Here’s a teaching that’s reshaped how I relate to my own mind:
The ego is a thought system, not a being.
It has no volition. It has no ability to choose. It is not who we are.
I think of the ego the way I think of my dishwasher. The dishwasher has a purpose, to wash dishes. I run it almost every day. I set the timer so it runs overnight, and on a winter’s morning I love opening it to release all that warm, steamy air.
Yet the dishwasher doesn’t have a mind of its own. It can’t turn itself on if I don’t set it up to do that.
The ego works the same way.
It’s a construct. A piece of software running in our mind that lets us experience this world. It allows us to believe we’re separate, that we have a personality, that we have a body, that we have a story.
Without the ego thought system, we wouldn’t be able to function in this dimension at all.
Yet here’s the critical part: we can use the ego without being identified with it.
Just like we can use a computer without thinking we are the computer. Just like we can use a dishwasher without thinking we are the dishwasher.
The trouble starts when we identify with the ego. When we believe the ego’s thoughts about us are who we are. When we accept the ego’s logic about the world as truth.
That’s when the suffering kicks in.
The ego’s logic, ACIM tells us, is as impeccable as the logic of the Higher Holy Spirit Self. Both are in us. Both have internal consistency. The difference is what they’re consistent toward.
The ego is consistent toward fear. The Higher Holy Spirit Self is consistent toward Love.
We choose which one we listen to. Every minute. Every thought.
Here’s the practical version: when we notice the ego software is running, we can simply unplug from it. We don’t have to argue with it. We don’t have to fix it.
We just step back and say, “I’m not running that program right now.”
If you’d like to practice this kind of unhooking, please join my Healing Religious Guilt Deep Dive Workshop on Saturday, May 16.
We can do this!
SATURDAY: This week, I’d like to invite us into this work together. My Healing Religious Guilt Deep Dive Workshop is this Saturday, May 16. Many of us are carrying religious guilt we don’t even recognize as religious guilt. It’s just woven into our sense of being “not good enough.”
LATEST PODCAST EPISODE: You’re Not a Victim What if life isn’t happening to me at all? This week I’m sitting with one of the most foundational sections of A Course in Miracles — Chapter 27, Section 7 — and walking us into a teaching that took me a few years of real willingness to fully accept. Why does almost every problem feel like something the world is doing to us? What’s the difference between responsibility and blame that most of us have never been taught? And what was the one tiny shift that helped me realize I’d never actually been a victim at all? This is part one of a two-episode arc. Listen with me on Episode 737.
If you’re carrying religious guilt – whether from how you were raised, from past lives spent in churches and orders, or from a wound you can’t quite name – join me for my Recovering from Religious Guilt Deep Dive Workshop This Saturday, May 16. God doesn’t punish us. We do. And we can stop. Let’s lay this down together. 
. Register at PowerofLoveMinistry.net/
