⁵Projection makes perception, and you cannot see beyond it. ⁶Again and again have you attacked your brother, because you saw in him a shadow figure in your private world. ⁷And thus it is you must attack yourself first, for what you attack is not in others. ⁸Its only reality is in your own mind, and by attacking others you are literally attacking what is not there. (ACIM, T-13.V.3:5-8)
It is essential to realize that all defenses do what they would defend. ²The underlying basis for their effectiveness is that they offer what they defend. ³What they defend is placed in them for safe-keeping, and as they operate they bring it to you. ⁴Every defense operates by giving gifts, and the gift is always a miniature of the thought system the defense protects, set in a golden frame. (ACIM, T-17.IV.7:1-4)
Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. (KJV John 18:36).
And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables. (KJV Mark 4:11)
The disciples said to him, "When will the Kingdom come?" He said, "It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Behold here,' or 'Behold there.' Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it."
(Gospel of Thomas, Logion 113)
We’ve been very confused for a long time, and some of us have actually sensed that there is a dissonance between Jesus and Paul, in the New Testament, which still shows up in some of the Jesus quotes, although it has been dressed up editorially with material of Pauline origin. Even in the Thomas Gospel there are a few quotes that seem out of synch, but the major quotes are actually quite coherent. (See my book Closing the Circle.)
For us, the greatest challenge is that Jesus speaks the language of non-duality, but the figures of speech he uses are sometimes hard for us to fathom, in part because the imagery is from a very different day and age, but mostly because you need to understand that Jesus teaches non-dualism, and by Peter and Paul he is reinterpreted in a dualistic fashion.
In the Bible he is quoted saying “to those outside the kingdom it all comes in parables.” In the Course the teaching is clear that everything in duality is metaphor. (Ken Wapnick titled one of his workshops “Duality is metaphor.”)
Logion 113 in Thomas, basically states that the Kingdom is everywhere, we just don’t see it. The non-dual reality that is our home is not affected by us having the dream of duality. The Course says:
²Yet separation is but empty space, enclosing nothing, doing nothing, and as unsubstantial as the empty place between the ripples that a ship has made in passing by. ³And covered just as fast, as water rushes in to close the gap, and as the waves in joining cover it. (ACIM, T-28.III.5:2-3)
At yet another level, the Course affirms:
The tiny instant you would keep and make eternal, passed away in Heaven too soon for anything to notice it had come. ²What disappeared too quickly to affect the simple knowledge of the Son of God can hardly still be there, for you to choose to be your teacher. ³Only in the past,—an ancient past, too short to make a world in answer to creation,—did this world appear to rise. ⁴So very long ago, for such a tiny interval of time, that not one note in Heaven’s song was missed. ⁵Yet in each unforgiving act or thought, in every judgment and in all belief in sin, is that one instant still called back, as if it could be made again in time. ⁶You keep an ancient memory before your eyes. ⁷And he who lives in memories alone is unaware of where he is. (ACIM, T-26.V.5:1-7)
To the Course, the world of duality is but a nightmare dream and it is nothing but our paranoid schizophrenic substitute reality in which the ego screams that I am NOT as God Created me. This is my world, my life, etc. Yet Reality simply is not changed by our denial of it. And we have the option at any moment to make another choice. We are not a victim of our imagined past. Reality is the Oneness of Non-Duality, of God and Heaven, Spirit, Eternity, Infinity. Only in our dreams do we believe we have shattered the Peace of Heaven, and substituted our own world of perception (duality) in which we see our selves as a body surrounded by a hostile world.
It may help to think of it in more abstract terms. Within duality, everything affirms duality, but oneness has not stopped or been denied. Within the dream of this world there is a (seemingly) powerful force, our ego-mind, that seeks constantly to confirm its own reality and our relationships with people, places and things serve to confirm our personal identity, and deny that we are still as God created us, spirit. And we project outside enemies, because they make our false self real, as we believe in this world of opposites.
The purpose of false dichotomies, false choices, is to keep us in caught up in the system of duality, which merely grinds on and on and on. The massive good news is that if our insanity is a decision, then we can change our mind, and this gives the Course its name: A Course in Miracles. The miracle is the realization and the experience that we can be in any situation and change our mind by from listening to the ego, the voice of separation, and more separation, and ever escalating hostility and tuning in to the Voice of the Holy Spirit, or Jesus. .
Oneness
The Course makes it very clear that it is pointless to argue about the reality of spirit, because it is beyond what we can understand other than by experience. When you know you know. The Kingdom is everywhere, it never is not there, except we don’t see it with the body’s eyes. Contemplation is different from vision. The Kingdom gradually reveals itself if we stop being blinded by the physical vision of the body’s eyes, and instead use the true vision, contemplation of spirit in which we become the conscious observers of the drama on the stage, which is duality, the world of opposites, but we are no longer its victim.
Duality
Duality is our substitute reality, which begins with what the Course calls “the tiny, mad idea,” the idea of separation from God, from the Oneness of Heaven. We maintain conflict, in order to prevent the memory of Heaven (another name for the Holy Spirit in the Course) to pop up in our mind uninvited. Read the quote from John 18:36 again (above). Conflict is the ontological reality of the ego.
A brother separated from yourself, an ancient enemy, a murderer who stalks you in the night and plots your death, yet plans that it be lingering and slow; of this you dream. ²Yet underneath this dream is yet another, in which you become the murderer, the secret enemy, the scavenger and the destroyer of your brother and the world alike. ³Here is the cause of suffering, the space between your little dreams and your reality. ⁴The little gap you do not even see, the birthplace of illusions and of fear, the time of terror and of ancient hate, the instant of disaster, all are here. ⁵Here is the cause of unreality. ⁶And it is here that it will be undone. (ACIM, T-27.VII.12:1-6)
In short, in this world we dream of being attacked, but underneath that dream, there is a deeper layer, for we accuse ourselves of having shattered the Oneness of Heaven, and chosen this world, this body, and this life over the Peace of God.
The Psychodynamics of Ego
The Course calls the psychodynamics of the ego the ‘laws’ of chaos. The most important realization is that at every moment we have a choice. The point of the conflict is to keep us preoccupied, so we never ever realize that. So the solution is not fighting evil, for that merely reinforces the problem, and it keeps us wrapped around the axle. The solution, the way out, salvation and awakening is to not buy the conflict and to realize we have another choice. Rooting around in the trash will not produce the answer. Our default is to repeat the choice for separation and the ego. The way out is the choice for the Holy Spirit.
Do you really believe that you can kill the Son of God? ²The Father has hidden His Son safely within Himself, and kept him far away from your destructive thoughts, but you know neither the Father nor the Son because of them. ³You attack the real world every day and every hour and every minute, and yet you are surprised that you cannot see it. ⁴If you seek love in order to attack it, you will never find it. ⁵For if love is sharing, how can you find it except through itself? ⁶Offer it and it will come to you, because it is drawn to itself. ⁷But offer attack and love will remain hidden, for it can live only in peace. (ACIM, T-12.VIII.1:1-7)
Again, the only hope we have is the miracle, metanoia: we can change our mind. Right now.
The Virus Parable
To me the AIDS crisis became a big symbol of the insanity of modern medicine. Eric Coppolino just did a brilliant interview about the 40th anniversary of the ´discovery of the cause of AIDS,’ which I remember vividly, because a colleague at work died of AIDS, which was only so named right after his death. I ended up studying Peter Duesberg and seeing him completely sidelined by Faucian politics. But AIDS was just a small scam, although it continues to this day.
Covid has blown things wide open, The book Virus Mania saw an updated release during the crisis, and among other things there is the brilliant five-part video series The Viral Delusion, (on Kim Osboel’s substack). The virus delusion is maintained by the psychotic need to see outside enemies we can fight.
On Defense
There were the ridiculous lockdowns, the masks and the social distancing, and eventually the vaccines, and they all proved only that defenses do what they would defend. And now the perpetrators are running away from the responsibility, but the evidence is overwhelming and it is all coming out. One of the people to watch is John Beaudoin Sr. In short, the whole drama can be seen as a tremendous object lesson in how and why the ego’s solutions never work, the Course would point out they were designed to fail, for the ego does not mean us well.
The only way not to go crazy by seeing all this is to turn inside and to realize that what you’re watching is the laws of chaos at work, and there is another answer open to you any time you want it. This is the surrender of the arrogant ego, that wants to keep us separate and unhappy, so we can only hear the noise (the ¨raucous shrieking” of the ego - Me thinks the lady does protest too much), and the other answer will not come to us, as long as we maintain any hope of answers from the ego’s false promises.
Now you are being shown you can escape. ²All that is needed is you look upon the problem as it is, and not the way that you have set it up. ³How could there be another way to solve a problem that is very simple, but has been obscured by heavy clouds of complication, which were made to keep the problem unresolved? ⁴Without the clouds the problem will emerge in all its primitive simplicity. ⁵The choice will not be difficult, because the problem is absurd when clearly seen. ⁶No one has difficulty making up his mind to let a simple problem be resolved if it is seen as hurting him, and also very easily removed. (ACIM, T-27.VII.2:1-6)