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(Volume 14 Number 2 June 2003)
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The Oneness of God's Son
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, #17).Donne speaks of the inherent oneness of mankind, which to him, a devout Christian, was God's creation. While we, as students of A Course in Miracles, would not see homo sapiens as part of God's living Oneness, we nonetheless can appreciate Donne's unified vision. Even though an illusion, the phenomenal world of bodies remains a unified whole -- illusory to be sure, yet a single projection of the single thought of one separated Son. We are all more than familiar with the core principle of the Course's thought system: Ideas leave not their source. If ideas do not leave their source, meaning the mind, the perceptual world can be nothing but a projection of the inner world; specifically, the idea of separation has not -- because it could not have -- left its source in the mind. Stated another way, we can see that effect has not left its cause, and so the inner and outer worlds are unified, as we see in this statement from an early workbook lesson. The context is how our attack thoughts are the cause of the world, the latter being but the hallucinatory effect of these thoughts:
Every thought you have makes up some segment of the world you see.…[The world] is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause.…Each of your perceptions of “external reality” is a pictorial representation of your own attack thoughts. One can well ask if this can be called seeing. Is not fantasy a better word for such a process, and hallucination a more appropriate term for the result? (W-pI.23.1:4;2:4-6;3:2-4).Since the separation began with the one Son believing he had attacked God, that single thought has remained constant and present throughout the fragmentation process, which resulted in the miscreation of the perceptual world of form and differences, a world of multiplicity that has been so impressively successful in concealing its -- literally -- single-minded origin. Recall this important passage from the text:
You who believe that God is fear made but one substitution.…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. Everything you see reflects it, and every special relationship that you have ever made is part of it (T-18.I.4:1,3-6; italics mine).Thus we can see that each seemingly separated fragment -- regardless of its form, animate or inanimate -- is a part of the one Son that believed in its deranged and hallucinatory mind that it could be separate. Yet it remains what it is -- God's one Son, albeit a sleeping one, as is reflected in Jesus' exclamation:
How holy is the smallest grain of sand, when it is recognized as being part of the completed picture of God's Son! The forms the broken pieces seem to take mean nothing. For the whole is in each one. And every aspect of the Son of God is just the same as every other part (T-28.IV.9:4-7).What is the same cannot be different, and thus “every aspect of the Son of God” remains the same and remains as one. We can therefore understand that not only is the whole of Christ's Love found within each fragment of God's Son, but also the whole of the ego's hate. Despite the myriad differences that abound in a world of bodies, distinguishing one form from another, we yet remain united in our shared hallucination of separation, as well in the shared memory of the truth of God's Love. Returning to John Donne, we can perhaps now better appreciate his vision of the inherent unity of mankind. How different a perception it is from our egos'! How different from the world's! If indeed we are all one, how can we ever truly attack? Moreover, how can we justify attack? Attack on anyone, for any reason, diminishes us, for we but attack ourselves by seeing a separated and individualized self that is a mockery of the glorious Self that God created. Such a radical vision of our inherent unity undoes the basis of almost all the world's beliefs: geopolitical, economic, religious, and social. It undoes as well the perception of what we conceive to be our problems -- on all levels -- not to mention their solutions. If the cause of the world is the belief in separation, then it must be that the solution for all pain and suffering is found, not in the world, but in the separated and guilt-ridden mind that first conceived of the thought of pain and suffering. Donne's inspired words reflect this decision's reversal by recognizing our inherent oneness -- in pain, sickness, death, and love; a oneness that by definition undoes separation. Remembering this causal connection between our thoughts (really, our thought) and the world undoes the ego's primary defense against our remembering God, Whose memory abides in our minds. For this reason the ego seeks to keep cause and effect separate, placing a huge gap between them. That gap is the world in macrocosm, and our special relationships in microcosm. Beginning with the one separation, the ego's world continued to separate and fragment. Indeed, our bodies were designed to perceive it so:
The purpose of all seeing is to show you what you wish to see. All hearing but brings to your mind the sounds it wants to hear. Thus were specifics made (W-pI.161.2:5-3:1).By keeping the specific effect (world) split off from the abstract or non-specific cause (mind), the ego ensures that the Son, now established as mindless, can never change his mind. There is method in the ego's madness, for it knows that for the Son to change his mind, the ego would inevitably be undone at its source: the Son's belief in it. The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, brings effect back to cause, thus undoing the ego's strategy of maintaining the gap. This is the vision Donne's words offer us: hurting others hurts ourselves. And so it must also be that forgiving others forgives ourselves. It is interesting to speculate that if the world had accepted this vision three hundred years ago, A Course in Miracles would not have been necessary. This leads us to another message the great poet has for us, as we see in this further excerpt from Donne's Devotions.
The Way to Recognizing Our Oneness
If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels.…Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, #17).We have the wealth -- the treasure of God's Love -- but do not know it. Indeed, we are the wealth, since having and being cannot be distinguished in God's Kingdom (T-4.III.9). The treasure of Christ that we both have and are has been unknowingly covered over by the thought of guilt -- the ego's treasure -- and then covered over a second time by the world of guilt. With such a doubly protected deception -- what the workbook refers to as a double shield of oblivion (W-pI.136.5:2) -- our decision for the ego is protected, seemingly forever, from any possibility of correction. But Donne points the way out, anticipating A Course in Miracles' discussion of forgiveness as the means for undoing our faulty decision making. Our poet is telling us that our treasure -- symbolized here by gold -- is worthless to us if it is not available to use. Similarly, our real treasure -- God's gifts of love and peace -- is meaningless if our awareness of it is blocked. However, awareness of our union with all people -- “but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me” -- allows me to remember that the way I see another is the way I see myself, and this is the way I become aware of God's gifts. As Jesus reminds us in the text, midst a discussion of healing:
To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers with Him, and God's Answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember (T-12.II.2:9-10).Thus do my attack thoughts of separation become the way that brings me back to the remembrance of the decision in my mind to deny the oneness of God's Son. By seeing these thoughts outside me in others -- the guilt I have projected from my mind onto their bodies -- I can now see them as my own, thereby providing another chance to remember that, to use Donne's words, my only security is in God, and not in specialness; my only recourse is God's Voice, not the ego's. Through the Holy Spirit's reversal of the ego's projection, I am able to recognize that what I have seen in another is the outward picture of my wish: the image of separation and guilt I wanted to be true (T-24.VII.8:10). Thus am I returned from the insanity of separate interests to the sane remembrance of our shared oneness as God's one Son. All perceived differences now disappear before the resplendent light of Christ, our true Self -- our one Self. Lesson 262, “Let me perceive no differences today,” prays beautifully in our name:
Father, You have one Son. And it is he that I would look upon today. He is Your one creation. Why should I perceive a thousand forms in what remains as one? Why should I give this one a thousand names, when only one suffices? For Your Son must bear Your Name, for You created him. Let me not see him as a stranger to his Father, nor as stranger to myself. For he is part of me and I of him, and we are part of You Who are our Source, eternally united in Your Love; eternally the holy Son of God (W-pII.262.1; italics omitted).We are the ones who pray, and, in truth, we are the ones who answer by choosing the Answer. Motivating our asking and receiving is the recognition that there “must be a better way” to look at the world (T-2.III.3:5-6) and, even more to the point, at the ways we perceive each other. The “better way” is Christ's vision, which embraces the Sonship as one, with no one excluded:
Yet this a vision is which you must share with everyone you see, for otherwise you will behold it not. To give this gift is how to make it yours. And God ordained, in loving kindness, that it be for you (T-31.VIII.8:5-7).With this vision to guide us, we walk the world with a new understanding that recognizes the universality of suffering and peace, both present in ourselves, both present in all living things. And to see them in one is to see them in all:
If people allowed themselves to experience the pain of others -- they would not be able to inflict it: no bombs, no murders, no tortures, no attacks of any kind.The truth of these statements and answers to these questions are obvious, once we recognize the value of shared interests, and the valuelessness of separate ones. Resistance to such recognition, while insane, is nonetheless inherent in our individual existence in which having and being are indeed separated, and need to be so if we are to survive as separated entities. It is in reminders that come from the John Donnes of our world that we find reinforcement for the choice that will at last bring us the security of Heaven's love and the peace of its oneness, gladly accepting the happy fact that we were wrong and God was right. Paraphrasing and adding to the question from the text, we can thus ask:
Who with the Love of God upholding them could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make? Especially if they knew that the object of their rapacity was their self, that it was their own death for which the bell of selfishness tolled (T-23.IV.9:8).However, not only do the inner and outer worlds of guilt, hate, and greed remain one, so too does peace, for, as we have already seen, we equally share the same wrong mind and right mind. In the world of the separated self, there are no true differences among its seeming fragments, despite all the ego's evidence to the contrary. Helen Schucman's lovely poem gently reminds us:
Peace cover you, within without the same,Our ego's dream is one of sin and evil, first seen in ourselves, and then magically seeming to appear in another, whom we posthaste proceed to vilify, attack, and seek to destroy. This prestidigitation has worked incredibly well, because we have managed to believe in the magician's lie that we are separate and independent creatures:
The strange position in which those in a world inhabited by bodies seem to be. Each body seems to house a separate mind, a disconnected thought, living alone and in no way joined to the Thought by which it was created. Each tiny fragment seems to be self-contained, needing another for some things, but by no means totally dependent on its one Creator for everything; needing the whole to give it any meaning, for by itself it does mean nothing. Nor has it any life apart and by itself (T-18.VIII.5).To be sure, each of us is indeed an island, entire of itself -- if we listen to the ego. But let us for an instant begin to question this insanity, and an ancient door opens that leads beyond the world of pain and death to everlasting peace and life (C-ep.1:11). The Teacher of teachers, our eldest brother Jesus, gently leads us back from the hellish life of separate islands to the reflected Heaven of shared existence and single purpose. Together with all of us he prays to our Source, as we together make our way to the light of love's perfect oneness:
In joyous welcome is my hand outstretched to every brother who would join with me in reaching past temptation, and who looks with fixed determination toward the light that shines beyond in perfect constancy.…And as each one elects to join with me, the song of thanks from earth to Heaven grows from tiny scattered threads of melody to one inclusive chorus from a world redeemed from hell, and giving thanks to You.…For we have reached where all of us are one, and we are home, where You would have us be (T-31.VIII.11:1,5;12:8).
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