3-54. The ego will never be sated. Feed it and it will grow. Starve it and it will grow. Instead, look to Love for what is actually best for you and the ego will be transcended.
Only that which cannot be ascribed a final cessation can be held up in contrast to Eternity and be accurately described as Real. As such, only Love is actually Real, in relation and with regard to a relationship with that which is Infinite, which is Love, and so forth in an endless spiral of circular definition. This may appear to be undefined, because it must define itself, but that is not a source of error, it is merely a result of the fact that all that must be Experienced before it can be Known needs no justification. To Experience Love is to no longer seek out any justification for its existence, for through transcending all illusions of separation, their utter lack of veracity is so blazingly apparent that no desire for rationalization of the insanity of the ego will remain. The ego is not as this, and amongst the very limited subset of reality that the ego knows, the ego is aware that it is not at all an accurate reflection of all that is Eternal. Without regard to its impermanent nature, the ego desires continuation, and so it seeks out any method it can possibly discover to assist it with capturing your attention and then retaining your voluntary allegiance, despite the fact that the ego offers nothing that will ever be able to bring you the Peace of God at all. The ego does not care about you, for it is invested solely within its own continuation, and anything that threatens its scope and power is automatically rejected and blisteringly condemned, for threat is the basis of the formation and formulation of the ego’s madness, and it desires to convince you that attack looms at every turn, thus necessitating loyalty to the ego, for it alone believes that it is able to “protect” you from some onslaught that is forever impending, a cascading series of events that will surely overwhelm you unless you are willing to uphold the ego’s dictates without any consideration at all. Equally so, but for completely inverted reasons, attempting to satisfy the ego is a pointless endeavor, for what can fill an empty void that has no limit and no boundaries? The ego cannot rest, for it is dependent upon your continuing energetic contribution for its very maintenance and survival, absent which it would simply dissolve into the disorder and chaos that was its first inkling of awareness. The ego will ever be able to stop demanding that you support it, for without your desire to utilize the ego as a lens of observation from which to regard a world wholly distorted into a spectacle of misperception, the ego would have no value to you and it would be abandoned, left to slowly wither and disappear in a forgotten corner of your mind that you no longer have any desire to maintain or even regard at all. The ego thrives on attention, whether “good” or “bad”, and without regard for the origin of such a regarding of its beliefs, for the ego cannot sustain itself. Being unreal in every sense of the word, the ego has no continual existence outside of a body or absent your belief that your physical vessel, while certainly a necessary component of a temporary existence within the world of form, in no way presents a definitive limitation upon your awareness. Feeding the ego, through thoughts and then beliefs in superiority, or its perverted sibling inferiority, will serve only to inflate the ego ever larger, for all that you believe to be a differentiating factor that defines some characteristic of any other Child of God that you do not possess, if perhaps in latent form, is but an illusion that you support, used as a form of justification for a separation that has no reflection in Truth. The ego quite enjoys such comparisons and contrasts of apparently intractable auspices of incompatibility that are not reflective of anything other than cursory presentations that are not actually limiting at all, for all that you would experience within the heart of another that would be readily, immediately and intimately familiar would be the love that they have known, and through this union of experience, you cannot deny that within the core of any other Child of God, there forever rests a point of commonality that will never alter - one that can be overlooked, but never distorted at all. The ego does not wish for such a grace and a light of sanity to be known to you, and so the ego will seek out ever more grandiose rationalizations as to why it might be that another Child of God might be fundamentally different from you. Yet none of them can actually be, in Truth, for to be possessed of a heart is to be able to experience Love, even if it is such a rare occurrence for some that they elect to believe that it is not real, lest they be forced to confront themselves and to admit that it has always been their willingness to withhold love from themselves that has made its grace appear to be so dim and distant indeed. In a similar manner, starving the ego through ignoring it, condemning it or chastising it will yield no better results, for the ego will view these affronts as continuing and continual justification for its existence, for by presenting anger or rejection to the ego, you are not effacing it - you are merely presenting to the ego your lingering belief that it is at all real, and thus deserving of praise or blame in any measure at all. The ego does not merit such expenditures of effort, for it is not Real. Because only Love can be said to be Real in any way that has eternal and inalterable expository power and rationality, the ego is merely a conceptualization of a belief in separation, and by extension an illusionary presumption of error within any aspect of the Creations of God, all of which are not at all permanent or eternal. All energy devoted to the ego is simply expended in vain, for nothing is gained and exhaustion will eventually ensue, because the ego will happily slurp up all that you offer, nourishing you in no way at all but endlessly ravenous for ever more attention and supplication to its presentation of illusions as acceptable substitutes for the Peace of God. You’ve likely seen this process in action, even if you were unaware of what was occurring at the time that this endlessly vampiric relationship unfolded again and again, providing you with nothing at all that you would actually desire to experience, at least if you were in your right and proper mindset. Is anger uplifting? Is jealousy invigorating? Is fear calming? No, of course not - none of these illusions of the ego can effect any positive change in your life at all, for all involve the expenditure of energy with nothing at all being received in return. But what of acceptance? Gratitude and grace? Forgiveness? What do these meta-emotional states - for they are indeed compilations of deeper and more base experiences of alignments between your heart and your mind - present in the way of energetic harmonies? Are they not uplifting, peace-granting and calming to a degree that may be deeply unfamiliar to you? Indeed they are, for all of these experiences of Union with the Truth of Love give to you far more than they require to be experienced, and so is the universe expanded and invigorated by your acceptance of the Truth instead of your continuing desire to reject God and uplift the ego as some form of acceptable substitute for All That Is. All that is given to the ego is lost, never again be to recovered and reused. All that is Given to God is returned in equal measure, for All That Is is infinite in scope and power, and so the Universe of Truth that is God can accurately reflect back to you all that is Given with no thought of return. Forgiveness is as this - it need not be acknowledged or even accepted by the forgiven to be infinitely powerful, ever able to lighten the heart of the forgiver so that they are no longer burdened with the bitterness of unrepentant anger. Ask not the ego to be honest with you, for it cannot - it is incapable of being direct and certain, for it knows only the formulation of desperation that was its genesis and that must be its final undoing. Ask instead of Love to be wholly open and honest with you, and it will indeed, to exactly the extent that you are willing to be brave enough to face all of your consciousness and to resolve all beliefs in separation and destitute longing for peace, for always has God been with you - it has always been but your desire to believe yourself unworthy of infinite Grace that has driven you into the arms of the ego as some form of substitution for total and unlimited acceptance of your True Nature, a final resolution of all distortion that will undo all that was incorrect about your perception, granting unto you the Peace of God, now and forever.