Making a Clean Break

That is the underlying theme of Logion 47, yet another "prequel" to the New Testament. The change of mind which Jesus advocates is a complete break with the past. The thought systems of the ego is utterly incompatible with the thought system of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus represents. The break has to be complete, for as long as you hang on to the ego even a little bit, you are hanging on to contradiction and to pain, and keeping conflict in your life.

This saying is just one of the many many ways in which the Jesus material that has been handed down to us is letting us know that his teaching is really, really different. His Kingdom is not of this world, give to God what is God's and to Caesar what is Caesar's, etc., and throughout the material of A Course in Miracles we find this principle clarified to us in great detail.

Here is where the metaphysics of the Course truly help in understanding our mistake, and understanding why it is impossible for us to exit from the mental knot which is the ego system, without appealing to something or someone who is not part of that system. These concepts become clearer every time you look at them, and appeal to us intuitively at a very deep level.

• One comes first. (Duh!) Here there is nothing but the consciousness of Heaven.
• We toy with the idea of being anything other than one, and stupidly we take this thought seriously, without realizing that oneness is ever so much still one, never mind if we take the idea very seriously, it remains nothing but a "tiny, mad idea." But if you take it seriously, it would be the first step of the separation. And we do take it very seriously...
• We get all impressed with our new found sense of self-importance, and forget to laugh about the whole thing, though we are nagged by the memory of Heaven (a.k.a. the Holy Spirit), which we cannot truly forget. So give him his own room, and tell him to stay there, so as not to spoil our game. This is the separation of the mind into Right mind and wrong mind.
• Now that we are feel free from that spoil-sport, we can totally run off with the ego, but we find ourselves feeling guilty, sensing vaguely that we did something wrong (sinned in the past), and are afraid of tomorrow, for we suspect God wants to get us back for running away from home (fear for the future). So now we cannot experience the present, but we use it to scheme to protect ourselves from that fearsome future, by defending ourselves from all the evils that are lurking in the world. This futile battle for self-preservation is what we think is our life, and we never admit the utter futility to ourselves, for try as we might it ends in death - the only certainty of the ego thought system. We're on borrowed time, until the Grim Reaper comes to collect the overdues.
• We now happily compound our error by extending the ego's run, and let ourselves once more be guided by its insane thought system, which inevitably recommends more of the same, namely to run away from the problem. At this stage it comes up with the idea that in this world of time and space we can have discrete individual bodies, where we will really be safe, ignoring the fact that it all reflects the same stinking thinking. This is the metaphysical equivalent of the Big Bang.

We find ourselves living a life in this world, and somehow smelling a rat. Somehow, the contradiction of Logion 47 makes sense, and we know something does not add up. With the growing discomfort we start looking for "another way," and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are just symbols of the part of our mind which still recalls all the way back to the Oneness of Heaven, and shows up in our lives as a Helper or Inner Teacher to fill in what the ego forgot, and so begins the way back home, on which we learn but to give up all the ways in which we've rationalized the ego's thought system. As we learn to navigate, and through forgivess touch on the miracle of Inner Peace, we also begin to notice more sharply how much the ego system is one of conflict, and how painful it is whenever we fall back on it. We need to learn this incompatibility fully, in order to be motivated to keep on making the other choice, until it finally becomes the default choice, in what A Course In Miracles calls "accepting the Atonement for ourselves," which is our only real job if we follow Jesus:

    Healing and Atonement are not related; they are identical. There is no order of difficulty in miracles because there are no degrees of Atonement. It is the one complete concept possible in this world, because it is the source of a wholly unified perception. Partial Atonement is a meaningless idea, just as special areas of hell in Heaven are inconceivable. Accept Atonement and you are healed. Atonement is the Word of God. Accept His Word and what remains to make sickness possible? Accept His Word and every miracle has been accomplished. To forgive is to heal. The teacher of God has taken accepting the Atonement for himself as his only function. What is there, then, he cannot heal? What miracle can be withheld from him? (ACIM:M-22.1)