Why Does This Process Require Brutal Honesty and No Private Thoughts?

The ego’s one job is to keep you engaged in making it real. It does this by coaching you to make what is outside of you real but it also does it by making you think that the self you made and its body are real. The ego tells you, “It’s you and me against the world. I will keep all of our secrets, all of our shames. I won’t tell anybody. All those things you don’t want anybody to know about are between you and me.”

This is an ingenious plan of the ego’s. It gets a huge bang for its buck. With the action of keeping secrets…

1. You are listening exclusively to the ego.

2. You are agreeing with the ego that you have something to be guilty about.

3. You are agreeing with the ego that you are separate and alone.

4. You are agreeing with the ego that you are that thing that has shame.

5. You are agreeing with the ego that you are special. No one else has this hidden sin.

6. You are agreeing with the ego that you are not the Son of God.

7. You are agreeing with the ego that that you are not the dreamer of the dream.

8. Who is the you who is having these “private thoughts”? The ego gains all of this, a bonanza, just by getting you to harbor a few private thoughts that are for you and it alone.

What could be secret from God’s Will? Yet you believe that you have secrets. What could your secrets be except another “will” that is your own, apart from His? Reason would tell you that this is no secret that need be hidden as a sin. But a mistake indeed! Let not your fear of sin protect it from correction, for the attraction of guilt is only fear. Here is the one emotion that you made, whatever it may seem to be. This is the emotion of secrecy, of private thoughts and of the body. This is the one emotion that opposes love, and always leads to sight of differences and loss of sameness. Here is the one emotion that keeps you blind, dependent on the self you think you made to lead you through the world it made for you.(T22.I.4)

Instead join with the Holy Spirit in this declaration: I am not this self I made. This self is one of thousands of selves I have made to hide from God. There is nothing special about this particular self. It is just one more tool of separation that is keeping me from remembering who I am. I will not pretend to be this self by hiding “private thoughts”. How can I have shame about some character I made up in a play? Only shameful guilty children have secrets. I will not let the ego trick me into keeping my shame and guilt by making it real by keeping secrets. I will clinically engage with this self I have made, this tool of separation, and examine its thinking as an aid to help me reach the home where God abides. I will not use its characteristics or stories to make it real. I will use them to forgive.