An alternate title for this fun and nerdy conversation might be: “Seriously? Taking (or leaving) the ego lightly (with a nod to Kenneth Wapnick).” Fellow enthusiasts, students, and teachers of A Course In Miracles, Stefan Bolz and Bruce Rawles continue an ongoing conversation about how foolish our egos are and how gently but firmly our Inner Kindness Teacher (a.k.a. Holy Spirit) lampoons our stubborn decision for masochistic mental misery in this video conversation. A sense of humor – completely non-derisive to all, please! – is vital to navigating back through the ego thought system. It is indicative of allowing the Holy Spirit to guide us out of the ego’s labyrinth of guilt (as quickly as we allow) to the peace awaiting us, achieved by our consistent forgiveness.
The word “joke” is only mentioned once in ACIM, but in a well-known paragraph:
“Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself and done to him. Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time.”
It should be obvious that the levity or humor in the Course is completely devoid of any harm, cruelty, or mean-spirited motivation, since those are really just variations of ego’s morbid, sinister, and wicked tyranny. When we laugh with the Holy Spirit or the Jesus of the Course, we gently, patiently, kindly laugh at the silliness of taking the ego seriously. There are 24 instances of “laugh” or variations of that word in ACIM.
Levity’s lightness lifts us (metaphorically) up vertically above the battleground of the ego’s heavy, uncertain, lonely, fearful, desperate, dreary, dark, and deadly gravity. The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland makes light of the insanity of dueling dualistic thinking by reminding all of us fantasy figures that we’re all mad here! Fortunately, we have our Inner Kindness Teacher to awaken us from the dream of separation through consistently relinquishing the gravity of condemning judgments.
Again, we discussed the movie Inception, featured in prior nerdy ACIMblog posts here and here, as well as Interstellar, both directed by Christopher Nolan. We also shared enthusiasm for the movies Arrival and Contact.
Here are some humorous ACIM quotes (oh-so-gently lampooning everyone’s ego) from a presentation I gave in June 2016 in Estes Park, Colorado at the Weekend of Freedom Retreat:
“There’s a little man; very sweet, very gentle, and he keeps tapping us and saying: ‘Come listen to me. This is not what you think. Let me tell you a very funny story.’ We don’t want to hear a funny story. … He says ‘Ya gotta hear this; it’s really cute; it’s sweet, it’s funny, it will make you laugh.’ (We respond:) ‘I’m not letting go of my anger, my grievance, my pain, my suffering, my memories or my specialness.’ He waits and waits and waits. He’s always smiling sweetly, gently, tenderly, kindly. That’s what forgiveness means. You don’t take things personally. You don’t let things upset you. How could a world of total unreality upset you? Unless you had an investment in the world of total unreality being reality.”
– Kenneth Wapnick, “Taking the Ego Lightly: Protecting Our Projections”“The acceptance of the Atonement by everyone is only a matter of time. ²This may appear to contradict free will because of the inevitability of the final decision, but this is not so. ³You can temporize, and you are capable of enormous procrastination, but you cannot depart entirely from your Creator, Who set the limits on your ability to miscreate. ⁴An imprisoned will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. ⁵Tolerance for pain may be high, but it is not without limit. ⁶Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way.” (ACIM, T-2.III.3:1-6)
Here is a related post featuring a calendar with Humorous quotes lampooning the ego, and a prior post with a video from the “Weekend of Freedom Retreat” conference presentation noted above.
I also stumbled on the “sin, guilt, and fear” phrase that Ken Wapnick described as the “unholy trinity” of how ego uses time, or rather abuses the past, present, and future to mindlessly reinforce our dream of separation. I recently made a little rebus for this:
We also touched on the importance of admitting that we’re clueless, and becoming happily clueless. This relates beautifully to the four stages of competence detailed in this blog post and how it relates to the “undo curriculum” of the Course:
From ego incompetence and insanity to Holy Spirit’s sanity: habits and the four stages
Here is some fascinating commentary on how photons don’t experience time (along with a few related ACIM quotes) that Stefan provided and read:
“A photon born in the first seconds after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, experienced zero time between the moment it was created and the moment it was absorbed. For that photon, birth and death were the same instant.
This is not a metaphor. It is a direct consequence of special relativity. As an object accelerates toward the speed of light, time for that object dilates and slows relative to everything else. At the speed of light itself, that dilation becomes infinite. No time passes between emission and absorption, regardless of the distance traveled or the billions of years that passed for the universe around it.
From your frame of reference, a photon leaving a star 8 minutes away takes 8 minutes to arrive. From the photon‘s frame of reference, it left and arrived simultaneously. It experienced no journey. It crossed no distance. The 8 minutes existed entirely in the universe it passed through, not in anything the photon itself experienced.
Scale that up. A photon from a galaxy 13 billion light years away has been traveling since the early universe by our clock. By its own clock, it never traveled at all. The entire history of the cosmos, every star that formed and died, every galaxy that assembled and collided, every civilization that may have risen and fallen, all of that happened in the gap between a photon‘s birth and death that the photon itself never experienced.
Time is not built into the universe at its most fundamental speed. It is something that emerges only for objects slow enough to be trapped by it.
Every moment you have ever lived, every memory, every second that felt urgent or precious, exists only because you are moving far slower than light. You experience time because you cannot escape it. The photon never could be trapped by it in the first place.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old. For light itself, it has always been no age at all.”
“Each day, and every minute in each day, and every instant that each minute holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror took the place of love. And so you die each day to live again, until you cross the gap between the past and present, which is not a gap at all.” (ACIM, T-26.V.13:1-2)
“This lesson takes no time. For what is time without a past and future? It has taken time to misguide you so completely, but it takes no time at all to be what you are.” (ACIM, T-15.I.9:1-3)
“The working out of all correction takes no time at all.” (ACIM, T-26.VIII.6:1)
“There is no difference in his state at different times and different places, because they are all one to God.” (ACIM, M-16.7:7)
“And now in all your doings be you blessed.” (ACIM, M-29.8:1)
“Do not despair, then, because of limitations.It is your function to escape from them, but not to be without them.” (ACIM, M-26.4:1-2)
“Knowing, as we have already observed, does not lead to doing. The confusion between your real creation and what you have made of yourself is so profound that it has become literally impossible for you to know anything. Knowledge is always stable, and it is quite evident that you are not. Nevertheless, you are perfectly stable as God created you. In this sense, when your behavior is unstable, you are disagreeing with God’s idea of your creation. You can do this if you choose, but you would hardly want to do it if you were in your right mind”. (ACIM, T-3.V.3:1-6)
“The curriculum is highly individualized, and all aspects are under the Holy Spirit’s particular care and guidance. Ask and He will answer. The responsibility is His, and He alone is fit to assume it. To do so is His function. To refer the questions to Him is yours. Would you want to be responsible for decisions about which you understand so little? Be glad you have a Teacher Who cannot make a mistake. His answers are always right. Would you say that of yours?
There is another advantage,—and a very important one,—in referring decisions to the Holy Spirit with increasing frequency. Perhaps you have not thought of this aspect, but its centrality is obvious. To follow the Holy Spirit’s guidance is to let yourself be absolved of guilt. It is the essence of the Atonement. It is the core of the curriculum. The imagined usurping of functions not your own is the basis of fear. The whole world you see reflects the illusion that you have done so, making fear inevitable. To return the function to the One to Whom it belongs is thus the escape from fear. And it is this that lets the memory of love return to you. Do not, then, think that following the Holy Spirit’s guidance is necessary merely because of your own inadequacies. It is the way out of hell for you.”
(ACIM, M-29.2:6–3:11)
“minds are joined” 22 instances in ACIM!
Here are prior related conversations with Stefan Bolz and Bruce Rawles:
- A Course in Miracles: ego foolery and Holy Spirit humor with Stefan Bolz and Bruce Rawles
- ACIM: Stop thrashing in ego’s quicksand – Stefan Bolz and Bruce Rawles conversation
This video was recorded on June 29, 2026.
Stefan’s excellent YouTube channel – A Course In Miracles – Applied – has over 200 insightful, clear presentations of important Course topics. He is also the author of several books and many other contributions to collaborative works on Amazon. More info is on his blog, Stefan’s Writing Desk: Stories of Hope and Splendor, and his Facebook page, Stefan Bolz, Author.
