My Ego Is a Master Illusionist
I'm doing it to myself
Posted by aplecompte on May 30th, 2009
In heaven Christ’s thoughts simultaneously create wonderful, joyous effects.
But for an instant I wanted more than that; I wanted to separate from God and run my own show, an absolute impossibility. So to bring about the experience I wanted, I fell asleep and dreamed it. In that instant my mind made the world; and God placed the Holy Spirit in my mind so that, when I wanted to, I could remember who I was.
Inside my belief that I separated, however, I felt terribly guilty about usurping God and feared He was angry enough to kill me if ever I came back. Desperate to hide, I repressed my memory of God and turned my mind over to the ego thought system. Now I identify with the ego. The ego’s purpose is to keep me believing that I am a separate person in the world. While perpetuating my dream, the ego has to deal with my feelings of fear and guilt.
My ego self uses two means of deception to accomplish its purpose:
Projection is an unconscious mental process for reducing inner turmoil. When I feel an upwelling of guilt and fear for having separated from God, my ego:
- Attributes negative motives and behavior to another person.
- Projects an image of that person displaying those negative motives and behavior on the screen of the world.
- Erases any thought of having projected that image from my memory.
I then perceive an angry person with evil intentions who is hurting me.
As an innocent victim I defend myself.
In reality cause and effect are simultaneous, which makes projection impossible. So here the ego adds the illusion of linear time to perfect the deception.
Linear Time is a loop of thought that keeps my mind constantly going over past illusions or imagining future outcomes. The constant verbalized inner dialog keeps my mind from becoming still and aware in the present, where it could hear the voice of the Holy Spirit.
Linear time also plays a crucial role in projection. It provides a gap* between cause and effect in which they can be made to appear to be reversed. The gap gives me time to:
- Project my judgmental thought onto another person (cause), make an attacking image of them (effect) and forget having done so.
- And then to switch to my conscious mind and perceive the person’s unprovoked attack on me as the cause of my hurt.
This ego trick produces all my upsets and keeps me from seeing that I’m doing it to myself!
* Link to demonstration of scientific measurement of the judgment gap.
