Day 5
How Did We Get Here?
We've just emerged from the first section of this series--on Course history--and now we're getting into what the Course teaches. We’ll start at the logical place: Where did it all begin? How did the world get started and how did we ourselves come into existence?
This is usually called “metaphysics,” meaning beyond the physical, and this picture of what is ultimately real is at the heart of what the Course teaches. Here is a brief description from “What Is A Course in Miracles?” in the front matter of the Complete and Annotated Edition.
The foundation for everything in the Course is its concept of an unconditionally loving God. Though God is genderless, the Course describes God as being like the perfect father—purely loving, without the slightest trace of anger—only expanded to infinity.
Before time began, this loving Father created us as His beloved Sons. He poured all of His attributes, all of His being, into us, so that we were exactly like Him—egoless, limitless, and filled with an impartial, all-encompassing love. He created us without bodies, without any boundaries to wall us off from Him. We thus existed in boundless oneness with God and with each other, basking in a love from Him that exceeds our current comprehension. As the Course says about this love, “There is nothing on earth with which it can be compared, and nothing you have ever felt apart from Him that resembles it ever so faintly”(T-14.VI.2:4). We lived in a timeless Heaven in a state of happiness so expansive that taking our greatest moment of earthly happiness and multiplying it ten thousand times only begins to hint at it. (W-107.2:1-6). Such a Heaven may sound alien to us now, yet this, says the Course, is our natural environment. This is home.
What, then, happened? “Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea at which the Son of God remembered not [i.e., forgot] to laugh" (T-27.X.6:1). We had a thought that we could go our own way, that we could be above the other Sons and even above God. This was impossible, for all of reality is changelessly held within the power of God’s authorship. And so we withdrew into a dream of separation. We collectively dreamt an entire universe in which everyone was separate, selfishly contending with each other and locked inside vulnerable bodies that aged and died. The Course teaches that the world of time and space was not created by God: “He is not mad. Yet only madness makes a world like this" (W-152.6:6-7). It also teaches that however solid this world may seem to be, it is not truly real.
This might initially sound disheartening, yet it is actually wonderful news, for it means that Heaven remains the only reality and that this world of pain never really happened. From an ultimate standpoint, it is laughable to think that we could truly leave God and make a world apart from Him. We therefore have a rational basis for feeling free from all that we have done and all that has been done to us, for we are free of it.
These ideas--that God is a God of pure love, that we are His beloved Sons, that this world is a collective illusion that has no real power over us--are ideas to which the Course repeatedly returns throughout its pages. It’s not hard to envision the effect they would have on us if we truly believed them. The Course promises that they have “the power to remove all forms of doubt and fear forever from your mind” (W-99.10:1).
Tomorrow we will look at the Course’s diagnosis of our problem, at what it says is the cause of our unhappiness.
See you then,
Robert Perry
Founder
Circle of Atonement
Reminder:
This content is for registered participants of Getting to Know A Course in Miracles, a free 14-day guided journey from The Circle of Atonement. You are welcome to invite any friends to register for the series at no charge by sharing the following link: circleofa.org/events.
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