The following transcription is taken from a dialogue between David and several participants at a small gathering. The text section referred to is taken from A Course in Miracles, Chapter 26, section 8 `The Immediacy of Salvation’.
David: “The one remaining problem that you have is that you seen an interval between the time when you forgive your brother, and will receive the benefits of trusting in your brother. This but reflects the little you would keep between you and your brother, that you and he might be a little separate. For time and space are one illusion, which takes different forms. If it has been projected beyond your mind you think of it as time. The nearer it is brought to where it is, the more you think of it in terms of space.” ACIM
There’s a lot of metaphysics right there in that first paragraph. He kind of eases into it, but then the last three sentences are the basis of everything we look at. They are zeroing in on that one remaining problem that you have. Everything is a thought in the mind. So every memory is just a thought, and if it has been projected beyond your mind you think of it as time. So all those memories of the times we’ve read this and of all the comings together… if you think of it everything is just a thought and if it’s projected beyond your mind you think of it as time. In other words, it seems to have happened in the past. Or to flip it the other way, if you can imagine it, even some of the images that have been coming about a center and how it would look and so on and so forth, all those images of a coming center or of a trip to a certain city or whatever, all those are images and if it has been projected beyond one’s own mind you think of it as time. As if I am a person and I have a private mind. As if I am a person in time. Instead of time and all the circumstances and events that have ever happened in a personal past or any past… I use the example of Julius Ceasar or Cleopatra or Abraham Lincoln or Gandhi or whatever, all of the images are of the wrong mind. When it seems to be beyond one’s personal private mind it seems to be projected to time as if it’s happened in the past or it will happen in the future. There’s nothing that happens apart from me. When I say `I am the universe’, that is in the deepest sense of the word, the universe of creation [of God and his Creations]. But even if you talked about a projected cosmos, there is no aspect of the cosmos that’s apart from me in the sense that the right mind is a perspective that sees that the entire project was made up and that there’s no ordering of any of the concepts and images. And so without that ordering there is no sense of being in the cosmos or a teeny little speck or part. It’s more of a sense of the vastness of `I dreamed this up’. This is the `dreamer of the dream’ analogy. In that experience there would be no sound, no image or light or variation of light, nothing within the cosmos that would be apart from one’s self so to speak if one is the dreamer of all that.
The second part, it says “The nearer it is brought to where it is, the more you think of it in terms of space.” We’ve been through this one before as well in the sense that if you perceive yourself as a body or as a person in the world, and you think of it as in, the deceived mind has surrounded itself with the cosmos …the first thing that it seems to have surrounded itself with in terms of spatial if you divided the cosmos into spaces, it’s wrapped in a body. And then seemingly outside of that body there are other bodies and walls and furniture and trees and grass and sky and sun and other planets. It seems to have wrapped the whole cosmos around it, beginning with the body. And so we get the line “The nearer it is brought to where it is, the more you think of it in terms of space.” Think of the projector, the closer you bring it to the projector the more it is thought of in terms of space and that is literally how it’s described. I know we’ve talked about the idea that even stars are described in terms of light years, because space seems to be getting so far out away from the projector that then they start being described of in terms of time, like all those events that seemed to have happened before or all those events that will happen in the future.
Participant 1: At any rate, whether it’s time or space it’s a means for distancing.
Participant 2: It is the same thing, it just sounds like something different. You wouldn’t think of the past as two miles ago versus years ago, or minutes ago or something.
David: “For time and space are one illusion, which takes different forms.” It is like the tree trunk analogy, where all the branches come back to the trunk. So you could have time and space seeming to be branches off the trunk but the ego is the ego and everything of the ego is the ego.
Participant 1: No matter what you call it, or how you conceive of it.
David: Yes. Or how many times it seems to have been multiplied. Looking at the ego belief system, it seems like it has oodles and oodles and oodles of beliefs.
Participant 2: A million times zero [is zero].
David: The ego is zero, the ego is zero.
“There is a distance you would keep apart from your brother, and this space you perceive as time because you still believe you are external to him.” ACIM
You can tell the personhood is in there. You would have to have a belief in personhood to be external to your brother. But if you’re brother is a body or a person and you’re a person then you seem to be external to your brother. If you’re a private mind and you’re brother seems to have a private mind then your private mind seems to be external to your brother’s private mind. That is the basis of what we go into from all these different angles, that personhood and the idea of a private mind – both of those are made up. It [personhood] cannot be so.
“This makes trust impossible.” ACIM
You could say the subject / object split makes trust impossible. When the mind seemed to fall asleep and believe in the ego, then it had two opposite thought systems. These thought systems have no meeting point and that’s where the intolerable sense of strain came in. It tried to dissociate and forget about the light, and keep them apart. It tried to spiral out away from that light at the bottom so that it could keep the two thought systems apart because if they were ever brought together it would be seen that they can’t coexist. One denies the other. The way to hang on to them both and to hang on to the split and the separation would be to spiral away from the light and keep the darkness as if it can have an existence by itself, apart from the light. So that intolerable sense of strain from trying to hold them both in, that’s where we talk about the idea that the cosmos was projected out and the split, instead of being seen in the mind as two thought systems which are irreconcilable, the split was seen as on the screen which is exemplified in the subject / object split where the mind is identified with a person and everything outside of that person which seemed to be perceived with the five senses was seen as the object. There’s the split. And there’s fear because the mind has done all this and in one sense you can say that it knows it’s done all this and has tried to forget the way it’s set things up. But the Holy Spirit is the reminder that this can’t be forgotten, that God can’t be forgotten. So, the mind still has the guilt and the strain but it seems to have relieved itself with this projected cosmos. It seems to have loosened up the strain a bit. It is afraid because it is really afraid of God. But it has projected it out so that it seems it is really afraid of all these things in the world. But this is a setup, it’s a scam. The thing is, is that the subject / object split has not resolved the conflict. The mind has tried to forget the wholeness that it really is and it’s made up a concept of a whole person, separate from the cosmos. That’s where the subject / object split arises. As long as the fear is maintained, until it is found to be a hoax and unfounded, the mind is in a fearful state and therefore that is what lack of trust or doubt is about. It is in a state of deception and it’s constantly in doubt. It can’t trust anything because it doesn’t know itself and that’s why the split has to be seen as not on the screen, not a split between two persons or a subject and an objective world. The split has to be seen in the mind for trust to be possible. Listening to the Holy Spirit would be the basis of trust. If one truly listened to the Holy Spirit, one would see that one is the `dreamer of the dream’, not a person or a little figure in the dream.
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