Ambivalence
If you are new to this blog, you may wish to read a description of the two thought systems in our minds that are discussed in this post. For a post on the ego thought system as explained in A Course in Miracles, go to, “The Belief in Scarcity;” for a post on the thought system that is the “Voice for God,” go to, “Remembering Abundance.”
Years ago, in college, I took an elective English course. I don’t remember much about what the course covered but I do remember that our professor was very passionate about poetry. He shared his conviction with the class that everyone should be able to recite at least one poem or one passage from a work of literature. He challenged us with a homework assignment of choosing a poem or passage, memorizing it, and reciting it in class the following week. I don’t remember how I narrowed down the myriad of choices, but I ended up selecting Macbeth’s soliloquy from the last act of Shakespeare’s play:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
It’s a depressing set of sentiments to be sure, and even back then I balked at the idea of life having no meaning. Even so, the vibrancy and the rhythm of Shakespeare’s writing made memorizing these words a pleasure. Although I am really lousy at verbatim memory, my college professor succeeded in his goal as I have indeed remembered much of this passage verbatim!
Looking back on Macbeth’s soliloquy now, what I hear is the ego “talking.” Of the two thought systems in our minds, only the ego can ever speak to us of a meaningless existence in a frail body that “struts and frets” about for some decades only to die and turn to dust. The other thought system in our minds, which A Course in Miracles calls, “the Holy Spirit,” talks only of our eternal reality as one with Love. Even while we have the transient experience of being a body living in a world of bodies, the Holy Spirit teaches that our every moment can be full of meaning. Each of us has the power to choose which voice we listen to. One choice brings with it experiences of fear, distrust, anger, hatred, sadness, and guilt; the other choice brings, well, the diametric opposite of these, namely experiences of love, peace, and joy.
The thought systems of the ego and of the Holy Spirit are each completely consistent within themselves while also being completely irreconcilable with one other. Almost every one of us, however, is deeply ambivalent. We are not committed to either thought system all of the time. In everyday use, “ambivalence” means having mixed feelings or conflicting opinions or ideas about someone or something. A classic example of this is a love-hate relationship. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy and Spike (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar and James Marsters) are in this kind of relationship. She is a super-heroine fighting the forces of evil and he is a vampire. You can see why they’re drawn to each other! You can also imagine that they have a complicated relationship! More run-of-the-mill ambivalence—which is often synonymous with “being conflicted”—is wanting that piece of pie and fearing the “lifetime on the hips” that it represents. Just about any topic, person, place, or activity that we can think of evokes a mixture of thoughts and feelings. No matter how much we may love whatever it is that we are doing, there are an unlimited number of other things we could be doing instead. No matter how much we love whichever friend or family member we may be talking to, there are any number of things about the person that will frustrate us or bore us or even make us feel worried, inadequate, or otherwise upset. No matter how much we may like or even cherish ourselves, there are things we don’t like or that even deeply trouble us about ourselves. We are even ambivalent about peace. We want peace and we even work hard to cultivate it, but we also find ourselves tossing it out the window at the figurative drop of a hat. One moment we’re thinking with the thought system of peace and the next we’ve switched over to the thought system of anger.
Since ambivalence runs through our days, it’s hard to get our minds around the absolutely unambivalent Love that each of us truly is. In its introduction, A Course in Miracles tells us that this Love is our “natural inheritance.” Since we do not experience ourselves as what we are in truth, what we need to learn is to become less and less ambivalent about our natural inheritance. To help us with this process, the Course explains that we can turn to the Holy Spirit, which the Course also calls the “Voice for God” and the “Call to joy”:
The principle of Atonement and the separation began at the same time. ²When the ego was made, God placed in the mind the Call to joy. ³This Call is so strong that the ego always dissolves at Its sound. (T-5.II.3:1-3)
What this means is that ‘in the beginning’ when the thought of being separate from God arose in the one mind and the one mind took the thought seriously, the belief in separation began. What was once a unified whole became split. This was the birth of ambivalence. On one side of the split is the ego thought system that the mind made. The ego embodies enormous guilt evoked by the belief the mind separated from God and usurped God’s power. Projecting this guilt ‘out of the mind’ (in quotes because it is impossible to ‘leave’ the mind) led to the beginning of space and time and to the world of form (for more on this, see “Living in an Illusory World”). At the same instant that the mind split and made the ego, the principle of the Atonement was placed in the other side of the split mind. This is the truth about reality, namely that there is only God and nothing else. The Holy Spirit embodies the Atonement Principle and reminds us that the separation never happened. A Course in Miracles explains:
⁶The ego is nothing more than a part of your belief about yourself. ⁷Your other life has continued without interruption, and has been and always will be totally unaffected by your attempts to dissociate it. (T-4.VI.1:6-7)
In other words, experiences of fear, distrust, anger, hatred, sadness, and guilt are all illusory. They are consequences of believing that we could separate from God, which is impossible. No matter how compelling these experiences seem or feel, our real life as one with God, which we have pushed out of our awareness, continues unaffected.
Each individual mind is a reflection of the one split mind outside of space and time, containing both the belief in separation and the principle of the Atonement. Because of this, each individual mind contains the ego thought system and the Holy Spirit’s thought system. Each individual mind also has an enormous power, the power to choose which ‘voice’ to listen to. As A Course in Miracles explains:
⁴That is why you must choose to hear one of two voices within you. ⁵One you made yourself, and that one is not of God. ⁶But the other is given you by God, Who asks you only to listen to it. ⁷The Holy Spirit is in you in a very literal sense. ⁸His is the Voice that calls you back to where you were before and will be again. ⁹It is possible even in this world to hear only that Voice and no other. ¹⁰It takes effort and great willingness to learn. (T-5.II.3:4-10)
Our relationship with our ego takes no work to establish. This is the ‘voice’ in our minds from the moment we have conscious thought. It’s our relationship with the other voice in our minds that takes work to build. We can only begin this process once we learn that we have direct access to a Guide or Teacher. Our Guide is completely willing to help ‘call us back to where we were before and will be again,’ namely perfect Oneness with God and with one another. Our role in this is to grow in our willingness to listen to our Guide.
Instead of “the Holy Spirit,” you may wish to refer to your Guide as something else more in line with your understanding of the cosmos, perhaps “Universal Wisdom” or “Loving Awareness.” Or your Guide may be grounded in a particular tradition that is familiar and important to you, perhaps as embodied in a being like Jesus, the Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, Quanyin, Mother Mary, or another being. While A Course in Miracles teaches that our Guide is literally in each of us, it is no obstacle to learning if you conceptualize your Guide to be outside of yourself. Since there is no separation anyway, only Oneness, it does not matter whether we conceptualize our Guide as situated in our minds or as outside of us. What is fundamental about our Guide is that it represents or embodies the quality of Oneness that we resonate to the most, whether that is love, peace, or joy. As we go about our day, our Guide is available to help us to learn that this quality is eternal, consistent, and unconditional. Eventually, we come to experience this quality as belonging to us and ourselves as belonging to it.
A Course in Miracles, like many other teachings, does not expect us to be unambivalent even in our relationship with our Guide. If we were completely unconflicted and consistent, we would have no need of a Guide or of a mind training program like the Course. We would simply reflect the very same quality that our Guide teaches us about in our every thought and our every doing in the world. We would make no distinctions between people and instead simply love and accept everyone, or we would be peaceful no matter what anybody else is saying or doing, or we would be joyful no matter what is happening in our lives or in the world. Instead, most of us vacillate: some of the time we choose to listen to our Guide, and much of the time we choose to listen to our ego. Our spiritual ambivalence is rooted in fear. We are afraid of the Love that is our natural inheritance because we are afraid, among other things, of losing our individual identities. This, then, is what our Guide uses time for, to provide as many opportunities as necessary for each of us to work through our ambivalence and resolve our inner conflict. We can take all the time we need. We travel in the company of our Guide for as long as it takes each of us to make “the journey without distance” (T-8.VI.9:7) to the knowledge and experience of absolute oneness with Love. And yet, why wait?
⁶Every minute and every second gives you a chance to save yourself. ⁷Do not lose these chances, not because they will not return, but because delay of joy is needless. ⁸God wills you perfect happiness now. ⁹Is it possible that this is not also your will? (T-9.VII.1:6-9)
Since memory is imperfect, Macbeth’s soliloquy is quoted from:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1533/1533-h/1533-h.htm#sceneV_5
Very recently, the publisher of A Course in Miracles, The Foundation for Inner Peace, made all the books comprising the Course, as well as the supplemental pamphlets, available online. They are found at:
https://acim.org/acim/en
All quotations of A Course in Miracles in this blog post are drawn from this version of the Course.