To gain the most from A Course in Miracles Text Made Simple, we recommend that
you read the corresponding chapter and section in the Text of the Second or
Third Edition of A Course in Miracles published by the Foundation for Inner Peace.
Read A Course in Miracles, Chapter 27, Section VIII. (pages 585-588)
This section is bringing to our awareness that, in truth, we are dreaming a dream of being separate from our true Identity. The central figure in this dream is the body. In the dream we identify with the body as what we are — we dream we are the body and when the body dies, we die. When something happens to the body, we think it is happening to us. That is why Jesus says that the body is the “hero” of the dream. He tells us, “There is no dream without [the body,] nor does [the body] exist without the dream in which [the body] were a person to be seen and be believed.” (1:2)
We are trying to prove that we are “autonomous and real.” (2:1) We are trying to be in control and decide things on our own. We are trying to be the decider of what is real and what is not real. Here we see that the purpose of the dream is to try to make it look like we are not the script writer of the dream, but merely the innocent victim of the events of the dream. We are trying to project onto a world outside us what we unconsciously believe about ourselves. In this dream of separation we want to see ourselves as the innocent victim of a guilty world.
Jesus tells us, “The world you see depicts exactly what you thought you did. Except that now you think that what you did is being done to you. The guilt for what you thought is being placed outside yourself, and on a guilty world that dreams your dreams and thinks your thoughts instead of you. [The world] brings its vengeance, not your own. It keeps you narrowly confined within a body, which it punishes because of all the sinful things the body does within its dream. [In this dream story] you have no power to make the body stop its evil deeds because you did not make it, and cannot control its actions nor its purpose nor its fate.” (7:2-7)
Jesus wants us to understand that we are experiencing these dreams because we rejected our real Identity and decided to replace It with being separate and alone. He tells us, “No one asleep and dreaming in the world remembers his attack upon himself. No one believes there really was a time when he knew nothing of a body, and could never have conceived this world as real. He would have seen at once that these ideas are one illusion, too ridiculous for anything but to be laughed away. How serious [these bodies] now appear to be! And no one can remember when [bodies] would have met with laughter and with disbelief. We can remember this, if we but look directly at their cause. And we will see the grounds for laughter, not a cause for fear.” (5:4-10 italics added)
It is when we take them seriously that these dreams of separation hold us in a state of fear. We are being reminded again and again in this Course that the way to freedom is not to take our dreams seriously because they are not true. “Together we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time.” (6:4-5)
The secret that we are keeping from ourselves is that we are choosing not to listen to the truth but instead are putting our belief in our illusions of separation. He tells us, “How differently will you perceive the world when this is recognized! When you forgive the world your guilt, you will be free of it. Its innocence does not demand your guilt, nor does your guiltlessness rest on its sins. … Now need you but to learn that both of you are innocent or guilty. The one thing that is impossible is that you be unlike each other; that they both be true. This is the only secret yet to learn. And it will be no secret you are healed.” (13:1-3, 6-9)
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