Ego Can’t Get No Satisfaction – SFACIM class/conversation

In this “Death Café” video conversation, we read and examine how we (identified as egos) want the world to be different to satisfy the ego’s incessant “needs” – the demands of the tyrannical ruler of our mind when we buy into its propaganda. Thanks to many different class participants who contributed to this conversation and who shared both Course quotes and their comments below; this also applies to many, many prior blog posts where class participants generously shared truly helpful ideas!

Here are a few related terms in ACIM and the frequency of their occurrence in the Course:

• Need: 882 instances
• Want: 667 instances
• Seek: 426 instances
• Try: 352 instances
• Desire: 163 instances
• Longing: 3 instances
• Satisfy: 45 instances
• Satisfaction: 14 instances
• Desperation: 6 instances
• Despair: 55 instances
• Anxiety: 23 instances
• Obsession: 3 instances
• Compel: 18 instances
• Strive: 19 instances
• Substitute: 102 instances
• Ambition (no instances)

Substitution is among the (unsatisfying compromising) ways we obliviate our awareness of the choice for peace; then we indulge in the tortuous oblivion of mindlessness:

“The one emotion in which substitution is impossible is love. Fear involves substitution by definition, for it is love’s replacement. Fear is both a fragmented and fragmenting emotion. It seems to take many forms, and each one seems to require a different form of acting out for satisfaction. While this appears to introduce quite variable behavior, a far more serious effect lies in the fragmented perception from which the behavior stems. No one is seen complete. The body is emphasized, with special emphasis on certain parts, and used as the standard for comparison of acceptance or rejection for acting out a special form of fear.” (ACIM, T-18.I.3:1-7)

In a sense, when we think, feel, or believe we lack anything out of need, we’re denying the fulfillment of peace we could experience right now – at this very moment. Believing that we make have sum

“Accept with gladness what you do not understand, and let it be explained to you as you perceive its purpose work in it to make it holy. You will find many opportunities to blame your brother for the “failure” of your relationship, for it will seem at times to have no purpose. A sense of aimlessness will come to haunt you, and to remind you of all the ways you once sought for satisfaction and thought you found it. Forget not now the misery you really found, and do not breathe life into your failing ego. For your relationship has not been disrupted. It has been saved.” (ACIM, T-17.V.8:1-6)

The only absolute satisfaction is forgiving ourselves for making up an intolerable dream. Beyond the ego’s nightmares (confined to needy fragments bounded and imprisoned by space and time) is the real peace of our eternal Self that has no end and surpasses anything we can imagine. We “particle-ize” what is whole to make a silly, seemingly separate self that never satisfies consistently.

“Today we are trying to use a new kind of ‘projection.’We are not attempting to get rid of what we do not like by seeing it outside.Instead, we are trying to see in the world what is in our minds, and what we want to recognize is there.Thus, we are trying to join with what we see, rather than keeping it apart from us.⁵That is the fundamental difference between vision and the way you see.” (ACIM, W-30.2:1-5)

“You who believe that God is fear made but one substitution. It has taken many forms, because it was the substitution of illusion for truth; of fragmentation for wholeness. It has become so splintered and subdivided and divided again, over and over, that it is now almost impossible to perceive it once was one, and still is what it was. That one error, which brought truth to illusion, infinity to time, and life to death, was all you ever made. Your whole world rests upon it. Everything you see reflects it, and every special relationship that you have ever made is part of it.” (ACIM, T-18.I.4:1-6)

“Dreams are perceptual temper tantrums, in which you literally scream, ‘I want it thus!’And thus it seems to be.And yet the dream cannot escape its origin.Anger and fear pervade it, and in an instant the illusion of satisfaction is invaded by the illusion of terror.For the dream of your ability to control reality by substituting a world that you prefer is terrifying.Your attempts to blot out reality are very fearful, but this you are not willing to accept.And so you substitute the fantasy that reality is fearful, not what you would do to it.And thus is guilt made real.” (ACIM, T-18.II.4:1-8)

We keep trying to fragment guilt and push it away by projecting it onto the world, but as ACIM reminds us consistently, this attempt is never successful because my mind indulges in dualistic thinking, and these thoughts are still in my mind. The thought of up-set is still in the set-up in my mind, which hasn’t left its source.

When we catch the tiny snowflake-sized insane, fantasy thoughts of grievances and don’t entertain them, they don’t accumulate. Then, we needn’t worry about being blindsided or buried by the inevitable avalanche of avoidance, repression, denial, and projection.

“Ideas leave not their source.” (ACIM, W-132.5:3)

“Dreams show you that you have the power to make a world as you would have it be, and that because you want it you see it. And while you see it you do not doubt that it is real. Yet here is a world, clearly within your mind, that seems to be outside. You do not respond to it as though you made it, nor do you realize that the emotions the dream produces must come from you. It is the figures in the dream and what they do that seem to make the dream. You do not realize that you are making them act out for you, for if you did the guilt would not be theirs, and the illusion of satisfaction would be gone. In dreams these features are not obscure. You seem to waken, and the dream is gone. Yet what you fail to recognize is that what caused the dream has not gone with it. Your wish to make another world that is not real remains with you. And what you seem to waken to is but another form of this same world you see in dreams. All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. Their content is the same. They are your protest against reality, and your fixed and insane idea that you can change it. In your waking dreams, the special relationship has a special place. It is the means by which you try to make your sleeping dreams come true. From this, you do not waken. The special relationship is your determination to keep your hold on unreality, and to prevent yourself from waking. And while you see more value in sleeping than in waking, you will not let go of it.” (ACIM, T-18.II.5:1-20)

Some quick quips gleaned from a local class recently on Rumi & Hafiz:

• There’s a Middle Eastern word for “death” that translates as “not here, somewhere else.”
• “Zero is where the real fun starts. There’s too much counting everywhere else.” – Hafiz

Segmenting, fragmenting, compartmentalizing, particleizing, and clustering are just some of the myriad ways we maintain the obliviating mindlessness of dualistic dreaming; we keep the “we/they” paradigm at the expense of peace. Each little bit of ego propaganda is equally unsatisfying, equally unfulfilling, equally silly, and forgivable:

“What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you?” (ACIM, W-12.5:1-2)

Each thought of separation makes specifics special and different, denying Holy Spirits correction that reminds us that all illusions are equally untrue and therefore, all of our special love and/or hate relationships with everyone and everything have the same effect of causing needless delay of the peace that is in our undivided mind.

“All your time is spent in dreaming.” (or oblivion or death) (ACIM, T-18.II.5:12)

“Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God’s teachers.” (ACIM, M-12.6:6)

True waking (from the Course’s perspective) would be the calm, lucid awareness that we are no longer at the mercy of the ego thought system we made up, having voluntarily restored our mind to the sanity of Holy Spirit’s gentle correction of the Atonement: “… not one note in Heaven’s song was missed.” (ACIM, T-26.V.5:4)

“I am responsible for what I see.
I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide upon the goal I would achieve.
And everything that seems to happen to me I ask for, and receive as I have asked.” (ACIM, T-21.II.2:3-5)

“Disappointment haunted all my dreams.” – The Monkees (“I’m a believer” lyrics, 1967)

We read from The Savior from the Dark (ACIM, T-25.II):

Here are the first 2 paragraphs of this section:

“Is it not evident that what the body’s eyes perceive fills you with fear? ²Perhaps you think you find a hope of satisfaction there. ³Perhaps you fancy to attain some peace and satisfaction in the world as you perceive it. ⁴Yet it must be evident the outcome does not change. ⁵Despite your hopes and fancies, always does despair result. ⁶And there is no exception, nor will there ever be. ⁷The only value that the past can hold is that you learn it gave you no rewards which you would want to keep. ⁸For only thus will you be willing to relinquish it, and have it gone forever.

2. Is it not strange that you should cherish still some hope of satisfaction from the world you see? ²In no respect, at any time or place, has anything but fear and guilt been your reward. ³How long is needed for you to realize the chance of change in this respect is hardly worth delaying change that might result in better outcome? ⁴For one thing is sure; the way you see, and long have seen, gives no support to base your future hopes, and no suggestions of success at all. ⁵To place your hopes where no hope lies must make you hopeless. ⁶Yet is this hopelessness your choice, while you would seek for hope where none is ever found.”

(ACIM, T-25.II.1:1–2:6)

The oblivion of unsatisfying dualistic (polarizing, differencing, antagonizing) substitutions is an avoidable delay or detour:

“Anything in this world that you believe is good and valuable and worth striving for can hurt you, and will do so.²Not because it has the power to hurt, but just because you have denied it is but an illusion, and made it real.³And it is real to you.”(ACIM, T-26.VI.1:1-3)

Nothing involving birth and death (the dream of duality) isn’t going to satisfy us, ever, no matter how many permutations we seem to try or how quickly ego gerrymanders the battle lines! We also begin to realize that character assassination is just as brutal as the physical variety, since, as we’re learning: “There is no order of difficulty in miracles.” (ACIM, T-1.I.1:1) There is also no order of insanity in warmongering duality in the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” thought system of separation, substitution, specialness and sin.

4. Perhaps you call it love. ²Perhaps you think that it is murder justified at last. ³You hate the one you gave the leader’s role when you would have it, and you hate as well his not assuming it at times you want to let the follower in you arise, and give away the role of leadership. ⁴And this is what you made your brother for, and learned to think that this his purpose is. ⁵Unless he serves it, he has not fulfilled the function that was given him by you. ⁶And thus he merits death, because he has no purpose and no usefulness to you.”

(ACIM, T-31.II.3:1–4:6)

The good news from above the ego battleground if we accept Holy Spirit’s gentle correction:

“You do not ask too much of life, but far too little. When you let your mind be drawn to bodily concerns, to things you buy, to eminence as valued by the world, you ask for sorrow, not for happiness. This course does not attempt to take from you the little that you have. It does not try to substitute utopian ideas for satisfactions which the world contains. There are no satisfactions in the world.” (ACIM, W-133.2:1-5)

“God did not create a meaningless world. He did not create [specify the situation which is disturbing you], and so it is not real.” (ACIM, W-14.7:4-5)

Summary: Look (with our Inner Kindness Teacher) at every dualistic ego substitution: look without condemnation at each little unsatisfying snowflake of specialness to prevent the unsatisfying (seemingly huge) peace-obliviating avalanche of guilt. (Or, using the analogy of our flooded downstairs garage from a few years ago, if we detect a leak quickly, we won’t get washed away in flood waters.)

(This conversation was facilitated by Bruce Rawles as part of the School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) curriculum hosted by Lyn Corona and Tim Wise. This YouTube video recording was made on January 14, 2025.)