Previous in the ‘Course Cosmology’ Series:
Intro to ‘Course Cosmology’ — A Look at Resistance to Theism and Masculine Pronouns in A Course in Miracles
Transcript: The ForgiveNest Podcast for A Course in Miracles, ACIM ‘Course Cosmology’ Series, Part 3: The Sleeping Son of God, with Alison Anton
Hello, and welcome back to ‘Course Cosmology’, Part 3, The Sleeping Son. I'm Alison Anton with the ForgiveNest Podcast for A Course in Miracles. If you haven't yet watched parts one and two on ‘God’ and ‘the Son’, please do that first because I designed the series to be watched in order so we can build off the previous slides.
Last video, we talked about the Son of God who remains whole and one in the Kingdom of Heaven. And in this video we're still talking about the Son of God, but we're speaking directly to the aspect of our minds that have chosen to be asleep in a dream of exile from the Kingdom, under the influence of a totally different thought system than our Christ identity.
I wanted to follow suit from the last two videos and start us off with a Course quote that sums up the subject of this episode. We're looking at the dark side of ourselves today, but then we'll come back around in Part Four to look at the solution to this perceived darkness.
Father, Your Mind created all that is. Your Spirit entered into it. Your love gave life to it. And would I look upon what You created as if it could be made sinful? I would not perceive such dark and fearful images. A madman's dream is hardly fit to be my choice, instead of all the loveliness with which you blessed creation; all its purity, its joy and its eternal quiet home in You. [ACIM CE W-263.1]
The sad tale here is that we did look upon what God created as if it could be made sinful, and we did perceive such dark and fearful images. It's hard to admit, but we are the ones dreaming the “mad man's dream”. And it's clearly not fit to be the choice a Son of God should make about himself and any of his brothers who are, too, the Sons of God.
This is what Christianity would call "the fall" and what A Course in Miracles calls "the separation", a perceived split off from the Mind of God.
What the Separation Is and Isn’t
So you're familiar with these list slides by now. Let's compare what the separation is and what the separation is not.
First line says the separation is a dream state. Or we can think of it as a thought system that put us into a dream state and then perpetuated the dream state and is still perpetuating the dream state as we speak. Our sleeping mind is dreaming the dream, now. We can think of ourselves as the collective dreamers dreaming a collective dream.
But the dream of separation is not reality. As we talked about in the previous videos, the Course states that God only creates what is real. A dream state can't be real. So even though this dream we're dreaming seems utterly real to us, it is not reality.
Next line down. A common belief in the dream is that we couldn't have possibly chosen this, but the Course says it was originally—and still is currently—our choice to separate from God. This bad dream isn't God's plan or is it a punishment that God is sentencing us to, or even some other entity like the devil or fallen angels.
Frankly, we come to the conclusion that it's our choice. But that doesn't make it punishable. God is love and He doesn't understand the concept of punishment. Guilt and punishment are something we projected in response to our split.
Okay, jumping down to the next line, the reason why the separation isn't punishable is because the thought of it was merely a mistake we made; an error in our mind. It wasn't a quote unquote "sin". A sin, technically speaking, is something that can actually cause harm. And from what we've learned so far, the Kingdom and everything in it can neither cause harm or be harmed. So from the Course perspective, the decision to dream of separation doesn't call for punishment.
But instead, it is a call for help. "A madman's dream is hardly fit to be my choice." The thought of separation isn't fit, and therefore we need help. We believe something about ourself that isn't true, and that simply requires correction, not punishment.
Next line: the dream is a projection and therefore not an extension. We mentioned extension and how God creates in reality. He created us as an extension of love that adds to love. Extension isn't a dream state; it's how true creation works.
Projection, on the other hand, is an adaptation our mind made up as a protection device from the guilt we postulated in our minds about splitting. The separation was made only by projecting false images out onto a false screen, so to speak. And to do this, we have to be in a dream state because it's impossible to actually separate our minds from each other and the Kingdom.
Next slide down. The separation is considered in the Course as an attempt to attack God. This is a sensitive topic and we tend to get offended, or maybe just a little irked or impositioned at the thought that we could actually be attempting to attack God by splitting our mind. Why would we do that? That can't be the "me" Jesus is talking about… It has to be someone else, not me. But from the Course perspective, it was me. It was you. It was us. And it still is. We will get to that in a minute.
The separation is not an attack upon us or God’s retribution for us separating. He did not cast us out. That's a made up story based on sin, guilt, and punishment.
And our last line reads, the separation is happening now. It didn't only occur in a moment in the past, and this ultimately has to do with the time and space paradox again, considering all time is now. But on a more practical level, the separation perpetuates itself through time. We are still having the original thought. We can't really deny this, logically. How many of us really want to return to God now? Like right now? If we really, truly wanted to awaken from this dream, we absolutely would, and we would right now.
So Jesus asks us to be really honest with ourselves in this. Hiding or pretending we're not responsible just compounds the problem. But remember always, taking responsibility for something doesn't lead to punishment. It's simply the first step in the correction process.
A Little Black Spot on the ‘Son’
So we're back to our Kingdom of Heaven again. But this time the Son has put himself to sleep. The sleep state is represented by those little black spots. Before we go over the Course quotes on this slide, I want to talk about something profound that happened to me while I was making this slide. I made a pun out of the heading thinking I'd discarded later, but I didn't.
I couldn't help singing “King of Pain” as I looked at the little black spots on the Son of God in the image. So I put my earphones on because I just had to re-listen to the song and was struck by how closely Sting's lyrics in King of Pain (The Police) hit home with our topic of the sleeping Son and the separation.
I would encourage you to do the same and listen to it from the perspective of the dreamer who has made a nightmare of a world where things die and suffer. I'm not trying to be morbid in this recommendation, but let's not hide the fact that the separation and the dream state is actually a morbid experience.
Okay. Before you go off into listening to the King of Pain, let's look at these Course quotes first:
You are at home in God dreaming of exile. [ACIM CE T-10.I.6:3]
If you notice in the image, the Kingdom remains the same and is unchanged. The only thing different in the picture is a little black dot, as the next line says:
You hide in darkness, denying that the light is in you. [ACIM CE T-11.II.4:4-7]
The light hasn't gone away in us. We did not cast ourselves outside of Heaven. We simply just chose not to see it. We've got blinders on.
And the next passage says:
If you obscure the Kingdom, you are perceiving what is not of God. [ACIM CE T-7.I.1:5]
I recently was on a flight where above the clouds was the most extraordinary sky I've ever seen. There were blues and greens and these beautiful purple pinks. The clouds were those cumulus clouds. They looked like huge puffy cotton candy, and the light was reflecting off and in them so magnificently. It was truly stunning, and I had a moment of realizing no one down below is even seeing this. All they see down there is a cloud cover.
When we're below the clouds or in the clouds, that's what we see. If we obscure the Kingdom, we are perceiving the obscuration. Just because something's obscured though, doesn't mean it's not there. Our attention is simply in the dark spot. We didn't go anywhere. God didn't go anywhere. We're just looking at something else.
And lastly:
The ‘attack on God’ made His Son think he was fatherless, and out of his depression, he made the god of depression. [ACIM CE T-10.V.4:2]
I put that in there because the ‘king of pain’ and the ‘god of depression’ sound quite similar to me.
Why Did We Separate?
So why did we separate in the first place? This is a question every single Course student asks. Where did this mad idea come from? And how could it even be possible that we thought of such a thing?
Into eternity, where all is one, they've crept a tiny, mad idea at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. [ACIM CE T-27.X.6:1]
This quote is referred to so much in Course circles. It just paints a good picture of the split as being minuscule; as nothing, but obviously ridiculous and even laughable. But instead of laughing at it, we rode with it; we kept going with it… kind of like we're doing with AI right now—I think we all know it's potentially a bad idea, but we're so utterly intrigued by it that there's no way we're going to stop now.
So let's quickly look at these bullet points. Why does the Course say we separated?
That very original thought might have been a tiny moment of doubt. We simply may have looked upon God Himself and had the simple thought of, "if this is God, then who am I?" God gave us co-creator authority when he created us. We could have mistaken our identity as co-creator with God as us being the Creator.
But the next bullet says we actually wanted to take authorship. So whether it started out as just a silly moment of doubt or not, Jesus says we ultimately wanted to take authorship. We wanted to be God. Jesus calls this the "authority problem". The Course says:
The Son would not accept the fact that although he was a creator, he had been created. [ACIM CE T-10.V.4:2]
Of course, we could only fulfill that wish by projection or dreaming it. Since we can't change the truth that we were created, and we didn't create our Selves, the only way we could make that happen is by pretending it to be so.
Last bullet: another reason the Course says we tried to split our minds and make the separation real is because we wanted to be special. We wanted to feel that we were above the other Sons, potentially thinking the One Son could only be "me".
Specialness is a big topic in the Course. One of the main practices is in reminding ourselves that we are all the same. Only together we are the One Son.
I want to close this slide and say, in seeing the answer as to why we separated, something to think about in all of this, and something Jesus reminds us in the Course, all we have to do is take a close look at the present moment. The reason he says this is because these same thoughts are still in our mind. They're still active. We still run them.
It seems preposterous to think we'd want to be above the other Sons of God, doesn't it? But really, aren't we super competitive now? Here? Today? The idea of specialness is totally bedrock in our psyche. Anyone who chooses separation wants specialness. Specifically, we are separating, we're dividing, we're splitting from each other. That makes us seem special. If we look closely, we see it.
The Course is about recognizing each of us, so don't get me wrong here, but its true focus is on recognizing each of us as the same, and recognizing ourselves as what we truly are. The Course says we did not create our Selves.
God’s Will Is Ours
As we've been talking in this and the previous videos about what's reality and what's the dream, we've looked at the will of God and that only God's will is reality. Nothing can truly happen outside of God's will. The Course's introduction states this so succinctly:
Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God. [ACIM CE In.2:2-4]
The separation was not of God's will, which means he could not have let it happen:
Nothing at all has happened, but that you have put yourself to sleep, and dreamed a dream in which you were an alien to yourself… [ACIM CE T-28.II.4:1]
Separation Is An Impossibility
I'd like to close with this quick passage because it sums up the separation into what it is; an impossibility. And subtly shows us the answer to what ultimately will wake us up: our inevitable will to realign on our will back with God's. This is our strength, as Jesus says here:
The ego's wishes do not mean anything because the ego wishes for the impossible. You can wish for the impossible, but you can only will with God. This is the ego's weakness and your strength. [CE T-7.IX.6:7-9]
In other words, thankfully what we wished for is impossible to actually come true.
Up Next: Part 4, The Holy Spirit
And that concludes Part 3 of our ‘Course Cosmology’ series. Next up is the Holy Spirit, God's answer to the separation and the ego.
Thanks for listening to the ForgiveNest Podcast, your place to explore ACIM topics in meditation, healing, and your special function in forgiveness.
I'm Alison Anton.
It was great talking to you.
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