II. The Alternative to Projection
1 Any split in mind must involve a rejection of part of it, and this is the belief in separation. The wholeness of God, which is His peace, cannot be appreciated except by a whole mind that recognizes the wholeness of God’s creation. By this recognition it knows its Creator. Exclusion and separation are synonymous, as are separation and dissociation. We have said before that the separation was and is dissociation, and that once it occurs projection becomes its main defense, or the device that keeps it going. The reason, however, may not be so obvious as you think.
Here is what I think when I read this paragraph. I began with a mind that knew only truth, only wholeness. There was Love and there was the extension of Love. This is all that was in the mind and so there was perfect peace. Then there was the thought of something else and the mind was split between Love and the idea of something not Love.
In order to explore the other idea, the thought of Love had to be dissociated. One cannot know unity and know separation in the same instant. To know separation and have that experience it was necessary to exclude oneness. The moment we remember oneness we lose the idea of separation. The idea of separation is not natural to us so we needed a device to sustain it and so we made projection.
Envisioning how we came to this place of a split mind and how we keep it going, it is easy to see how we reverse it. We undo the ego (separation thinking) by losing interest in separation and placing our mind on only the truth. We stop projecting and the thought system of separation must collapse. In A Course in Miracles, we learn what is going on and how to recognize it as it is happening. We learn that there is an alternative and that the alternative is preferable.
Then we start to back out of the separation idea a step at a time, but that can be accelerated the moment we decide that we want nothing else but the truth. The actual change in mind is that simple, we choose again. All of the work involved is to bring us to the place where we want nothing but God. This explanation may be too simplistic, and it may not be exactly the way it happened, but it is a helpful explanation that I was led to.
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