A further summary of the Course by Kenneth Wapnick may be read at his websiteSUMMARY OF
A COURSE IN MIRACLES ®
Reprinted from Healing the Cause - A Path of Forgiveness
by Michael Dawson.
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"You may be surprised to hear how very different is reality from what you see."(T348;
T-l8.I.5:1) Our senses report to us a seemingly real and substantial world. The Course
informs us however, that we spend all our sleeping and waking time in a dream of
seeming separation from God. Our true nature is still spirit, as God created us,
and will be eternally. God is described as perfect, limitless, formless, eternal
and changeless and so therefore His Creation, the Christ or Sonship, must also be.
Nothing in our universe can be described by any of these words and therefore it cannot
have been created by God. We are ideas in the mind of God and as ideas we cannot
leave the mind of God. This perfect unity of God and Christ is Heaven and nothing
can threaten this.
For reasons we cannot understand, a thought of separation from God, which the Course
calls the ego, entered the collective mind of the Sonship. This idea, at which we
"forgot to laugh", stated that we could take the place of God and become
the Creator. God's answer to this was the creation of the Holy Spirit in our mind
to correct this "tiny mad idea" of separation.
Choosing not to listen to the Voice for God, we experienced an overwhelming sense
of sin at what we thought we had accomplished. From this act of sin came guilt and
the fear of God's punishment. Our minds became split into the wrong mind of the ego,
the right mind of the Holy Spirit and the sleeping Son of God (the decision maker)
who has now to decide who to listen to. The ego part counsels us that we cannot survive
the avenging anger of God as represented by the presence of the Holy Spirit in our
mind. Out of fear, we listen and identify with the ego's counsel and project the
thought of separation out of our mind as an image. This image is the physical universe
where we can now hide from God's anger and our guilt.
A veil of forgetfulness falls over our decision and this illusory world appears very
real to us. Yet we are still safe in heaven although lost in our dream of exile.
So powerful is this illusion that we could not awaken without the help of the Holy
Spirit. Our body now seems a reality and not spirit which vision would reveal to
us. The ego teaches us to deny our guilt and project it onto others. Our guilt (self-hate)
now seems to be created by people and circumstances outside ourselves. We now feel
justified in feeling anger towards others and attack in self-defence becomes a necessity
(special hate relationships). Feeling a great lack within us, the ego counsels us
to find people who can fulfil our imagined needs - security, sex, money career etc.
(special love relationships).
To awaken from this dream and regain our lost vision, we need to undo our belief
in separation from God. The Holy Spirit's plan for our awakening is called the Atonement
(correction of perception). We begin to learn that the world is but a neutral mirror
to the beliefs in our mind. No person or event has the power to give or take our
peace from us. When we get disturbed about someone or something "out there"
in the world we are only seeing a projection of some part of our mind that is not
forgiven.
If we can have the "little willingness" to allow the Holy Spirit's counsel
of forgiveness to enter our mind we can begin the journey of undoing separation by
joining with others. We forgive by first removing our projections from the world
and then bringing them back to our mind where they originated. Now we have the opportunity
to heal our mind by ceasing to judge its ego content. It is our self-judgment that
prevents our mind being healed by the Holy Spirit. Guilt demands punishment, not
healing.
As we learn to stop judging ourselves we allow the ever present love of the Holy
Spirit to shine away the clouds of guilt in our mind. This shift of perception from
the ego's world of separation and attack, to the Holy Spirit's counsel of joining
and forgiveness is called a miracle. As we practice forgiveness in our relationships,
we start to undo the guilt that covers the memory of God's love in our mind. We begin
to see that we have not been running away from God's anger, but from God's love.
To allow the awareness of God's love back into our mind will cause our ego to disappear,
and this is our greatest fear.
Relationships become classrooms in which we learn to forgive ourselves by forgiving
others (holy relationships). Jesus is the greatest example to us in teaching this
lesson of forgiveness. Increasingly, we realise that when people attack us through
fear, they are really asking for our love. Thus we begin to allow the Holy Spirit
to transform our world from the prison of the ego to a teaching device that will
awaken us from the dream of separation and allow us to enter the real world of vision.
With the reawakening in our mind of the knowledge of who we really are, we will walk
this world in complete peace with an inner joy that nothing can take from us. We
will now perceive everyone as our brothers and sisters whose reality is eternal spirit
and to whom we extend the love of the Holy Spirit.
See also "What it Says" from Preface to A Course in Miracles
A further summary of the Course by Kenneth Wapnick may be read at his website
