No Independent Self (excerpt)
I will address again what we do in meeting the assaults of the flesh. The answer is that we do not fight temptation or take condemnation for it.
The very opposite. We recognize that the real temptation is to make me think I am the independent self that I am not. Then I am again “under the law,” yet cannot fulfill it, because independent self is really Satan as me (Matt. 16:23). It is the sin of unbelief. What then do I do? I quickly recognize that the problem is not my having flesh temptation, but rather my temporarily forgetting (2 Pet. 1:9) that I am no longer an independent self. Who I am is simply and solely an expresser of Christ in His nature.
Therefore, as quickly as I can, I accept the fact of being tempted, for we live in a totally tempting world. Accepting that, I don’t deny or resist the temptation. Instead, I resist the tempter (James 4:7) by saying, “That’s not me you are pulling. That’s only my outer soul emotions and bodily appetites, which of course are open to all that can reach me from your outer world (for his is ‘the spirit of the world’—1 Cor. 2:12). But I am not a bunch of outer responses: I am Christ as me. He is the real Self expressed by my human container self.” As I do that, I am in fact doing what Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4:10: inwardly recognizing my place of death in His death to those old pulls of Satan on my human self. In place of these temptations, I am seeing myself in my true self-relationship of Christ in me as me. As I do that, the consciousness of myself as a Christ expresser swallows up the negative consciousness of of Satan and his pulls on me. Satan flees (James 4:7). I resist him by replacing false belief in him by true belief in who I really am—Christ as me. Light swallows up dark. We don’t fight the dark; we recognize its right to exist, but we replace it by turning on the light.
Taken from: No Independent Self
