Since it was first published in 1975, A Course in Miracles has been the cause of much confusion, frustration and exasperation worldwide.  Why is the language so hard to understand?  Why is it so damn long?  And just what the heck is it saying?  If you have felt this way at one time or another, you are definitely not alone.  Few people seem to pick it up right off the bat.  For some it can take many years.  Others may study it their whole lives and never fully understand it.  Then there’s yet another group that wind up thinking it says a whole bunch of stuff which it just doesn’t.  While it’s impossible to cover the magnitude of the Course in just one short article, let’s summarise and simplify the basic metaphysics.  So, just what is A Course in Miracles saying?

 

Quite simply, the Course teaches that, the world you see has nothing to do with reality.  It is of your own making, and it does not exist (W-1.14.1:4).  It’s not real.  There’s nothing there – period.  Zilch.  Nada.  Zero.  Cue the scoffing and snorts of indignation.  “You can’t be serious!  It can’t actually be saying that!?  Of course there’s a world out there, I can see it!”  I hate to break it to you, but that’s exactly what it’s saying.  The Course likens the world we see to a dream, similar to our dreams when we sleep at night.  Think about it.  Does not a world that seems quite real arise in dreams? (T-18.II.1:1).  And while you see it you do not doubt that it is real (T-18.II.5:1).

 

When we sleep, we project mental movies across the screen of our minds.  We have all experienced being in a dream state where you are so fully engrossed in the images that you believe they are really there.  It’s not until you wake up that you realise you were just dreaming.  Nothing happened.  It’s also your experience that upon waking, you are waking to your ‘real’ life.  But the Course teaches that this is a false experience.  It says, all your time is spent in dreaming.  Your sleeping and waking dreams have different forms, and that is all.  Their content is the same (T-18.II.5:12).  

 

Our nightly dreams and what we think of as our ‘daytime waking state’, are all just a part of the same dream.  We think daily life is our reality because it appears solid and real, but it’s not true.  It’s an illusion.  “How is this possible?” I hear you ask.  Here’s a brief history lesson, although probably not of the kind you are used to.  This is the history of how our whole world appeared to come about, compliments of the Course.  

In reality, which is our pre-dreaming state, only pure Oneness exists.  This Oneness is our Source – it is where we come from, and every single person and thing is a part of it.  This Source has been given a vast array of names – Spirit, Allah, Brahman, and the Tao, amongst many others.  The Course simply refers to it as God, or Heaven, which are the same.  You can use whatever word works best for you; it really doesn’t matter.  Personally, I prefer to use Source.  For the sake of this article we will stick with the Course’s terms of God and Heaven.

 

God, or Heaven, is not a person or a place, contrary to popular religious beliefs.  It has no form, and no image.  It is completely abstract, eternally perfect, changeless and all-encompassing.  There is nothing else.  God is pure love, and he continually creates and adds to His Kingdom by extending this love.  These loving extensions are as eternally perfect and changeless as he is.  These extensions are us.  This is what we are in our pure state – extensions of the Love of God.  This is not to be misconstrued to mean that we were created as separate individuals.  We are a part of God.  A piece of the whole, just like a ray of sunshine is not separate from the sun but is an extension of it.  This is what the Course refers to as Christ.  Christ is us – all of us – in our awakened state.

 

So, what happened?  How did we get from there to here, from Heaven into this world and these bodies?  What caused us to be so far removed from our Source?  The Course tells us that, for the very briefest of instants, a part of Christ appears to have a crazy thought, or what it calls the “tiny, mad idea” (T-27.VIII.6:2).  This goes something along the lines of, “What would it be like to be separate from Oneness?  What would it be like to be apart and on my own?”

 

Now, this thought is utterly preposterous to reality.  It is such a ridiculous impossibility that it is not even acknowledged by God, who knows only wholeness.  But being an extension of God, the Mind of Christ is indescribably powerful.  In this particular instant, that does not serve it well!  Where there once was only knowledge of perfect oneness, now the idea of duality has entered.  This change in awareness is enough to propel the Mind of Christ into the dream state the Course refers to.  Having focused its attention on this new idea, it is completely fixated, just like we are in our nightly dreams.  The result being that it is no longer aware of where it actually is, which is still at home in God.

 

In this newly experienced state, Christ isn’t Christ anymore.  In the belief that it is possible to be anything other than an extension of God, it now thinks it has actually achieved the impossible – separated itself from Heaven.  It is dreaming that it really is apart from Oneness.  It is dreaming that it is no longer in the mind of God, and is now its own, individual mind.  The Course calls this seemingly split off aspect, simply, the mind.  

 

It’s important at this point to recognise that this mind isn’t actually real.  It is a part of the dream and doesn’t really exist.  You could see it more like a character that Christ is conjuring up in its sleep.  Similar to the way that we see figures in our own dreams at night.  Christ is now identified with this fictional mind and believes that this is who it is.

 

Now, this mind is split into two parts.  On the one hand is the right part of the mind, or in Course terms, the Holy Spirit.  This part knows that the idea of being separate from God and Heaven is just an illusion.  It knows that this is just a dream, and it remembers its oneness with God.  Then there is the wrong part of the mind – the ego.  This part believes in the idea of separation and thinks it really is possible to exist apart from God.  The ego is the symbol of separation, just as the Holy Spirit is the symbol of peace (T-5.III.9:4).

 

At this point, it is still possible for the mind to undo the dilemma it has found itself in and wake up.  But it has to make a choice.  If it chooses with the Holy Spirit by seeing how ridiculous the idea of duality is and not taking it seriously, then it will simply awaken from its dream state and carry on with life in Heaven as usual.  However, if it chooses with the ego and takes the idea of separation seriously, the result will be to lead it into an even deeper sleep.  

 

I think you probably already have a hunch who the mind chose.  You guessed it, the ego!  Having made this choice, it has identified with the wrong part of its mind, putting itself into and even deeper dream state.  It is now completely unaware that there even is another option to choose from.  It no longer remembers that it has a right mind, and it has no memory of the Holy Spirit. 

 

It’s now that the mind finds itself in a bit of a quandary.  Its newly experienced state of separation is so alien to it that it is overcome with confusion and panic.  This induces a whole heap of previously unexperienced feelings such as uncertainty, fear and above all else, guilt.  Why guilt, you may ask?  The wrong part of the mind, the ego, reasons that if it has managed to separate itself from God, in doing so it has destroyed perfect Oneness.  It is directly responsible for the destruction of Heaven!  

 

The guilt the mind feels over this prospect is beyond anything we are capable of imagining.  On top of this, it concludes that God must be furious and will surely come after it in a bid for revenge.  Of course, God, being perfect love, could never conceive of such a thing.  And besides, nothing has happened.  God is still whole, as is Christ, who is merely dreaming this whole thing up.  But the mind doesn’t know this.  The mind believes it is all real. 

 

So now it is feeling a mix of unimaginable guilt and indescribable fear.  The pain and anguish of these feelings are just too much to take.  The mind will do anything to get away from them, and the ego has just the remedy.  It projects them out.  The mind needs somewhere and something to project them on to, and so, doing what dreaming minds do best, it creates images.  Not just a handful of images, but trillions of them!  The more things outside of it that it can project its fear and guilt onto, the better!  And so came about the creation of everything we think exists – the world, time and space, planets, the entire cosmos and everything and everyone in it.  All of it is just one giant projection of the ego mind!

 

At this point in our little history lesson, the mind’s awareness has become so entwined with the pictures it has created, it no longer remembers that it is the one creating them.  In fact, it thinks it is them!  It forgets that it is the formless spirit behind the images, and it believes it is the images.  It has divided and splintered itself into so many parts that all these individual parts now believe they exist separately from all the others and are each encased in their own individual form.  Whether it be a blade of grass, a bird or a human, it makes no difference.  Each one now thinks it is in some form of body and has forgotten it is a mind at all.  

 

As the Course explains it – The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and complete idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that within it is your kingdom, where God can enter not (T-18.VIII.2:5-6).

 

On the surface, it seems that this plan has done the trick.  It appears the mind has succeeded in getting rid of the guilt it was experiencing, and the fear of God is gone as it no longer even remembers Heaven at all.  There now appears to be a multitude of ‘other’ things outside in the world.  On any given day any one of them could do, say or cause something that it can attribute as being the cause of its mental distress.  “The guilt is not in me,” it reasons.  “It is in the world and other people outside of me.  They are the guilty ones.”  

 

The mind thinks it has gotten rid of these feelings by giving them away to other things outside of itself.  But it’s a faulty system.  The images aren’t really outside.  They are still in the mind, playing out like movies across its own mental screen.  Therefore, the guilt the mind is projecting onto them is really just going straight back to itself.  It has merely buried these feelings deeper within, where they are now totally unconscious, and has removed itself one level further from its true reality.

 

To wrap up the lesson, we now have what appears to be an entire universe out there, consisting of billions and billions of individual forms.  In case you hadn’t already figured it out, each one of these forms is us.  We are the characters in the dream.  We are the projected images being dreamed up by the ego mind, which itself isn’t real, and is being dreamed up by a sleeping aspect of the Christ Mind in Heaven.  And none of it is happening.

 

That basically summarises the Course’s explanation of what’s going on.  If you’re already somewhat familiar with its teachings, then this little review won’t come as much of a shock.  But if you’re just starting down this rabbit hole it can be a bit confronting and, dare I say, utterly unbelievable.  That’s okay.  I’ll be honest with you; the first time I heard it I really wasn’t sure how to take it either.

 

So, where does that leave us?  The whole point of the Course is to teach us how to undo this mess.  Firstly, each seemingly individual character has to play their part.  Yes, that’s you and me.  We have to wake up to the fact that we are not people and bodies, but are each an aspect of the one dreaming mind.  You are the dreamer of the world of dreams.  No other cause it has, nor ever will (T-27.VII.13:1-2).  

 

As each of us begin to remember we are the dreamer, the mind as a whole will then see that the images it had been identifying with were its own projections and aren’t real.  It will withdraw the projection, and the world and all its individual forms will simply vanish.  The mind, remembering that it is in fact a mind and that it has two parts, can now choose again.  Where before it chose the ego and fell further asleep, now it can choose the Holy Spirit, awaken from the dream and remember its true identity as Christ in Heaven.

 

Sounds pretty straight forward, right?  Well…not exactly.  I’m not going to lie; there’s quite a bit of work involved.  But the Course does have a solution, and it involves the same choice we wrongly made in the beginning.   We have the same power to choose now, as characters in the dream, as we did when we were the split dreaming mind. This is the choice between the wrong-minded ego and the right-minded Holy Spirit.

  

 

Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, and it’s quite a process, but that’s what the Course and the workbook are for.  It’s a bit of a mind trip.  Okay…a lot of a mind trip!  But don’t take my word for it. The whole point of the Course is to actually practice it so you can experience this truth for yourself.  It’s this experience the Course is geared towards.  

 

So, while the language may be daunting and it can be hard to comprehend at first, with practice there will come a point where it all starts to sink it.  And if there’s something about the Course that really resonates with you, then you won’t be able to help but keep going back to it.  So just enjoy the ride. I can promise you, it’s totally worth it.