What I've been watching myself do in relationships with other people, when I see that there's
a conflict between us is I keep watching myself hooking into their issues and making it about
me instead of stepping back and being neutral with it and allowing them to go through whatever
process they need. KW: That's the idea. I mean the idea is always
before you do anything with this situation or with a relationship that you must look
at yourself. And you also—it's very important to respect other people's decisions, even
if they're ego ones. In a sense that's what you get with Jesus throughout this whole course.
You always get the idea that he's respecting the power of our mind even when we choose
wrongly. He doesn't abuse us; he doesn't criticize us; he doesn't put guilt on us. He basically
says, "I'll wait patiently until you choose again, and my patience is infinite." And
it's very important that you respect the mind of other people to choose the ego, because
if you don't respect their power to choose wrongly you are denigrating that mind's power
that one day will choose correctly. That doesn't mean you have to agree with what they're doing.
It doesn't mean that you don't behaviorally say something or intervene if that seems loving
and is not coming from your ego. But it does mean that you have to respect the power of
their mind to choose wrong-mindedness otherwise that you are, again, you are not respecting
the only thing in the universe that could save them, which is the power of their mind
to correct itself. And the way that you do that, certainly at the beginning is that you
don't take their attacks personally. That's very, very important, that you don't let their
egos take you away from the peace of God within. And to the extent that you could remain peaceful
within, that peace (if it's truly the peace of God) will embrace everyone, including whoever
the person is that you're having difficulty with. And then you won't be motivated to change
them; you'll be motivated to love them. And they would experience that love and they would
experience that kindness and that's what would say to them, "I could choose again too."
And that's particularly difficult when you're in a relationship with someone that who means
something to you that you could see is choosing wrongly. I mean parents have this all the
time obviously; you know, teachers have it; therapists have it, you know? Anybody in a
position of helping has it. When you—when people that you care about obviously do things
that are harmful to others or to themselves, and that doesn't mean, again, you don't intervene,
but if you're intervening from your ego it's to help you, not to help them. And it's really
important, once again, not to take it personally and many times love means letting people make
their own mistakes because that's the only way they'll be able to learn. If you deprive
them of their mistakes—this is especially true, I think, with children—if you deprive
them of their mistakes you're depriving them of a classroom in which they could learn eventually
not to make mistakes. The worst thing parents, teachers, or adults of any kind can do with
a child is lose it. When you get angry at a child—which is different from being disciplined
and firm, etcetera, and setting limits—when you get angry at a child you have said to
that child, "You are right; you have changed God. You have taken mommy and daddy who are
so loving and kind and you've changed them into people who get as insane as you. They
throw temper tantrums too, just like you do." It's the worst thing you can do for a child,
because you are proving to them their worst fear is true. You're saying, "You have an
omnipotent ego;" that's the grandiosity of the ego. "You have an omnipotent ego.
Look what you can do. You're all-powerful. You could take me and you have power over
me to render me into a screaming idiot." When you make someone angry you have become
God. You have changed someone else. The guilt over that is enormous because it reminds you
of the original change that you instituted, when the ego changed God; not in reality,
but in its dream. That's the beginning of the ego's dream. In reality nothing happened.
God knows nothing about the dream. God knows nothing about His angry, guilty, sinful, insane
Son. God only knows Himself and His Son as an extension of Himself; that's all God knows.
God knows perfect Oneness because there's nothing else. Well because we cannot truly
change God, we had to make up a god whom we could change. An earlier chapter also talk—talks
about this and says when we demanded special favor from God and He did not give it, which
is the favor we asked God to acknowledge our individuality, to acknowledge us as a separated
thing, independent of Him. When God would not do that, would not grant us that special
favor, we made of Him an unloving Father; that's what the passage says. In other words,
we said, "All right, this God doesn't work for me anymore. I'm going to make a god who
does work for me; a god who gets angry." Because the true God doesn't recognize what
doesn't exist, so we made up a god who will recognize what doesn't exist: us. We'll make
a god who counts the hairs on our head, loves us more than the sparrows or the lilies of
the field. We'll make a god who believes in sin but then has this wonderfully redemptive
plan: murder; of redeeming us from sin. Smart, right? What's incredible is that people have
believed this, but people have believed it because that's the ego thought system that
everyone believes in, whether they're Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or atheists;
it doesn't matter. Everyone believes it. What Jesus wants us to do in this course is see
how ludicrous this thought system is, not how sinful, not how horrific; how ludicrous,
how silly. That's when he talks about the gentle laughter that looks at all this and
smiles and says, "This can't be." But we say "Yes, it is," each and every time
we get angry, each and every time we get critical of someone, each and every time we find fault
let alone get enraged at someone. That's what we're saying. We're saying this thought system
is true. The only hope is for someone not to take you seriously, not to give you
power over them so they demonstrate to you another thought system. And again, take Jesus
as your model. He tells early on in the text, "Take me as your model for learning."
Well, one very helpful model he is for us is to watch how he is with us through this
course. He is very clear about what's a mistake and what's not a mistake; very clear. Very
clear that a mistake is not a sin, but he's also very clear about the love with which
he approaches us that allows us to make mistakes if we're too afraid of the truth. You never
have the feeling as you read through this that he's condemning you or waving an accusing
finger at you because you don't do the workbook right or you read the text upside down and
don't understand what you're reading and then do the exact opposite of what he says. You
never have the sense that he's judging you or condemning you. You know, he says earlier
in the text, "I will respect what you made because you made it. I will not uphold it
because it is not true, but I'll respect what you made." And as he explains to us, the
ego is—the ego makes. Spirit creates; the ego makes, so "I'll respect what you made
but I will not uphold it because it is not true, but I will respect it." And so you
take that as your model: respect the choices that people close to you make or other people
make. If you really want to be a loving instrument, if you want to be an instrument of change
then you would realize that meaningful change only occurs on the level of the mind; only
occurs on the level of the mind. And so that's where you want to gently lead this person;
not by your words necessarily, but by how you are. Your quiet defenselessness speaks
volumes. Your quiet defenselessness says to the other person, "The same choice I made,
you can make. You have a wrong mind and a right mind; choose again." That's what Jesus
says practically on every page in this book.