Notes on the Text of A Course in - Stephen Wingate

anything that protects the ego-self is defended. I will
scream and yell if my ego-self protection is
threatened. Any teaching that threatens our
specialness and individuality we will fight against —
all of this is born of the fear of Atonement.
Children do not know what is good for them, nor do
we. Clinging to the ego-self is hurting us, not
helping. The Holy Spirit's offer of Atonement will
help us, but being like children we scream and yell
when our beloved toys are threatened!
•
We all are trying to get God to pay attention to us.
This is why the ego wrote the Bible. In the Bible,
God pays attention to us: He creates us; He loves us;
He hates us; He murders us; He saves us. Each
intervention proves God recognizes us. From the
ego's point of view, it does not matter if God loves us
or hates us, saves us or destroys us — as long as He
notices us.
In the Course, God does not know about individuals.
This is not terrible, this is joyful. God's not knowing
us is an expression of the Atonement principle — the
separation never happened. Because the separation
never happened, God cannot know a separate ego.
And strictly speaking, the ego knows nothing of
spirit. The ego's real threat is of the decision maker
or the Son of God who has the power to withdraw his
belief in the ego's existence, and the ego would
disappear back into the nothingness from which it
came.
•
Spirit has no "enemy." The ego is terrified the Son
will withdraw his belief in it. Existence is specificity.
The ego offers the "reward" of special separate
existence. The ego's god offers eternal life — if you
are good and do what he tells you! Or punishment in
hell if you do not do as the ego's god tells you.
Everybody's ego god is different in terms of good
and evil.
Spirit offers permanent, unshakable Being. The ego
does not want permanent, unshakable Being because
it does not exist in the non-specific, abstract oneness
of eternal Being. Egos exists only in separation. Loss
of individual existence is the ego's terror.
The oneness of God's love is covered over first by
the belief in sin and guilt in the mind, and second by
making a body and world onto which it projects its
sin and guilt out of the mind and onto the body and
<strong>Notes</strong> on Chapter Four – The Illusions of the Ego
15
world it made. Once we are identified as a body in
the world, we are mindless, unaware of our mind's
power to choose, and unaware of our real identity as
God's Son.
•
Your belief in darkness is why the light cannot enter.
Belief is the key word. The light is the Atonement
principle in the mind that is first covered by the
darkness of the ego's belief in separation, sin, guilt
and fear; and then veiled by making a body and
world onto which we project the sin and guilt. Once
we believe that sin and guilt are in the world, the
source of our problem (belief in separation in the
mind) is forgotten and veiled by the body and world.
•
In the presence of God's love the ego ceases to exist.
"God has given us everything" is a statement of the
principle of abundance, contrasted with the ego's
scarcity. The absence of God's abundance is the ego's
scarcity and lack which the ego tries to compensate
for by offering us "special" love to make up for
God's unconditional love we have chosen against —
special relationships are covered in later chapters.
•
The primary motivation of the ego is to keep us
mindless which preserves its separate identity. The
ego tells us it wants us to be happy, that we can only
be happy as an individual and having our
"specialness" needs met. It does not tell us the only
way we can be truly happy is to choose the oneness
of the Holy Spirit. The ego's thought system and the
body and world it made have one purpose — to
preserve the ego's special separate existence.
Sane judgment is in the right mind with the Holy
Spirit who represents the Atonement. The ego
conceals the Atonement under the thought system of
sin, guilt and fear in the mind, and then by making a
body and world onto which it projects the sin, guilt
and fear, thereby preserving the ego.
•
The ego's goal is to keep away the Atonement. To
ensure we never realize our mistake of choosing the
ego rather than the Holy Spirit, the ego develops a
strategy. The strategy arose from the Atonement
principle and the ego's fear of Atonement. The
strategy is to make us mindless by making a world
and a body and having us identify with it. The ego
first makes us fear the mind by making sin, guilt and
fear real and telling us God will punish us for our sin
which motivates us to leave the mind and hide in the
body and world. The ego then projects the sin and