Lesson 113: Review of
Lesson 95: I am one Self, united with my Creator.
Lesson 96: Salvation comes from my one Self.
The idea that I am “one Self, united with my Creator,” is guaranteed to make your ego emit an evil, “Muhwahaha” kind of chuckle. You can feel it rubbing its hands together, saying, “We’ll see about that.”
The ego demands that we be many selves – the self we take to work, the self we show up as in all sorts of relationships, be they intimate, casual or just in passing, the self we take to events, the self we take to religious communities. The ego insists that we need many masks, many personas, because, it direly whispers to us, “no one will like you if they saw the real you.”
Fact is, the ego won’t like you if you saw the real You – that one Self that is united with your creator. That Self is kryptonite to the ego and it’s fully invested in making you believe that you would face rejection and hatred if the world ever saw your true Self.
So, we play the game – we put on our different faces depending on the people, places and things we expect to encounter. We laugh at the jokes to keep coworkers happy, we nod and smile when the boss says something that deeply conflicts with our values, we argue politics with those who basically agree with us to avoid offending others, and on and on it goes.
This lesson, however, encourages us to focus on our one, true Self that has never left its creator. We try all these different masks because we fully believe that the ego’s world is real and is not just an illusion we have willingly miscreated with a bunch of other ego driven bodies. This world of competition, fear and anxiety isn’t real. Our one Self has no need of such a world, because it is already living in a world of love, joy and peace. That world is constantly being made available to us if we’re willing to stop believing we are several personas living in a body and realize we are but one Self, forever united with our Creator.
Today’s lesson invites us to examine all the ways we tend to show up in the world around us and question whether we’re being true to our one Self or if we’re constantly feeling pressured to play the ego’s identity game.
“Salvation,” this lesson reminds us, “comes from my one Self.”
Salvation, remember, is simply whatever we need to remember who we are. “Salvation,” the Course tells us, “is undoing in the sense that it does nothing, failing to support the world of dreams and malice. Thus, it lets illusions go. By not supporting them, it merely lets them quietly go down to dust.”
When we realize we are one divine Self living in a body with an ego that insists we are separate and many, we begin the process of salvation that dispels the ego’s lies and returns us to our state of wholeness in God.
Buddhist teacher Ajahn Chah reminds us that our mind is not split, like the ego wants us to believe. Instead, he says, “the mind is like a single point, the center of the universe.” This is our one Self, and if we’ll remain there and trust that salvation will come and we’ll remember who we truly are then we will not be tempted to believe our thoughts.
Instead, when we live from our single center of Self, Chah says our thoughts “and mental states are like visitors who come to stay at this point for short or long periods of time. Get to know these visitors well. Become familiar with the vivid pictures they paint, the alluring stories they tell, to entice you to follow them. But do not give up your seat — it is the only chair around. If you continue to occupy it unceasingly, greeting each guest as it comes, firmly establishing yourself in awareness, transforming your mind into the one who knows, the one who is awake, the visitors will eventually stop coming back. If you give them real attention, how many times can these visitors return? Speak with them here, and you will know every one of them well. Then your mind will at last be at peace.”
Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash