Why
the ego wants you to think the world is black and white
The least you should know about the ego, Part 5.
A discourse by Jesus
NOTE: This
teaching was given on May 9, 2006, after the NEW
DIRECTION was implemented.
The most obvious example
of the ego’s relativistic, dualistic way of thinking is what I
prefer to call black-and-white thinking. This plot by the ego makes
blatant use of the basic duality built into the mind of anti-christ.
It defines two opposites that are opposites in every way, meaning that
there is no overlap or potential for compromise. There is no grey zone
because the opposites cannot co-exist but must cancel out each other—or
so it seems. One opposite is defined as being absolutely good and the
other is defined as being absolutely evil, thus setting up an inevitable,
to-the-death struggle between them.
The ego makes people believe that the only way for them to please God
and be saved is to take the side of good and to fight against evil.
An extreme outcome of this scenario is the definition of two religions
or ideologies that both claim to be the only true one, making their
respective followers believe it is their duty to fight the other. The
ultimate triumph of the prince of this world is to get two groups of
religious people to kill each other in the name of the same God, as
for example in the Crusades.
The result of this ego-manipulation is that people adopt a very simplistic
view of the world. Their religion is completely true and all others
are completely false. There is no room for any nuances in between, which
means that people almost inevitably become extremists and fanatics.
This is a very easy approach to life because it really does not require
people to think for themselves. They simply accept the definitions created
by the leaders of their society without making any personal attempts
to discern whether their leaders are right according to the Christ standard.
They believe these leaders are absolutely right and that God himself
would agree with them.
The consequence of this approach to life is that once people have accepted
that a particular belief system is absolutely good, they will never
question it. Thus, they will blindly follow what the leaders of their
religion has defined as absolutely right, and this has led to some of
the worst atrocities in history. I described this scenario as follows:
Let them alone:
they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind,
both shall fall into the ditch. (Matthew 15:14)
Yet instead of leaving the
blind leaders alone, people follow them uncritically. They never question
that the black-and-white definition of life might not be in alignment
with God’s truth. As a result, many people have spent one or more
lifetimes engaging all of their energy and attention in this dualistic
struggle between two relative opposites. Such people have defined an
enemy or scapegoat and they believe they must do God’s work by
destroying the enemy.
As long as people are trapped in this extreme form of black-and-white
thinking, they are absolutely convinced that they are working for good
and will be saved. Yet the stark reality is that everything they do
to fight the self-defined enemy only serves to trap them more firmly
in the dualistic state of consciousness. This obviously prevents them
from putting on the wedding garment of the Christ consciousness, that
is the ONLY way to enter Heaven.
It can be extremely difficult for extremists to admit that they are
wrong. They cannot admit that what they have seen as a work for God
has not promoted God’s cause but has only served to reinforce
the dualistic struggle created by the forces of anti-christ. Such people
tend to become very defensive and hostile toward anyone who questions
the validity of their approach. This is why the scribes and the Pharisees
wanted me dead and why some people in today’s world become fanatical
in defending their “truth.”
The sad fact is that such people are unapproachable for a spiritual
teacher. You see this illustrated in how the scribes and Pharisees rejected
my attempts to show them the higher way of Christ. They literally used
their black-and-white viewpoints to justify rejecting the Living Christ,
meaning that they had put their own graven image before the Living God.
They used a relative image to justify not reaching for the direct experience
of God’s absolute reality—the experience I came to offer
to all who were willing to lose their mortal sense of identity for my
sake.
Overcoming extreme selfishness
You will remember that I earlier said that the ego creates a false path
to salvation. By using black-and-white logic, the ego creates the impression
that being saved is a matter of belonging to the only true religion
and meeting its outer requirements. The more people identify with their
egos, the more prone they are to believe this illusion. It seems so
easy that instead of doing the hard work of pulling the beam from your
own eye, you simply have to believe a predefined doctrine and follow
a set of outer rules.
At the beginning level of the spiritual path, people are prone to accept
the black-and-white approach to salvation. Thus, they become very zealous
– even fanatical – in following their particular belief
system – be it religious, political or scientific in nature –
and they absolutely refuse to question it. That is why some people can
believe that by killing the enemies of God, they will instantly be saved.
Now comes one of the subtleties that the more mature spiritual seekers
need to understand. The extreme outcome of being blinded by black-and-white
thinking is that people become entirely self-centered and selfish. They
often believe they have a supreme right to do what they want and that
anyone who opposes them – including the rest of the human race
– is wrong. They start acting like predatory animals who take
whatever they want and are unwilling to consider how their actions affect
other people, affect themselves in the long run or compare to higher
principles. In the past, humankind was at a much lower level of consciousness
than today, as illustrated by the cave man society in which the law
of the jungle ruled. In today’s world, you see this level of consciousness
in many criminals, from leaders of organized crime to pedophiles or
serial killers.
How do you take people who are completely selfish and raise them to
a more spiritual level? Extreme selfishness is the ultimate outcome
of the relative logic of the ego. In the Christ mind you see that all
life is one, and thus when you hurt another, you are hurting yourself.
When you are completely trapped in the mind of anti-christ, you think
you can hurt others without hurting yourself, you even think you have
the right to do whatever you want, regardless of how it affects others.
You justify this by using the relative logic of the ego, which can truly
make it seem like anything – including total selfishness –
is justified.
How do people start rising above this level of consciousness? They do
so by realizing that there is something beyond the ego’s relative
logic, that there is something that is right or wrong according to a
higher standard. Do you see the point here? When you are completely
selfish, you see nothing beyond the relative logic of your ego and thus
you think you have the right to do anything you want. To begin the process
of escaping total selfishness, you must realize that there is a higher
standard for evaluating your behavior, so that you choose to limit certain
types of selfish behavior.
For most people who are trapped in selfishness, this realization comes
only when someone “puts the fear of God in them.” In other
words, these people begin to realize that there is such a thing as long-term
consequences. Their souls can be affected in an afterlife by what they
do in this life, and they will either be rewarded in Heaven or burn
forever in hell. Thus, from a purely selfish motive, these people begin
to modify their short-term egotistical behavior according to a higher
standard.
Because these people are still identified with their egos, they cannot
yet see the limitations of the relative logic of the ego. So they need
a very simplistic, black-and-white belief system with clearly defined
rules for how to avoid hell and get into Heaven. Here comes the subtle
point. When people start modifying selfish behavior, they have reached
a turning point from which genuine progress is possible. Yet there is
a real danger that these people will be fooled by their egos to enter
the blind alley of fanaticism, where they think they serve God by fighting
what their belief system defines as the enemies of God. This will, of
course, abort such people’s progress.
However, if people avoid going into fanaticism, it is possible to make
genuine spiritual progress by following a black-and-white belief system.
The reason being that when you believe certain types of behavior will
send you to Hell, you gain a very strong motivation for modifying selfish
behavior. This will cause a soul to make less karma, and thus the soul
can gradually free itself from at least some of the downward pull of
the dualistic struggle. When you are completely selfish, everything
you do creates negative karma that only reinforces the sense that you
are in a struggle against everyone else. When you relieve some of this
pressure, you can begin to see through the more selfish beliefs, and
thus you can free yourself from some of the illusions of the ego.
Judge not
My point is that even though most fundamentalist Christians will reject
this website as the work of the devil, there are actually people who
have made progress by following a fundamentalist belief system. The
problem is that this progress will only last for a time. A black-and-white
approach simply cannot take you above a certain level of the spiritual
path. And because this approach is still so heavily influenced by the
relative logic of the ego, it can very easily become a blind alley that
begins to take you into a downward spiral of judgment and pride, which
is only marginally better than the downward spiral of selfishness.
The problem is that a black-and-white belief system automatically implies
a value judgment. “The members of our church are automatically
good and everyone else is bad.” This inevitably causes people
to judge others based on a relative standard, defined by their egos.
As I said:
1 Judge not, that
ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what
measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew,
Chapter 7)
Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.
(John 7:24)
Judging according to appearance
means that you judge based on a relative, dualistic standard created
by the ego. Judging righteous judgment means that you discern absolute
truth based on the vision of the Christ mind. When you judge based on
the ego, you inevitably feel that you are better than other people,
and this leads to spiritual pride, which binds you to the duality consciousness.
Do you see my point? The ego wants a relative standard because it allows
it to build the appearance that it is better than others. It can then
create the illusion that because you are better than certain other people,
you are guaranteed to be saved. As I explained in a previous discourse,
there is no such value judgment in the Christ mind. That which is in
alignment with God’s law is real, and that which is out of alignment
with God is unreal. The Christ does not use the relative terms good
and bad—it does not compare things on a relative scale that leads
gradually from one extreme (good) to the opposite extreme (evil). The
Christ mind does not judge based on appearance but is only concerned
about whether something is real or not real.
One might say that the deepest level of ego-identification is to be
completely selfish. You are completely identified with the dualistic
struggle, thinking that life is a battle between you and the world.
As you rise above this, you stop indulging in the most extreme selfish
behaviors, but this makes you feel you are better than those who are
still acting in “primitive” ways. At the lower level, you
might engage in religion in order to destroy all threats to your religion,
thinking God will reward you for doing so. At the next stage, your motivation
for being involved with religion is to prove the superiority of your
religion and thus create the appearance that you are so good that God
simply has to save you.
A closed circle
The problem is that as long as you think the world is black and white,
you cannot grow beyond a certain point. Black-and-white thinking sets
up a scale with two extremes and then makes people think they have to
choose one of the two polarities. In other words, if the world is engaged
in an epic struggle between God and the devil, then you must obviously
choose the side of God in order to be saved. Yet when this struggle
is defined in black-and-white terms, it will seem as if choosing the
side of God means choosing a particular religion in this world. And
once you have chosen that religion, you must uncritically accept all
of its doctrines—for if you don’t, the devil will get you
and take you to hell.
This line of thinking obviously leads to a fear-based approach to salvation,
which gives rise to two problems. One is that you simply cannot enter
the kingdom of God while there is ANY fear left in your being. That
is why I said:
36 Master, which
is the great commandment in the law?
37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
(Matthew, Chapter 22)
Until you overcome fear,
you cannot put on the Christ consciousness. Yet how do you overcome
fear? Partly by using the rational mind to reason that your fear is
based on a lack of knowledge and partly by reaching for a direct experience
of God’s transcendent reality, whereby you will experience the
perfect love that casts out all fear. The problem here is that as long
as you are trapped in a black-and-white belief system, you will be afraid
of doing either.
Your belief system will strongly discourage you from thinking for yourself
and questioning the beliefs that give rise to fear. And any black-and-white
belief system on this planet states that you cannot experience God directly;
you need the outer church and its priesthood as a mediator between you
and God. That is why the black-and-white thinkers of the Jewish religion
killed me after I stated that the kingdom of God is within you.
So fear itself makes a black-and-white belief system a closed circle,
a trap for your mind. It creates a prison for your mind, and once the
Conscious You is inside, your ego throws away the key. The Conscious
You can step outside at any moment, but in order to do so, it must be
willing to confront its fear and confront the fact that a black-and-white
belief system is based on an illusion.
You see, the psychological effect of a black-and-white belief system
is that it focuses your attention on a scale with two polarities, and
then it makes it seem like truth has to be found somewhere on that scale.
In other words, there is nothing beyond the relative scale. Yet any
time – and I mean ANY TIME – you have a belief system with
two opposites, you have a dualistic belief system. And in such a belief
system BOTH OPPOSITES WILL BE DEFINED BY THE MIND OF ANTI-CHRIST.
I know this can be a startling statement considering the fact that most
religions – including Christianity – define the world as
an epic struggle between good and evil, between God and the devil. Yet
as I have said, there is a stage on the spiritual path where people
need to overcome the extreme selfish behavior by following a black-and-white
belief system. However, there comes a point in your growth, when you
MUST move beyond that stage in order to make further progress. And you
do this ONLY by reaching for the Christ mind, which is beyond either
of the two extremes defined by ANY black-and-white belief system!
Do you see my point? As I explained in previous discourses, the reality
of God CANNOT be put on a relative scale and it has no opposite polarity.
God’s reality has no opposite because that which is outside of
God’s reality has no reality. And that which has no reality cannot
be in opposition to that which has reality. Thus, in the Christ mind,
there is only that which is real and that which appears to be unreal
because the law of free will has allowed it to take on a temporary appearance
outside God’s reality. Yet this unreality can exist only in the
minds of co-creators who are trapped in duality.
It is only when you step into the mind of anti-christ that opposites
become possible. In this frame of mind there seems to be two opposites,
such as good and evil, true and false. These opposites cancel out each
other, and because one can destroy the other, it seems like both of
them have – the same – reality. This is what gives rise
to fear of evil because people in a dualistic frame of mind think evil
is real and has real power over them. When you attain the Christ mind
and see that evil is not real and that its appearance has no power over
you, you lose all fear. Yet as long as you believe evil has the same
reality as good, you cannot overcome that fear. The trick is that evil
DOES have the same reality as relative good. Thus, you need to use the
Christ mind to see the absolute good of God.
My point here is that a black-and-white belief system makes you think
that you have to move toward relative good and avoid its opposite, namely
evil. It makes you think that a statement must be either true or false,
meaning that you must side with what you – or your belief system
– have defined as true and avoid anything that contradicts or
goes beyond it.
People think that by moving toward relative good, they are moving closer
to God. This is both true and untrue. If you move away from selfish
behavior, you are moving away from the extreme forms of egotistical
behavior. This gives you the potential – but ONLY the potential
– to rise above duality—which will bring you closer to God.
The big question is whether you keep moving toward a relative extreme
(good as defined by the ego) – and thus inevitably become trapped
in pride – or make the leap and reach for something beyond the
dualistic extremes.
Christ truth cannot be forced into a dualistic belief system, and thus
Christ truth can NEVER be found on a scale with two opposites! Christ
truth is beyond duality and thus you can find it ONLY by reaching beyond
the black-and-white belief systems of this world. As I have said, only
when a soul reaches a certain maturity will it be ready to question
its belief system and realize that the world is not black and white.
I could say much more about black-and-white thinking, but the most important
fact you need to understand is that it becomes a trap for your mind.
Once you accept any black-and-white belief system, the ego can always
come up with a seemingly watertight argument for why you should not
look beyond it. Many fundamentalist Christians believe Christianity
is the only true religion, the Bible is the infallible word of God and
their literal interpretation of the Bible is the only true one. Thus,
anything beyond their present beliefs is of the devil and they should
avoid thinking about it—which is why they reject this website
as the fundamentalists of the Jewish religion rejected me when I walked
the Earth in the flesh.
Likewise, many scientifically minded people believe there is nothing
beyond the material universe. Thus, any belief system that proposes
a “supernatural” cause is unscientific and the product of
the subjectivity of the mind. The effect of a black-and-white approach
is ALWAYS that it closes your mind to growth. As I said in a previous
discourse, you settle for a description of truth – a description
created through the mind of anti-christ – and you use it to justify
not reaching for a direct experience of the Spirit of Truth.
Billions of people are trapped in some version of a black-and-white
belief system. Yet most of the people who are open to this website have
already started seeing the fallacy of this approach to religion/life/salvation.
They have started seeing through the illusion that there is only one
true religion and that “our side is always right and the other
side is always wrong.” They have started realizing that life is
not as simple as the black-and-white thinking implies and that a more
sophisticated approach is needed. They have also started distancing
themselves from the extremism and fanaticism – often even the
value judgment and pride – that is so common for the black-and-white
approach.
We might say that such people have started seeing through the black-and-white
illusions of the ego. Yet although this clearly represents a higher
level, it is extremely important for spiritual seekers to realize that
they are still not above the relative logic of the ego. I have said
that the ego has a built-in contradiction and seeks to create two opposite
viewpoints in every situation. Obviously, black-and-white thinking defines
such opposites, but this form of thinking also forms its own polarity.
In other words, black-and-white thinking has its own opposite and when
people start rising above black-and-white thinking, it is quite common
that they jump into the opposite extreme. In the next discourse we will
examine this extreme, and I hope I can prevent sincere seekers from
being stuck in that extreme longer than necessary.
Why the ego wants you to think the world is gray
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Copyright
© 2006 by Kim Michaels |
