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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
A Course In Miracles
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By becoming involved with tangential issues, [the ego] hopes to hide [from your awareness] the real question [concerning its motivations]... The ego’s characteristic busyness with nonessentials is for precisely that purpose [which is, to distract itself]. Preoccupations with problems set up to be incapable of solution are favorite ego devices for impeding learning progress [toward sanity] … these [are] diversionary tactics
the ego … judges only in terms of threat or non-threat to itself… is primarily concerned with its own preservation in the face of threat… The ego exerts maximal vigilance about what it permits into awareness, and this is not the way a balanced mind holds together … it raises control rather than sanity to predominance…
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Editor’s note: The theme of all of these comments concerns a sanity which the ego studiously avoids. The avoidance comes by way of inveterate distraction, of "characteristic busyness," of background noise, of “majoring in the minors,” of preoccupation with non-essentials or fretting oneself with issues over which one has no control.
not the way a balanced mind holds together
Notice the above quote: "maximal vigilance" and over-emphasis on "control." But this is not the path to a healthy mind. It's all fear-based.
Preoccupations with things that don't matter is how the ego distracts itself from the truth at hand -- there is no threat and scarcity in God's domain, only safety and abundance.
The following is a favorite selection from Dorothy Brande's writing which addresses the same pathology:
Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!, published in 1936 during the dark days of the Great Depression, preaches to a nation drowning in self-pity: "... the Will to Fail, the Will to Death... Nature prepares us for each new phase of life by closing off old desires [and death at the end of a good life is a natural example of this]... But when it appears in youth or full maturity it is as symptomatic of something wrong... Most of us disguise our failure in public... most successfully from ourselves... we seem silently to enter into a sort of gentleman's agreement with our friends... 'Don't mention my failure to me [and I will do the same for you]'... So we slip through the world without making our contribution, without discovering all that there was in us to do... All those in the grip of the Will to Fail act as if they had a thousand years before them... the solitaire-players, the pathological bookworms, the endless crossword puzzlers... the line between recreation and obsession is not hard to see... [ones] crying that one must have recreation give themselves dead away as setting an abnormal value on release... [the] aimless conversationalists... the Universal Charmers. When you find yourself in the presence of more charm than the situation calls for, you are safe in saying to yourself, 'Ah, a failure!' ... [one] who insists on being accepted as just a great, big, delightful child... so exceedingly lovable, even to strangers... A healthy adult does not need the tenderness or indulgence of every casual acquaintance... they must go on being more and more charming... or face the truth -- admit that they have not adequately discharged their responsibilities... a falsely purposeful routine [represents] activities [which] are only apparently purposeless. There is in every case a deep intention, which may be stated in many ways. We may say that the most obvious intention is to beguile the world into believing that we are living up to our fullest capacity... In the long run in makes little difference how cleverly others are deceived; if we are not doing what we are best equipped to do ... there will be a core of unhappiness in our lives which will be more and more difficult to ignore as the years pass... these victims present a dreadful spectacle... insane misers, stuffing a senseless accumulation of trash, odds and ends of sensations, experiences, fads and enthusiasms, synthetic emotions, into the priceless coffer of their one irreplaceable lifetime. Whatever the ostensible purpose may be, it is plain that one motive is at work in all these cases: the intention, often unconscious, to fill life so full of secondary activities or substitute activities that there will be no time in which to perform the best work of which one is capable. The intention, in short, is to fail."
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