What Is the Authority Problem in ACIM?
Johannesburg – Authority Problem—What Is the Authority Problem in ACIM?
Issues that come up in parenting reflect the authority problem. The ego’s thought system rejects God as its Author and wants to assert its own free will, control, and authority. We are here to be givers. It is a state of mind that shares true generosity and holds the same loving attitude towards everyone we meet or think of.
Gold Nugget:
“In A Course in Miracles terms, Jesus says that the one problem, if you go deep enough in your mind, is called the authority problem. Authority problem involves control. It involves who is the leader and who is the follower. And the authority problem is really this: who is my author? When we have an author of a book, the author is one who writes the book. But if we talk about identity, who is my author? it comes down to two choices: God is my Author, God is the Creator, God is the Source, God is the Author, or I can be the author of myself. They cannot both be true. One is a true Author, and the other is a false sense of authorship.
You know how it is with children. Sometimes people call it the terrible twos when all of a sudden the finger comes out—it could be a finger pointing back at the parent—and then this curious word that comes out, spoken with a sense of strength, ‘No.’ And there is where the control can come in. The parents can go, ‘Now I’m the Mummy,’ ‘I’m the Daddy.’ You see this authority issue is in the mind, and it just gets acted out in terms of parents, children, co-workers, bosses, you could say police figures, political figures. Authority figures seem to be sprinkled throughout the dream, and whenever you feel a rise like, You are not telling me what I’m doing, and nobody is going to tell me what to do. That is like a reflection of this inner authority problem.
And I did a YouTube. You might enjoy the YouTube. I love the names they come up with with these YouTubes. I just do the talks, and then they edit them, and they put them up. They named one of my YouTubes, ‘Who’s Your Daddy?‘ And that talk was about, am I in this humble flow of my Creator, of my Source, of Love, in which I see that God created me perfect and innocent and glorious? Or am I in this sense of egoic personification of control, of I have to prove my worth—it is not that it was just established by God; I’ve got to prove that I’m worthy, prove that I’m talented, prove that I’m skillful, prove that I can take care of myself even. And all of that is part of this authority problem, thinking that I can create myself. The Course is teaching, ‘I am as God created me.’ It is saying, come in your mind back to that beautiful experience of knowing your source of love and you as love itself, and let go of this egoic sense of trying to maintain a separate unique existence that is apart from everybody else, separated by time and space, private bodies, private worlds, private minds, private thoughts. We have got to go in a new direction.”
Recorded at the 2014 LM South Africa Tour on December 10, 2014 in Johannesburg, South Africa
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