Ego Death or No Ego? Forgiving the False Identity

What if your ego isn't the enemy—but a mere dream you can wake up from? 

In this New Year's Eve episode of Live Like Eden, host Lindsay dives into the spiritual crossroads of ego death, balance, and true forgiveness to help you start 2026 with inner peace.

Today's insights include:

Prioritizing Spirit in Your Resolutions: We'll briefly explore common New Year's goals like fitness and finances, and learn how connecting to your higher self first sets a lighter tone for everything else in life.

Demystifying Ego Death: Let's unpack the concept of ego dissolution— from sudden awakenings like Eckhart Tolle's to gradual processes—and question if the ego can truly "die" while you're in a body, drawing on insights from spiritual teachers and A Course in Miracles.

Forgiving the Illusion: Finally, discover A Course in Miracles' radical take on forgiveness as a tool to undo the ego's false system, recognizing separation as a belief (not reality) to foster unity, peace, and a return to oneness with God.

Ready to dissolve illusions and live lighter? Tune in now, share this episode, and visit livelikeeden.com for your free awakening quiz or a 30-minute consult to personalize your spiritual journey.

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Transcript

Hi, I'm Lindsay, host of the Live Like Eden podcast. What do you do when your whole life flips upside down? Are you questioning everything, lost in chaos, or yearning for life's deeper meaning? I've been there, deep in the thick of it, unraveling my own awakening mass for over 20 years.

Now I'm here to help you through yours. I share no-nonsense weekly wake-ups cutting through the ego's illusions to wake you up to your own spiritual wisdom. No mountaintop bliss needed here, just practical tools, insights, and real life experience to save you time, plus a much needed laugh when we're all losing it.

Let's dive into this fresh new episode. Can you believe it's New Year's Eve already?

We're back here again. Happy New Year, everybody. For those of you that celebrate, and if you're like me, you're going to be in bed before midnight. Maybe we'll go out to dinner, but there's not a lot of celebrating in my house on this holiday, except for the young people who like to do that.

I remember doing that when I was younger. I don't much care about it anymore. I feel like every day is the same day. But anyway, I thought it would be fun today to bring in the new year with something that a lot of people that listen to the show have asked me about.

And I want to get into this topic. And it's the question for those of you that are spiritual seekers, and you're really truly looking for an experience of the higher self with a capital S, or the return to peace in your mind, or returning all the way home to God, you know, whatever it is for you.

There's a process in which that happens. And in spiritual communities and There's a lot of discussion about the ego and the ego dying. Ego death is a term you'll hear. And many people ask, should I focus on ego death? Or is there any way that there's a balance between your ego and spirit as you move through life?

Like, can these systems work together? And I want to address this. And I'm going to give you different perspectives on it. And then you can implement whatever you wish into your own life. And that's what I love about this show. I don't really believe there's right or wrong to any of this.

It's more about what works for you, what resonates with you. And then when you find that thing that resonates with you, it becomes a regular part of your life.

How do you implement it and practice it in your day-to-day life? Before we dive into this pretty deep topic of I do want to mention as it's New Year's and most of us think about New Year's resolutions, what are we going to do differently this year? I really screwed up on that last year and I want to make it better this year.

Resolutions are symbols of setting intention for what you wish your life to be like, right? And most of the time it has to do with feeling better, feeling better in our life. And I thought it would be fun to look it up on AI and I'm a fan of Grok. And so I asked Grok, hey, Grok, give me the top 10 most common New Year's resolutions that people have.

And it does its scan right through the internet, probably checked a million blog posts and people's opinions, blah, blah, blah.

But here's what it spit out to me as the top 10 most common New Year's resolutions. Number one, save more money. Yeah, I think that's probably true. A lot of people focus on the finances. How am I going to live? How am I going to retire? Number two, Exercise, get more fit, right?

Everybody returns to the gym on January 2nd. It's a very popular time at gyms, yoga studios, you know, any kind of fitness place gets jam-packed at the beginning of the year. Eat healthier, yeah? Typically everybody's thinking about that. I gotta start eating better, especially after the holiday binge, you know?

And losing weights up there. Everybody wants to drop the LBs from the last few months. or weight you've put on throughout the year. Improve your mental health, improve physical health.

Be happier, spend more time with family and friends. Yeah, how many of you have that? Be happier is a good one. Learn a new skill or a hobby. More of a personal development goal. Travel more. That would be on my list. And lastly, number 10 here, it spit out reduce stress or focus on self-care.

And all of these top 10 have to do with your personal life, don't they? How to live a better life, how to live well in the world. You know what's missing from this list? Nowhere in this list do I see anything that says, get in touch with my spiritual self and be more peaceful.

Didn't make the list. Well, I think it would be very important for all of us to put that at the top of the list.

Because that dictates how we're going to feel with anything we're doing. We put a lot of emphasis on the body, right? All that stuff's about the physical well-being. There was one about your mental well-being, but a lot of it's about the body. How's the body functioning?

How am I doing in the world? I don't know about any of you listening, but I've learned over the course of many, many years that my connection to something greater sets the tone for for my day. It sets the tone for how I view things. It sets the tone for how much peace I'm going to experience.

And I know when I'm choosing to side with that insane ego mind, it becomes very obvious. When you make spirituality or the connection you have to presence or God or consciousness or Jesus, you know, any terms, whatever you're comfortable with in your life, When you make that a priority, your life gets lighter.

And so maybe I should go back to Grok and say, Grok, what's up with spirituality and living a more peaceful existence? Why is that not on the list? And then maybe we could start to understand why the world is so messed up half the time, right? It makes sense.

It's usually not on the top of people's lists because survival is the name of the game. We got to do this and this to make something happen, right? But if you think about it, if you put the connection to spirit at the top of your list, your whole world is capable of shifting.

And just because the physical may not catch up with it, but you feel better in your mind, in your experience of life, isn't that what we really want? The feeling of peace, the feeling of connecting to love inside of us.

Not necessarily getting it from other people. I mean, we think we want it from other people. We think we want recognition from other people. We think we want somebody else's love that only they can give it to me. But that's not true. The truth is when you have it and experience it within, then you can extend it outward all the time.

And you recognize that you're actually not seeking anything out there. Now you have to do out there to make your life go and make yourself live here. But what we're really seeking is something deeper. Just by saying this in the beginning, think about the new year as a time if you use resolutions or a time to make intentions for the year or you want your life to go in a different direction, consider putting connecting to spirit right at the top of your list.

There's something that I do that I don't talk about ever, but in the morning I set my alarm earlier than I need to get up. And I do it on purpose for many reasons. One, I I'm not somebody who just hears the alarm and I'm up and moving out of the bed. I sort of like to just lay there in the comfort and warmth of my blankets, especially when it's freezing outside.

And it's still dark in the winter. It's like, oh, I need some time to kind of reintegrate back into the body, especially if you're like a dreamer and you go into extreme dream state or you don't feel connected to your body at all. I always take a few moments off.

to reintegrate back into the physical. And then I sit and I connect with spirit and I ask spirit to guide me throughout my entire day.

I ask that I see whatever situations or experiences or events that may happen, that I see it through the eyes of spirit and not my insane ego mind. I And I've been doing it so long and I feel this very large presence all the time so that when I'm walking out in the world or I'm speaking to someone in my home or, you know, whatever the situation, it really doesn't matter.

There's always the observer that I often speak of on this show, that awareness that is so large that is watching all of this play out on the stage of life. Yes, there are times where I react differently. As I'm watching, I still know what's happening, but I can't stop it.

And then there's times where I wait.

I'm completely waiting and listening before I make a response. But the awareness is there. That could be something to think about this year is connecting to the larger awareness so that you may view your life from a different vantage point. And then you realize from that vantage point that you have a decision to make and on who you want to listen to in your life.

Do you want to listen to the chatterbox of the cyclical ego that's going to take you in circles, chasing your own tail over and over, constantly coming up with justifications and reasons for why it's doing what it's doing, or completely step out of that madness, step off the carousel, the merry-go-round, or the hamster wheel, or how we just go through time here every year, right?

Going through the seasons over and over and over, right? They're all symbolic. We continue the cycle or you step out of it and you're watching with spirit. So let's get into this show today. The ego, the death of the ego. What should you focus on? The different spiritual paths that talk about this, people that have experienced it.

what they say, and then I wanna use A Course in Miracles as always because it looks at this very differently than any other spiritual system that I know of. So is ego death a thing? Can the ego truly die while you're here in a body? Well, I have no idea.

I'm not gonna sit here and say I know for certain because I really don't. I don't think any of us know for sure. But what I would say is this, the closer one gets to the experience of the higher self, the closer one experiences spirit and not necessarily the experience of the body anymore.

The more that progresses in your life, the closer you would be to self-realization with a capital S or God-realization, that there's a moment or an experience of complete disconnection from the body, which is the ego's creation according to the Course in Miracles.

you would completely step out of that experience and have that holy instant, as the Course refers to it, that moment of total oneness and symbol of home and God. There's people who've explained that, like Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, the Maharishi, you know, all these people throughout history, the Buddha, Jesus.

I mean, these people are telling you that there's a connection to something beyond the world entirely.

Which is often referred to as the illusion, the whole physical world being an illusion. Then there's people who discuss ego death as simply the ego in you has been silenced so much that you no longer feel it or connect with it, that you're completely in the presence of spirit all the time.

I think this is very rare that anybody's doing it all the time because as long as we're still in the world, There's still a remnant of the ego, right, in a body. It's how we operate in a human existence. Because if the body ultimately was created by the ego, as A Course in Miracles states, major religion does not share that view.

Pretty much all the major religions are saying God is the creator of the universe.

And he created the body and he created all this stuff. I'm not looking at it from that perspective today. I'm looking at it from if the ego created the universe and the body, it's essentially unreal. Because the only thing that's real according to the Course is God.

So people who have an experience of the ego dissolving or the undoing of it, it's essentially meaning that you're getting closer and closer to true connection with spirit, which is the symbol of home. which is the symbol of our real home in God. And the further and further you get to that, the less relevant the body will be, the less relevant the ego mind will be, the thinker, the belief structure, the constant commentary, the cycles, all of it.

This could also be looked at as the awareness in you has grown so much that the ego is shrinking.

You don't even see it anymore. It's like it's not there. Now the personality self will continue to stay there because that's how you operate in a body. It doesn't mean that you're attached to it any longer, right? You could see it. It doesn't mean that you give it any ounce of power over you.

So you could sum up the ego death is the dissolving of an identity that you believe you are. The identity of me as Lindsay, this special identity is disappearing. Another way to look at it would be That for eons, we all have worn a very thick veil or veils, many veils.

There's like this protective veil the ego throws on so that we don't remember our home. We don't remember it at all. It's like we have amnesia. And we do. Total amnesia. We have no clue how we got here, what the hell we're doing here, and how to get back.

So say there's these very thick, heavy veils cloaked over us. So that we don't remember we separated from God. That's the big one. That we chose to separate from eternal oneness. So we put up a veil. The ego throws up the veil and says, we don't want to remember that it was our decision to do that.

Let's blame God, right? So all the major religions do that. God did all this. We didn't do it. That's another veil that the ego is kind of throwing up, right? It's not taking responsibility. It's saying, God did this to me. I didn't do it. I'm not responsible.

And then you just keep creating and fragmenting off more individuality, more specialness, more separation over and over and over. When ego death and dissolving of the ego is getting rid of the separation, you're returning to unity in God eventually, right?

When you're totally home and we're all free from this and eternal oneness, you could say that. So this dissolving of the identity is not a fun process because none of us realize how attached we truly are to ourselves, to our own ego mind. And then to top it off, the collective ego mind, which is all of us that split off from the whole.

It was that one split from the whole. And then we fragmented into individual separate bodies and identities. And that's what you see. That's what we see in the world, right? But if the ego is going to dissolve and there's a thing called ego death or dying, then it's a very difficult process for most of us.

There are rare occasions where somebody just has an epiphany and they wake up and everything's different. You've heard that, you know, Eckhart Tolle speaks about him being miserable, depressed, suicidal, and then woke up one morning and it was like gone.

I'm like, wow, that's amazing. Wouldn't that be nice for all of us to just wake up and everything's different and voila. I'm not saying his life prior to that was exciting. It didn't sound exciting at all. It sounded like he was miserable. Same thing with Byron Katie.

Any of you listen to Byron Katie? She's great. She was a miserable person. I think she was basically locked herself in her house, was very agoraphobic, I think socially phobic, anxious, depressed, lots of problems, miserable. And I think she got sent out to even a halfway house.

They didn't know what to do with her, right? I think she was just such a mess. And then she had this experience where... She's on the floor, you know, in this house. She didn't believe she deserved a bed. I think her story, the way she tells it. And then she sees like a cockroach or a bug and all of a sudden everything dissolved, which sounded like that insane thinker, that attachment to mind just vanished.

But for the vast majority of us, it's a process, right? I mean, it's something that happens slowly over time. And the other thing to think about is even if you have a moment of A temporary lapse of this stronghold of the ego does not mean it stays permanently the rest of your life.

But the memory of what you experienced was so profound and so strong that it alters your life forever. You now know that you are this vast sea of boundlessness and you find yourself merging with that as you live out the rest of your life. It doesn't mean that you don't see that your mind is still there, that the ego can slip in, it can reestablish itself, but you have the awareness of when it happens so you can see it.

You can see when it happens.

So this is the concept of ego death, the dissolving of an identity you believed to be true. A Course in Miracles would take it even a step further and say that the ego isn't even real. It never even happened. That's a whole nother level of metaphysical discussion.

But that's essentially what it's saying. You're terrified of dissolving an identity that was never true in the first place. And that can be shocking. Like, what? I'm not real? Yeah, people don't like that conversation. And you can see why. It's scary.

It scares people to think, well, if I'm not me, then what am I? And then you go down this whole rabbit hole of, you know, existential crisis. annihilation of self. You know, these are things that come up in the ego's fear of it. And keep in mind, it's the ego that's terrified of that.

And the course is reminding us, but essentially, it's not real.

You're making it mean something. And that's what we're doing in the world every single day. We're making it mean something. We make everything mean something to reinforce it. And the When you're looking at your life and you are wanting to discover your spiritual self, right, and you're looking for that pathway home, should you give a hardcore look at your ego?

Should you try to dissolve it? You know, what's the best route? Well, certainly through regular spiritual practices of meditation and things like this, if that's something that resonates with you, those practices just allow you to get in touch with that awareness.

So for the 25 to 30 minutes you're sitting in meditation, you are disconnecting from the ego, the thought system, or at least you're attempting to, and the body.

For those of you that go into deep, deep meditation, the body doesn't even seem like it's there. Those are great practices to do just to experience more awareness, get in touch with beyond body, beyond the mind. There's a million meditations out there that you can use.

Or me personally, I don't want anybody talking while I'm meditating. It's just silence. Because the talking for me seems to just keep me thinking. So I'm looking to just completely clear, no sound, nothing, sitting in peace. So whatever works for you, know what works for you.

And then eventually it can change over time. And then you can do open-eyed meditations too. You don't have to be closing your eyes. You can be open-eyed sitting and just observing with no thought. You can do all of that. So there's many ways and techniques and practices that you can implement to start discovering and feeling and experiencing more awareness, more presence in your life, the spirit that's there for all of us.

Now, can you have a balance between your ego and spirit? I mean, some people may say yes. You know, some people would say, yeah, you can just balance it out. I don't think that's the point of returning home. And this is my personal opinion. So take what you want from it.

But if it's true that we are really trying to get home and home has nothing to do with this illusory world, it has nothing to do with an ego. It's only about God. Then choosing spirit, which is the symbol of God or the messenger of God or the reminder of home is who we would want to be choosing as much as possible.

Because the ego's objective is to keep us separate from that. So something to think about is maybe not, can I have a balance between this? But can I have the awareness or can I look? Can I really look at the ego and see what it does, how it operates, when I'm choosing to separate, and then notice it?

That's all. And then you say, oh, there I am. There it is. I'm siding with the ego because, and you know how you know? Because you feel separated from everything around you. You're separating yourself from somebody else. That is one of the biggest signs and clues if you're siding with the ego or not.

You know, you're feeling angst against something. Then you know that's the ego. Make it really simple. Don't overcomplicate it. That's the other thing. I think the ego has made a complicated system. And there's the spiritual ego, too, which has also made a very complicated return home.

Spirituality sometimes makes it so complicated. And I don't think it is. I don't think it's complicated at all. It's the simplest thing. It's our true nature. It's only the ego that's making it confusing. So when you feel like you're confused and everything's just like, ugh, the ego is at work.

It really is.

So you could, like I said, instead of balancing these two, you could look at it more like I'm watching with the decision-making mind. This is the part of your mind that now realizes you have a choice. And when you know you have a choice in who and how you see with, and when I say who, I mean with the ego or spirit, that is all you need.

You only need to know you have a choice. You don't have to be the perfect meditator. You don't have to be checking off all the spiritual to-do lists. You know, if I do all of these things, I'm going to be more spiritual and I'll be enlightened. You don't have to do any of that.

You could do that if you want, but you don't have to. You don't have to make it a huge production. Because as A Course in Miracles says, and it's so radically different than so many teachings, is it's really telling us that our only problem was ever that we believed an idea of separation that never happened.

So it all happened in a mind. It never happened in a physical universe at first. At first, it was just a thought. And we took the thought seriously, and then we were so terrified to return that we covered it up, the ego was created, and it projected a physical universe.

You don't have to believe that to still practice choosing spirit or the ego. You don't really have to even understand all of that. It's more about the practical application of wanting to feel more peaceful, right, in our New Year's resolution, to connect with our spiritual self, ask for guidance.

Ask that I see this clearly. Go up into the decision-making mind and say, I know I can choose differently. I can choose to see this through the eyes of peace. I don't have to see or feel separation from anyone or anything. That in itself is an undoing of the ego.

Really, truly looking at someone that you are having difficulty with. For example, let's say you're with a loved one or a dear friend who you think has betrayed you in some way. And every time you look at this person, you literally loathe them. You disconnect because you're so mad that they did what they did to you.

You know, whatever it is. It could be a million different reasons or ways that they crossed you, you could say. This is how the ego interprets it. And in our world, we're taught forgiveness, right? Religion teaches forgiveness. But I want to make a distinction here of how forgiveness undoes the ego.

But there's distinctions between the religious viewpoint of forgiveness and A Course in Miracles viewpoint on forgiveness. They're different. Very, very different.

And the difference is this. So you're looking at the person who has betrayed you in some way. And because you're a faithful person, you know you should forgive them. And you forgive them. And you work at it. And you ask for guidance. And you forgive this person.

In this form of forgiveness, though, we believe the person actually did something bad to us. We believe it happened. We believe that it was real. And we believe that the person sinned, right? Even if you're religious, you think they sinned against you.

So what we're doing in this form of forgiveness is we're saying we acknowledge it was a sin. We know that they did something they shouldn't have. It was wrong. And now, because it really happened, right? I'm making it all real. I'm going to forgive them.

But in that form of forgiveness, you're still reinforcing that all of this really happened, that the ego really separated and is separate from God and the whole thing, right?

You see the system there. I'm not saying that doesn't work. Maybe it works for people. That form of forgiveness works. However, A Course in Miracles uses forgiveness to undo the ego thought system, but it's a very different perspective. And the difference is this.

The course uses forgiveness so that you can practice it all the time and forgive everything in your life, everyone you see around you. anything anybody's done to you. But the difference is, the Course will say, you're forgiving it because it never happened.

You never separated from God. You only believe you did. There's nothing to forgive. Now that's a very different point of view, isn't it? And what it does and why the Course is so wonderful, if you're really and truly wanting to return to peace and undo the ego's thought system, this actually makes sense.

Because if it's true that we're all really eternal oneness in God and that's never been altered and we're only believing in this dream world, right?

The separation from God, we only believe that we're here. Doesn't mean we actually are. If it's just a belief, then anything that we think has happened here or anything that somebody has done to us that we want to project out, right? And say, somebody wronged me is actually never occurred.

And we're using forgiveness to forgive the belief in separation at all. So you're applying forgiveness to whomever you're with. For instance, in this situation, for the person that you believed betrayed you, you're looking at the person now through the Course's view of forgiveness that helps undo the ego.

And you're saying, even though I believe that all of this happened and I gave it so much meaning and it's ruined us or it's ruined our time here together or we've made it impossible, right?

I mean, whatever scenario is happening, I recognize that underneath the illusion of what is playing out here never happened. It's not happening. My reality is in God, and I recognize that you and I are joined in oneness in God, and I forgive the entire thing.

The entire belief in separation is what the Course is using forgiveness for. It's using it as a means of waking you up from the dream. So in this viewpoint, you're talking about a completely different understanding of what the world is and how to get home than what all the major religions and spirituality are using forgiveness as.

Now, I'm sure that any pathway, if you practice it enough, is going to lead you home. Eventually, you're going to realize the illusion of the whole thing, no matter if you go through religion or spiritual practice or whatever.

They're all going to wake us up. But I will say, I think A Course in Miracles is here to save us time. It's cutting through all of the extra crap and just going right to the source. It's like you don't have to do all the stuff. You just go right to the original error.

And for those of you that that resonates with, you can practice that in your life. When you're going through your daily life, you ask for guidance from spirit. You ask that you see your ego clearly, that when you feel that angst and separation within you, you know you're choosing the ego.

And then you just say, there it is again. There it is. I'm choosing that. Because I don't want to feel the peace of God right now. That's it. That's all. And then you just go on with your day. But every time you do that, and the more awareness and presence you bring to every situation in your life, the easier it's going to get to live lighter, right?

Forgive situations and connect to that calm, still center point that's within each and every one of us. That memory of home is there. You know, but the ego is just so full of traps and distractions and spiritual distractions too that grab our attention all the time.

So it's another way to look at it. Is there an ego death? Yeah. At some point, the ego is going to dissolve completely. However, A Course in Miracles is saying there never was an ego. There's actually nothing to dissolve. That's a very different viewpoint, right?

I can't help but think, and this is something that helped me in my own life. When I was going through literal hell and I was in severe, severe fear and terror, I dove into A Course in Miracles to understand what fear is really all about. And when you get to that understanding that there is no world, there is no separation at all, a lot of times that can scare people and it's like, oh no, and you get a feeling of heaviness.

I find it can be very liberating. Because it automatically shifts you out of, oh, you mean I'm creating this whole hellish experience? I'm actually doing it. And you realize you're holding the gun to your head. Nobody else is doing it. I'm doing it. That's a freeing moment.

Because you also have the power to get rid of the gun. You know, there is no ego to dissolve. Now that's freeing. And then you start really building a relationship and a trust between with your spiritual guidance. Trust is huge. Trusting that spirit is leading me.

I'm not in charge of this. I just thought I was. There's something else going on here. And when you recognize the spirit within and the ego starts to, you know, take a little nap, spirit is extending itself through you with everyone you're around.

And then you have these moments, even when you're in conflict with another person or yourself, that you realize you're giving it meaning. I'm believing in the separation. When I feel the, ugh, I'm believing in the separation. And now I choose to hand it over to spirit.

And I see that this person, even if I don't feel it just yet, is just like me. And we are both one in God. And I forgive this entire thing. That's forgiveness from A Course in Miracles perspective, and it saves time. It saves cyclical dancing over and over and over with the ego.

The forgiveness of A Course in Miracles is designed to undo the ego in this whole thing. It's designed to wake us up, to get us out of the dream and realize we've just been dreaming. So if you are a truth seeker and you want peace in your life, using the concept of forgiveness in the way that A Course in Miracles explains it, will really make you feel lighter the more and more you practice it.

And you won't take everything so personally because really what we're doing is we're always projecting things out from our own self onto somebody else anyway. So when somebody has done something to you and I say, oh, this person just did this to me, there's some part of me that goes, this person just did this to themselves.

We all do that. If I'm upset and I am projecting on to one of my loved ones, there's a part of me that knows this is about me. I'm feeling separate right now, right? I'm feeling separated and I'm angry and I'm projecting it out onto somebody else. And when you know that you're doing that, you know you have the choice.

And that's all that it takes is a choice. I can see through the eyes of spirit. So for those of you that wonder if you can have a balance between the two, I would say maybe just take the word balance out and you're just saying, well, I just know when I'm in the ego and then I know I have another choice to make.

And every time that I go and choose the ego, there's always another opportunity. Always, always, always. As long as we're in this world, there will always be an opportunity to see it clearly until we're finally out of it and home and peace in God. And as far as ego death or the death of the ego, the more and more you connect with spirit, the less valuable your ego will be.

You won't see it the same way anymore. And even if the ego pops up, you won't give it much attention. You might laugh at it. You might see it. You might even act on it sometimes. But you'll know. And that's really all that matters is that you just have the awareness and you know.

And you know that you have that ability to choose. It's not about being a perfect human. It's not about transcending the body. A Course in Miracles says the body isn't even real. What's there to transcend?

Again, very metaphysical perspective, but it kind of makes you laugh a little bit. When you really dive into the text or you're really into practicing it, it's like, wow, yeah, what am I so worried about? If everything's always been fine and home and God, then what am I so worried about?

Why is it I'm so worried? And the only answer to that is it's just the ego that is terrified of its non-existence. That's it. That's all it is. And then you live a little lighter. You get a little happier. You start feeling well. Maybe you start feeling better than all those resolutions you decided to make for your body.

You actually start feeling well in your mind, in your state of being. It's just emanating in your field, your energy field. Your frequency is rising. So think about that this New Year's. Putting the connection to spirit or awareness or presence, you know, whatever term you use at the top of your resolution that will set the tone for everything else that you're doing in your life.

And the more committed you get to that, the more you implement it daily. Remember, set a time or a little reminder for yourself to connect, whether like it's first thing in the morning like I do, or if you make a little reminder on your phone that pops up and just say something funny that'll make you remember.

Plug in. Tap in. Wake up. You know, make it fun. It doesn't have to be so rooted in density and make it enjoyable. This is something you're doing in your life and nobody has to know you're doing it. It's just for you. It's for you to feel more peaceful.

It's for you to continue on your spiritual path in a lighter way. So before I sign off here, just a couple of takeaways is remember that anytime you feel separated inside yourself or angst or something, you know it's the ego because the ego is all about separating.

It believes it's separate from God. That's the one thing to think about for your experience in life. Like when you're moving through your practical daily life, when you feel the separation and the need to separate from anything around you, ego is talking.

And then how do you switch? You know, you have a choice to make. You realize that you can choose to side with that side of your mind, the ego mind, or you can turn it over and say, spirit guide me. Let me see through your eyes because I clearly feel separated and I know that deep down that I'm not.

I know that we're all one. And then ask for guidance that you see it differently. Drop the judgment. And then just watch what happens in your life. You know, you don't have to have a to-do list or 10 steps to do. You literally have one. I feel separate.

Now I'm handing it over and help me see.

And then go through your life and see what happens. And do it all the time. Start practicing it and make it simple. So I hope this helps you all understanding a little bit about the dissolving of the ego and A Course in Miracles perspective on forgiveness and how to do it, and then how forgiveness in your life actually helps you undo the ego thought system so that eventually we all return home.

Happy New Year, everybody. I really hope that you're off to a great start. I wish you all the best in 2026, and I will see you all next week. That's it for today's show. Thanks so much for listening. If it resonated, please share, follow, and drop a review with your takeaways.

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