Your mission is very simple. You are asked to live so as to demonstrate that you are not an ego, and I do not choose God’s channels wrongly. (T-4.VI.6:2-4)

How do we demonstrate that we are not an ego? In order to act like we are not an ego we have to stop thinking with the ego. The ego wants us to judge and think that there are good things in the illusion and bad things. It does not care which way we judge. It just wants us to judge. Why? Because in order to judge something as good or bad, as desirable or undesirable, as helpful or hurtful, in order to have an opinion, we must first judge it as real. That is all the ego cares about.

What is temptation but a wish to MAKE ILLUSIONS REAL? (T-30.VIII.3:1)

If the illusion is real then the separation is real then the ego is real. Game, set, match. We win the grand prize of continuing to participate in the delusion of the cycle of birth and death. We get to keep denying truth and God. We get to keep making everything we made to hide the truth, real. We get to keep having the illusion that our wish for specialness was granted and our fondest desires are being realized. Happy?

Our problem was never the separation. It was making it real. Forgiveness is the process of learning that it and all of its effects, are not real.

Psychotherapy is the only form of therapy there is. Since only the mind can be sick, only the mind can be healed. Only the mind is in need of healing. This does not appear to be the case, for the manifestations of this world SEEM REAL indeed. Psychotherapy is necessary so that an individual can begin to QUESTION THEIR REALITY. Sometimes he is able to start to open his mind without formal help, but even then it is always some change in his perception of interpersonal relationships that enables him to do so. Sometimes he needs a more structured, extended relationship with an “official” therapist. Either way, the task is the same; the patient must be helped to CHANGE HIS MIND ABOUT THE “REALITY” OF ILLUSIONS. (P-in.1:1-8)

Forgiveness also entails learning to remember God.

And what more transcendent aim can there be than to recall the way, the truth and the life, and to REMEMBER GOD? To help in this is the proper purpose of psychotherapy. Could anything be holier? For psychotherapy, correctly understood, teaches FORGIVENESS and helps the patient to recognize and accept it. (P-1.2:3-6)

Forgiveness also entails removing the blocks to truth which are our own wrong-minded beliefs.

Very simply, the purpose of psychotherapy is to REMOVE THE BLOCKS TO TRUTH. Its aim is to aid the patient in abandoning his fixed delusional system, and to begin to reconsider the spurious cause and effect relationships on which it rests. (P-1.1:1-2)

So psychotherapy, which means mental correction in the Course, teaches forgiveness. It helps the patient change his mind about the “reality” of illusions, remember God and remove the blocks to love’s presence. Which collectively result in our living so as to demonstrate that we are not an ego. Forgiveness has many facets. We have a lot to learn.

What might the end game look like?

Never forget you give but to yourself. Who understands what giving means must laugh at the idea of sacrifice. Nor can he fail to recognize the many forms which sacrifice may take. He laughs as well at pain and loss, at sickness and at grief, at poverty, starvation and at death. He recognizes sacrifice remains the one idea that stands behind them all, and in his gentle laughter are they healed. (W-187.6:1-5)

God’s teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God’s teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God’s teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs. (M-12.6:2-11)