What is Insanity?
Our ego story, whether we appear to be normal or not, is the
source of our insanity and unhappiness. Just because everyone says a thing is sane and normal does not make it so.
Our insanity is our consensus view of reality.
The teachings of A Course in Miracles address
the question of insanity: The ego is very anxious to preserve
its reasoning, not realizing that it is totally insane. And you must realize just what this means, if you would be restored
to sanity. The insane protect their thought systems, but they do so insanely. And all their defenses are as insane
as what they are supposed to protect. The belief in separation has nothing in it, no part, no "reason," and no attribute
that is not insane. And its self-protectiveness is as insane as the whole. The special relationship, which is
its chief defense, must therefore be insane.
The ingeniousness of the ego to preserve itself is enormous,
but it stems from the very power of the mind the ego denies. This means that the ego attacks what is preserving it,
which must result in extreme anxiety. That is why the ego never recognizes what it is doing. It is perfectly logical
but clearly insane. The ego draws upon the one source that is totally inimical to its existence for its existence.
Fearful of perceiving the power of this source, it is forced to depreciate it. This threatens its own existence, a state
which it finds intolerable. Remaining logical but still insane, the ego resolves this completely insane dilemma in a
completely insane way. It does not perceive its existence as threatened by projecting the threat onto you, and perceiving
your being as nonexistent. This ensures its continuance if you side with it, by guaranteeing that you will not know your own
safety.
The ego cannot afford to know anything. Knowledge is total, and the ego does not believe in totality. This unbelief is its origin, and while the ego does not love you it
is
faithful to its own antecedents, begetting as it was begotten. Mind always reproduces as it was produced. Produced
by fear, the ego reproduces fear.
The relationship of anger to attack is obvious, but the relationship
of anger to fear is not always so apparent. Anger always involves projection of separation, which must ultimately be
accepted as one's own responsibility, rather than being blamed on others. Anger cannot occur unless you believe that
you have been attacked, that your attack is justified in return, and that you are in no way responsible for it. Given
these three wholly irrational premises, the equally irrational conclusion that a brother is worthy of attack rather than of
love must follow. What can be expected from insane premises except an insane conclusion? The way to undo an insane
conclusion is to consider the sanity of the premises on which it rests. You cannot be attacked if you have no idea what
is happening, how appropriately can you expect to react?
You might ask yourself, regardless of how you may account
for the reaction, whether its unpredictability places the ego in a sound position as your guide. Let me repeat that
the ego's qualifications as a guide are singularly unfortunate, and that it is a remarkably poor choice as a teacher of salvation.
Anyone who elects a totally insane guide must be totally insane himself. Nor is it true that you do not realize the
guide is insane. You realize it because I realize it, and you have judged it by the same standard
I have.
God
is as dependent on you as you are on Him, because His Autonomy encompasses yours, and is therefore incomplete without it.
You can only establish your autonomy by identifying with Him, and fulfilling
your function as it exists in truth.
It would be madness to entrust salvation to the insane.
Because He is
not mad has God appointed One as sane as He to raise a saner world to meet the sight of everyone who chose
insanity as his salvation. What is producing this world
is insane, and so is what it produces. Reality is not insane, and I have real thoughts as well as insane ones. I can
therefore see a real world, if I look to my real thoughts as my guide for seeing. I am upset because I see a meaningless world.
Insane thoughts are upsetting. They produce a world
in which there is no order anywhere. Only chaos rules a world that represents chaotic thinking, and chaos has no laws.
I cannot live in peace in such a
world. I am grateful that this world is not real, and that I need not see it at
all unless I choose to value it. And I do not choose to value what is totally insane and has no meaning.
You would not excuse insane behavior on your part by saying
you could not help it. Why should you condone insane thinking? There is a confusion here that you would do well
to look at clearly. You may believe that you are responsible for what you do, but not for what
you think.
The truth is that you are responsible for what you think, because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice.
What you do comes from what you think.
All who believe in separation have a basic fear of retaliation
and abandonment. They believe in attack and rejection, so that is what they perceive and teach and learn. These insane
ideas are clearly the result of dissociation and projection.
What you teach you are, but it is quite apparent that you
can teach wrongly, and can therefore teach yourself wrong. Many thought I was attacking them, even though it was apparent
I was not. An insane learner learns strange lessons. You
cannot evaluate an insane belief system from within it. Its range precludes this. You can only go beyond it, look back
from a point where sanity exists and see the contrast. Only by this contrast can insanity be judged as insane.
With the grandeur of God in you, you have chosen to be little
and to lament your littleness. Within the system that dictated this choice the lament is inevitable. Your littleness
is taken for granted there and you do not ask, "Who granted it?" The question is meaningless within the ego's thought system,
because it would open the whole
thought system to question. I have said that the ego does
not know what a real question
is.
You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and
how much God, in His Love, would not have it so. Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His
Son if he were not free. To interfere with you would be to attack Himself, and God is not insane. When you deny
Him you are insane. Would you have Him share your insanity? God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never
cease to love Him. That was the condition of His Son's creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. To know that is sanity.
To deny it is insanity.
God gave Himself to you in your creation, and His gifts are
eternal. Would you deny yourself to Him? The ego,
then, is nothing more than a delusional system in
which you made your own father. Make no mistake about this. It
sounds insane when it is stated with perfect honesty, but the ego never looks on what it does with perfect honesty. Yet that
is its insane premise, which is carefully hidden in the dark cornerstone of its thought system. And either the ego, which
you made, is your father, or its whole thought system will not stand.
The idea that the guiltless Son of God can attack himself
and make himself guilty is insane. In any form, in anyone,
believe this not. For sin and condemnation are the
same,
and the belief in one is faith in the other, calling for
punishment instead of love.
Nothing can justify insanity, and to call for punishment upon
yourself must be insane. Insane ideas have no real relationships,
for that is why they are insane. No real relationship can rest on guilt, or even hold one spot of it to mar its purity.
For all relationships that guilt has touched are used but to avoid the person and the guilt.
Do not underestimate the intensity of the ego's drive for
vengeance on the past. It is completely savage and completely insane. For the ego remembers everything you have
done that has offended it, and seeks retribution of you.
Test everything that you believe against this one requirement,
and understand that everything that meets this one demand is worthy of your faith. But nothing else. What is not love
is sin, and either one perceives the other as insane and meaningless. Love is the basis for a world perceived
as wholly mad to sinners, who believe theirs is the way to sanity. But sin is equally insane within
the sight of love, whose gentle eyes would look beyond the madness and rest peacefully on truth. Each sees a world
immutable,
as each defines the changeless and eternal truth of what you are. And each reflects a view of what the Father and the
Son must be, to make that viewpoint meaningful and sane.
Your special function is the special form in which the
fact
that God is not insane appears most sensible and meaningful to you.The whole belief that someone loses but reflects
the underlying tenet God must be insane. For in this world it seems that one must gain because another lost. If
this were true, then God is mad indeed! But what is this belief except a form of the more basic tenet, "Sin is real,
and rules the world"?
For every little gain must someone lose, and pay exact
amount in blood and suffering. For otherwise would evil triumph, and destruction be the total cost of any gain at all.
You who believe that God is mad, look carefully at this, and understand that it must be either God or this must be insane,
but hardly both.. Salvation is rebirth of the idea no one can lose for anyone to gain. And everyone must gain,
if anyone would be a gainer. Here is sanity restored.
The time has come to laugh at such insane ideas. There
is no need to think of insane ideas as savage crimes, or secret sins with weighty consequence. Who
but a madman
could conceive of them as the cause of anything? Their witness, pain, is mad as they, and no more to be feared than
the insane illusions which it shields, and tries to demonstrate must still be true. It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external
to your mind can hurt
or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself
affects you. There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it
is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely
recognizing what you are. As you perceive
the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of
innocence and holiness. Who but the insane would undertake
to believe what is not true,
and then protect this belief at the cost of truth? This is why
the ego is insane; it
teaches that you are not what you are.
Perceive any part of the ego's thought system as wholly insane, wholly delusional
and wholly undesirable, and you have correctly evaluated all of it. This correction enables you to perceive any part
of creation as wholly real, wholly perfect and wholly desirable.
Disobeying God's Will is meaningful only to the insane.
In truth it is impossible. Your Self-fullness is as boundless as God's.The ego will make every effort to recover and mobilize its energies against your release.
It will tell you that you are insane, and argue that grandeur cannot be a real part of you because of the littleness in which
it believes. Yet your grandeur is not delusional
because you did not make it. You made grandiosity and are afraid
of it because it is a form of attack, but your grandeur is of God, Who created it out of His Love. From
your grandeur you can only bless, because your grandeur is your abundance. If only the loving thoughts of God's Son are the world's reality, the real world must be in his mind.
His insane thoughts, too, must be in his mind, but an internal conflict of this magnitude he cannot
tolerate. A split
mind is endangered, and the recognition that it encompasses completely opposed thoughts within itself is intolerable. Therefore
the mind projects the split, not the reality. Everything you perceive as the outside world is merely your
attempt to maintain your ego identification, for everyone believes that identification
is salvation.
Yet consider what has happened, for thoughts do have consequences to the thinker. You have become at odds with the world as
you perceive it, because you think it is antagonistic to you. For
the memory of God can dawn only in a mind that chooses to remember, and that has relinquished the insane desire
to control reality. You
who cannot even control yourself should hardly aspire to control the universe. The ego is
our control mechanism, as though the universe is separate from us and needs controlling.
We either depend on the peace, power and love of God or upon
our insane story. Is our story crazy? Examine your story closely and you will find that it is fear-based and victim-oriented.
Our ego story is illusory and unrealistic, producing the experience of pain, failure, suffering and disease.
We cling to our story as much as
we resist it. Our story seem inevitable and necessary.
The ego system is chaotic, unreasonable and insane, yet it
claims sanity. We do not recognize that the ego is insane, or we would not cling to it so tenaciously. The belief
in separation has nothing in it, no part, no reason, and no attribute that is not insane.
The special relationship (codependency) is one of the chief
earmarks of insanity.
Anger is also a good example of ego insanity.
Anger cannot occur unless you believe that you have
been attacked, that your attack is justified in return, and that you are in no way responsible for it. Anger
always involves the projection of separation, which must ultimately be accepted as one's own responsibility, rather then being
blamed on others.
Given these three wholly irrational premises, the equally
irrational conclusion that a brother is worthy of attack rather than love must follow.
Only the insane would choose fear in place of love,
and only the insane could believe that love can be gained by attack. But the sane realize that only attack could produce
fear, from which the love of God completely protects them.
The belief in sickness is another example of the ego's insanity
story. Sickness is insanity because all sickness is mental illness, and in it there are no degrees. One of
the illusions by which sickness is perceived as real is the belief that illness varies in intensity; that the degree of threat
differs according to the form it takes. Herein lies the basis of all errors, for all of them are but attempts to compromise
by seeing just a little bit of hell. This is a mockery so alien to God that it must be forever inconceivable.
But the insane believe it because they are insane.
A madman will defend his own illusions because in them he
sees his own salvation. Thus, he will attack the one who tries to save him from them, believing that he is attacking him.
This curious circle of attack-and-defense is one of the most difficult problems with which the psychotherapist must deal.
In fact, this is his central task; the core of psychotherapy. The therapist is seen as one who is attacking the patient's
most cherished possession; his picture of himself.
A Course in Miracles goes further:
When a brother behaves insanely, you can only heal him by
perceiving the sanity in him. You can accept insanity because you made it, but you cannot accept love because you did
not. It is given to you to learn how to deny insanity, and
come forth from your private world in peace.
The Holy spirit will restore sanity because insanity is not
the will of God. The Holy Spirit reverses the course of insanity and restores you to reason. Inward is sanity; insanity is outside you. There is no reason in insanity, for it depends entirely on reason's absence. What makes no sense and has
no meaning is insanity. If our belief in separation is insane,
you can only imagine how
insane worry, fear, insecurity and anxiety are!
You are one with it all. What is there to be anxious
about? You are not separate from anything in the entire universe! There is nothing you could be a victim of!
That is why "There are no victims!"
All victimization is imaginary. All victimization
is the result
of what the Bible calls "evil imagination." St. Paul put it
this way : "Romans 8:
35-39 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine,
or nakedness, or peril, or sword? For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,
nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor
any other creature, shall be able
to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Nothing can separate us from love. The belief in such
separateness is insanity. Worry and anxiety about
such separateness is insanity. Love is the only reality;
all else is illusion, fantasy, the erroneous use of imagination. Wake up to reason, to truth, to reality.
Let go of your ego story. Stop empowering it. Surrender it. Your symptoms and suffering are your invitation to
sanity, to truth, to self-realization.
