This morning we are going to go on a journey through hate to love. One of the aspects of
A Course in Miracles that distinguishes it from most other spiritualities and religious
thought systems is its emphasis on looking at the ego, looking at our guilt, looking
at our self-hate which is really a synonym for guilt and then looking how we project
this guilt onto the world and hate everyone and everything. And it's the process of looking
at the ego that enables us to get past it and finally remember the love that the ego
thought system and the guilt and our hate were meant and were made to conceal. After
about the first year of the Course's scribing, Jesus had given Helen a personal message (actually
there were always a lot of these that he gave to her) that was specifically meant for her
and Bill. It was not part of the Course, and in that he basically told Helen and Bill that
he was leading them on a journey through hate to love. The message begins by saying you
have no idea of the intensity of your desire to get rid of each other, and it goes downhill
very quickly from there. He goes on to describe how much they hate each other. It's only after
that that he also says how much you love each other, but this love is covered over by the
hate. And that if you don't appreciate the enormity of this hate, the gargantuan nature
of this wish to destroy, you will never be able Jesus tells Helen and Bill and tells
all of us, you will never be able to get past it to the love. It's the looking at the ego
with the love of Jesus beside us that undoes it. When one examines what the ego thought
system is, which Jesus does in painstaking detail for us in A Course in Miracles, that
we recognize that what keeps the ego thought system going is not the ego thought system
since the ego thought system is nothing, how could nothing be kept going? It's our belief
in it and it's our belief in trying to preserve it. And the way we preserve the ego thought
system is we first make it real, then make it so horrifically real and terrifyingly real
that we never want to look at it, that we then leave the wrong-mind which is the home
of the ego thought system and make up a world in which to hide. And that's what we all did
collectively as one Son of God and then fragmented ourselves into billions and billions and billions
of pieces. And the purpose of all this is to maintain the illusion that the thought
system of the ego is alive and well, and carefully and almost in a sacred fashion preserved in
the mind. So the problem was not the ego thought system. The problem was that we chose it and
then forgot that we chose it, and the whole point of A Course in Miracles is to help us
get back to that choice point, what we at the Foundation call the decision maker, the
decision-making part of the mind, so we could look at what we have chosen so we could choose
again. There is a wonderful line that closes Chapter 23 where Jesus says "Who with the
Love of God upholding him could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make?" When
we finally reach "Above the Battleground" which actually is the title of the section
that that line ends, if we are above the battleground with Jesus which means in our decision-making
mind and we look back at our choice for murder or for the miracle that would correct it,
nobody would find that choice hard to make. It will be a foregone conclusion that with
Jesus' love beside us we would choose his love instead of the ego's hate, but we don't
know there was a choice point. We don't know that we have chosen hate, we are just aware
that we hate. And so the idea that...what enables us to go through hate to love is to
look at it and that was the message that Jesus was giving Helen and Bill one year into the
Course scribing. And certainly is the over-riding message of the Course, is the message that
he gives us on every page. We need to look at the ego with him, not be afraid of it.
He tells us "Call it not sin but madness..." "Invest it not with guilt..." "And above all,
be not afraid of it." Now that's the passage where he is talking about the original error
but then the following paragraph actually makes it clear he's really talking about each
of the fragmentary shadows of that original error. All the ways that we go through our
daily life hating, judging, criticizing, finding fault, we are taught that a mild "twinge of
annoyance" is a mask "drawn over intense fury"...so all the little ways that we express our separation
from each other and from God. And what all these little ways represent is the over-riding
thought of self-hate, the guilt over what we believe we have done, that we have destroyed
Heaven, attacked and murdered God, and crucified His Son. So it's this self-hate born of that
belief in the reality of sin, of separation, that we then project out in hate. And so in
the Course we are always playing catch up as it were. We begin where we think we are
which is in the world of bodies and relationships, and then following Jesus' guidance we go back
seeing the world as an "outside picture of an inward condition." We return to the inward
condition which was the mind's choosing, and it's the being able to look at my hate for
what it is...a projection of my self-hate that enables me to get back to my decision-making
mind, look at that self-hate or that guilt, and choose again. Again that's how we make
and complete that journey through hate to love that is our true reality.