Part I of this article, which appeared in the June 1994 newsletter, discussed the unity of Heaven. This unity, which is A Course in Miracles' definition of Reality, consists of the perfect Oneness of God and His creation Christ, our true Identity. In that article we further described Heaven as a non-dualistic state, meaning that "nowhere does the Father end, the Son begin as something separate from Him" (workbook, pp. 237-38; W-pI.132.12:4), because Heaven "is merely an awareness of perfect oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else; nothing outside this oneness, and nothing else within" (text, p. 359; T-18.VI.1:6). This fact alone is true, and only this truth is Reality.
But then, as A Course in Miracles states, something seemed to happen: "Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh" (text, p. 544; T-27.VIII.6:2). And yet we say seemed to happen because the "tiny, mad idea" that we could be separate from our Source is only a dream. As the Course says elsewhere of this idea of separation: "In time this happened very long ago. In reality it never happened at all" (manual, p. 4; M-2.2:7-8).
In his madness -- in which Reality becomes illusion, and illusion Reality -- the Son of God believed that the impossible had actually occurred. Now he exists in a dualistic state of subject and object, in which he believes that he is separate from, and independent of God, his true Source. This has enabled the Son to think that he is now his own creator and first cause, self-created and autonomous. Indeed, one of the most telling characteristics of this separated state is thinking, which clearly reflects the dualism of thinker and thought, and then of thought and object, even if the object is the Son's own mind. And on such thinking is the ego's world of complexity erected, a world where specifics -- the logical effect of duality -- rule as the only "reality."
In this state, it is indeed almost impossible for a dissociated or split mind to remember the abstract, non-specific Oneness of creation, let alone the instant of separation that "is beyond all memory, and past even the possibility of remembering" (manual, p. 4; M-2.4:1). The unity of God -- our Source and Creator -- with Christ -- His creation -- is almost unfathomable because of the process by which our post-separation, perceptual minds categorize all thinking into perceiver and perceived. This dualism is the nature of all thought in the separated world. For example, if we try to meditate on Oneness, it is always from the position of us as the subject and our Source as the object. This basic dualistic experience, therefore, practically ensures that the non-dualistic reality of our Source and our oneness with It will remain almost unreachable, until we let go of the thinking process and, moreover, thought itself.
However, if we strive in our meditations to let go of all thought, that effort we are expending is already an expression of a thought, and therefore will inevitably be a block to the awareness of our truly experiencing ourselves as a non-dualistic Thought in the Mind of God. As Jesus teaches, in the context of becoming freed from all self-concepts:
Salvation can be seen as nothing more than the escape from concepts [i.e., thoughts]. It does not concern itself with content of the mind, but with the simple statement that it [the mind] thinks (text, p. 613; T-31.V.14:3-4).
Therefore we can conclude that it is our thoughts themselves that are the interference to our awareness of Oneness, since it was the "tiny, mad idea [thought]" which, A Course in Miracles teaches, led us down the ladder of separation. The three following statements from the workbook exemplify the inherent unreality of thought. The first of these comes in the context of the lesson title, "My thoughts do not mean anything.":
This idea applies to all the thoughts of which you are aware.… The reason the idea is applicable to all of them is that they are not your real thoughts.… you will have no doubt that what you once believed were your thoughts did not mean anything.… The emphasis is now on the lack of reality of what you think you think.… Now we are emphasizing that the presence of these "thoughts" means that you are not thinking. This is merely another way of repeating our earlier statement that your mind is really a blank (workbook, p. 16; W-pI.10.1:1-2,5; 2:4; 3:2-3).
It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing. You think you think them, and so you think you see them (workbook, p. 25; W-pI.15.1:1-2). Nothing except your thoughts can attack you.
Nothing except your thoughts can make you think you are vulnerable. And nothing except your thoughts can prove to you this is not so (workbook, p. 40; W-pI.26.4:2-4).
Let us review how we overcome this literally self-imposed dilemma. We believe that we have actually changed Reality by accepting a thought into our minds that we could separate from our Source. Thus, by the interposition of a split mind and the process identified as thinking, we believed we had changed our true Identity as a Thought at one with God. When the seventeenth century French philosopher Descartes said: "I think, therefore I am," he was really making an ego statement that a being which could think has existence. Now, as students of A Course in Miracles, we can look at that assertion and realize that a right-minded correction would read: "I think, therefore I am not." This is so because, as we have already seen, thought itself is a denial of our true Identity as a unified Thought in the Mind of the Source of all Thought. This is a unity which, again, allows no dualistic distinction between thinker and thought, and even between Creator and created.
Once this realization is fully acknowledged by us, we can then proceed with the Atonement process of undoing, by accepting the Holy Spirit's correction thought for each ego misthought that we had first accepted into our minds. The reluctance if not outright refusal to access the correction thought of the Holy Spirit for our ego misthought comes from the fact that we are not the authors of the correction script, but we are indeed the authors of the ego's wrong-minded script.
The emerging paradigm can thus be summarized as follows:
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1) We become aware that we have been identifying with our wrong minds;
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2) We actively decide to change our minds and thus we access the correction in our right minds; and
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3) We accept the correction, despite the fact that the "I" who have identified with the wrong mind will experience this switch as personally insulting, for this self is not the origin of the right-minded correction thought.
When we finally come to the realization that all of our thinking is image-making, as A Course in Miracles identifies it, we have reached another plateau on our journey home. Next, within this process we must hold somewhere in our minds the idea that time and the entire world are already over (text, p. 547; T-28.I.1:6-7), and that we are simply "reviewing mentally what has gone by" (workbook, p. 291; W-pI.158.4:5). This is important in order for us to realize that all of our thinking is simply a mechanism for accessing a script that is already undone. The end result is that we have an imagined experience that seems real -- through the ego's magic tricks and sleights of hand -- of the inherently unreal world that was over long ago.
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