3-3. Ego-minded thoughts will continue to arise after you are Awake. However you will no longer be able to believe them. They will simply cease to have any effect.
Of course it would seem only rational and reasonable to presume that after you’ve Awakened to Love, leaving behind the darkness of the ego and its mad dreams of separation, that you would be somehow freed from the ego - free to be at Peace, to be calm, centered and composed in all situations. And indeed, so you shall be, for you now carry the literal Peace of God within you, now Awoken, now Aware and now Present at all times. Yet still, despite how far you have journeyed - and you truly do not know how distant your prior state of disunion with Truth was - still you will find that your ego will not relent. Why is this? Why would it be that this lie, this insanity, this illusion so now fully exposed to the Light of Love, might still somehow have the seeming ability to invade your mind, attempting to cast doubt and disperse your now collected thoughts to the winds of alteration and change? Why indeed. The ego does not magically disappear just as soon as you elect to turn away from its darkness. The ego does not easily relent, and it will not simply crumble under its own fragmentary foundations merely because you have elected another Path - a new way, as it were, to see the world afresh in each and every moment. Do not ask the ego to relent. It has no idea that it can, and even if it did know, it would not. Not ever. Why might this be? It is simple, really. The ego does not know that it is an illusion. To admit to itself that it was never real would undermine all of its tenacious grip on your mind, and this your ego will never consent to do. The ego is not to be fought. It is not to be conquered, slain and left to fester in some darkened corner of your mind, an example for other misperceptions to observe and take heed of what becomes of an illusion when it attempts to challenge the Truth of Love. That is not to be the fate of the ego, for even to presume that it could be killed in some manner would be to lend it a life that it has never enjoyed. The ego simply does not exist. It is not Real. It has never been and it will never be. How are you to triumph over that which has never actually existed at all? All attempts to overthrow the seemingly despotic rule of the ego will fail, for there is nothing that you need to do to be free of the ego. You need only turn your attention away from its gibbering madness, accepting the Light that you have found in your heart in the place of the ego’s sordid attempts to distract you and the ego will naturally begin to fade away, if ever so slowly at first. Be not concerned with the amount of time that appears to transpire while you remain still and certain, continuing to hear the desperate pleas of the ego but refusing to feed it with your attention any longer. Time is irrelevant and utterly inapplicable to this process of gentle and soulful correction, this peaceful realignment with Truth and surrender of all that was never real. To battle an illusion is a meaningless concept in Truth, for there are no aspects of the Truth of Love that stand in opposition to either other. They are all complete and Total, just as they are. Just as they were Created - with and because of the Perfection of God - they remain eternally Perfect and Whole, forever untainted by the desperate illusions that the ego has for so long attempted to cast over them, hoping in vain to hold your attention indefinitely, so that you might never Return to Love, for indeed as you Return does the ego grow ever fainter within your mind. It will not stop pleading with you for love, but you cannot justifiably love an illusion, and so what it requests of you is meaningless. Do not attempt to imbue a meaningless entreaty with the Power of your mind, for in doing so you only try in vain to bear witness to a falsity that has never been representative of anything at all. Release these desires, for they serve you no longer and they offer no solace, no peace and no comfort, no matter how convincingly they may have presented themselves to you in the past. Where you are to tread now the ego cannot venture and this is well indeed, for the confusion of the ego has no place within the sanctity of your now healed mind. Release it with gentleness, for while once you believed that it served you, protecting you from assaults that you thought so fierce and so immediate that you had desperate need of its protection, now you See that you have always been utterly Safe, for what can attack Love? How can Love fall before any assailant, destined to be murdered and cast aside, lost to time and no longer able to heal and correct the Vision of all of the Children of God? This cannot be. It is madness to think as such but this is exactly the bargain that the ego has for so long offered you - protection from an attack that will never come, for Love is unassailable and Perfect, just as it was Created. The effects of the ego’s beliefs can only render you numb and dead to your True Self for just as long as you should wish to believe that it was ever appropriate for you to pour your infinite Power into the ego, suffusing it with a majesty that it has never enjoyed, attempting to prop up its faltering and baseless foundations with the Power that you have through - and because of - Love Itself. Allow it to wander away, blind in its rage at your unwillingness to allow it any further sway over your mind, destined to be forever unable to see anything at it truly is, for the ego is an illusion of the body and Love is the Truth of your Soul.