4,5,6,del 3er

This is not a self-help course but just the opposite. This Course has stated time and time again that you cannot learn on your own and that resigning as your own teacher is the only way to learn a new curriculum. This Course will not call you to effort of any kind. It will not tell you to leave behind your addictions or to go on a diet or a fast. It will not even tell you to be kind. It does not tell you to be responsible and does not chide your irresponsibility. It does not claim that you were once bad but that by following these tenets you can become good. It gives no credence and no blame to any past cause for your depression, anxiety, meanness, illness or insanity. It merely calls you to sanity by calling you to let go of illusion in favor of the truth.

4.2 The sameness that this Course calls you to is not a sameness of body or of habit. It asks not for monks or clones. It asks not that you give up anything but illusion, which is the giving up of nothing.

4.3 Before we can go on you must take all such ideas from your mind. Such ideas are not small matters. Ideas are the foundation of the self. You cannot have an idea of goodness without having an idea of evil. You cannot have an idea of an ideal state without having an idea of a state that is not ideal. You cannot have an idea you call “right” without believing in an idea that can be “wrong.”

4.4 The ego made such ideas necessary for the idea of the ego was “wrong” or inaccurate. The only way to bring that inaccuracy to light was through contrast.
4.5 To function from an inaccurate foundation was to build upon that foundation. Building a structure with a foundation that would not support it was the folly that the ego made of life. The only way for such an error to be seen as an error is through its dysfunction.

4.6 The only way to correct such an error is to dismantle the structure and begin again with a foundation capable of being built upon. This is what we have done. We have taken away the foundation of illusion, the one error that became the basis of all that came after it. You cannot make another error such as this for it is the one error. Does it not make sense that the only error possible is that of not being who you are?

4.7 You can dismantle the ego and build another in its place and this has at times been done in the individual with great training, as in military training, or in cases of great abuse when a second ego personality is developed to “save” the first. The ego has also been dismantled and rebuilt over time and been seen as the rise and fall of civilizations. The only replacement that will work is the replacement of illusion with the truth. The very purpose of this treatise is to prevent the replacement of illusion with illusion, or one ego-self with another. The training of this Course, while gentle in nature, has been great, as great as that of any military training, as great as any emotional trauma that has left one in a state of emptiness. This is, in effect, the state in which you currently find yourself.

4.8 I repeat, and will do so again and again, that the ego-self is gone from you. Whether you fully realize this or not matters not. This the Course has accomplished. Now the choice is before you to do one of two things: to proceed with love or with fear. If you proceed with fear you will assemble a new ego-self, an ego-self that perhaps will seem superior to the old, but which will nonetheless still be an ego-self. If you proceed with love, you will come to know your Christ-Self.
chapter 5
Original Purpose


5.1 You have just been told that you now exist in a state of emptiness. This is not a state to be feared. Yet it is this fear of emptiness that has, in the past, made those who have experienced it rush to find the easiest and most available replacement (the ego or that which has become familiar if not known). While few of you have ever before reached the emptiness caused by the complete absence of the ego, just as few of you have never felt some sort of absence. All the lessons you have drawn to yourself in your lifetime have worked toward this absence in the hopes of filling the emptiness with the fullness of the truth.

5.2 As with the gentle learning of this Course, not all emptiness has come to you at the hands of suffering. Each time you have “fallen” in love you have emptied a space for love to fill. Each time you have felt true devotion you have emptied a space for love to fill. You have been emptied of the ego-self as creative moments of inspiration filled you and emptied of the ego-self in moments of connection with God.

5.3 Conversely, you have been emptied by the lessons of grief as the loss of love has led to a loss of self. You have been emptied by a loss of self due to illness or addiction, depression or even physical exhaustion. All these things you have brought to yourself for they have been the only way past the ego’s guarded gate.
5.4 You have tried to live in a house built on a faulty foundation, attempting to make-do with what you have. All your time was spent in making repairs and this time spent kept you too busy to see the light that was always visible through the cracked and peeling walls that you built. That you would eventually call to yourself a fire that would burn these walls to ash or a flood that would wash them away, was as much a part of the survival mechanism of your real Self as was the rush to rebuild a part of the survival mechanism of the ego-self.

5.5 All this you have already tried to do; these lessons you have already tried to learn. This Course has come so that these many things that you have tried need not be repeated, just as the crucifixion came to end the need to learn through suffering and death.

5.6 The story that I lived was appropriate for the time in which I lived it and has an appropriateness that continues even now. I walked the earth in order to reveal a God of love. The question of the time, a question still much in evidence, was how mighty could God’s love be if it were given to a people who suffered. The answer was that God’s love was so mighty that he would even allow the death of his only son to redeem the world.

5.7 The death of an only son, then as now, would be seen as a sacrifice of enormous proportions, the greatest sacrifice of all. But the story was not one of sacrifice, but one of gift giving. The greatest gift of all was given, the gift of redemption. The gift of redemption was the gift of an end to pain and suffering and a beginning of resurrection and new life. It was a gift meant to empty the world of the ego-self and to allow the personal self to live on as the one true Self, the one true Son of God. The gift of redemption was given once and for all. It is the gift of restoration to original purpose. Without there having been an original purpose worthy of God’s son, the crucifixion would have ended life in form and returned the sons of man to the formless. Instead, the sons of man were freed to pursue their original purpose.

5.8 This story has been repeated endlessly in time, in time extending both forward and back. Each father’s son will die. Yet this means not what you have taken it to mean — an endless series of generations passing. What this means is that in each the ego will die and the Self be reborn to life eternal. Without rebirth of the Self, the original purpose goes unfulfilled. Since God is original purpose, original cause, the origin of Self and of relationship, original purpose cannot go unfulfilled. What this means is that the illusion will be no more and truth will reign. Such is the reign of God.
chapter 6
the Desire for Reward


6.1 Can you give up your desire for reward? To give up your desire for reward is to give up a childish desire that has become like unto a plague among you. While many of you see it not, everything you do is based upon desire for reward. This is your desire to be given to in return for what you give. It stems from your idea of yourself as a “child” of God, and a notion that would seem to suggest that the child is less than the parent. Although you see yourself as the child of your mother and father, this notion of your self as child has not made you cling to a childish image of yourself as less than what your parents are. While you may still desire recognition and affirmation from them, this is not the same as the “rewards” you seek, some of you from God, some from life, some from fate. No matter who it is you think is in charge of rewarding you, the attitude that causes you to desire reward is what must be done without.

6.2 This may seem a step back from the lofty heights we have just traveled, discussing the reign of God and the meaning of life and death. But this is one of the key ideas that will keep you from yourself, and has much to do with your former notions of God and your own self. It is an idea that has been transferred to all of life, much as the idea of an unlovable self was transferred into all areas of life without your realization.

6.3 Reward is intricately tied to your notions of being good, performing deeds of merit, and taking care of, or surviving the many details that seem to make it possible for you to live within your world. The idea of reward also transfers to ideas related
to comparison, as lack of reward in one instance and reward given in another, is the cause of much of the bitterness that exists within your hearts.

6.4 While many of you who have read this far and learned this much may not be those whose bitterness is mighty and held tightly to themselves, bitterness must still be discussed, for while bitterness remains, vengeance will remain. You have been shown that God is not a God of vengeance but you are still in the process of learning that your Self is not vengeful. The ego has given you many reasons to be distrustful of your Self, beginning with the idea of your abandonment here. Since the ego is a chosen self and a learned self, there has always been just enough room within the ego’s thought system to keep within you the idea of a self the ego is not. Thus has the ego had a self to blame for everything, including your very existence. This blame is as old as time itself, and the cause of bitterness being able to exist, even within your hearts.

6.5 While the untrue cannot exist with the true, what I am calling here bitterness is all that you have forced, through sheer strength of will, to pierce the holiness of your hearts. Bitterness and the idea of vengeance go hand-in-hand. This is the idea of “an eye for an eye” or the exact opposite of the idea of “turning the other cheek.” While this may seem like the very idea of evil which I have denied the existence of, it is not evil but bitterness. You may believe that bitterness is just another word, another label for the evil you have always been convinced existed in the hearts of some, but even being that it is “just” another word, it is one chosen to introduce an idea of such fallacy that it rivals only the ego in its destructive potential. Bitterness is to your heart what the ego has been to your mind. It is the one false idea that has entered this holiest of places, this abode of Christ, this bridge between the human and the divine. It exists not in some but in all, as the ego has existed not in some but in all. Like the ego, it has not caused you to be unlovable or unrecognizable. But it has become, like the ego, so much a part of your reality, that it must, like the ego, be consciously left behind.

6.6 Bitterness, as the word implies, is something taken into the self much as the bitter herbs of scripture illustrated. Many rights and rituals exist for the purification of the unclean but I assure you that you are not unclean and that none can cleanse bitterness from the heart without your choice. The time of tenderness began your release of bitterness and but made you ready for this choice. Choose now to leave your desire for reward, all of your reasons for bitterness, and bitterness itself behind. Bring bitterness no longer to the dwelling place of Christ and we will seal the place of its entrance with the sweetness of love so that bitterness will be no more.