Introduction: Dissociation as a Defense

The ego is nothing more than a part of your belief about yourself. Your other life has continued without interruption, and has been and always will be totally unaffected by your attempts to dissociate it.(1)

The most threatening thought to the ego -- the part of us that likes being us -- is not God, Jesus, or his course, as one might expect, but the power of our minds to choose God, Jesus, or his course: the light of Atonement over the darkness of separation. Since the ego cannot destroy the light, it does the next best thing -- it dissociates it. By so doing, it removes the light's presence from our awareness, ensuring that we will never choose it. After all, how can we choose what we do not know is there? Moreover, the ego continues its defense by dissociating the mind from the projected body. After all, how can we choose when the mechanism of choice -- the decision-making mind -- is no longer accessible to us? However, we shall not address this aspect of the ego thought system in the current article. Our focus instead is on how we maintain this strange split in our minds (light vs. darkness), which is reflected in the split in our everyday lives (good vs. evil), especially as we, students of A Course in Miracles , seek to practice its principles. Thus we read the following cogent description of this process of dissociation and projection:

If only the loving thoughts of God's Son are the world's reality, the real world must be in his mind. His insane thoughts, too, must be in his mind, but an internal conflict of this magnitude he cannot tolerate. A split mind is endangered, and the recognition that it encompasses completely opposed thoughts within itself is intolerable. Therefore the mind projects the split, not the reality. Everything you perceive as the outside world is merely your attempt to maintain your ego identification…(T-12.III.7:1-5).

The internal split we dissociate consists of the thoughts of separation and Atonement, sin and its correction. The ego tells us these mutually exclusive thoughts constitute a conflict, a war that can only result in our own defeat. This threat of annihilation is so extreme that we believe we can survive only by denying its presence and magically hoping to be free of it by projecting it outside us, thereby perceiving external conflict and believing it to be real. This passage from the workbook amplifies the insanity of this dynamic, emphasizing the attack that is the ego's true nature and therefore becomes the nature of the external world we think we inhabit:

The world you see is a vengeful world, and everything in it is a symbol of vengeance. 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.23.3)

What then has occurred that we became psychotic-like hallucinators, thinking delusional thoughts of separation and perceiving what is not there? Simply stated, we took the ego's thought system of darkness seriously, cavalierly dismissing the Holy Spirit 's light of Atonement as fantasy. By so doing, we committed the “sin” of making the error of separation real. Inevitably, then, this seriousness permeates our world, where matters of life and death, pleasure and pain, good and evil, become paramount in our experience. The body has replaced the mind as the seat of destiny, and our only focus becomes its preservation, always at the expense of others on both physical and psychological levels. The special relationship between our bodily selves reflects the original special relationship between the decision-making mind and the ego, which substitutes for the mind's holy relationship between the same decision-making mind and the Holy Spirit.

There is no seeming hope at this point, for the world is too much with us, to quote Wordsworth's famous verse, yet there remains an answer nonetheless. Despite the seeming power of this global and universal insanity, it can all be undone by the gentle smile that looks on both dissociated thought systems. Thus they are brought together in the healing brightness that undoes illusion, permitting us to know again the truth of the Atonement that is the way out of the dream, and which heralds the return to our true Self as God's one whole and innocent Son.

Looking without Judgment: The Gentle Smile of Love

The belief in sin has been uprooted in [the] smile of love....the gentle smile and tender blessing [love] offers to its own.(2)

The problem, therefore, is that we failed to look with the Holy Spirit at the fundamental ego thought of separation, having chosen instead to identify with the ego's quick look that established itself as real and serious, buttressed by its unholy trinity of sin, guilt, and fear. Once identified with this thought system of separation and attack, we also identified with the ego's plan for self-preservation: never looking at the ego's thought system in the mind that is its source. What is not looked upon, once again, can never be undone. Thus we continually experience the need to project the inner dissociation between the ego's thought of separation and the Holy Spirit's Thought of Atonement. By seeing them outside and conveniently forgetting that we projected the inner conflict, we ensure that the mind's dissociated state will never be healed by our choosing to undo projection through forgiveness. This is the meaning of the line from the workbook:

The [unforgiving] thought protects projection, tightening its chains, so that distortions are more veiled and more obscure; less easily accessible to doubt, and further kept from reason [i.e, right-minded forgiveness] (W-pII.1.2:3).

If the problem is therefore defined as taking the ego's thoughts of separation and attack seriously by virtue of not looking at them, the answer is obvious. We look at the ego, but with a gentle smile that knows that what is seen is but an insane thought that has no effect. As this lovely line from the text says: “not one note in Heaven's song was missed” (T-26.V.5:4). In other words, what appeared to be the truth had no effect upon the truth. The Oneness of God's Son remains safe within the Unity of its Creator.

And so we end the ego's dissociation by bringing together the ego's perceptions of external splits of victim and victimizer, and Jesus' vision that sees that our perceptions -- born of the mind's decision for the ego -- are merely defenses against his vision of the inherent sameness of the Sonship. Through his eyes, distinctions among its seemingly fragmented members are seen as spurious. Jesus teaches us that what we perceive outside is only a projection of what we first made real in our minds:

Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that.… It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition (T-21.in.1:1-2,5).

By returning the projection to the wrong-minded decision for the ego that was projected, we are able to look at the ego's thought system of separation anew. Such looking -- the miracle -- undoes the dissociation of our split mind, returning us to the sanity of right-minded thinking. The following passage provides the rationale for the healing property of the miracle, which teaches us that the separation we perceive in the world wherein fragments of God's one Son are perceived at war with each other, is but a projection of the mind's split wherein God's Son is perceived to be at war with his Creator:

Dissociation is a distorted process of thinking whereby two systems of belief which cannot coexist are both maintained. If they are brought together, their joint acceptance becomes impossible.… You cannot have them both, for each denies the other.… Bring them together, and the fact of their complete incompatibility is instantly apparent. One will go, because the other is seen in the same place (T-14.VII.4:3-4,7,9-10).

The ego's world of bodies, however, presents us with countless challenges to Jesus' vision, for the goings-on here seem serious indeed. We are all more than aware of the untold sufferings that are rampant in the world -- past and present, whether on the individual level of personal or familial illness, or the catastrophic deaths inflicted by nation states, religious fanatics, or what are usually and naively known as natural disasters. Who but the totally insensitive could ever conceive of smiling, let alone laughing at such misery? Yet who but the insane could think that God's perfect Son could suffer, or that he whom God created eternal could ever die? Such, then is the paradox of our human experience. On the one hand, we exist as bodies, prey to “natural” forces beyond our control, vulnerable to attacks on all levels, from the macroscopic ravages of war to the daily microscopic assaults of viruses, bacteria, and the like. On the other hand, we are not bodies but minds, and thus are vulnerable only to our wrong-minded decisions to remain asleep, dreaming of separation, guilt, and attack. Helping us make that shift in identification from body to mind is Jesus' purpose for his course, and it is the gentle smile of the miracle that brings this shift about.

Thus Jesus asks us to look with him at our world, recognizing, as did Plato over 2500 years ago, that there is a distinct difference between appearance and reality. In other words, things are not what they seem. The external world of pain, suffering, and death is merely the effect of a decision the mind has made to believe in the reality of pain, suffering, and death. Similarly, an object falls to the ground when we drop it not because of the law of gravity, but because our minds believe in a world governed by laws such as gravity. There can be no compromise here, and Jesus is unequivocal about his teaching that the world does not exist outside the mind that thought it, as this important passage from the workbook explains:

The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real.… There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release.… Ideas leave not their source. This central theme is often stated in the text, and must be borne in mind if you would understand the lesson for today [“I loose the world from all I thought it was.”].… There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach (W-132.4:1-3; 5:1,3-4; 6:2-3).

The implications of this, needless to say, are enormous. It means that nothing in the physical world should be taken seriously, in the sense of having power to affect our state of mind, either as the cause of our happiness or misery, our feelings of well-being or pain and suffering:

…nothing outside yourself can save you; nothing outside yourself can give you peace.…nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace or upset you in any way.… [This] places you in charge of the universe, where you belong because of what you are (W-pI.70.2:1-3).

The universe we are in charge of is the mind, which must also mean the universe we perceive to be outside ourselves, for if ideas leave not their source, as we just read, then the outer world has never left the inner world of our thoughts. And since these are our thoughts, we are the ones in control of them. In this happy idea is found our salvation from the prison of the ego thought system. Thus we can read this line and joyously know that Jesus is speaking of us:

He laughs as well at pain and loss, at sickness and at grief, at poverty, starvation and at death (W-pI.187.6:4).

This laugh is not derisive or insensitive (can one imagine Jesus in this negative light?), but is born of the gentle awareness that bodies have no effect on the mind, illusions can never alter truth. Now we recognize the difference between cause and effect, and have come to understand why Jesus called his book A Course in Miracles. It is the miracle's function to give “back to cause the function of causation, not effect” (T-28.II.9:3). By returning our awareness to the mind, which is the cause of the world and all the suffering it contains, we remember that we as decision-making minds are the cause of our experiences, and not the helpless effects of a world beyond our control. This is reflected in these lines that are often misunderstood by students:

I am responsible for what I see.
I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide upon the goal I would achieve.
And everything that seems to happen to me I ask for, and receive as I have asked.

Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done to you. Acknowledge but that you have been mistaken, and all effects of your mistakes will disappear.… His power of decision is the determiner of every situation in which he seems to find himself by chance or accident.… Suffer, and you decided sin was your goal. Be happy, and you gave the power of decision to Him Who must decide for God for you (T-21.II.2:3-7; 3:3,5-6).

Jesus is not referring to external events, which are only epiphenomena of the mind's decision, but our perceptions of these events. Since projection makes perception and ideas leave not their source, our perceptions of external events are but effects of the mind's decision either for the ego or the Holy Spirit , and do not exist outside the mind that conceived them. And thus we are responsible for how we see the world, and therefore are never the helpless and innocent victims of what we misperceive -- what does not exist can have no effect on us. Once again, it is only our power of decision that causes happiness or suffering.

Having risen above the battleground with Jesus (T-23.IV), we now look back on the world and join in his gentle smile, for we are no longer taken in by the ego's deceptive distortions of the principle of cause and effect. Seen now in its proper perspective, this principle becomes the means by which we look kindly on the projected world of loss and death, and join in Jesus' happy laughter as effect (body) has been brought to cause (mind), and softly let go:

In gentle laughter does the Holy Spirit perceive the cause, and looks not to effects. How else could He correct your error, who have overlooked the cause entirely? He bids you bring each terrible effect to Him that you may look together on its foolish cause and laugh with Him a while. You judge effects, but He has judged their cause (T-27.VIII.9:1-4).

Blessed with Christ's vision, we behold the world as He does and are healed, along with all the Sonship:

And yet you look with Heaven's smile upon your lips, and Heaven's blessing on your sight. You will not see sin long. For in the new perception the mind corrects it when it seems to be seen, and it becomes invisible. Errors are quickly recognized and quickly given to correction, to be healed, not hidden. You will be healed of sin and all its ravages the instant that you give it no power over your brother. And you will help him overcome mistakes by joyously releasing him from the belief in sin (T-19.III.9).

Yet must this healing be applied directly to a world of specifics, and our newly-attained vision be extended to embrace a world that still believes in the cruel ravages that fate bestows upon our bodies. A specific example, therefore, can be instructive in terms of applying the Course's abstract principles to our everyday lives. Indeed, the workbook for students, the second part of A Course in Miracles' three-part curriculum, is geared precisely toward that application. Our next section provides such an example.

An Example: “Nothing so blinding as perception of form.”(3)

It is not easy to perceive the jest when all around you do your eyes behold its heavy consequences, but without their trifling cause.(4)

We have already commented on the ego's persuasive nature and its making the world to be a compelling witness to the dream's reality, “proving” that the separation is in fact the truth, while the Holy Spirit's correction of Atonement is a lie. Only by rising above the battleground, the meaning of being in one's right mind with Jesus, can one see through the lie to the truth. Thus Jesus encourages us:

We are ready to look more closely at the ego's thought system because together we have the lamp that will dispel it.…we must look first at this to see beyond it.…to truth (T- 11.V.1:3,5-6).

During a recent class at the Foundation, a Norwegian man living in Sweden told a horrifying story that was still unfolding in the course of his visit. He was living in a small village, where all the inhabitants knew each other. Just before he left for the States, a ten-year old girl was abducted and subsequently found killed; her killer, a recidivist offender having come forth to confess his crime. One can imagine the catastrophe this was for the family and the community, and our Norwegian friend was struggling to make sense of this from the Course's perspective. The event, along with his response, provided an excellent vehicle for discussing how one can approach such horror and find peace, this being but a microcosm of the horrendous cruelties we hear about daily on both local and international news programs. Succinctly stated, how can one live in a peaceful, loving state in the face of obvious evil that occurs in the world; how can one respond with a gentle smile when there is such untold suffering all around us?

Jesus alerts us to this difficulty when he tells us:

It is not easy to perceive the jest when all around you do your eyes behold its heavy consequences, but without their trifling cause. Without the cause do its effects seem serious and sad indeed. Yet they but follow. And it is their cause that follows nothing and is but a jest (T-27.VIII.8:4-7).

We are thus thrust back on the confusion of cause and effect, mind and body; the confusion of levels that Jesus alludes to early on in the text in the context of physical symptoms, what the world terms sickness:

Miracles rearrange perception and place all levels in true perspective. This is healing because sickness comes from confusing the levels (T-1.I.23). Sickness or “not-right-mindedness” is the result of level confusion, because it always entails the belief that what is amiss on one level can adversely affect another. We have referred to miracles as the means of correcting level confusion, for all mistakes must be corrected at the level on which they occur. Only the mind is capable of error. The body can act wrongly only when it is responding to misthought (T-2.IV.2:2-5; italics mine).

Clearly, then, sickness is not what is wrong with our bodies, any more than injustice can be blamed on one person or group. Sickness and injustice can exist only in the mind, since there is nothing else, and are nothing but the product of our mistaken belief that there is a real world outside us, the projection of the mind's thought that the separation from God is real. To be sure, injustice reigns supreme in the bodily world of one or the other: the more powerful individual or group wins and lives, the other loses and dies. Our Swedish story aptly falls into that category, for the more powerful man did indeed triumph over the weak and helpless girl, who ended up losing her life. Sickness reigns supreme as well: the more powerful microbe wins and survives, a person loses, suffers, and eventually dies. Yet we are not our bodies or egos, which are but parodies and travesties of our reality as God's Son (T-24.VII.1:11; 10:9).

And so, returning to our example, paradigmatic for all forms of injustice and evil, we can ask Jesus' help to look at the situation differently. As he urged Helen one day when she asked how to respond to a person's call for her specific help, advice we can apply to this and every situation that confronts us:

You cannot ask, “What shall I say to him?” and hear God's answer. Rather ask instead, “Help me to see this brother though the eyes of truth and not of judgment,” and the help of God and all His angels will respond (Absence from Felicity, p. 381).

I have often cited Jesus' message to Helen in these Lighthouse articles because it is so central to his message in A Course in Miracles, yet one which can easily be overlooked. Before we respond to any situation, we need first go within and ask our inner teacher for help that we look at it through his eyes. His vision makes no judgments of the separated fragments of the Sonship, for his gentle perception sees the truth of the inherent sameness in all of us: one split mind, consisting of the wrong-minded ego, the right-minded Holy Spirit, and the decision maker that chooses between them. Likewise, he sees every situation as the same: either a projection of the ego's thought system of separation and attack, or an extension of the Holy Spirit 's thought system of Atonement and forgiveness. If it is the former, then his response is kind and loving; if the latter, his response is kind and loving. This is why there is no order of difficulty in miracles (T-1.I.1:1). Since every problem is the same, as are every illness and conflict, Jesus teaches us to always focus on our need to judge and to see the same as different, choosing evil over good, the darkness of sin in place of the light of innocence. In other words, as we have seen earlier, we project our inner split onto the world, and thus believe we see it there. We therefore respond to situations as if they were the way we perceive them. Yet if projection makes perception, we are seeing nothing more than our own delusional system:

As a man thinketh, so does he perceive.… Perception is a result and not a cause. And that is why order of difficulty in miracles is meaningless. Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy. Nothing perceived without it means anything (T-21.in.1:6,8-11).

Therefore, Jesus' vision is an all-inclusive one in which forgiveness is for all or none of us; a vision in which no one loses and everyone wins. Coming to Jesus about the situation in Sweden, we would hear that there is another perspective through which we can view what happened: above the world's battleground. Rather than see the events as separating -- a victimizing man killing an innocent girl -- we would see them as opportunites to learn that appearances deceive: Nothing so blinding as perception of form (T-22.III.6:7). Looked at from the perspective of the world and body, something horrific did indeed happen; a perception from which there is no way out, for attack breeds defense, which breeds attack, as this graphic description from the workbook depicts:

It is as if a circle held it [the mind] fast, wherein another circle bound it and another one in that, until escape no longer can be hoped for nor obtained. Attack, defense; defense, attack, become the circles of the hours and the days that bind the mind in heavy bands of steel with iron overlaid, returning but to start again. There seems to be no break nor ending in the ever-tightening grip of the imprisonment upon the mind (W-pI.153.3).

Thus does the thought system of separation continually reinforce itself, with no escape possible until another thought system is chosen. And so Jesus continually invites us to join him outside the world's dream and return to the mind, where his sanity and love await us, thus ending the dissociation of truth and illusion. Back in our minds, we remember that our purpose in being here is to awaken from the dream, not to establish a happier one. We recognize that all people involved in a situation -- the little girl, the abuser-murderer, the child's family, the villagers, and we who are hearing about it -- are part of the same insane thought system of separation, dreaming the single dream of sinless victims and sinful victimizers. And from this dream we all will awaken, for we are one. Together, or not at all (T- 19.IV-D. 12:8) is Jesus' replacement for the ego's one or the other. Thus we return to the home we never truly left.

Conclusion: The Light of Sinlessness Restored

Father, Your Son is holy. I am he on whom You smile in love and tenderness.(5)

To hasten our return, we need to practice daily, if not minute by minute, looking at the world as Jesus does, learning to laugh gently at the absurd thought that the world can take God's peace from us, or give it to us. This gentle smile is the basis of forgiveness, defined in A Course in Miracles as forgiving others for what they have not done to us (e.g., W- pII.1.1:1). Regardless of their actions, people have not affected our minds. A dream after all, can have no effect on a dreamer, unless the decision is made to give it that power:

…you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that you were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you failed to recognize it is your dream (T-27.VIII.10:5-6).

And so we join in Jesus' gentle smile as we interact with the dream figures of the world, without exception. All God's apparently separated Sons are sinless, or all of us must become sinners. God's Son is one, and therein lies his holiness. Our elder brother teaches us to smile at all appearances of pain and evil, seeing the single content behind the form:

Certain it is that all distress does not appear to be but unforgiveness. Yet that is the content underneath the form. It is this sameness which makes learning sure, because the lesson is so simple that it cannot be rejected in the end (W-pI. 193.4:1-3).

The unforgiveness born of our guilt is the source of our wrong-minded perceptions of separation and differences. Yet how easily are these corrected when we shift the mind's content to sameness and joining, recognizing that no perception that differentiates among God's Sons is ever justified. Jesus sees us all as one, and laughs gently at our silly illusions to the contrary. His smile calls us to join with him, as we join with all our brothers. And so, with his smile on our lips, we say to everyone we meet, in words that come from the heart that knows its salvation abides in God's Son as He created him:

Father, Your Son is holy. I am he on whom You smile in love and tenderness so dear and deep and still the universe smiles back on You, and shares Your Holiness. How pure, how safe, how holy, then, are we, abiding in Your Smile, with all Your Love bestowed upon us, living one with You, in brotherhood and Fatherhood complete; in sinlessness so perfect that the Lord of Sinlessness conceives us as His Son, a universe of Thought completing Him (W-pII.341.1; italics omitted).

FOOTNOTES:
1. T-4.VI.1:6-7
2. T-19.III.8:5; T-20.VI.10:3
3. T-22.III.6:7
4. T-27.VIII.8:4
5. W-pII.341.1:1-2