Teachings of Christ Mind

^5.1 While you have just been told that you now exist in a state of emptiness, this is not a state to be feared. Yet it is this fear of emptiness that has, in the past, made those who have experienced it rush to find the easiest and most available replacement (the ego or that which has become familiar, if not known). While few of you have ever before reached the emptiness caused by the complete absence of the ego, just as few of you have never felt some sort of absence. All the lessons you have drawn to yourself in your lifetime have worked toward this absence in the hopes of filling the emptiness with the fullness of the truth.

^5.2 As with the gentle learning of this Course, not all emptiness has come to you at the hands of suffering. Each time you have “fallen” in love you have emptied a space for love to fill. Each time you have felt true devotion you have emptied a space for love to fill. You have been emptied of the ego-self as creative moments of inspiration filled you and emptied of the ego-self in moments of connection with God.

^5.3 Conversely, you have been emptied by the lessons of grief as the loss of love has led to a loss of self. You have been emptied by a loss of self due to illness or addiction, depression, or even physical exhaustion. All these things you have brought to yourself for they have been the only way past the ego’s guarded gate.

^5.4 You have tried to live in a house built on a faulty foundation, attempting to make do with what you have. All your time was spent in making repairs and this time spent kept you too busy to see the light that was always visible through the cracked and peeling walls that you built. That you would eventually call to yourself a fire that would burn these walls to ash or a flood that would wash them away, was as much a part of the survival mechanism of your real Self as was the rush to rebuild a part of the survival mechanism of the ego-self.

^5.5 All this you have already tried to do. These lessons you have already tried to learn. This Course has come so that these many things that you have tried need not be repeated, just as the crucifixion came to end the need to learn through suffering and death.

^5.6 The story that I lived was appropriate for the time in which I lived it, and has an appropriateness that continues even now. I walked the earth in order to reveal a God of love. The question of the time, a question still much in evidence, was how mighty could God’s love be if it were given to a people who suffered. The answer was that God’s love was so mighty that he would even allow the death of his only son to redeem the world.

^5.7 The death of an only son, then as now, would be seen as a sacrifice of enormous proportions; the greatest sacrifice of all. The point of the story, however, was not one of sacrifice but one of gift giving. The greatest gift of all was given, the gift of redemption. The gift of redemption was the gift of an end to pain and suffering and a beginning of resurrection and new life. It was a gift meant to empty the world of the ego-self and to allow the personal self to live on as the one true Self, the one true son of God. The gift of redemption was given once and for all. It is the gift of restoration to original purpose. Without there having been an original purpose worthy of God’s son, the crucifixion would have ended life in form and returned the sons of man to the formless. Instead, the sons of man were freed to pursue their original purpose.

^5.8 This story has been repeated endlessly in time, in time extending both forward and back. Each father’s son will die. This means not what you have taken it to mean, an endless series of generations passing. What this means is that in each the ego will die and the Self be reborn to life eternal. Without rebirth of the Self, the original purpose goes unfulfilled. Since God is original purpose, original cause, the origin of Self and of relationship, original purpose cannot go unfulfilled. What this means is that the illusion will be no more and truth will reign. Such is the reign of God.