Notes on the Text of A Course in - Stephen Wingate

Main Theme: Awakening from the secret dream and
the world's dream.
Introduction: This chapter is a powerful, poignant
and beautifully written overview of the Course. It
describes the right mind, the wrong mind, and the
purpose that the body and world serve the ego and
the Holy Spirit. The core of the wrong mind is the
belief in the unholy trinity of sin, guilt and fear
which is referred to as the ego's "secret dream." The
secret dream is the ego's story of separation from
God, which evokes guilt, and fear of punishment.
The ego tells us that God is angry and will punish us
so we better hide. The ego makes a body and a world
of bodies in which we can hide from God and blame
everyone else for our sin and guilt. The projection of
the body and world is referred to as the "world's
dream."
Through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, the Course
teaches us that the source of all our problems in the
body and the world is in our secret dream in which
we believe we separated from God. The ego's
strategy is to keep us distracted by the world's dream
so we will not get back to the real source of our
problems which is the secret dream of separation in
the mind. When we get back to the decision making
part of our mind we can choose the Holy Spirit and
wake up from the world's dream and the secret dream
which means the dissolution of the ego, and the
realization of our true Identity as Christ.
•
The original instant of belief in separation from God
is the birthplace of the ego's secret dream and the
source of the world's dream. We must return to the
original instant of the secret dream and realize we
never separated from God's wholeness to resolve all
our problems of separation in the world's dream. The
"hero" of the world's dream is the body.
•
I attack you because you attacked me. I am innocent,
you are guilty. My attack is justified, yours is not. So
says the ego.
•
If the world you made is real, separation from God is
real, sin is real, guilt is real, fear is real, death is real
and the ego is real. Without separation from God —
sin, guilt, fear, death and the ego do not exist. This is
why you love sin, guilt, fear, attack, sacrifice and
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE HEALING OF THE DREAM
92
death; without them, you, as you believe yourself to
be, are dead.
•
We made the body weak, vulnerable and completely
at the mercy of events beyond its control to prove we
are innocent victims of a sinful, guilty world of
others who should be punished instead of us.
Sickness, vulnerability, suffering and death prove we
have our own special separate existence apart from
God and the world.
•
Everything in the world you made serves the purpose
for which you made it: to prove your special separate
existence is real, and to blame someone else for it.
•
We cannot resolve our suffering because we have
projected its cause onto others: germs, viruses, our
family, friends, intimate others, society, culture,
governments, religions, God and evil doers around
the world — the world's dream. To resolve our
suffering we must go back to our minds and wake up
from the original secret dream — the belief in
separation from God. We must understand cause and
effect to be free of suffering.
•
To suffer and play the role of victim you must
remain ignorant of the true cause of suffering, and
project the cause onto everyone and everything
outside of your own mind.
•
The purpose of the world I made is to prove the
avenger is outside of me, and I am innocent.
•
There is no salvation for you in the world you made
to prevent your salvation. To the ego, salvation is
death. The miracle facilitates a shift in identity from
the character in the dream to the dreamer of the
dream, and ultimately to our true Identity as Christ in
Spirit.
•
The ego's wrong minded function is to maintain its
special separate existence at another's expense and
God's. The ego has split its function from God's and
everyone else's, making the world a battleground of
opposing purposes.
•
We love all the evil doers in the world because we
made them to prove our relative innocence.