Notes on the Text of A Course in - Stephen Wingate

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The ego's purpose is to maintain its special separate
existence. The ego is illusory. God's Will is that He
is one. God is the only reality. The conflict between
the ego and God is the conflict between illusion and
reality, which is no conflict at all. The separation
never happened, and there is no real authority
problem.
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In the Knowledge of Heaven there is no separation of
God and Christ, or of Creator and Creation. God is
one with His Son in truth. Separation is impossible
because God is one, and there is only God. The Son's
freedom and autonomy is in the realization of his
oneness with his Father. There is no other freedom.
From the ego's perspective, being one with God is
bondage, tyranny and slavery. So the ego fights with
all its might against God, the original tyrant, to
maintain its separation. Even the ego's longing for
God is twisted into a strategy to maintain its
specialness, autonomy and separation from Him; this
is the "spiritual" ego.
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What separates us from God is merely fear, not
reality. Fear is part of the ego's strategy to keep us
from getting back to the power of our mind to choose
against it, and for the Holy Spirit. It is important to
be fully aware of the dynamics of the ego in order to
let it go.
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God is not dependent on us or incomplete without us.
This is another example of how the Course uses
anthropomorphic symbology to facilitate our
understanding. We can relate to and understand the
incompleteness a parent feels when separate from its
child — the Father from His Son. True freedom and
autonomy is in the realization that the Father and Son
are one. The ego's idea of freedom and autonomy is
in the belief that the Father and Son are separate.
Incompleteness is only imagined in the mind of the
separated Son.
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Now we will look at the Holy Spirit's Answer to the
ego's authority problem.
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In terms of our identity, the infinite and the finite are
mutually exclusive. You identify yourself with one
or the other. Either you are infinite or you are finite;
eternal or temporal. This is another example of the
first principle of miracles which is that there is no
order of difficulty among them. God’s universe is the
universe of Spirit, not the physical universe.
<strong>Notes</strong> on the Text of A Course in Miracles
40
To benefit fully from the teachings in this Course, it
is imperative that you take its abstract concepts and
principles and apply them to concrete situations in
your daily experience — relationships with family,
friends, enemies and intimate others.
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The closer we get to realizing the original error, our
belief in separation from God, the more fear we may
experience as the ego shrieks in terror, petrified of its
looming demise.
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The "bleak little world" is your world. You are the
hero of your bleak little world, and if it vanishes, you
vanish with it — and this is your fear. There is no
love, no peace, and no happiness in the world we
made, because we made the world out of a projection
of our sin, guilt and fear. To know true love, true
peace and true happiness we must leave the bleak
little world we made and go back to our Source.
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The dark companions of specialness are sin, guilt,
fear and hate. When brought to the light, the dark
companions disappear into the nothingness from
which they came.
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To the ego, which is the child of darkness, the dark
companions of sin, guilt, fear and hate are comforters
because the ego cannot exist without them. To the
Son of God, who is the child of light, there is no
darkness at all. The peace of God cannot be found in
the darkness of special relationships, separation,
conflict, rejection or judgment; but only in the light
of oneness, peace, acceptance and forgiveness.
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Learning this Course means the end of the ego. Any
resistance to learning the Course is an attempt by the
ego to maintain its existence.
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The underlying principle of the whole Course is
summed up in the statements, "There is no order of
difficulty in miracles, and there is no hierarchy of
illusions. Only reality is true." This is simple, yet
radical. The challenge is in applying these simple
and radical principles to your own daily experience
so you reap the full benefit of the Course. The
Workbook for Students facilitates the application of
the teachings learned in the Text.
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This is not a Course in philosophical speculation.
The Course is given to facilitate a shift in identity
through the use of philosophy and its practical
application in our daily lives. There is one problem