Lesson 22: “What I see is a form of vengeance.”

Vengeance means “Retribution exacted for a punishment or wrong.” 

The ego’s world is one of dangerously terrible wrongs.

The ego believes that whenever we make mistakes or sin, we will be met with a reaction of intense and painful death. 

The ego makes the world the place where we do wrong things and end up in hell as a result.

The ego, by nature, is judgmental, so by nature, there is no way for the ego not to judge.

When we see from the ego’s perception, it necessarily pins us in the position of doing wrong, and thus, deserving a slow, torturous death.  

The ego is so extreme, it makes the way we sin be met with such a spell of damnation that it is impossible to fathom, because the ego is always off balance at the core, and so all of the ego’s perceptions are also off balance as well. 

The ego is not God and this is why the ego’s core is always off kilter. It is so powerfully bad.

We just need to sit and realize how insane the ego really is. 

All of the ego’s beliefs have no reality and no justification in the world because they are baseless and not founded on God, but the ego is still convincing.

We just get used to the depth of the ego’s insanity, and we say it is the most normal thing out there because it looks familiar and so in a way it seems safe.  

We have the rare opportunity in the Course to simply wake up and notice stuff like this is actually horribly bad.

We are just asked to see it for what it is, so we can get to the point of no longer ignoring it and giving it all the latitude to base our reality upon. 

We are asked to simply stop and breathe and listen and wait, and then, in a moment of God’s clarity, we just need to notice that we want more for ourselves than the nightmare. 

This is the only thing we need to do- is to question the vengeance, question the nightmare.

This question allows us then to be open to seeing something else as a next step. 

But for the moment, our open mind is the only way to get ourselves to God, and to peace of mind, and so we take the steps needed to just have an engagement or introduction with the truth.