Complete abstraction is the natural condition of the mind. ²But part of it is now unnatural. ³It does not look on everything as one. ⁴It sees instead but fragments of the whole, for only thus could it invent the partial world you see. ⁵The purpose of all seeing is to show you what you wish to see. ⁶All hearing but brings to your mind the sounds it wants to hear.
3. Thus were specifics made. ²And now it is specifics we must use in practicing. ³We give them to the Holy Spirit, that He may employ them for a purpose which is different from the one we gave to them. ⁴Yet He can use but what we made, to teach us from a different point of view, so we can see a different use in everything.
Part of the mind is now unnatural because we have made ourselves a separate identity, which wants to be different of the whole of which it is a part, and run its own show. In this condition of separation it seems as if various outside forces work on us, for better or for worse, for the world outside of us is the reflection of our unconscious. In this condition, we feel a victim of the world, and natural disasters, people, diseases, and once in a while something fun, too, are all outside forces working on it. We like to repress and forget the unpleasant stuff and retain the good stuff, as best we can.
In the process of dealing with disease, there are two basic choices, as there are in everything. To A Course in Miracles, the choice is always between love or fear. Between the right mind and the wrong mind, and our one freedom is how we look at anything, with the Holy Spirit (or Jesus, Quan Yin, or Krishna, Higher Self, etc.), or with the ego (the unholy trinity of me, myself and I). I always love this description from Gloria Wapnick best: the mind is like a radio that can be tuned to just two stations: WEGO or WGOD. Or, I guess, you could call it WEGO vs WHS. And, as always, Jesus in the Course introduces himself as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, and Ken Wapnick used to explain him as: “Jesus is a What that looks like a who, because you think you’re a who.” It helps us to think of Jesus as a person, but it also helps to realize that he is merely the personification of an abstract principle. I was never introduced to him by name as a child, my parents left the church (a liberal remonstrance church) shortly after my birth, as they found they could not buy into the Christian version of Jesus, so to me he was God’s Help, which is the etymological meaning of the name Yehoshua anyway. It is just more comfortable to personify him as “Jesus.”
The Course also teaches how the “tiny, mad idea,” which is the separation-thought, called ego, is a mistake, not a sin. In other words, it is open to correction by the mind that made the mistake. This means that you are not stuck in this ego identification, but there is a way out, an exercise of free will. Or, to put it in more abstract terms, Heaven is when we know ourselves as one with God, our Source, and consciousness is what arises from the separation thought, the “tiny, mad idea.” Consciousness is dualistic and it is the foundation stone of the dream of this world. The point the Course makes, is that just because our mind chooses duality, the Oneness of Heaven is not lost.
The cause of pain is separation, not the body, which is only its effect. 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. ⁴Where is the gap between the waves when they have joined, and covered up the space which seemed to keep them separate for a little while? ⁵Where are the grounds for sickness when the minds have joined to close the little gap between them, where the seeds of sickness seemed to grow? (ACIM, T-28.III.5:1-5)
Ergo, the body is merely the physical manifestation of the separation thought. In our nightmare dream, we think we pulled it off, and we shattered the Peace of Heaven, we offed God, who is now angry at us, or so we imagine, and the body and the world are our hiding place from God’s wrath. We blame this God for creating the world, but in reality this creator God, is merely a projection from the ego. This is the essential operating mode of the ego: we attack the whole, deny it and repress it, but a basic law of the mind is that we project what we repress. So from the silly idea that we shattered the peace of Heaven, and started on our own, we now project that there is an angry God out there who is out to get us. This concept is around in the language that is common in the insurance industry that calls acts of nature “acts of God,” thereby emphasizing the fact that we do not control them. They seem to arrive from outside.
The ego-self is always preoccupied with its defenses. However, just like in the Course quote above, about the waves closing behind a passing ship, the Kingdom is not at all disturbed by the fact that we should be having a bad nightmare. In the Thomas Gospel we find this quote:
The disciples said to him, “When will the Kingdom come?” He said, “It willnot 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 peopledo not see it.” (PGoTh Logion 113)
The Course offers a vivid expression of our delusional state of mind:
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.
In short, Oneness did not cease to be one because we decided to count till two and beyond. One is still one. However, the ego uses the world and other people in it, as a way to prove itself, and as a testimony to its reality. This is why we want to be different from everybody else. This includes the idea of pathogens. It is simply psychologically attractive to think we are being attacked by specific parts of the world, be they invisible patho-genens or massive natural disaster or merely nasty neighbors, or invading armies, or space aliens, etc. etc. etc. The mechanism of projection simply wants to have something specific to project onto, even if that something it totally hypothetical, as in a virus. Peter Duesberg powerfully made that point in his book The Invention of the Aids Virus. We can now happily add the SARS CoV-2 corona virus to the list. There is palpable relief if the “scientists,” such as our chief healthcare magician, Dr. Anthony Fauci, can point to a cause.
The Course explains this phenomenon very clearly in these passages:
Projection makes perception. ²The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. ³But though it is no more than that, it is not less. ⁴Therefore, to you it is important. ⁵It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. ⁶As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. ⁷Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. ⁸Perception is a result and not a cause. ⁹And that is why order of difficulty in miracles is meaningless. ¹⁰Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy. ¹¹Nothing perceived without it means anything. ¹²And where there is no meaning, there is chaos. (ACIM, T-21.in.1:1-12)
And here is how we dream of being attacked in many forms, which merely covers up the repressed dream in which we think we destroyed the peace of Heaven:
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)
These concepts lead us toward and understanding of healing, which is wonderfully discussed in a podcast on Miracle Voices, where Matt McCabe interviewed Judy Skutch-Whitson.
In the Course, Jesus explains many times over that the ego system is complete chaos, he even speaks of the “laws of chaos,” emphasizing in the most simple terms that one single faulty premise in a logical proposition will invalidate everything. The “tiny, mad idea,” is only a dream, it never really happened, but in the dream, it creates a virtual house of mirrors, in which the whole world and everything in it reflects back those chaotic thoughts. Our life is merely a matter of watching reruns, in which we repeat endless variations of the same themes, and the repeat mechanism is denial and projection, so we forever see the cause outside where it cannot be fixed.
We should appreciate even a little bit how this individual self is not real, and is constantly busy to seek witnesses to its reality, and being attacked is a very effective source of such tautological proof. Now the tremendous psychotic dynamics that hold the virus concept in place, can be understood much better. If almost defies imagination otherwise, that the world should for a hundred years keep an explanation in place that is purely hypothesis and was never proven. but it is emotionally satisfying, and that in turn is expressed in the ability to make a lot of money fighting it. If we did not know the cause, we’d have nothing to fight, but once we can pin the blame, we can now field an army against it, as the world just did with the corona-madness of the last four years.
Gratifyingly, excellent literature is appearing, and the whole notion of contagion and viral illness is collapsing in on itself, as a growing gropu of indivudals, including many eminent scientists, see the illogic of germ theory for what it is; a psychotic hallucination.
The house of cards is about to fall however. There was no pandemic.
And vaccination is a completely idiotic concept, if nothing else because it primes the immune system (if it even does that), against some disease vector, and therefore sub-optimizes it and compromises the body’s ability to fight off other illnesses. A basic car mechanic would understand that you cannot tune an engine to just one parameter, for you’ll throw the system out of whack, but doctors do this routinely, and continue to believe they are being rational, when the historical record clearly shows that vaccines have never been effective in reducing the disease they were supposed to fight.
Elizabeth Hart provides an interesting argument that vaccination is political, which does make sense, and the corona mania bore this out. It was already declining as an issue before the vaccine was introduces, and the vaccine produced endless adverse reactions, without any proof of effectiveness in preventing the infection, or limiting contagion, which is a fraught concept in its own right.
J.B. Handley’s piece below is also not to be missed.
In conclusion, fighting the disease makes it real, but the ego is addicted to the notion of pathogens attacking us, so diseases are a defense mechanism. Their purpose at an ontological level is to demonstrate that the body is real. Fighting these diseases then is another way of making them very real, and making the body real. Still many spiritual traditions, starting perhaps with Advaita Vedanta make it very clear that this world is Maya, an illusion. There is a way out though, the change of mind which Jesus always talked about (metanoia in the NT), or the miracle, in A Course in Miracles.
You are at home in God, dreaming of exile but perfectly capable of awakening to reality. ²Is it your decision to do so? ³You recognize from your own experience that what you see in dreams you think is real while you are asleep. ⁴Yet the instant you waken you realize that everything that seemed to happen in the dream did not happen at all. ⁵You do not think this strange, even though all the laws of what you awaken to were violated while you slept. ⁶Is it not possible that you merely shifted from one dream to another, without really waking? (ACIM, T-10.I.2:1-6)