James K Anderson

Get Ready

If you can slow yourself down for just a few moments and take some deep breaths and allow yourself to sink into a totally honest moment, and dwell on the essence of this world, you have to admit that this life is a phenomenal mess. If you are reading this, you are most likely a believer in God, whatever form that belief may take. Have you thought about how tolerant you are of this world, and how conflicting your beliefs about God's role in it may be? There is certainly plenty of good here, but where does all the rest of that bad stuff fit in with a god who cares about anything? So many people aren't honest, or polite, or in the least bit concerned with anyone except themselves. Natural disasters are occurring at an unprecedented level. There is poverty, unrest, fear, war, starvation and every negative idea you can imagine taking place all over the planet on a regular basis. But then, after the introspection is over, isn't it easier to forget and move on, allowing the truth, once again, to be replaced by the crazy? After all, it's so impossible for us as individuals to know how to change something so vast. And we all have our own piece of the pie to strive for, and when we aren't striving for that, all we can hope for is a few moments of peace, away from the insanity.

Get ready!

In the current state of the world, no matter when and where you are reading this, most of us believe that God created us along with this world, and that inevitably leaves us with one huge, unanswered question: What the heck was he thinking? Today, many of us have rejected the idea of a god, because are very angry that he could cause, or even allow, the incredible amount of suffering that must eventually come to each of us. A God of love in inconceivable, and incongruous with a world such as this. If you do believe in God, he's ultimately in charge of everything, right? He must not be such a great guy if he has let it come to this. Where the hell is he while all this crap is happening? Sipping a bottomless cappuccino?

And so, as more and more people actually try to think about life in a real way, the trend has been to slowly but surely simply let go of the possibility of a god, any god. Of course, we also blame other humans for this suffering because most of the pain is caused by seeming injustice and outright cruelty that we mete out to each other. We feel incredibly angry, and we're not sure how or why it has come to this. We feel guilty, yet very justified for being so angry. Many wallow in their sadness, and many others ignore what's outside their own perimeter, with a tunnel vision that just allows them to see the next item on their personal agenda.

We live in crippling anger and blame and regret and confusion and guilt. A lot of our anger is passionate and very intense. There is so much repressed anger that when people could finally begin expressing that anger openly and anonymously on the internet, the scope of it has revealed itself, and it is overwhelming. The anger and the pain we are all expressing is clearly accelerating.

So, what if you were to face this insanity head on instead of accepting it as the way things are supposed to be? What if you decided to really look at it, why it exists, and who you are in the grand scheme of things? Our collective world mind is out of control and there seems to be no way back to sanity. We have avoided thinking too seriously about God, because he seems to be so hard to find, and it seems to be way beyond our feeble human ability to make any sense of the world. In any event, God certainly doesn't seem to want, or be able, to do anything about it. Our anger demonstrates that we are in an almost constant state of feeling victimized by everything and everyone around us. What kind of a world is this? Why would a so‑called loving god do this to us?

Are you spending any time asking yourself meaningful questions about life and God and who you are? Do you believe that the answers to all of your questions are available, or do you feel they are beyond your pay grade? What if those answers are not only available, but they are necessary for you to understand before you can make any meaningful changes in your life? The answers to this bunch of insoluble problems are offered by, and many are unique to, A Course in Miracles. Although the Course puts our lives into a perspective and a context that is unbelievably beautiful and satisfying at the deepest level of the soul, the Course is also based on one very disturbing and difficult idea. Before you can accept the teachings of the Course, you must be open to this rather apple‑cart‑upsetting concept and to seeing this life very differently than you ever have before.

Warning! For most of you, this idea will cause an immediate and strong negative reaction because it goes against everything you have believed in for your entire life. It goes against what every major religion teaches–at least on the surface. Your ego will have a powerful inclination to reject it firmly and without consideration. And yet I ask you to consider it. I don't ask that you believe it–at least not right away. I only ask that you keep an open mind to this idea, because it is a very difficult idea to process, and also, because if you do, if and when it finally starts to sink in, it will change your world forever, literally.

Tiny and Mad

That idea is this: this world is an illusion. This world does not exist. Quite literally, it is simply the collective dream of the Son of God, who is all of us together. You and I are asleep, and this world is as unreal as the dreams we now have at night. It is powerful and real to us because we have dreamed it up using the mind of God, which we share. It is an illusion born of a very understandable, but strange idea. God created his only Son in perfect love as an extension of Himself, yet still one with Him, part of God forever, endowed with every quality and ounce of power and creativity of God. God creates through extension; in other words, whatever God creates always remains a permanent and part of Him, and what God extends is love. This Son of God (us) has absolutely all of the attributes of God because when God creates something, He can put no less than all of Himself into it. That means that the Son of God is exactly like God in every way except one; God is the Father. The Son did not create himself. God did. The Son of God lives within the body of God, one with God forever, having everything, lacking nothing.

T-28.V.7. You who believe there is a little gap between you and your brother, do not see that it is here you are as prisoners in a world perceived to be existing here. 2 The world you see does not exist, because the place where you perceive it is not real.

A Course in Miracles puts forth a very beautiful context for this life, and it fits together in an amazing way. There are no gaps or missteps in the entire work. There is nothing senseless. It doesn't demand or coerce you to believe anything. It merely offers you something to help you lessen your suffering. Yet it is all based on this one, incredible, unbelievable, incomprehensible bombshell of an idea; this universe doesn't exist. The Course is certainly not the first thought system to say this. The Truth has always existed and, therefore, it has always been available to those who are able to access it.

The idea that life is an illusion exists in the Vedas, but what they say can be confusing because of the many conflicting and puzzling ways life is explained. The Course is clear, and repeats the idea many times and in many consistent ways, constantly cajoling us to consider it as inevitable truth. The Course simply describes what happened within the body of God and the troubling idea that arose from His Son.

Most likely, at the very moment of creation of the Son of God, what the Course calls a tiny, mad idea occurred. That tiny, mad idea, thought by the Son of God, was actually a fairly deep thought with layers of meaning and the basis for everything we now believe about ourselves, as well as this crazy dream world. The Son of God was curious about the only things he did not know and could not experience. The main idea behind this universe, and what the Son did not know, came with the desire to understand the concept of uniqueness, or specialness. This is anathema to God. In the real world of God and oneness, there can be no specialness. God and love can only be absolutely equal and fair in all things, so the idea that some aspect of the Son of God could be different, or special, from another immediately creates the necessity of judgment, because judgment is automatic when different things need to be compared. God knew that specialness was an idea that undermined everything that love was. So when the Son of God asked for uniqueness, God said, "Like, no way," or cosmic words to that effect. That idea of specialness is outside of what can be true, for oneness means that there are no parts, no separation, no comparisons.

If the Son of God could not experience uniqueness within himself as part of God, then the only way to experience it was to add another mind‑blowing concept to the original tiny, mad idea. The Son of God wanted to know something else he did not know; "OK if I can't be special within God, then what would it be like not to be God?" That's a pretty significant idea for someone who knows everything; a part of God wants to know what it would be like to be something other than himself, so he could experience the opposite of God. And if he could experience what it felt like not to be God, then what would that possibly look like? What would be the ramifications of the idea of specialness that God was so against? Who or what would someone living according to a different framework be like? What would life be like without the perfection of God, or the perfection of oneness? How could there be something else? And if there was life without God, where would or could that life come from? How could any life arise without a creator, from nothing?

All of these thoughts are very related. In this theoretical daydream, the Son of God simply began to question his origin and his nature. If he were not God, he would certainly not be part of God, so who would he be? If he wanted to experience specialness, then there would have to be things that were different from each other, so comparisons could be made. Also, in this theoretical scenario, the Son wouldn't be the "son" of anyone anymore; he would somehow be responsible for his own creation and his own life, or the result of some spontaneous cosmic randomness.

Now, why would the Son of God be so interested in being different from God, or experiencing specialness? This entire scenario of specialness seems to have come about because the Son of God recognized immediately that He was an offspring, and because of that, He was a tiny bit different from God, because He didn't create Himself, so he was a Son to His Father, His Creator. The Course mentions that the one problem we have here is caused by what it calls Authorship. This just means that God is the father and the Son is the son, and God created the Son, and that small difference determines the cosmic pecking order of existence, as the Son must now also create His own children. If that slight difference existed, it also meant that difference was built into Him somehow, and it seemed natural for Him to explore differences. So, this world was a natural outgrowth of the Son taking the idea of differences to their most insane level. This universe seems to be a part of the Son's birth process that the Son is experiencing as He settles into the truth of His reality. He must let go of this vestigial baggage of ideas of differences before He can become the pure Son of God as he travels through the birth canal to his true identity. Our entire universe may just be this process of the Son of God finally coming to the realization of Who He really is and shaking off the chaff of random ideas and reckless thinking of His natal disorientation, as He settles into the majesty of perfection.

As I said, this is the basis of everything we believe about this world. Many of us believe in God, but this is a world where belief in God is a choice, not a fact. We just don't know, unless we strongly pretend we know, just like we pretend everything else. Knowing God will never be a provable concept, shared by one human with another. God can only be known, or experienced individually. Many of us really hope there is a God. But here, we have imagined a world where God has been eliminated, and we have separated ourselves from our source and from each other. But because we really were created by God, there is something way down inside each one of us that still knows who we are. So, God seeps through into our beliefs. The more we let go of this world that is based on no God, the more we can feel our connection to God. In the meantime, we imagined a world where we arose from something other than God. We have, in essence, become our own creators, and in so doing, we have symbolically overthrown God. If there is no God, we had to come from somewhere! So we created a universe that arose spontaneously from nothing in a big bang, that is also self‑sustaining and self‑contained; a universe that we believe, in turn, created us. Now we can put our finger on the starting point of life, and also experience what it is like not to be God. We can each be special.

I don't know about you but this is unbelievably clever to me. This isn't really that radical, but just a simple matter of curiosity. We just want to know what we don't know. We want to experience something outside the box. We are just the rebellious, petulant child, acting out against our parent. We weren't being mean with this tiny idea. That's against our true nature. We were being curious and we wanted to experience something outside of the boundaries of perfect love. We needed to experience iPhones and croissants and falling leaves and kangaroos, badly. Simple as it is, this will take a while to process for most of us.

Here is something even more amazing. As I said, the tiny, mad idea was a complex thought with many layers, so add this to the first part of that idea; the source of the tiny, mad idea isn't just that the Son of God wanted to know what it would be like to be unique or not to be God: its true origin is that the Son of God felt there was something else he wanted that he did not have or know. He felt the idea of lack. The tiny, mad idea was remarkable in that it comes from the mind of the Son God, that complete, unbelievably perfect mind imagining for the tiniest moment, just after He was born, that there was something lacking. There was something out there that God could not provide.

Based on the original tiny, mad idea, this entire universe is built on the foundation of lack, and the corollary to that idea, which is desire. Desire is the idea that you need something because there is something missing. This is an amazingly rich idea. The tiny, mad idea is not merely the thought that created the universe billions of years ago, it is also the idea that sustains it to this day. We live our lives in a world that expresses lack and herefore, desire, in every form. The Son of God wanted to experience concepts and ideas that were outside of the boundaries of truth. The three‑dimensional world of form is a place of separation and lack, of specialness and the absence of God, and it is the entire theme of this life we are living. We do not ever believe ourselves to be complete or whole, or "finished." We can only have what we take from someone else, making them less complete. Every single moment of the day, we are absorbed in the struggle of give and take, of what we lack and in the striving for it, whether it's food, love, money, health or respect, or any of a billion variations on those themes. We are in the constant search for more; some sort of completion. No matter what we have, there is always something missing. There will be no feeling of completion until we realize that we have, at this moment, absolutely everything we could ever want or need. This doesn't translate well into the world of solid matter, because this world is incomplete by its very nature, so it stands to reason that your completeness lies beyond this world.

Another way to understand the tiny, mad idea is that, with the request for specialness, the Son of God wanted God to change the truth. But what could be changed in perfection? Any change to perfection must result in something that isn't true; something that falls outside of perfection. The Son began to recognize and give importance to what wasn't true: lack, specialness, separation. We began to believe that our insane desires were true. This still holds true today in our lives, and the result is the world you see around you. This world isn't true, and in our collective insanity, we have utterly convinced ourselves that it is, and most of us really like it–for the most part.

This is an amazing thing to wrap your head around. The goal of this life is to return to God, and that means to accept, without any doubt, there is nothing lacking in your life, because the real you is already with God, safe and perfect and lacking nothing.