Ken Wapnick workshop, March 2012: “An unexamined life is not worth living” (Socrates)
Let your mind be the hero of your day’s dream.
Dedicate each day to the Holy Spirit to serve the Mind, not the body’s needs: pain-relief/pleasure, etc.
Relationships must be healed at the level of the mind. There’s no real need to ‘talk things out,’ where you are working on a special relationship between two separate bodies, as in couples therapy. Work it out instead with thee Holy Spirit. Then it permeates down to the level of the physical relationship.
The ego owes its entire existence, and its continued power, in persuading the decision-maker to believe in it. Our power of choice is its real threat, not God or the Holy Spirit. So the ego’s job is to keep the decision-making mind off of the awareness of choice, by using our guilt of punishment for the separation of God to keep us in fear and unaware of our power to choose. But every thought the ego uses to defend the choice to be a body in the world has a corresponding thought that Holy Spirit offers our decision-maker instead so that we may choose the Mind.
The ego uses differences to separate. The Holy Spirit uses our oneness to unite. We relive the original moment of separation each time we focus on differences, or get angry, or judgmental.
When you attack someone else, you know on some level you are doing it unfairly, because you have a sense that they are not the reason you are upset. So you inherently believe you deserve punishment for attacking them, and expect to be attacked back. Even if they don’t react, you will make up their attack in your mind. But when you listen to reason and forgive from your right mind, you hear any attack as a call for love.
(note: When the Course uses the term ‘reason’, it is referring to right-minded thinking.)
Look honestly at your judgments with Jesus. Someone said to Ken that they don’t have to do anything, but just be. When Ken questioned him what he meant, the man said he just responds like Jesus would. Ken said that sounds like the same thing he was saying by looking at your judgments with Jesus, just inviting him in. (Jonathan’s note: The ‘I need do nothing’ statement taken out of context?)
Differences include denigrating your supposed enemy, saying they look different, speak differently, believe differently; so now you can ‘kill’ them without feeling immediate guilt. But any judgmental thought that is not love, is really murder. At the core of every perception of difference is the ego saying, “that other person is sinful, and I am guiltless.” And so the ego triumphs over God to get its needs met, which is to triumph over the mind.
The world makes no sense because it is an inadequate solution to our problem. It was made from the premise of insanity as a thought of separation, and so can never be the solution. There really is no problem to solve, except the belief in the ego itself.
I need do nothing was originally just a message to Helen during an elevator strike at her apartment that actually never happened, but she moved out for fear that it would cause her inconvenience! In truth there is no problem, so you need do nothing to solve it.