One of the most obvious difficulties with the Course for many people is its specifically Christian language. It talks about forgiveness, salvation, the Holy Spirit, the Son of God, God the Father…The teaching speaks to you, the reader, directly and personally as in the voice of Jesus: This course has come from him because his words have reached you in a language you can love and understand (M23 7).
But many people do not love or understand this language. On the contrary, Christian terms are so tainted with concepts of sin and sacrifice, judgement and joylessness; and so associated with a long history of emotional, intellectual and physical violence, that the Course’s use of them puts people off at least as much as it reassures. But for a course in forgiveness to be written in the language we most need to forgive has a teasing pertinence.
And meanwhile, those who do love and understand the language soon find that it is charged with such different meaning that old ways of thinking dissolve within it. Like it or not, wherever you come from in background or belief, you will start the Course with a set of preconceptions, and they will be wholly overturned as you continue with it.
For the whole point is that all forms, all appearances, all experiences, all words have no intrinsic or final reality in themselves. They have no power but that you give them. The meaning you read into them is in the mind of you, the thinker. They are ultimately unreal because they only exist in relation to a separate somebody – you or me; and the ‘you’ or ‘me’ that we think we see are not real either. The mind chooses either to look upon a dream world of its own constructing, or awakens to absolute reality. Within the dream, it uses language – any language – to spin a point of view, or to remind itself of the truth it can never completely forget.
So it is that the Course can use a language that is controversial, emotive, confusing, open to differing interpretations, often misleading and often inconsistent – in places so dense, convoluted and abstract that you hardly know what it is talking about – and still transmit to you, through you, passing your understanding, a joyous, liberating vision of a wholly different reality. For the language is of this world, but the meaning comes to us from within our own mind, an echo of a knowledge that is in us, around us, right here, right now, everywhere, always.
Repeatedly the Course reminds us not to confuse form with content; or we will not be able to look past all the forms of this world to see the reality that is beyond language and image altogether. If you read the symbolic language too concretely, or use the Course’s vocabulary jargon-style without questioning what it really means, you will not make the shift from false to true perception, just fall back into old habits of guilt, fear and self-absorption. You will try to bend the Course to your ego purposes rather than let the Course free you from them. The ego blows smoke in our eyes so that we see only pictures in the smoke and not what is really there; and it is part of the smoky magic that we do not see we are blowing the smoke in our own eyes. The ego is a choice the mind makes, that you the thinker makes, minute by minute
This course has come from him…but not from a separate, superior ‘him’; it comes from you, from what you really are, from where you already are, from where you are not you at all, but only everything and everyone. ‘This course’ has not come into this world at all. What is true about it is here now and always has been. It is this world that is not here. This personal person whose eyes you think you are looking through is barely a curl of smoke: not there!
His words have reached you…that is, something in you that is not you-the-thinker has for an instant seen through the smoke and caught a glimpse of the knowledge you tried to haze out of awareness. These words are not ‘sent’ by a Someone to ‘us’; but how else can we, who think in disconnected words, who picture ourselves as separate from each other and experience totality in bits, understand that there is only one Word and it is absolute silence – and that this is what we are?
God does not understand words, for they were made by separated minds to keep them in the illusion of separation. Words can be helpful, particularly for the beginner, in helping concentration and facilitating the exclusion, or at least the control, of extraneous thoughts. Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. They are thus twice removed from reality (M21 1.7).
Since we live in a divided state of mind looking out on a world that mirrors division back to us, we can only learn of oneness in a dualistic language that must contradict itself in the attempt. But we can remember that this is only a mirror, and a cracked one at that; that truth is wordless but unmistakable, and when it touches you on the quick, not to jump for safety back to the familiar nothings of the dream. Like any teaching, the Course can be helpful, or misleading, according to your wish. It may be, for you, the special form in which the fact that God is not insane appears most sensible and meaningful to you…The form is suited to your special needs, and to the special time and place in which you think you find yourself (T25 VII 7). But the form is still only smoke. The reality is what you see through it, past it, in it, free of it.
