Copyright 2001, Colin C. Tipping

1. Ego As The Enemy:
In this model, the Ego is said to exist as a deeply-held
set of beliefs about who we are in relationship to Spirit,
formed when we experimented with the thought of sepa-
ration from the Divine Source. In fact, we could say
that the Ego is the belief that separation actually oc-
curred.
At the moment of separation, so the story goes, the
Ego had us believe that God became very angry about
our experiment. This immediately created enormous
guilt within us. The Ego then elaborated on its story by
telling us that God would get even and punish us se-
verely for our great sin. So great was the guilt and the
terror created in us by the belief that this story was true,
we had no choice but to repress these emotions deep
in our unconscious mind. This spared us from the con-
scious awareness of them.
This tactic worked quite well, yet we retained a great
fear that the feelings might rise once again. To remedy
this problem, the Ego developed a new belief — that
the guilt lay with someone else rather than within our-
selves. In other words, we began projecting our guilt
onto other people so we could be rid of it entirely. They
became our 
scapegoats
. Then, to ensure that the guilt
stayed with them, we became angry with them and kept
up a continuous attack on them.
(For more detailed
information on denial and projection, see Chapter
Seven).
Herein lies the origin of the victim archetype and the
human race’s continual need to attack and to defend
against each other. After attacking the people onto
whom we projected our guilt, we fear them attacking us
in return. So, we create strong defenses to protect
ourselves and what we see as our complete innocence.
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At some level we know we are guilty, so the more we
defend against the attack the more we reinforce our
guilt. Thus, we must constantly find people to hate, to
criticize, to judge, to attack, and to make wrong simply
so we can feel better about ourselves. This dynamic
constantly reinforces the Ego’s belief system, and in
this manner, the Ego ensures its own survival.
Using this behavior pattern as a reference, we can now
see why, throughout history, human beings have had
such a high investment in their anger and such a high
the knowledge of love and eternal life. We project this
division onto the physical world by always seeing the
enemy as 
out there
rather than within ourselves.
While all belief systems quickly become resistant to
change the Ego is no ordinary belief system in this re-
gard. It is extremely resistant to change. It holds in-
credible power in our unconscious mind and carries
an enormous block of votes when it comes to making
decisions about who we think we are. This belief sys-
tem is so very powerful that it appears to be an entity in
its own right — and we have named it the Ego.
We have become trapped in the belief in separation to
such a degree that it has become our reality. We have
been living the myth of separation for eons, making real
the idea that we chose separation by naming it the origi-
nal sin. In actuality, no separation ever occurred. We
are as much a part of God as we always were. We are
spiritual beings having a human experience, remem-
ber? Consequently there is no such thing as original
sin in this sense.
Jesus purportedly gave us this revelation — the truth
about our illusion — in 
A Course In Miracles
, a three-
volume work by Jesus channeled through a lady named
Helen Schucman, the purpose of which was to show us
the error of the Ego’s way and to teach us that the way
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home to God is through forgiveness. 
(Interestingly,
Helen was a very reluctant channel and never did be-
lieve a word of what she channeled.)
Contrary to some
prevailing Christian theology, many biblical scholars find
these very same ideas expressed in the Bible.
Anyway, contrary to what the Ego would have us be-
lieve, the truth is that we actually come to the physical
plane with God's blessing and His unconditional love.
God always will honor our free will and our choices at
the highest level and will offer no Divine intervention —
unless asked.
Fortunately, Radical Forgiveness provides the perfect
tool for asking for such assistance because, in the pro-
cess, you demonstrate to God that you have seen be-
yond the Ego and glimpsed the truth that only love is
real and that we are all One with God, including those
who seemed at first to be our enemy.