Tuesday Text: Chapter 3: Sane Perception, Section 6: The Divided Mind

          Joy is an attribute of the Kingdom

Chapter 3: Sane Perception, Section 6: The Divided Mind

Class notes 8/4/26

          Most of the abilities you now possess are shadows of your real strengths. Your spirit knows, loves and creates. These are its unequivocal functions. Unequivocal: no doubt, unambiguous. Our present function is equivocal or open to question. This happens because we are no longer certain how to use our strengths. So we are as of yet incapable of knowledge because we are uncertain. Certainty knows, you don’t have to question. We are incapable of true love because we still perceive lovelessly. How does it land when Jesus says that you are incapable of true knowledge or love? You can’t create surely because perception deceives and illusions are not sure.

          Only the levels of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit are capable of unity. Spirit has no levels and all conflict arises with the idea of levels. Perception did not exist before the separation introduced degrees, aspects, and intervals. War arises when some regard others as on a different level. All interpersonal conflicts arise from this fallacy. The levels introduced by the separation are disastrous. They have to conflict. One level is meaningless to the other. 

          Freud realized this. Freud’s picture of the psyche includes:

-The Superego- morally right and perfect

-The Ego- The reality principle

-The ID- the pleasure principle 

They have different goals. Freud saw these goals as forever irreconcilable. They are conflict prone by definition. They want different things and follow different principles.

          The ACIM picture of the psyche includes:

-The superconscious- revelation level- direct experience with God

-The conscious level- gets impulses from the unconscious and superconscious. This is the level of perception but not knowledge. To perceive is not to know.

-The unconscious- properly only consists of the miracle ability and should be under Jesus’ direction 

          Edgar Cayce’s readings teach that the highest level of the mind is the superconscious. All knowing at one with God, the level of spirit. Here Cayce is more correct than Freud. Consciousness was the first split you introduced to yourself. You became a preceiver rather than a creator.Consciousness is the domain of the ego. Jung was right when He insisted that the ego was not the self and the self should be regarded as an achievement. He did not recognize that the achievement was God’s. 

          The ego is a self made attempt to perceive yourself as you wished, rather than as you are. This is an example of the creator/created confusion. You did not create yourself. The ego can ask questions but not perceive wholly valid answers because those are of knowledge and can’t be perceived.The mind is confused only one mindedness is without question. A separated or divided mind is uncertain by definition. It has to be in conflict, it is out of accord with itself. Conflicts within your mind come from the same place as conflicts between people. One part of the psyche perceives the other on a different level and does not understand it. This makes the parts strangers to each other. This is the essence of the fear prone condition. When you are in this place, an attack is always possible. You have every reason to feel anxious about how you perceive yourself. This is why you can’t escape fear until you know that you did not create yourself and can not create yourself. You can never make this misperception valid and when you can at last perceive clearly you’ll be glad that you can’t. 

          Your creation is beyond your own error and how you see the data. That is why eventually you will choose to heal the separation. Do not confuse right mindedness with the knowing mind because it is applicable only to perception. You can be right minded or wrong minded and this is not subject to degrees so it is not knowledge. Right mindedness is a correction for wrong mindedness and applies to a state of mind which induces right perception. It is miraculous because it heals misperception and healing is a miracle in how you view yourself. Only the sick need healing. Your spirit does not need healing but your mind does. 

          Freud gave an upside down account of how divisions of the mind rose from the bottom up. He said the ego developed from the id and the superego came from the ego. This is impossible; the unconscious can’t generate consciousness. You can’t create something you don’t know., so the ego did not arise from the unconscious. A lower order perception can’t generate a higher order one because it doesn’t understand it. But a higher order one can produce a lower order one by misperceiving it. 

          Perception is a misuse of will because it involves uncertainty. The mind is active and has will power. When it willed the separation, it willed to perceive it. Until the mind chose this it willed only to know. After the separation it had to will ambiguously and the only way out of that is clear perception. The ego is as frail as Freud perceived it. If you attempt to endow the ego with the power of the spirit, as some later theorists did, it is confused thinking. Freud know a bad thing when He saw it, but He failed to realize that a bad thing can’t exist.  It’s not necessary to get out of something that doesn’t exist. The thing to do with a desert is to leave the desert.

          The mind returns to it’s proper function when it wills to know, this puts the mind in the spirit’s service where perception is meaningless. The superconscious is the level of the mind that wants to do this. Freud is particularly wrong here because his super ego is a big step away from Jesus’ superconscious. Freud was right when he said the parts of the psyche are not things or entirely separated, i.e. they used to be one. The mind divided itself when it willed to make levels and the ability to see them, but it couldn’t entirely separate from spirit, which derives the ability to create. Even in miscreating, you are affirming your source, you can’t stop creating because the spirit God created is eternal. 

          The ability to perceive made the body possible because you must perceive something with something. Perception involves a translation or exchange which knowledge doesn’t need. You then perceived your body as yourself, you interpreted it that way, this is a distortion of creation. If we see ourselves as a body, it is a case of mistaken identity. The superconscious could not reconcile the loss of power because it is incapable of darkness. That is why it became almost inaccessible to the mind and entirely inaccessible to the body. It was perceived as a threat because light does drive out the dark by establishing the fact that it isn’t there. The truth will always destroy error. This is not active destruction, knowing does not do anything. It can be perceived as an attacker but it can’t attack. 

          What you see as it’s attack is your recognition that it can always be re-membered. You can go back, reattached. The Christ self can’t be destroyed.