(The ego’s myth: sin, guilt, and enforced mindlessness)
Enter now the ego’s strategy to devise a plan so the Son of God will never change his mind. Its goal is simple, and its means to achieve it ingenious. Its sole purpose is to make the Son of God mindless, for if he no longer knows he has—and is—a mind, he cannot change it. And so the ego adopts the plan to make the mind so abhorrent and terrifying that the Son will voluntarily wish to leave it, thereby becoming mindless, ensuring that the original decision for the ego remains permanent and its existence secured. The ego’s plan centers on instilling the fear of God—literally—in the Son’s mind. It tells the Son a story—a cosmic myth—the purpose being to cause the Son to choose to flee his mind, never to return. The foundation block of the ego’ s story is the unholy trinity of sin, guilt, and fear. Here is the tale, briefly summarized: We have sinned against God. By selfishly wanting our separation, a price had to be paid for our freedom—God had to be destroyed since oneness and separation cannot coexist.
And thus we fear His Love, believing it will destroy us.
We now have a serious problem confronting us—instant annihilation. Remember, however, that this problem is non-existent, for there is no angry God, no sin to be punished. This is but the ego’s made-up story to motivate us to choose mindlessness.
Pursuing its strategy, the ego sought to drive us out of our minds—literally and figuratively—to attain its goal of mindlessness. It succeeded in blotting from awareness the Content of God’s Love by convincing us to choose against its reflected content, the Holy Spirit ’s Atonement principle.
And so our individual self was preserved, as the ego successfully consummated its strategy of making the Son of God mindless, one among billions of fragments of God’s Son.
Believing now that we are bodies, the content of both love and guilt has been buried beneath the form; the Self of love concealed by the decision-making self of guilt, which in turn has been concealed by the body, the embodiment of the ego’s thought system of separation.
The mind’s battleground of kill or be killed has become the content of the world.
(The body as perpetual problem machine)
Soon after, when it craves attention, seeks comfort, or wants to be held, it either throws a tantrum or smiles sweetly. In this fashion, we begin our lives in the body by quickly learning to solve the problems of life and getting our needs met. Thus it is that everything in the world is an attempt to solve a problem.
“Let me recognize my problem so it can be solved” and “Let me recognize that all my problems have been solved.” Obviously, nothing truly gets resolved because there is nothing there to resolve. Looking at the body objectively, one can easily see the ego’s strategy of setting up perpetual problems for perpetual dis-ease; e.g., perhaps we solve the problems of food, money, or health today, but what about the future? I may finally have learned to satisfy my needs, but that does not mean the same plan will work tomorrow, next week, or next year.
The ego’s principle here is that the more guilt inducing and fearful the form, the less likely we are to move to the mind, where the Holy Spirit exposes the world’s purpose of being the source of guilt and fear. We want our eyes always to focus on the body—ours and other people’s—and never on the mind.
Like in the fairy tale, our right mind recognizes that the ego’s emperor—ruling the kingdom of sin, guilt, and fear—is made up. Moreover, not only does the emperor have no clothes, there is no emperor.
However, the only problem to be solved is the mistake of believing there is a world and body that are the cause of pain and suffering. We know that perception lies because it stops at the form and does not go beyond it to the mind.
“Nothing so blinding as perception of form” (T-22.III.:7). We need to recognize that everything here is perception of form because, again, the body was made to conceal the mind’s content of guilt, which itself was made to conceal the true content of the mind’s power to choose. Within the dream, our only self-concept is that of decision maker—the power to choose the ego or the Holy Spirit.
The point of those two stories, which in a sense is the basis for this discussion of sex and money, is that problems pertaining to them, or to any other specific problem area, are all the same.
(Separation, creation, and the illusion of god-making)
In “The Laws of Chaos,” Jesus says: There is no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion (T-23.II.:1-3).
We therefore believe we usurped God’s place on the throne of creation, and within the ego thought system have the illusion of being creators, essentially negating the biblical story of creation. The projection of this unconscious thought system results in a world of bodies, which then become the instruments of self-creation.
On the most basic level, then, being in a body symbolizes guilt. For example, taking a breath is the way we keep our bodies alive, and can be construed as a way of saying to God: “The breath of your spirit is not enough for me. I need something outside You to sustain my life because You will not give me what I want.”
When sex is understood from this perspective, we see that the many problems surrounding it have nothing to do with sexual behavior, but rather with the underlying thought of guilt that says: “I am a god who has destroyed God, taking His creative life for my own.” Sex becomes but another way of reminding ourselves that we have sinfully usurped God’s function and supplanted Him.
It has become tempting for many people to spiritualize sex, making it into something holy. Yet nothing of the body could be holy—or unholy—for it is neutral. Again, bodily activity can serve the holy purpose of forgiveness, or the unholy purpose of reinforcing specialness. To reiterate this point, of itself the body is nothing, and so having sex is not a spiritual or profane activity. Its value depends solely on the purpose it serves.
Sex clearly makes the body real, whether as a way of producing children, having a good time, or a combination of both; whether sex is guilt inducing, or a source of repeated pleasure. The body remains the central focus, and that focus is the real attraction. This holds for almost any other bodily activity as well, but sex is an especially useful defense, a most effective way of dealing with form instead of content.
Sex confirms the reality of the body, and it cannot be stressed enough that the ego made the world and body so we would be distracted, ensuring we would never return to the mind. The result is our constant focus on form at the expense of content.
The complex notwithstanding, sex is clearly something that occurs between separate people, as opposed to the thought of love that embraces God’s Sons as one.
Sex is one or the other, what the ego said at the beginning to God: “I am going to get my pleasure at Your expense.”
(Sex, projection, and the ego’s distraction engine)
Remember that the fundamental problem for the ego is the threat inherent in the power of the Son’s mind to choose. The ego fears the decision maker, but as part of its survival strategy it declares that this is not the problem, which, instead, is sin, guilt, and fear. Therefore, the problem is no longer that we chose to separate, but that we are separate, a state the ego equates with sin.
We therefore learn that we want to have a bodily problem, preoccupation, or concern—anything that will command our attention, a wonderfully effective means of keeping us mindless—the method in the ego’s madness.
And even though we are becoming more adept at seeing connections between genetic make-up and addictions, food issues, allergies, and sexual impulses, the fact remains that genes are not the cause of our problems and needs: … Appetites are “getting” mechanisms, representing the ego’s need to confirm itself. This is as true of body appetites as it is of the so-called “higher ego needs.” Body appetites are not physical in origin (T-4.II.:5-7; italics mine). The body is thus a cosmic plot of the ego—the part of the mind that wants to remain separated—to distract us from the only real threat to our existence: the power of the mind to choose.
Or in experiences of jealousy, we can easily see the projection of the belief that love has been won through thievery and deception, setting up the inevitable punishment of having the same fate befall us. As the text explains: …those who project are vigilant for their own safety. They are afraid that their projections will return and hurt them. Believing they have blotted their projections from their own minds, they also believe their projections are trying to creep back in (T-7.VIII.:9-11).
We realize that the bodily life we have, along with everyone else’s—past, present, and future—is a fragment of the one life we share as God’s insane Son. We differ only in the ways in which we express this insanity, which has but one root cause: the mind’s decision to believe the ego instead of the Holy Spirit.
(The miracle: from form back to the one content)
“The miracle establishes you dream a dream, and that its content is not true” (T-28.II.:1). The solution to any and all problems is the same: we bring them from their expression as form to their one ego content; thousands upon thousands of different forms, but the content of guilt is one. This content shifts by our no longer judging the guilt as sinful, but forgiving it as simply a mistake.
God, Who knows nothing of any of this. Yet once the ego began weaving its nightmarish myth of what we did to God, and what He will do in return, it convinced us that we had committed an unimaginably heinous sin, despicable and unpardonable: we raped and violated our Source, wresting in righteous wrath (T-23.II.:2) what
Sex as a Classroom Once we understand that problems with sex, as with all other problems, are not what they seem, there is hope. We no longer have to attempt to solve a problem that has no solution.