something and I know it's either
going to give me pleasure or pain, I know it's the ego working, right? Right. So then
I say, I ask Jesus to let me go back to that blue dot and the only way I can find out that
I'm really using the Holy Spirit's way is to realize no matter what happens, it's not
going to effect me. Right, and also don't judge yourself for giving power to something
in the world to give you pleasure or pain. That's what's important. In other words, if
you are really looking with Jesus above the battleground, then you are going to look down
on the dream and you will smile at it. And if you do anything else but smile at it, you
are making it real and taking it seriously. Remember, we'll look at this passage later,
but the line that we always quote: "Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad
idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh." And so anything that you make real
in this world, which means you give it power to either make you happy or sad, anything
is a projected shadow or a shadowy fragment of the tiny, mad idea because the tiny, mad
idea is separation. So if I think there is something out there that could affect me,
positively or negatively, obviously I believe in separation. I'm here and there's that something
out there that could affect me. So it's all a form of the tiny, mad idea so remember that
line. The problem was not the tiny, mad idea. The problem was we took it seriously. The
problem was we looked at the tiny, mad idea of separating effect from cause and we put
a slash mark there. That was the problem. What the Holy Spirit does is that He looks
at that and just smiles because he knows that the line between cause and effect, between
God and Christ has never been broken. Therefore, that's the model you want to take. So you
want to look at any expression of the tiny, mad idea, at any form, anything that either
breathes of separation, anything, and smile at it. The smile means—because it's not
the physical smile—the smile means this has no power to take away the love or the
peace of God from me. Here again is where the whole idea of purpose becomes extremely
important. What this course does that no other spirituality has ever done is not only describe
the ego thought system and the illusory nature of the world, but it helps us understand the
purpose that it serves—why there is a world and why there is a personal world for all
of us. It serves the purpose of keeping us mindless, which is another way of saying it
serves the purpose of keeping us not being responsible, because the mind is the source
of responsibility. In fact, there is only the mind. This entire world is found within
this blue circle. Just as whenever you dream at night, however cosmic your dream might
be, it still is in the mind of you, the dreamer. Well, it's no different with the physical
universe. It is literally a dream, Jesus means that. This is not true and it all exists right
here in this blue circle. And it's only when again we could return our attention to that
blue circle that we understand that. That's what it means to be above the battleground.
It's in that blue circle because when you're above the battleground with Jesus, the decision
maker becomes an observer. When you're in your right mind, the decision maker is an
observer. There are so many passages in this course that describe the process of looking.
One of the lines I always quote because it is such a wonderfully succinct summary is
"Forgiveness.... is still, and quietly does nothing....It merely looks, and waits, and
judges not." So what forgiveness does is it comes back here above the battleground and
does nothing because why should you do something about something that doesn't exist? Why fix
something that's not there? When an individual does that, we call that person schizophrenic.
That's why Jesus tells us over and over in this course we are insane. We are hallucinating.
That's a word he uses, "hallucinating." We are trying to fix something here. Everything
here in red is made up—everything. Everything in blue is made up too, but it's a correction
for what the ego has made. What forgiveness does is it goes back to this point above the
battleground. It is quiet and still, does nothing. It looks on the ego thought system,
waits for us to identify with our role of being a decision maker and above all, doesn't
judge. It says, yes, this is devastation. This is sin, this is guilt, this is fear,
this is murder, but it's all made up. "...not one note in Heaven's song was missed." "Ideas
leave not their source." Nothing happened. So take all these statements and put them
together. The miracle establishes that we are dreaming a dream and it's not true. The
miracle looks on devastation and says it's not true. Forgiveness looks on all this and
says it's not worthy to judge. There is nothing here to judge. The only judgment is that there's
nothing here to judge. That's why Jesus says this course is very simple. What makes it
so difficult is the concept that Freud was the first one to have articulated, the concept
of resistance. We are resisting the simple truth. We are resisting what Jesus says in
the last chapter, "the simplicity of salvation." We want to make it complicated. Christian
theology has made salvation incredibly complicated. It is very simple. You may look on the dream
and you smile sweetly and gently and say this has had no effect on anything. That's all
you do. You don't change it. You don't fix it. You simply look and you don't judge. And
as we will see later, what this means specifically is you look on the egos of other people and
you don't judge and you look on your ego and you don't judge, but you look at the ego.
You can't say it's an illusion until you first look at it. This is from "The Dynamics of
the Ego," on page 202. This is where the line comes that I already quoted about having the
lamp with Jesus that will dispel the ego. Just look at sentence 5 and 6: "The "dynamics"
of the ego will be our lesson for a while, for we must look first at this to see beyond
it, since you have made it real." Here again he's setting forth the whole
program of his course. Together, you and I, he tells us will look at the ego, not because
it's real but because you have made it real and so we first must look at it in order to
see beyond it, and then he says it again: "We will undo this error quietly together,
and then look beyond it to truth." You can't get to the truth until you first look at the
error. This is not a course in love and beauty and truth and peace and joy. This is a course
in looking at the error. It's looking at the devastation of the ego thought system. And
when you look at it with him, you will then look beyond it because you will then realize
you are looking at nothing. As he says later in the text, sin is not a solid wall of granite.
It's a tiny wisp of black smoke without the power to keep the light that shines beyond
it from shining through. In another place, he talks about the clouds of guilt, and he
says these have no power. A cloud can't even hold a button. A button will fall through
a cloud because a cloud is nothing. We think it takes away the sun, but all it does is
hide it. That's what guilt is. That's what the ego thought system is. It has no power
to keep the light away from us, but you won't know that if you don't look. And you first
must acknowledge there is something there that you are looking at which means you must
acknowledge the ego in you, not the egos in everybody else. There is no everybody else.
Everything is a projection of what is in the mind. So we use what we have projected to
get back to the source of the projection. That's how Jesus turns the tables on the ego.
The ego uses projection to preserve itself. Jesus takes projection to turn it back inward
and say the world, which is a projection, is an "outward picture of an inward condition."
That's the hope. And back inside the mind we can finally get back to the cause; and
once we are back to the cause, we could change it. I can't change the cause of distress by
trying to change something in the world. It's exactly what the ego wants. I could only change
the cause of distress and pain by going back to its source which is in the mind, and that's
the cause.