Introduction: Helen Schucman's Vision

One evening while Helen Schucman, scribe of A Course in Miracles, and I were meditating, she told me that she saw a picture of the two of us standing together midst ruins and rubble; she in a tattered white dress, and I a little boy. The relationship could have been mother-son, if not literally so, certainly in spirit. Helen's feelings and her description of the scene strongly suggested Qumran (the locus of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered in 1947) during the time immediately following the destruction of the Essene community by the Romans around A.D. 70. We actually had visited there the previous summer.

I envisioned myself standing there with Helen at Qumran, and then began a symbolic series of inner events that seemed to reflect a healing process in Helen's mind. We set out northward toward Galilee, along the Jordan river, and our journey culminated with Helen and I reaching what evidently had been our goal from the beginning, a lovely grove of trees in lower Galilee, the biblical site of Jesus' childhood and much of his ministry. I had rarely seen Helen so moved. She began to weep at seeing this grove, saying: "I never thought I'd see those trees again." Through the woods could be seen the figure of Jesus, and joyfully we knew we had reached the end of our journey. (1)

Our metaphoric peregrination could be thought of as everyone's journey, beginning with the devastation wrought by our belief in sin, attack, and loss of innocence, and ending with the joyous discovery that this was indeed "a journey without distance" (T-8.VI.9:7): our perceived sinfulness was but a terrible dream with no effect upon our reality as God's innocent Son. As we happily read in Lesson 93:

   Why would you not be overjoyed to be assured that all the evil that you think you did was never done, that all your sins are nothing, that you are as pure and holy as you were created, and that light and joy and peace abide in you? Your image of yourself cannot withstand the Will of God. You think that this is death, but it is life. You think you are destroyed, but you are saved (W-pI.93.4).

What a wondrous experience to know these words are true, that the salvific trees of innocence we never thought to see again were always there, patiently awaiting our return to them. And yet how painful to realize we do not accept them, that our belief in the sin of separation and the desire to remain a sinner are more powerful than the love we need to destroy in order for our special self to survive. Indeed, the pain of this disbelief is so far beyond words and concepts that we need to call upon the artist to express for us a symbolic rendering of this most agonizing despair. We therefore turn to perhaps the greatest poet and dramatist of all, William Shakespeare, and his magnificent tragedy Othello. It can arguably be said that nowhere in all literature is the experience of the horror of sin portrayed with greater insight and feeling than here, equaled in power and depth of emotion only by Verdi's penultimate opera of the same name (Otello). We therefore begin our journey to the trees by briefly examining Shakespeare's fallen general and the horrifying instant when he recognizes the awesome and irreversible consequences of his betrayal of love.

The Othello Syndrome: Everyone's Tragic Story of Guilt and Punishment

Admirers of Shakespeare's most celebrated dramatic heroes can far more easily relate to the tragic flaws of Hamlet's indecisiveness, Macbeth's ambition, and Lear's senile folly than to Othello's failing to distinguish between truth and illusion. Yet at the same time we can all relate on some level to the terrifying result of this flaw, which speaks to the broken hearts of all of us. Othello, as no other literary work I know, depicts the secret fear that lurks in the minds of everyone who is born to dwell in this "dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die" (W-pII.13.5:1). The play offers no hope, for evil has clearly triumphed over good, and the ego thought system of deception, despair, and death has been seen as the final word and ultimate authority.

To succinctly summarize the dramatic action, Othello is a celebrated Venetian general who listens to the lies of his ancient (i.e., captain), Iago, who for his own purposes falsely accuses the general's wife Desdemona of infidelity. Othello decides to believe him over his innocent wife's protestations and, raised to a frenzy of jealousy, kills his cherished spouse, only to discover after the murder that Iago had woven a tapestry of lies to entrap him. Confronted with the immutable nature of his crime, Othello fatally stabs himself, but first recalls the kiss he bestowed on his love when just a few moments earlier he entered her bed chamber for the last time:

I kiss'd thee ere I kill'd thee: no way but this;
Killing myself, to die upon a kiss (V,ii).

One cannot imagine a more telling metaphor to depict the innermost layer of our unconscious minds. We are all Othellos, having chosen to believe the ego's lies of separation over the Holy Spirit's truth of Atonement, and still choosing to place our faith in a pathological liar who can never be trusted. The unmitigated revulsion of the tragic denouement of our sin—we shall never regain the love and innocence that we dreamed we threw away; no, destroyed—leads us into the waiting arms of specialness that are designed to protect us from what we believe we have done.

Any student of A Course in Miracles recognizes the centrality of the special relationship in the ego's arsenal of weapons against God, and the most painful sections in the Course to read, let alone put into practice, are those that describe the murderous dynamics of specialness, the mother of all defenses. Indeed, when Helen completed scribing the final group of sections that specifically deal with this topic and reveal the depth of our hate and guilt (T-24.I-IV), she heard Jesus' words of understanding and gratitude, "Thank you. This time you made it." This suggested to her that in some other dimension she had attempted to write these sections down, but had not been able to complete them. And, from the ego's point of view, with good reason! The guilt that is born of the belief we destroyed the innocence of God's Son, reinforced by seeking to destroy our brothers, is preserved beneath the veil of forgetfulness. This allows us to continue unabated our ego's journey on the precipitous slope that inexorably leads to the hellish existence of sin, betrayal, and death.

Specialness ensures that the innocent Self of Christ, our true Identity, remains forever hidden and beyond retrieval. In the Psychotherapy pamphlet we read: "And who could weep but for his innocence?" (P-2.IV.1:7). In other words, all sadness can be traced to the insane thought that through our sin we irrevocably lost the innocence that vanished forever when we chose to leave our Creator and Source. The disastrous results of pain, suffering, and death are inevitable, for they but logically follow the one mistake of taking the tiny, mad idea of separation seriously—i.e., calling it sinful:

   Sin is not an error, for sin entails an arrogance which the idea of error lacks. … [Sin] assumes the Son of God is guilty, and has thus succeeded in losing his innocence and making himself what God created not (T-19.II.2:1,4).

Sin "proves" God's Son is evil; timelessness must have an end; eternal life must die. And God Himself has lost the Son He loves, with but corruption to complete Himself, His Will forever overcome by death, love slain by hate, and peace to be no more (W-pII.4.3.3-4).

The unchanging relationship between sin and its wretched consequences is also captured in the story of Adam and Eve, the myth of the Western world and the foundation for both the Old and New Testaments, not to mention the religions spawned by them. Consider what happens to these first two "sinners." Like Othello, they listen to the wrong voice, the serpent and its lies, and then pay the price set by the enraged and vengeful God:

Unto the woman he [the Lord God] said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. … And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life … the Lord God sent him [Adam] forth from the garden of Eden … and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life (Genesis 3:16-17,23-24; KJV).

And so the punishment for sin is a life of suffering and death, culminating in eternal banishment from Heaven; i.e., life in hell. What crueler effect can there be of our sin? What hope can be sustained in the face of such devastating and unrelenting certainty? What but the defenses of repression and projection can enable us to maintain our existence while still believing in the ego's unchallenged reality of guilt and punishment? No one can live in the presence of the searing pain of this self-hatred, and so we bury its tormenting agony beneath layers and layers of defenses, which merely retain the guilt but do not undo it. Left to fester unnoticed and thus uncorrected, guilt continues to make its presence known, leading to a bodily existence of untold misery, Thoreau's "lives of quiet desperation." We never know the actual source of our miserable state, which is perceived to be everywhere but in the sleeping mind that has chosen to believe in the lies of sin and guilt:

   The witnesses to sin all stand within one little space [i.e., the decision-making mind]. And it is here you find the cause of your perspective on the world. Once you were unaware of what the cause of everything the world appeared to thrust upon you, uninvited and unasked, must really be. Of one thing you were sure: Of all the many causes you perceived as bringing pain and suffering to you, your guilt was not among them (T-27.VII.7:1-4).

Of course, the cause is not really guilt per se, since how can what does not exist be the cause of anything? The decision-making mind that chooses guilt is the source of all the problems we experience as bodies.

Indeed, concealing our mind's choice for the ego's guilt is the purpose of the world ("Thus were specifics made" [W-pI.161.3:1]), as it distracts our minds from themselves so that we would not remember that it was only our decision to be separate from love that has caused our distress. Innocence could not have been lost if we had not wanted it not to be found. As Jesus teaches us in A Course in Miracles, the ego's maxim, its raison d'etre for the world, as it were, is "Seek but do not find" (T-16.V.6:5). Our lives are quietly desperate because we shall never find the love and innocence for which we yearn, since we are looking in the wrong place.

Recall the joke about the man coming upon his friend one evening who is searching for a lost object on a well-lit street corner. Asking him specifically where he thinks he dropped what he is looking for, the man is told that it was dropped half a block away from the corner. He follows with the obvious question of why his friend is searching in a place where it was not lost. The response, which is the punch line of the story, is "because the light is better here under the lamp post." The ego (the part of our split mind that likes being separated and special) made the body with eyes so that it could see the "light" in the external world and therefore never find what was lost, our innocence that remains buried and thus unremembered in the mind. The bodily dreamworld of guilt has come to occupy our attention so that the mind's dreamworld of guilt is obscured, an obscurity that prevents our ever awakening from the dream to the loving innocence we left only in our delusional state of thinking.

And so the mind's guilt over the nonexistent sin of destroying innocence remains concealed and protected by a world that is ignorant of what is driving its very existence. The ongoing yet unseen presence of the guilt that determines our fate is described in this trenchant passage from the text:

Its [Guilt's] shadow rises to the surface, enough to hold its most external manifestations in darkness. … Yet its [guilt's] intensity is veiled by its heavy coverings, and kept apart from what [the body] was made to keep it [guilt] hidden. The body cannot see this [guilt], for the body arose from this for its [guilt's] protection, which depends on keeping it [guilt] not seen. The body's eyes will never look on it [guilt]. Yet they will see what it dictates (T-18.IX.4:3-7).

In this way we condemn ourselves forever to a life of despairing darkness, wandering "in the world, uncertain, lonely, and in constant fear" (T-31.VIII.7:1). Othello has become our model for learning, supplanting Jesus (e.g., T-6.in.2:1), whose loving place in our hearts has been usurped by the insane decision to believe the "voices of the dead" (W-pI.106:2:3) that speak to us of the pain of separation, the jealous agony of specialness, and the absoluteness of death. Having learned the ego's lesson of guilt, there is no choice but this:

The certain outcome of the lesson that God's Son is guilty is the world you see. It is a world of terror and despair. Nor is there hope of happiness in it. There is no plan for safety you can make that ever will succeed. There is no joy that you can seek for here and hope to find (T-31.I.7:4-8).

This clearly establishes that the Iago who represents the ego thought system will continue to exert dominion over truth, while the Othello mind that has chosen to believes its lies can never be corrected. The guilt with which it has identified holds full sway, protected by the mindless world of bodies that we have made our home:

   The body will remain guilt's messenger, and will act as it directs as long as you believe that guilt is real (T-18.IX.5:1).

As long as you believe that guilt is real. This is the crux of the problem, as well as its solution. As the above passage makes crystal clear, the issue is not the guilt itself, nor the world of guilt that arose from it, but only our belief in them. This understanding is imperative if we are to return attention to our minds so that we may hear a different Voice, the loving words that say to us that we are wrong, for "God thinks otherwise" (T-23.I.2:7). We then allow ourselves to hear Jesus' comforting words to us in all three books of his course, that the truth is quite different. Our grateful ears listen to his loving wisdom in the following examples among many, which our teacher continually presents to us in the face of the ego's insistence that sin and guilt are real, and fear is justified:

   Son of God, you have not sinned, but you have been much mistaken (T-10.V.6:1).

   You have not lost your innocence. It is for this you yearn. … This is the voice you hear, and this the call which cannot be denied (W-pI.182.12:1-2,4).

You but mistake interpretation for the truth. And you are wrong. But a mistake is not a sin, nor has reality been taken from its throne by your mistakes (M-18.3: 7-9; italics omitted).

This correction from sin to mistake, guilt to innocence, is the basis of forgiveness, the thrust of A Course in Miracles, to which we now turn.

Forgiveness: Our Greatest Joy

The greatest joy this world can ever hold is knowing that we are truly forgiven; truly, truly forgiven. This joy is greatly increased by virtue of its contrast with the profound sadness brought on by our guilt. The contrast is nothing less than extraordinary, and is reflected in the juxtaposition of the wrong- and right-minded thought systems found in Lesson 93:

   You think you are the home of evil, darkness and sin. You think if anyone could see the truth about you he would be repelled, recoiling from you as if from a poisonous snake (W-pI.93.1:1-2).

Light and joy and peace abide in me. My sinlessness is guaranteed by God (W-pI.93.8:2-3; italics omitted).

Becoming at last intolerant of negative feelings about ourselves, we call out in desperation and hope that there must be a "better way" (T-2.III.3:6), another Teacher we may choose to learn from, a different thought system to identify with. This invitation to the Holy Spirit begins our ascent up the ladder the ego led us down (T-28. III.1:2), the same journey Helen and I symbolically took that follows the miracle's healing path from the ego's devastating twin worlds of guilt (mind) and destruction (body) to the innocent world of light and joy and peace. All thoughts and feelings that are not totally loving to all people can be traced back to the unforgiveness of ourselves (guilt) over our perceived sin of "wresting in righteous wrath" (T-23. II.11:2) the innocence that belongs to another (and Another). As we read from the workbook:

   Certain it is that all distress does not appear to be but unforgiveness (W-pI.193.4:1).

Stated in straightforward English, all distress is unforgiveness, and it is this distress that permeates our lives. As indicated above, our distress-filled lives as seeming prisoners of a body that is referred to as a "rotting prison" (T-26.I.8:3) are tolerated through our special relationships, which seem to bring a modicum of peace and succor in a world we all know on some level is not our home. But somewhere within we know that this comfort is not what Jesus offers us when he says at the close of the workbook:

You do not walk alone. God's angels hover near and all about. His Love surrounds you, and of this be sure; that I will never leave you comfortless (W-ep.6:6-8).

What worldly experience can ever come close to the joyous comfort that Jesus brings us through forgiveness? It is nothing less than the peace of God that comes when we know, not only that we are a mind, but a guiltless mind that is free from the illusions of an insane thought system, and therefore identified with the thought of truth:

   Can you imagine what a state of mind without illusions is? How it would feel? … Without illusions there could be no fear, no doubt and no attack. When truth has come all pain is over, for there is no room for transitory thoughts and dead ideas to linger in your mind (W-pI.107.2:1-2; 3:2-3).

All pain is resistance, our fear of the truth of our identity as God's one Son. Within that Self, the Christ that God created one with Him, there is no place for our special, individualized identity. From deep within our minds we know that this little self, and the thought system and world that are its foundation and protector would dissolve into the Love that created us, as we read:

   You have built your whole insane belief system because you think you would be helpless in God's Presence, and you would save yourself from His Love because you think it would crush you into nothingness. You are afraid it would sweep you away from yourself and make you little. … You think you have made a world God would destroy; and by loving Him, which you do, you would throw this world away, which you would. … And it is this that frightens you (T-13.III.4:1-3,5).

In order to preserve this illusory self, we built a world of separation and differences (the hallmark of the special relationship), and it is the ego self in which we have placed our faith that is the cause of our pain and suffering. This is why A Course in Miracles focuses on the healing of relationships as the means of our returning home, and forgiveness as its central teaching. Forgiveness undoes the belief that salvation comes at the expense of others—one or the other—by inculcating in us the vision born of the principle together, or not at all (T-19.IV-D.12:8). One cannot imagine this vision of all-inclusiveness more movingly described than in the inspiring words of the text's stirring final section, in which Jesus sings to us:

To your tired eyes I bring a vision of a different world, so new and clean and fresh you will forget the pain and sorrow that you saw before. 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.8:4-7; italics mine).

Yet the painful fact is that we all, to a person, do not do the simple things (of forgiveness) salvation asks (T-31. I.2:2) that we attain this vision. Nothing is more emphatic in A Course in Miracles than Jesus' constant exhortations for us not to judge, but our everyday lives are damning witness to our resistance to this simple thing. Judgments, criticisms, attacks are the bell ringers of our lives, and what can these thoughts, feelings, and behaviors be but our ego's ways of keeping us from the only truth within the illusion: the universal sameness of God's Son. While our bodies bespeak separation and differentiation, our split minds remind us that, in the words of prominent American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, "we are all much more human than otherwise," possessing the same wrong- and right-minded thought systems, and the decision-making ability to choose between them.

To understand this strange situation of not practicing a thought system that we most deeply believe in, we need to understand our split-minded allegiance to two mutually exclusive goals: awakening from, or remaining in the dream; seeing the trees of light, love, and hope, or remaining forever in the darkness of despair and death. From our choice of goal arises our perceptual world, along with the means—vision or judgment—of attaining it. The section "The Consistency of Means and End" provides a helpful summary of our situation:

You recognize you want the goal. Are you not also willing to accept the means? … A purpose is attained by means, and if you want a purpose you must be willing to want the means as well. How can one be sincere and say, "I want this above all else, and yet I do not want to learn the means to get it"? … And when you hesitate, it is because the purpose frightens you, and not the means (T-20.VII.2:3-4,6-7; 3:4).

When Jesus asks us to be honest and hide nothing from him (T-4.III.8:2), this is what he means: He is asking us to be honest with him (and ourselves) about how fearful we are of the goal of seeing those trees again, and so we cling to the ego's means of judgment and attack. If we are truly desirous of the goal, however, we would joyfully accept the means and never see them as difficult. This desire and acceptance translates into our greeting each new day with the happy thought that it contains the very opportunities for us to learn the Holy Spirit's lessons of forgiveness. Painful or challenging situations or relationships would no longer be greeted with fear, anxiety, and resentment, but rather with the gratitude of knowing we are in class and learning the lessons that will speed us along our path, gently opening our eyes to see what we never thought we would look upon again, and remembering the innocence we thought was gone forever. Thus would forgiveness end the Othellian nightmare of guilt, paving the way for the "new and clean and fresh" vision that is Jesus' gift to us, the final act of our journey home.

Act VI: Awakening from the Nightmare

Shakespeare's tragedies have five acts, at the end of which most of the protagonists meet not-very-happy deaths, but we can envision a sixth and final act for Othello, wherein our hero awakens from his nightmare, realizing it was all a dream and that the trees of innocence had never left him. One can then envision that all that happens from the time Othello and Desdemona enter their bed chamber (II,i) until the play's end is a dream of sin and guilt (Othello having "stolen" the innocent Desdemona from her father Brabantio and eloping with her), leading to the ultimate punishment of death—homicide and then suicide.

In this new act, however, Othello awakens and recognizes that the source of this dream was his mind's decision to be separate, for Acts II-V were nothing more than "an outside picture of an inward condition" (T-21. in.1:5), a "pictorial representation of [his mind's] attack thoughts" (W-pI.23.3:2). Because it was his mind's decision to dream the nightmare, his sleep can be changed to a happy dream, from sin to innocence, guilt to forgiveness. Othello is now free to choose to listen to the voice of his true Friend and not the voice of the prevaricating enemy. His inner ears having opened, he is able to hear the sweetest song we could ever imagine in this despairing dream of death, the voice of Jesus again singing to us and offering us the hope this world can never give:

   How can you who are so holy suffer? All your past except its beauty is gone, and nothing is left but a blessing. I have saved all your kindnesses and every loving thought you ever had. I have purified them of the errors that hid their light, and kept them for you in their own perfect radiance. They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt. They came from the Holy Spirit within you, and we know what God creates is eternal. You can indeed depart in peace because I have loved you as I loved myself. You go with my blessing and for my blessing. Hold it and share it, that it may always be ours. I place the peace of God in your heart and in your hands, to hold and share. The heart is pure to hold it, and the hands are strong to give it. We cannot lose. My judgment is as strong as the wisdom of God, in Whose Heart and Hands we have our being. His quiet children are His blessed Sons. The Thoughts of God are with you (T-5.IV.8).

Jesus' love does not really erase our destructive and guilt-ridden thoughts, but rather calls us to realize that they were truly nothing. Withdrawing our belief from them is the cause of their gentle evanescence, and thus we learn that nothingness can have no effect on us for dreams are not reality. This allows the space for the memory of the Love that created us to dawn upon our minds. The Thoughts of God that Jesus speaks of—the innocence of our true Self—have never left us, nor have we left Them. In gratitude do we awaken from the dream of sin and death, remembering the home in Heaven we never abandoned. Through tears that are born of the most wonderful joy imaginable, our reawakening right-minded self exclaims, as did Helen: "I never thought I'd see those trees again." And we are glad and grateful it is so (W-pI.200.11:9).

FOOTNOTES:
1. The complete account of this experience can be found in my Absence from Felicity, pp. 416-17.