Shattered, Scattered & Scared
How Fear Entered the Mind of God's Most Cherished Creation
We are a shattered people. War, starvation, violence, and distrust have sadly marked the advance of man since the advent of recorded history. Why, we wonder, has nothing changed over the course of the last millennium in terms of addressing our deeply shattered nature?
Why are countries across the globe in a near constant state of violent confrontation? Why is it not possible to go for more than a few months without learning of the latest industrywide scheme to cheat or defraud consumers? And why with such disturbing frequency do requests come from distant lands to feed and shelter refugees fleeing yet another government-sponsored campaign aimed at ethnic or religious cleansing?
On a more personal level we are bathed in fear, being continually immersed in the idea that we’re secretly harboring some undiagnosed illness, in imminent risk of being attacked by aliens of both domestic and interstellar origin, or in the process of losing our youth, vitality, erection or a host of other culturally-endorsed markers of right living. We’re even told that we’ll lose our very souls to the depth of hell if we’re not able to keep our bodily desires in check. But why is all the chaos, violence and fear mongering necessary?
It’s easy to blame the media, politicians, or heartless billionaires, but the truth is the media creates content based on what we’re most eager to consume, we elect the politicians, and billionaires only exist becuase we buy all the shit that they are selling. The operative word is we. We the people. We create our reality by our choices and we appear by all accounts to favor a fear-based existence, But again, why?
A Quick Look Back
In my two previous posts I provided an overview of key learnings that guide Coursian beliefs and behaviors, which ultimately inform the choices we make on a daily basis. They described our true reality as God-created beings of light, life and love and that our true home is a boundless realm of pure Oneness and peace that is both changeless and eternal.
We are there now, dreaming of a world rotating around a sun in the center of a solar system that lies within a swirling galaxy that floats within a seemingly endless universe.
The posts go on to explain that we choose to make an illusionary universe in which we experience change that inevitably leads to pain and suffering, as well as recurring cycles of creation and destruction, but it doesn’t elaborate on what motivated us to believe we could separate ourselves from God or the fearful implications of having done so.
This post will attempt to bridge that gap.
Shattered
Is it not easier to find things that we hate about our lives, jobs, government, and most importantly, ourselves, then it is to identify and express to others what we truly love? Are we hardwired like this for a reason? The evidence of history would seem to indicate that there is something in our core programming that impels us to act like this over successive generations.
Failing to comprehend how the seemingly endless stream of negative events is still possible in the twenty-first century, we are tempted to ask what role God plays in this perpetual chaos? Why would a loving God create humankind, only to have us suffer so mightily at the hands of our fellow man?
The Great Escape
In a major departure from the Abrahamic religions, Coursianity doesn’t have God creating the world and all of the subsequent madness that attends it. Instead we did…or at least we chose to imagine we did. It all began with what the Course calls a “tiny mad idea.”
“You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it for the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father Who truly loved His Son. Therefore you made of Him an unloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father could give. And the peace of God’s Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his real Father, having attacked his own glorious equality with Him.” ACIM T-13.3.10
The Course goes on to explain that the “special favor” was born from a desire to be autonomous and self-created rather than accepting the perfect love and unity that God offered. While this choice was impossible in reality, our belief in it created the dream of separation we experience as the world.
“The separation started with the dream the Father was deprived of His effects, and powerless to keep them since He was no longer their Creator. In the dream, the dreamer made himself.” ACIM T-28.2.8
This explanation for the cause of our separation from God makes a great deal more sense to me than the Biblical version that features a lush garden, two naked humans, an apple, a tree and a snake.
This alternate version explains that having been created by God in Heaven as holy perfect and having everything…a tiny mad idea crept into the mind of God’s children that they lacked only one thing…the ability to be self created. That not being possible in Heaven, we chose instead to run away from home and by the power of our minds placed ourselves within an imagined universe where matter rules, time and space exist, and we control the means of our own creation and destruction.
Or as the Course puts it:
“Dreams are perceptual temper tantrums, in which you literally scream, “I want it thus!” And thus it seems to be.” ACIM T-18.2.4
Clues to Our Separateness
The making of the dream created a split in the collective mind of God’s children. Before I delve into that topic further, it is important to know that the Course describes the mind as representing “the activating agent of spirit, supplying its creative energy.” This means that spirit creates through the power of the mind.
Although the idea isn’t covered in the Course, I’ve often wondered if the energy required to split a unified mind—much like the splitting of an atom, but orders of magnitude greater—is what caused what is commonly referred to as the Big Bang. The Course does hint at that possibility when it states “That [the separation] was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected and drawn between you and the truth.” ACIM, T-18.I
The split caused a tiny part of the mind to separate from the whole, which is analogous to the concept of a horcrux in the Harry Potter novels whereby a portion of the soul is torn away to be placed in an object that is then secreted away for safe keeping. In the case of the Course, the object is the body and the tiny slice is of mind instead of the soul, which we buried deep in our subconscious lest it be discovered and returned to the whole, thereby undoing the illusion.
“In this world, because the mind is split, the Sons of God appear to be separate. Nor do their minds seem to be joined. In this illusory state, the concept of an “individual mind” seems to be meaningful. It is therefore described as if it has two parts; spirit and ego.
Spirit is the part that is still in contact with God through the Holy Spirit, Who abides in this part but sees the other part as well. […]The other part of the mind is entirely illusory and makes only illusions. Spirit retains the potential for creating, but its Will, which is God’s, seems to be imprisoned while the mind is not unified.
The mind can be right or wrong, depending on the voice to which it listens. Right-mindedness listens to the Holy Spirit, forgives the world, and through Christ’s vision sees the real world in its place. This is the final vision, the last perception, the condition in which God takes the final step Himself. Here time and illusions end together.
Wrong-mindedness listens to the ego and makes illusions; perceiving sin and justifying anger, and seeing guilt, disease and death as real. Both this world and the real world are illusions because right-mindedness merely overlooks, or forgives, what never happened. Therefore it is not the One-mindedness of the Christ Mind, Whose Will is one with God’s.” ACIM C-1.Mind-Spirit
Scattered
One of the reasons I created Coursianity was to explore topics that I think are aligned with Course teaching, but aren’t explicitly covered in the text or workbook.
One example would be the idea that when our imagined, self-imposed exit from Heaven took place we created a universe that not only includes our own little blue marble of a planet but also trillions of other planets spread across the vast expanse of space. Because it’s a mind-made universe, it stands to reason that there are billions of other life-forms other than our simple human species. To believe otherwise would defy logic and only serve to repeat the narrow-minded thinking that sent a brilliant man like Galileo into church sanctioned exile nearly 400 years ago.
“You who believe that God is fear made but one substitution. It has taken many forms, because it was the substitution of illusion for truth; of fragmentation for wholeness. It has become so splintered and subdivided and divided again, over and over, that it is now almost impossible to perceive it once was one, and still is what it was. That one error, which brought truth to illusion, infinity to time, and life to death, was all you ever made. Your whole world rests upon it.” ACIM, T-18.1.4
This shattering and scattering of the unity minded into billions or perhaps trillions of individuated bodies that spread across the universe is a daunting idea to grasp, but it does open the possibility for us to make meaningful contact with beings from without our solar system…if we haven’t done so already. When that does happen I hope that we can see them as having had a shared creation experience with us in spirit through God, Source…or whatever they call their celestial originator, as opposed to labeling them as devils, demons or any other fear-fueled derogatory slur.
Scared
Given the material we’ve covered so far, it’s easy to see why we would be scared of the world we created and the myriad bodies that populate it. As the Course puts it “Fear is both a fragmented and fragmenting emotion,” (ACIM, T-18.I), meaning that fear is a product of the separation and serves now to maintain it.
“Within this (body-centric) kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And to defend this little speck of dust it bids you fight against the universe. This fragment of your mind is such a tiny part of it that, could you but appreciate the whole, you would see instantly that it is like the smallest sunbeam to the sun, or like the faintest ripple on the surface of the ocean. In its amazing arrogance, this tiny sunbeam has decided it is the sun; this almost imperceptible ripple hails itself as the ocean. Think how alone and frightened is this little thought, this infinitesimal illusion, holding itself apart against the universe. The sun becomes the sunbeam’s “enemy” that would devour it, and the ocean terrifies the little ripple and wants to swallow it.” ACIM T 18.8.3
Unity is not only possible, but inevitable
We typically seek to change the world through financial and political means, when a more fundamental approach is needed: changing our minds about the “others” in our life by seeing them as part of ourselves, as members of one community united eternally through our shared creation experience as spirit. At our core, I believe we all know this to be the true path to world peace and prosperity, but the hard question is how do we build a common bridge that can span the deep spiritual chasm that we’ve dug over the last several thousand years?
How can we move from a “my God, my land” view of our existence to a more fundamental perspective that joins us all as one people, while at the same time allowing every individual to practice, or not, any faith-based philosophy of their choosing? The Course teaches that our Father’s Will contains no second option, no alternative reality where we exist apart from His perfect Love. True freedom comes not from asserting our individual will against God’s, but from discovering that our authentic will is actually identical to His.
When we stop imagining ourselves as separate beings with conflicting desires, we realize that God’s Will for us—to be “wholly safe, eternally at peace”—is precisely what our deepest Self truly wants. This alignment isn’t a surrender of our will but rather the joyful discovery of our real Will, which was given to us as an eternal part of our Father’s Love. In this recognition, the apparent conflict between human autonomy and divine Will dissolves into the happy realization that they were never truly separate at all. We just need to open our hearts and minds to the voice of the Holy Spirit to begin the process of healing the separation.
“How can you wake children in a more kindly way than by a gentle Voice that will not frighten them, but will merely remind them that the night is over and the light has come? You do not inform them that the nightmares that frightened them so badly are not real because children believe in magic. You merely reassure them that they are safe now. Then you train them to recognize the difference between sleeping and waking, so they will understand they need not be afraid of dreams. And so when bad dreams come, they will themselves call on the light to dispel them.” ACIM T-6.5.2
We can “call on the light” by quieting our mind and looking within to the spark of divinity that God placed within us in the form of the Holy Spirit. As the eleventh learning of the Coursian Creed states: Because I require a guide to show me a new way, I must first admit that I am lost and express a willingness to be led to a new vision of myself and the world.
Welcome to the new way!
Coursianity serves as a medium to compose, contemplate and convey deeply-held beliefs about my own religious and spiritual identity. It’s not something you’ll ever be asked to join, other than electing to follow or share this account if you think it beneficial to your own or another’s search for deeper meaning in the midst of a confusing and chaotic world.
If this post resonates with you..or not, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Your insights help to shape my future writings.
Questions for Reflection
What do you think of the idea of shifting our focus away from our individual man-made identities to an all-encompassing, unifying and shared creation experience?
Have you ever felt like there’s a part of your mind that’s working against your best interests?
If extraterrestrial beings exist, how do you think they would be received by humanity?
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