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SearchI get angry and want to quit when doing the lessons, but another part of me wants to continue.
Question:
Today while doing my lesson I found myself getting angry. I really felt like quitting and running away. Then another part of my mind said no, I should continue. There seem to be two parts of my mind—the one that wants to run and the one that wants to persist.
Answer:
Yes, you are describing a split mind. The part that is in contact with love is the sane part. It keeps calling you to Heaven and to release the other part to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit cannot come into your mind and take away the fear or error unless you voluntarily give it over. The Course is about bringing illusions to the truth. It is about bringing the darkness of the mind to the light of the Holy Spirit.
There is no battle going on between God and the devil. God is pure love. In truth, God has no opposite. This cosmos is the result of the belief in opposites. It is very difficult to hold two thought systems in mind, one of love and one of fear. They have no meeting point. The split is intolerable, and so a cosmos of time and space was made as a giant screen for ego projection. Thus was a world of duality and opposites made, past and future, male and female, cold and hot, fast and slow, high and low, big and little, on and on. It was made to see the split in the world, instead of in one's own mind.
To blame the world instead of accepting forgiveness within; this is the ego system to keep the illusion going. When you get angry, the ego says "blame this person or blame that thing." But by projecting blame, you keep the anger! When you see that the anger comes from your own attack thoughts and grievances, you can then release those thoughts.
As long as the error is projected, the ego is protected in the mind. Jesus knows that you will get angry many times. The Course does not advocate stuffing or repressing feelings. As you do the workbook, the feelings of hurt will come up. This is your opportunity to release them. Jesus teaches: Anger is never justified. Pardon is always justified. This is another way of saying, Love your enemies. Bless those who curse you. Anger is never about what it seems to be about, so let's look at some basic metaphysics underlying the anger:
When the mind believed it fell from grace and separated from God, it was very afraid. The ego voice, which is the voice of fear, told the mind it was guilty and must run away. You might say that the garden of Eden spoken of in the Bible describes the world of time and space. The cosmos is just like a giant fig leaf with which the mind tried to cover itself. God is pure love and oneness. Therefore God cannot come into duality. Duality is the hiding place. To the mind that believed it had separated from God, the ego said: "Here is your new home now. Be content with the body as your new home. We will make up everything that you seem to have in Heaven. We will make a new kind of love, with bodies. We will make a new kind of freedom, with movement of bodies. We will make a new kind of happiness with pleasures of the senses, to take the place of your home in Heaven." Some belief systems even teach the immortality of the body, but the body is temporary, as are all the fleeting pleasures of the world. They come and they go, but they never satisfy completely. The ego wanted God to bless its new world and give reality to the fantasy of time and space. The anger is because God cannot do this! God is Divine Love. God knows Christ as Divine Love. This love is abstract light, total joy, constant communication, gratitude, infinite, perfect. God would not be God if He granted the ego's wish, so all anger is a temper tantrum, wanting the temporary to be true and real. Forgiveness releases the illusion of this entire cosmos and remembers the reality that God created Eternal.
Love,
David