WTB – I’m just going to jump in and ask the question I’ve wanted to ask ever since reading Disappearance of the Universe. In thinking about God and Creation, it never made sense that something that is whole, seamless, and infinite, could ever even conceive of a creation that was fragmented and limited. When I read Disappearance it was like, “Finally, somebody said it.” Yet the explanation from Arten and Pursah about how the multi-verse of all creation resulted from an infinitesimally small, timeless bobble in the seamless fabric of the IS somehow didn’t quite convince me either.

Gary: Yeah, you know it’s kind of like the equivalent of you’re sleepy and you’re driving your car late at night. And you start to doze off for just a second and then you wake yourself up like real quick. And so it's just maybe a second - an inconsequential blip on the screen, and everything keeps going. You keep driving along and you get to your destination and everything is fine. That’s kind of like the equivalent to what the Course (A Course in Miracles) calls the tiny “mad” idea. Nowhere does it ever say that Christ actually separated from God. In fact it says just the opposite. It says the full awareness of the atonement is that the separation never occurred.

So when we ask questions like yours, I think that Disappearance of the Universe comes about as close as you can get to answering that question with words. But the truth is, the question cannot be answered with words because the answer does not exist on the same level as where we’re asking the question. We’re asking the question from an intellectual level, which is the domain of the ego of course - and I don’t just mean you, because I asked the same question basically in the book on page 135. And what Arten and Pursah are saying is that we’ll never get an answer in words that can satisfy us because words cannot make us feel full whole and complete. The only thing that will really satisfy us is an experience of wholeness, an experience of what we really are and where we really are. And that is the answer, not words.

A Course inMiracles says, “Words are but symbols of symbols which are twice removed from reality.” Well, when you think about it, how can a symbol of a symbol ever satisfy you? How can it ever make you feel full and whole and complete? The only thing that will ever really satisfy you and answer that question is not a symbol of reality but an experience of reality. And that’s what Jesus says in the Course about these kinds of questions that we ask. At one point he actually says, “There is no answer, only an experience. Seek only this and do not let theology delay you.”

So what he’s saying is that the answer to that question, and the answers to all questions, is an experience of what you really are, what the Course calls the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. And some people have that experience; I’ve been fortunate enough to have it. The main experience that the Course is going for is inner peace, which is kind of like a pre-requisite to going home, because peace is the condition of the kingdom. But, at the same time, there is the possibility of having the experience even in this life and when we appear to be in this world it’s still possible to have the experience of being with God where you actually have an experience of perfect oneness with God. And that really is the answer to all questions. That is the great mystical experience that has been recorded by great mystics like Jesus and Buddha throughout history. And that is the one thing that can really answer our questions because it takes place on a level that is above where the question is being asked. It’s like what Albert Einstein said about the problems of the world cannot be solved on the same level of thinking that made the problems.

According to Arten and Pursah and A Course in Miracles, there’s only one problem and that is the idea that we have separated ourselves from our source. And that’s why the Course says a sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct; the one real problem is the idea that we’ve separated ourselves from our source. And it doesn’t matter what you call your source. It could be the Tao, it could be God, which, according to A Course in Miracles, is perfect and eternal and cannot change or be changed because it doesn’t have to evolve. If it had evolved then it wouldn’t be perfect. And what we need to do in the dream where we appear to be - and we think this dream is so important but in fact it’s really nothing - what we need to do is learn how to remove the blocks to the awareness of what we really are.

The Course says it does not aim to teach the meaning of love, which is beyond what can be taught because that’s an experience. It does aim, however, to removing the blocks to the awareness of loves presence. The removing of the blocks is roughly the equivalent of undoing the ego in Buddhism. In fact you’ll find probably more parallels between A Course in Miracles and Buddhism than between A Course in Miracles and Christianity, even though the Course uses Christian language. I think it has much more in common with Buddhism because you see the idea that there is this one ego appearing as many. It’s like there’s really only one of us that thinks that it’s here and you’re it. It’s not somebody else. It’s like my teachers are fond of saying, there’s nobody out there because what we’re seeing is a projection that is coming from our own mind, and part of what we want to do is take responsibility for that and go to a position of being at cause of the whole thing instead of being at effect of the whole thing.

If we’re at the effect of the whole thing then we’re a victim, and forgiveness would never be justified. But if we’re at cause - like Buddha when he said, “I am awake” - you know he meant that he realized that the world was not being done to him, it was being done by him. And that is the complete reversal of thought that A Course in Miracles is going for. This is a course in cause and not in effect… which I think they (Arten and Pursah) really clarify more and more in Disappearance and now in Your Immortal Reality. We start to shift from being the victim of the world and thinking it was something that was done to us, and start to go back to a position of strength and power which is in coming from a place where we are at cause of the whole thing.

WTB: And that’s at a totally different level of mind.

Gary: Yeah, and it’s also a totally different kind of forgiveness. I want to make sure people don’t think we are talking about the old fashioned kind of forgiveness. The old fashioned kind of forgiveness would be more in harmony with Newtonian physics where you have separation, where objects are separate from each other and have an influence on one another. The old fashioned kind of forgiveness actually fosters separation because you’re forgiving somebody else for what they’ve really done, which means that you’re separate and [think] that they’re bodies and that they’re sinful.

The kind of forgiveness my books teach puts things more in sync with the new physics. As you know the new physics teaches us that there isn’t really any such thing as separation. One of the things I got from What the Bleep was how everything is one and everything is connected and all the rest is made up. And so, if we are one, then this new kind of forgiveness would forgive people, not because they’ve really done something, but because we’ve made them up in the first place. We’re not victims of them. Rather we are seeing a projection that is coming from our own unconscious mind, and then we’re viewing it with our conscious mind in much the same way as when you go to the movies.

Once the movie gets going you want to think that it’s real. But the truth is, there’s nothing happening up there on the screen. It just looks that way. It’s a trick, and where the movie’s really coming from is a projector in the back of the theater and it’s hidden and I’m not supposed to think about that because my attention is supposed to be diverted to the screen. Now if I want to have an impact on what is on the screen, it doesn’t do me too much good to be fooling around with the screen. If I really want to change what is on the screen and have a lasting impact, then I have to go back and find the projector and change what’s in the projector.