Before you sought out salvation, you were forced to plan your own escape, and the very activity of planning involved your ego in dream stuff and stimulated the energy of false hope and false faith. Your mind slowly became a dungeon with no hope of escape.

The very desire to free yourself condemned you to the quicksand of scheming and planning. Anticipation conflicted with a true purpose waiting to unfold; always fear and anxiety attended your hopes, which sprang from dreaming.

To create the faith you need to exist, you are forced to scheme and dream, but dreams lie, and their hopes mislead. Desperately you analyze everything. You reach down again and again into the bowels of your intellect for answers.

You rehearse everything because you have no plan except what bubbles up to meet your willful desire for schemes and plans. And those plans are never your own. They emanate from the demon of the intellect.

Man is not a creator of meaning. He is the medium of meaning. In your pride you are tempted to express the tempter’s meaning, believing it to be your own.

Willing things to happen is dying; through willing, you feel that dying. And as you begin to feel that dying, you become super self-conscious of the functions of your body, and through the effort of will you may try to will your body life.

Because this willing is also dying and wrong, you feel additional guilt and panic over dying. The panic comes from the realization that you, “god,” are not really eternal at all. You are a dying “god,” a fallible, whimpering dog.

You see, part of the notion of being a god is to be unmindful of death, because a god lives from everlasting to everlasting. Your ego, descending into the intellect, forgets the truth about death through receiving ideas of glory—but through the sin factor you become conscious of dying, and then, through additional willing, you experience panic. All selfish, highly ambitious, highly motivated egos find themselves struggling to maintain their own health and body functions.

There being nothing greater than you, you are alone with the problems, which cry out for decisions and judgments.

Instead of realizing, and being awakened by what you read, you learn everything in order to feed your ego the facts you crave to construct the perfect world, to prove yourself and realize your own perfection.

"Man is not a creator of meaning.

He is the medium of meaning."

Pride, like God, wills things to happen. In your pride you cannot relax your will, your effort; you cannot let go, to let happen what should. There being nothing greater than you, you are alone with the problems, which cry out for decisions and judgments.

And if you should finally let go, it is only because the world you have shaped draws upon you and drains you of your ignoble breath until you have no strength left with which to will things, to hold everything together, and it all comes crashing down around you.

Here is panic again, panic that comes from having to face your fallibility; add to this the panic of having the terrible responsibility to make things happen.

You get up in the morning, and the whole dilemma of decision making begins anew. You can’t decide what tie or dress to wear. And why are such petty decisions so important to you? Because dress is royal plumage.

It affects the outcome of your relations with people, and since decision making is the basis for conflict, you feel anxiety, fear, and panic.

When you realize that you are not in control, you resent knowing the truth of it, and that panics you again into trying to control and will things to happen.

Decision making can affect your breathing, your digestion; every movement and gesture becomes deliberate be­cause the ego life is a deliberate thing. As you become aware of guilt, of panic, of dying, you again become increasingly self-conscious of your life-support systems; your preoccupation with willing them to fruition causes extra guilt and panic.

Deliberate acts of breathing cause guilt and dying, but the only alternative to that is to decide not to breathe, and you panic when you find you can’t even do that. Everything you do, or do not do, proves the tragic error of a will that is “free” to will.

When you realize that you are not in control, you resent knowing the truth of it, and that panics you again into trying to control and will things to happen.